Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Alexander Dallas Bache: Science and Technology in the American Idiom

1970; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 11; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tech.1970.a894147

1097-3729

Nathan Reingold,

Research, Science, and Academia

Alexander Dallas Bache: Science and Technology in the American Idiom NATHAN REINGOLD In the early summer of 1864, Alexander Dallas Bache, the superinten­ dent of the Coast Survey, became seriously ill. While he lingered at the edge of death, a network of personal relations, institutional connections, and assumptions about scientists and engineers eroded away. After his death in 1867, the memory of Bache became dimmer. By the end of the century he was usually absent from those quaint collections of sketches of investigators that once passed for history of science and technology. But as serious scholars—the Luries, Duprees, and Goetzmanns—began to poke into Bache’s area looking for the antecedents of our present com­ munity of scientists and engineers, they encountered him, a massive but obscure historical reality. Since over a century has elapsed since his death, it is perhaps fitting that a would-be biographer should try to explain why Alexander Dallas Bache is not simply a massive obscurity but a significant landmark jn the history of science and technology in the United States. When Death’s finger first touched Bache in 1864, his prospects had seemed very good. He was president of the National Academy of Sciences, a creation of his and his cronies, the Lazzaroni.1 Opposition existed, of course, but, as long as Bache was active, his old friend Dr. Reingold, of the Smithsonian Institution, is editor of the Joseph Henry Papers. He is the author of Science in Nineteenth Century America, a Documentary His­ tory. This paper is derived from research performed with the aid of grants from the National Science Foundation and the American Philosophical Society. 1 To the best of my knowledge, Edward Lurie was the first serious historian to investigate the Lazzaroni. His Louis Agassiz, a Life in Science (Chicago, 1960) is the best introduction to the subject. Further useful information is in A. Hunter Dupree, Asa Gray (Cambridge, Mass., 1959) (see also, Dupree, Science in the Federal Gov­ ernment [Cambridge, Mass., 1957], pp. 115-48); M. M. Odgers, Alexander Dallas Bache, Scientist and Educator, 1806-1861 (Philadelphia, 1947) is quite innocent of these topics. Although I shall talk of the Lazzaroni and of their “program,” readers should understand that I am not talking of a group with a fixed membership and an explicitly formulated program. When the historian gets further away from a small group of socially congenial men and starts talking implicitly or explicitly of invisible colleges and conspiratorial elites, the facts become less and less relevant. All that I mean to state is that there was a small group around Bache and a larger group with less close ties to Bache, both of which shared some attitudes toward science and its role in the nation. The leading members, besides Bache, were the mathematician Benjamin Peirce, the zoologist Louis Agassiz, the astronomer B. A. Gould, and with reservations, the physicist Joseph Henry. Other significant members of the group were O. W. Gibbs, the chemist, and the Navy astronomer, Charles Henry Davis. 163 164 Nathan Reingold Joseph Henry might not join forces with Asa Gray, William Barton Rogers, and James Dwight Dana2 to overthrow the Lazzaroni “pro­ gram.” Besides, Bache was wonderfully adroit at effecting compromises and arrangements. There now existed a mechanism, the National Acad­ emy, for channeling federal funds to worthy investigators. And this same Academy, by setting standards and judging all by these criteria, would determine who was worthy. Bache’s friends were entrenched in Harvard, Pennsylvania, and Columbia; open and tacit supporters were at many other institutions. Bache’s pre-Washington career had prepared him for his role as the self-anointed leader of the scientific establishment. As a graduate of West Point, Bache was well educated in an American version of the tradition of the Ecole Polytechnique. And he had started his professional career as an army engineer. Although he left the army very soon to teach at the University of Pennsylvania, he was at ease with the military, then as now, an important factor in the official world of science and technology. Obviously talented as an organizer and administrator, Bache was active in local and national scientific bodies and also acquired a deserved...