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If you look at science and technology/engineering as a unified field, you can see that not everything conforms to the "American" model: the military is arguably

by alricb 12y ago

If you look at science and technology/engineering as a unified field, you can see that not everything conforms to the "American" model: the military is arguably just as important to American science/technology as it was to Soviet science (the Manhattan Project, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Air Force owned forging presses, ARPANet, the DoE, Boeing, the Dodge Brothers plant to manufacture recoil cylinders, etc.)

s_q_b 12y ago
Don't forget the Valley's own government-sponsored roots: Navy money funded the Federal Telegraph Corporation and later Moffet Field, which begat Eitel-McCullough, a wartime manufacturer of radios and vacuum tubes. Varian Associates, another wartime manufacturer, was instrumental in getting Stanford Industrial Park built, where HP was founded. NACA (later NASA) brought Lockheed to the area, and worked hand-in-glove with Fairchild as its only supplier of the transistors needed in the Space Race for years, which firmly centered the semiconductor revolution in the area. Of course, this is to say nothing of the Federal research dollars which still constitute a massive portion of university research funding, including at Stanford itself. And of course, to add to the countless examples outside the Bay area, there's the National Laboratory system. If you look closely, the American and Soviet science systems don't appear all that different. The chief difference is that the Soviets preferred to keep everything under direct governmental control, while the United States prefers to use government contracts and grants to drive scientific progress through the private sector and university system. That, and there's significantly less chance of being thrown in prison for espousing political views in the modern US.
- avmich 12y ago
  You forgot separation of research and teaching.
darkmighty 12y ago
There's also the (former) elephant in the room that was Bell Labs: the huge R&D lab was owned by Ma Bell, essentially a government endorsed monopoly. I think it's safe to say Bell Labs represented a large portion of the whole of US's technical and scientific output in the 20th century (reminder: they invented the transistor, information theory, lasers, radio astronomy, UNIX, ... ; it's mindblowing).

by alricb 12y ago

s_q_b 12y ago

Don't forget the Valley's own government-sponsored roots: Navy money funded the Federal Telegraph Corporation and later Moffet Field, which begat Eitel-McCullough, a wartime manufacturer of radios and vacuum tubes. Varian Associates, another wartime manufacturer, was instrumental in getting Stanford Industrial Park built, where HP was founded. NACA (later NASA) brought Lockheed to the area, and worked hand-in-glove with Fairchild as its only supplier of the transistors needed in the Space Race for years, which firmly centered the semiconductor revolution in the area. Of course, this is to say nothing of the Federal research dollars which still constitute a massive portion of university research funding, including at Stanford itself. And of course, to add to the countless examples outside the Bay area, there's the National Laboratory system. If you look closely, the American and Soviet science systems don't appear all that different. The chief difference is that the Soviets preferred to keep everything under direct governmental control, while the United States prefers to use government contracts and grants to drive scientific progress through the private sector and university system. That, and there's significantly less chance of being thrown in prison for espousing political views in the modern US.

avmich 12y ago
You forgot separation of research and teaching.

darkmighty 12y ago

There's also the (former) elephant in the room that was Bell Labs: the huge R&D lab was owned by Ma Bell, essentially a government endorsed monopoly. I think it's safe to say Bell Labs represented a large portion of the whole of US's technical and scientific output in the 20th century (reminder: they invented the transistor, information theory, lasers, radio astronomy, UNIX, ... ; it's mindblowing).