Irving Langmuir, the General Electric Research Laboratory, and when applications lead to theoryTo this point, I’ve written tens of thousands of words on this Substack covering the work of scientists from the early-to-mid-1900s — a golden era of American science and innovation — in a familiar setting: the university. But, in fact, the university is not the setting in which…
A Progress Studies History of Early MIT — Part 1: Training the engineers who built the countryThe MIT Series Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen opened their 2019 Atlantic piece that helped jump-start the progress studies movement with the following passage: In 1861, the American scientist and educator William Barton Rogers published a manifesto calling for a new kind of…
A Report on Scientific Branch-Creation: How the Rockefeller Foundation helped bootstrap the field of molecular biologyThis piece is noticeably longer (twice the length) than the others on this Substack. This is because 1) it is a practically-oriented historical follow-up on the ideas discussed in this Substack’s most popular piece on scientific branch-creation and 2) unlike the MIT series, there…
FreakTakes
FreakTakes
FreakTakes
freaktakes.substack.com
FreakTakes
I dive into the historical details of the early-20th Century's most innovative groups to explore how we can build better research orgs today. Extremely practical takeaways from from wildly interesting stories from a different age of American science.
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