This year marks the 75th anniversary of the National Science Foundation (NSF), born 10 May 1950, when President Harry Truman signed legislation creating the agency while riding through Idaho on a train. The government had just applied basic science to winning World War II with radar and the atomic bomb. In creating the NSF, it put basic science to work in peacetime to improve the world.
We can trace the idea of the NSF back to two luminaries who saw the clouds of World War II gathering over Europe and realized that the US scientific establishment was unprepared to help the US defend itself. One was President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The other was Vannevar Bush, a former dean of engineering and vice president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who in 1938 became president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, an organization that funded and conducted scientific research.
As chairman of the National Advisory Commission for Aeronautics
(precursor to NASA), Bush knew Roosevelt’s assistant Harry Hopkins, and after he expressed his concern, Hopkins arranged a meeting with Roosevelt on 12 June 1940. After less than 10 minutes, the President approved Bush’s proposal to create a committee of civilian and military scientists to coordinate scientific research with defense needs and named Bush to head it. In two weeks, Bush, age 50, appointed seven civilian scientists and two military officers and held the committee’s first meeting.
Bush was “tough, brilliant, versatile, [and] abrasive on occasion,” wrote Milton Lomask, who interviewed him while writing a 1976 history of the NSF. To Lomask, Bush was “a man of many interests who called management an ‘art’ [and was] a consummate administrator.” Those skills made him a take-charge manager who could juggle multiple projects successfully. Income from a startup that grew to become Raytheon allowed him to devote much of his time to work essential to the national interest.
The new committee ran on emergency funds, limiting its administrative clout. To give it more power, in mid-1941 Roosevelt put Bush in charge of a new Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) funded by Congress so it could negotiate contracts and launch programs. Those powers became vital when the US entered the war in December 1941.
As head of OSRD, Bush had presidential support and could make things happen. The agency supported the MIT Radiation Lab in its development of microwave radar, which became instrumental in winning the war in Europe. OSRD brought in top experts in optical science to manage important projects; Brian O’Brien from the University of Rochester and George Russell Harrison of MIT headed groups that advanced optical instruments and spectroscopy. Edwin Land’s Polaroid Corporation developed a new class of optical range finder. After the war, the Library of Congress reported that the OSRD had spent $450 million providing Allied forces with more accurate, powerful, and versatile weapons, as well as safer and more effective medical treatments. That may not seem a staggering sum today, but it had a tremendous bang for the buck during the war. Harvard President James Conant, a colleague during the war, called OSRD Bush’s “greatest invention.”
During November 1944, Roosevelt looked forward to the war’s end and asked Bush to envision the future for US science, writing: “New frontiers of the mind are before us, and if they are pioneered with the same vision, boldness, and drive with which we have waged this war we can create a fuller and more fruitful employment and a fuller and more fruitful life.”
Portrait of Vannevar Bush. Photo credit: Harris and Ewing, News Service, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.
FDR did not live to see the resulting 42-page report, “Science: The Endless Frontier.” Bush sent it to President Truman, and it was published in Science in July 1945. Bush envisioned a civilian-managed organization that would invest in basic research, largely conducted in universities, to support industry and health, as well as national defense, and also help support education of the next generation of scientists and engineers.
The report was an important step toward creating the NSF, but the road to legislation that would do so was fraught, albeit not nearly as intensely as it is today. Bush wanted to return science to its traditional independence from military control after the war, but some in Congress wanted to maintain wartime military influence. The debates over management and other details went on for years. When President Truman signed the law creating the NSF in 1950, it capped agency spending at $15 million a year, not the $33.5 million a year Bush had proposed.
In its first years, the NSF focused on supporting graduate students and basic research in mathematics, physical sciences, and biology. Only in the mid-1950s did the young organization get the congressional approval and money needed to start large programs. One of the first targets was optical astronomy.
Opening the giant 200-inch Hale Telescope on California’s Mount Palomar to observers in autumn 1949 led to a wave of new discoveries, and made astronomers eager for more observation time and more telescopes. Yet the world’s largest telescope could only accommodate a limited number of observers, and its design dated from the early 1930s. And as the long delays in funding and building Palomar showed, the instruments and facilities required for optical and radio astronomy had become so expensive that only the federal government could afford to build them.
Under its charter, the NSF could not operate its own laboratories, but it could pay other institutions to build and operate them for all qualified users, unlike Palomar, which was owned by Caltech and the Carnegie Institution. Program officers at the NSF started in 1955 by hiring Aden Meinel, an astronomer at University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory, to manage selection of a site—Kitt Peak—54 miles from Tucson, Arizona, and then to manage construction, which began at the site in 1958. In 1957, a group of seven US universities active in astronomy teamed to form the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) to manage the Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO). Today AURA has 47 members in the US and three overseas.
Kitt Peak Observatory opened in 1960 with 16- and 30-inch telescopes in operation. Work on a new 82-inch (2.1 m) telescope was underway. When the KPNO 2.1-meter telescope saw first light in September 1964, it tied the Otto Struve Telescope in Texas as the world’s third largest optical telescope. The next big step was building the four-meter Nicholas U. Mayall telescope, named after the Kitt Peak director who succeeded Meinel. When it saw first light in 1973, it was the world’s second-largest optical telescope, exceeded only by the Hale. Since then, KPNO has merged with other observatories, and is now part of the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (better known as NOIRLab). Its newest NSF-funded instrument, the 8-m Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, will see first light later this year.
The late 1950s saw more NSF investment in big science research programs and facilities. The agency sponsored the participation of US scientists in the International Geophysical Year from 1 July 1957, to 31 Dec. 1958. The program involved 67 nations and some 10,000 scientists around the world, and it saw peaceful cooperation between the US and Soviet scientists. The global program expanded our understanding of the Earth, atmosphere, oceans, space, and sun, and contributed to the discovery of plate tectonics. After the 1959 Antarctic Treaty was signed, the NSF became responsible for the US Antarctic Program.
Starting in 1957, the NSF expanded to include social sciences. Basic research in engineering and computer and information sciences followed during the 1970s and ’80s. Math and physical sciences and support for science education remain important NSF programs.
We can only mention a small part of what the NSF does now to help education and science. Its fiscal 2024 budget was $9 billion, 40,000 times its first appropriation of $225,000 for 1951. It’s helped many of us get started in science in general, or in optics in particular. As one of those who benefited, I want to thank the NSF for a summer fellowship in Nick George’s holography lab at Caltech, which helped me get my first job writing about optics.
Jeff Hecht is an SPIE Member and freelancer who writes about science and technology.
