Session M9: Invited Session: A History of Physics in Industry followed by Panel Discussion

Commercial Scholarship: Spinning Physics Research into a Business Enterprise

The American Institute of Physics' Center for History of Physics has conducted a three year NSF funded study of physicist entrepreneurs during which we interviewed 140 physicists who have founded ninety-one startups. Forty of those companies have spun research out of twenty-some universities. Startups spun out of university research tend to be technology push companies, creating new potentially disruptive technologies for which markets do not yet clearly exist, in contrast to market pull companies founded to address innovations responding to market demands. This paper addresses the unique issues found in university spinout companies and their responses to them. While technology push companies are generally considered to be higher risk compared to market pull companies, the university spinouts in our study had a higher rate of both SBIR and venture capital funding than did the market pull companies in our study.   

A Place for Materials Science: University of Pennsylvania's Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter

The University of Pennsylvania's Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter (LRSM) opened its doors in 1965. Constructed to house cutting-edge research on Materials Science, the LRSM building was designed to foster interdisciplinary research among physicists, chemists and metallurgical engineers. Each of the five floors of the new building included a central facility, including a high magnetic field center, an analytical chemistry research center and an electron microscopy center. While primarily funded by the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency, the LRSM also was also partly sponsored by industry. The LRSM received funding from Philadelphia Electric Company, General Electric Company, and IBM, among others. In this paper, I will study how the building was designed to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration, while also becoming a place of intersection among academic, private, and governmental interests. This project is a collaboration with Hyungsub Choi.   

Dad's in the Garage: Santa Barbara Physicists in the Long 1970s

American physicists faced many challenges in the 1970s: declining research budgets; public skepticism of scientific authority; declining student enrollments; and pressure to shift to topics such as biomedicine, environmental remediation, alternative energy, public housing and transport, and disability technologies. This paper examines the responses to these challenges of a small group of Santa Barbara physicists. While this group is not representative of the American physics profession, the success and failure of their responses to changed conditions tells us something about how American physicists got through the 1970s, and about the origins of some features of American physics today. The three physicists examined here are Philip Wyatt, David Phillips, and Virgil Elings. In the late `60s, Wyatt left a defense think tank to found an instrumentation firm. The Santa Barbara oil spill and other factors pushed that firm toward civilian markets in biomedicine and pollution measurement. Phillips joined Wyatt's firm from UCSB, while also founding his own company, largely to sell electronic devices for parapsychology. Phillips was also the junior partner in a master's of scientific instrumentation degree curriculum founded by Elings in order to save UCSB Physics' graduate program. Through the MSI program, Elings moved into biomedical research and became a serial entrepreneur. By the 1990s, Wyatt, Phillips, and Elings' turn toward academic entrepreneurship, dual military-civilian markets for physics start-ups, and interdisciplinary collaborations between physicists and life scientists were no longer unusual. Together, their journey through the `70s shows how varied the physics' profession's response to crisis was, and how much it pivoted on new interactions between university and industry.   

Industrial Physics---Southern California Style

Only in Southern California did space-age style really come into its own as a unique expression of Cold War scientific culture. The corporate campuses of General Atomic in San Diego and North American Aviation in Los Angeles perfectly expressed the exhilarating spirit of Southern California's aerospace era, scaling up the residential version of California modernism to industrial proportion. Architects William Pereira and A.C. Martin Jr., in collaboration with their scientific counterparts, fashioned military-industrial `dream factories' for industrial physics that embodied the secret side of the space-age zeitgeist, one the public could only glimpse of in photographs, advertisements, and carefully staged open houses. These laboratories served up archetypes of the California dream for a select audience of scientists, engineers, and military officers, live-action commercials for a lifestyle intended to lure the best and brightest to Southern California. Paradoxically, they hid in plain sight, in the midst of aerospace suburbs, an open secret, at once visible and opaque, the public face of an otherwise invisible empire. Now, at the end of the aerospace era, these places have become an endangered species, difficult to repurpose, on valuable if sometimes highly polluted land. Yet they offer an important reminder of a more confident time when many physicists set their sights on the stars.   

Panel Discussion - Perspectives on the History of Industrial Physics

This panel discussion provides the speakers and the audience an opportunity to explore the common themes these papers exhibit in greater detail.