The Scientific Mystique in Engineering: Highway Research at the Bureau of Public Roads, 1918-1940

Abstract

Historians of technology have shown a continuing fascination with the relationship between science and technology, an interest derived in large part from the manner in which technological change over the last century has been perceived to result from scientific advances. Their analyses, however, have frequently produced divergent views regarding the interaction of these two fields, and, as one observer commented at the 1983 meeting of the Society for the History of Technology in Washington, D.C., one formula capable of explaining all situations is unlikely to emerge.' Moreover, no significant effort has been made to understand the meaning of this interaction for 20th-century engineering; as Nathan Reingold and Arthur Molella have pointed out, most historians implicitly assume that engineering has benefited auto-

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