Federal Science and Education for Industry at McGill, 1913–38

James Hull

The rapid arrival of the second industrial revolution on the heels of the first transformed Canada’s economy.¹ That second revolution, the rise of science-based industry, depended crucially on new educational institutions. As, in Harry Paul’s wonderful phrase, the factory became dependent on the faculty, university-educated engineers, chemists, metallurgists and others moved into managerial ranks of new corporations and found themselves in proximate, if not always unchallenged, charge of production.² The knowledge they acquired as part of their training immediately changed production but modified the nexus of exchange relations of which it was a part.

So too did the knowledge required by the change in methods of training. Under the impact of continuous-process production and the scientization of traditional processes, the dynamics of chemical systems, unit operations and new specialties such as colloid, cellulose and electro-chemistry did not replace but were added to traditional qualitative and quantitative analysis and laboratory methods.³ As industrial processes changed they became attractively interesting to university scientists. Broader areas of overlap between academic science and industrial research science manifested

themselves.⁴ Government science formed the third circle in the Venn diagram. In defining the relationship among the three parties, universities’ internal critics and reformers acquired great scope to advance their own schemes. Recent science policy debates have described relations between universities, industry, and governments as a "triple helix." Etzkowitz and others have show how shown how—although science and markets, and private and public sectors have been differentiated functionally—their relationship may be analysed dynamically. The term triple helix refers to a network overlay of communications and expectations that reshape the institutional arrangements among the science institutions and functions of government, private firms, and academia.⁵ Further, interactions among the three sectors "led to the creation of integrating mechanisms ...and hybrid organizations."⁶ Although this framework gives no undue weight to any of the actors, Godin and Gingras have rightly insisted on the continued leading role of the universities as producers of knowledge.⁷

For the historian, a crucial aspect of this debate is the timing of the universities’ "new" relationship with government and industry, and their unfortunate tendency to date important changes to a recent period. Louis and Anderson claim that prior to the Second World War "universities produced very little of value to the larger society, other than educated clergy and lawyers, and ‘well-rounded’ national leaders" suggesting the authors ascribe little value to engineering, medicine, or secondary education.⁸ The Langfords however caution that the triple helix model "is not an entirely novel phenomenon."⁹ Gingras’ careful summary is closest to the mark for the Canadian experience, and tells us when and where we must start:

Although the discourse on the importance of research in the ‘modern’ university began in the 1870s and multiplied from the beginning of the twentieth century, only in the 1910s did war and the problems of Canadian industry give nation-wide coverage to these claims, hitherto confined within the walls of the universities which sheltered active researchers.¹⁰

During World War One the Federal government established the Honourary Advisory Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, forerunner of the National Research Council.¹¹ Although most immediately justified as an initiative to mobilize scientific resources during Total War, the new Council represented a response to demands for better organization of scientific research which had been heard in Canada for several years. Given a broad mandate to identify, mobilize, coordinate, and promote research resources, the Council chose three ways to proceed: scholarships, Associate Committees, and Assisted Research grants. Scholarships for graduate work in the sciences by Canadian students promoted the production of research workers.¹² The Associate Committees brought together scientists and engineers around a specific topic at the Council’s expense. The Assisted Research grants went to individuals, usually university science professors, to carry on specific projects.

The Honourary Advisory Council brought only a modest increase in funding to scientific and industrial research in Canada. More importantly, it stimulated a great deal of thinking about the long-term organization of research. The Royal Society of Canada (rsc), which before the war had imagined taking a leadership role in this area, urged, in the Spring of 1918, the setting up of a Dominion Central Laboratory. The Society of Chemical Industry and the Canadian Society of Chemists joined the rsc’s efforts, headed up by the University of Toronto chemistry professor Lash Miller, to lobby for such a facility.¹³

Objections came quickly. University of Toronto physicist J.C. McLennan suggested that university-affiliated laboratories of the Mellon Institute kind be established in several cities in Canada, with a standards laboratory in Ottawa. McGill’s L.V. King, then receiving grants from the Honourary Advisory Council, thought research should be done at the universities. He stressed the primacy of standards work for a national laboratory, on the model of the United States National Bureau of Standards, ignoring or unaware of the work of his McGill colleague R.F. Ruttan to establish a separate Canadian standards body.¹⁴ Queen’s W.L. Goodwin echoed those opinions, insisting the Universities are the mothers of Research.¹⁵

These matters had a full airing in the 1919 hearings of the Special Committee Appointed to Consider the Matter of the Development in Canada of Scientific Research.¹⁶ Chaired by Member of Parliament Hume Cronyn, the Committee received a large number of representations in favour of government action respecting a research laboratory. These came from Boards of Trade, educational institutions, scientific and technical associations and other bodies. The Canadian Fisheries Association and the Canadian Mining Association both dissented. The former looked to the Fisheries Research Board for its scientific information and, instead of a central bureau of research, argued for government grants to university biology departments in support of research. The latter hoped that any research institute would not encroach on the work of the Department of Mines.

A good cross-section of government scientists and university science professors appeared before the Committee as witnesses. Honourary Advisory Council Chairman A.B. Macallum reported on the Council’s work and painted a gloomy picture of the state of research in Canada. When asked whether the lack of demand in Canada for research scientists caused the universities to produce so few science PhDs or vice versa, Macallum rather lamely and misleadingly referred to the alleged classics or humanities biases of Canadian universities. He hoped this orientation was changing and that industry would see the usefulness of employing trained researchers produced by the universities. A National Research Institute, he argued, would be a place for the employment of researchers, and would encourage the universities to produce more of them. The Council, Macallum stated, agreed no government money should go to the universities for industrial research. Not only was there a constitutional obstacle, but public subsidy would crowd out the pure science the universities should be doing, besides training researchers.

Lash Miller informed the Committee that since 1892, the Honours Chemistry course at the University of Toronto had included a large research component and had graduated about six students a year. The department judged that Canada could not support a greater rate of production of research scientists. Miller suggested the government support the Society of Chemical Industry’s efforts to get managers of technical businesses who are not chemists to see the advantages that would accrue to them through the employment of scientific assistance.

A.S. Mackenzie, President of Dalhousie and a member of the Honourary Advisory Council, declared that if education had been a federal responsibility, national pride would have required a major research presence in one or more universities. The Council, he said, had rejected the model of decentralized laboratories in major manufacturing centres, tied to local universities. That model would have been unworkable because it would lead to particularistic bickering and duplication of effort. Besides, research aimed at industrial applications would take time away from pure research in the universities.

R.F. Ruttan Director of the Chemical Laboratories at McGill and also a Council member, stated that Canada’s first need was for researchers and these must come from the universities. Industries should accept the importance of such people. The universities needed money for mission-oriented research in the form of provincial grants and private donations. Government had a role to play in assisting industry with its scientific needs just as agriculture was assisted by the experimental farm system. Government research would help small firms otherwise unable to finance their own research facilities, a chance to compete. Ruttan envisaged a system whereby the universities produced researchers, Dominion research laboratories gave them initial employment and from this pool industry would recruit its research scientists. This would end Canadian industry’s reliance on foreign-trained technical specialists.

In its conclusions the Cronyn committee noted the country’s tradition of government science and the examples of the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States in giving support to national research. It recommended the government provide funding for research to exploit the country’s natural resources and to foster Canadian industry on world markets. The committee did not resolve any of the difficult questions of support for national research.

The struggle to find a new relationship of science to industry, government, and academia is not a construct of later science policy theorists but rather an historical episode. Etzkowitz and Webster see the story as one of conservative universities responding more rapidly in response to external influences than to internal ones.¹⁷ That view does not capture the subtleties of the universities’ own reformers’ strategic devices, among which was the use of external influences to promote changes that, for their own reasons, they wished to produce. Ruttan and his colleagues were such university reformers and had particular and explicit intentions. Quite apart from any interest in industry science, they had specific notions of the function and development of Canadian universities and of scientists as professionals. They asserted claims to a greater prominence for research, relief from some of the burdens of teaching, and the growth of graduate schools. Their conception of the role of science in the university curriculum shaped their attitudes to the organization of scientific research in Canada. And so too did, quite simply, their desire for more funding.¹⁸

Although assigning the "second academic revolution" to a more recent date, Etzkowitz and his co-workers have shown how just as universities had to accommodate a research mission along with their traditional teaching one, they have later sought to accommodate an economic development one.¹⁹ Canada’s institutions of higher education had been drawn into industry-oriented investigations even before the Great War.²⁰ Both levels of government favoured staple-based development that would allow the capture of more value for the country’s natural resources through domestic processing, and both saw science—their own, industry’s, and universities’—as necessary to industrial transformation. McGill’s interest in forest products science dated from before the First World War.²¹ The university’s Department of Chemical Engineering had experimental scale pulp digesters and other equipment donated by industry with which senior students could conduct investigations.²² Thus when the Federal Department of the Interior, in 1913, established the Forest Products Laboratory of Canada (fpl) to conduct research on the scientific and technical problems of that sector, the university was a natural site for the new government laboratory.

That the Laboratory (soon re-styled "Laboratories") might have some place in the education of McGill students had been contemplated from the start. The University’s students already received lectures in wood pulping and distillation.²³ When a recent McGill Chemical Engineering graduate, A.G. McIntyre, got the nod as first Superintendent of the fpl, he negotiated an agreement with McGill Dean of Applied Science, Frank Adams, for fpl staff to give lectures to chemistry and engineering students.²⁴ John Bates, McIntyre’s early successor as head of the fpl, took the position that a federal government laboratory could not properly involve itself with education. It could however provide McGill students an opportunity for contact with pulp and paper investigations and processes. Bates himself lectured to senior students.²⁵ Defining its relationships in a different direction, the fpl handled certain research inquiries which the Honourary Advisory Council received from industry with Bates getting an appointment to the Council’s chemistry committee.²⁶

In the immediate postwar era, senior McGill administrators, including Adams and Director of Chemistry R.F. Ruttan, began actively to promote the idea of some formal structure for education in pulp and paper making at McGill. Proposals included a school of papermaking, similar to those in the US, and joint remuneration of a professorship by McGill and the federal government, through the fpl.²⁷ Ruttan had argued along these lines in his testimony before the Cronyn Committee.²⁸ On its own, McGill established in 1921–22 a new course in colloid chemistry. External lecturers in organic industrial chemistry spoke on pulp and paper, wood distillation, and mill waste.²⁹

One proposal from the fpl’s advisory committee, on which the industry and McGill were well represented, would have had the facility coming under the joint control of the federal Forestry Branch, the Honourary Advisory Council—now permanent but without its own laboratories as yet—and the pulp and paper industry, the latter making a direct financial commitment.³⁰ This idea was a non-starter, though the Council did make a small appropriation for the study at McGill of sugars in sulphite liquor waste. Although the fpl assisted Professor V.K. Kreible’s work, it was a one-time ad hoc arrangement.³¹

Private industry increasingly accepted that the raw material they processed was not wood but rather cellulose. Nowhere in Canada was such thinking so advanced as in the Ottawa Valley pulp and paper company Riordon. The fpl, during the Great War, had cooperated with Riordon in investigating the chemistry of lignin, the principal non-cellulose component in wood.³² Under C.B. Thorne, the firm developed a complex, tightly-controlled bleaching process to produce the cellulose needed for rayon, bottle caps, cellophane, and cellulose esters.³³ Technically-trained people in the industry thought they had seen the future and it was cellulose.³⁴

Elsewhere, I have argued this change in the industry’s understanding of its knowledge base led to institutional changes that redefined the fpl. In the early 1920s, the fpl split asunder. Its Pulp and Paper Division remained in Montréal and eventually joined with the cooperative research programme of the Canadian Pulp and Paper Association (cppa) and McGill. The other more wood-oriented parts of the government laboratory moved to Ottawa.³⁵

At one level the point at issue was, as ever, money. McGill wanted some means by which to pry money out of industry, wanted to retain the fpl or some part of it at the university, but did not or could not commit funds of its own. Industry, although doing a lot more research of its own, of course wished to see the state, either directly or via the support of institutions of higher education, pick up some of the tab. While the Federal government remained committed to the fpl it was not prepared to subsidize either McGill or the pulp and paper industry while exercising parsimony in its funding of the Laboratories. And also as ever, Deputy Minister of the Interior W.W. Cory pursued baffling private schemes.³⁶

Thus the parties made mutually unacceptable offers to each other. The government would keep the fpl in Montréal if McGill would provide it with rent-free accommodation. McGill would donate land if the government would construct a new building. The industry mouthpiece the Pulp and Paper Magazine of Canada, continued to sound the theme of education for industry, but was in no position to do anything practical about it.³⁷

The deus ex machina arrived in the form of a bequest to McGill from the widow of paper magnate E.B. Eddy. Eddy’s bequest allowed McGill to come to the table in a much stronger position. As early as November 1923 John Bates, by that time in private industry, Ruttan and McGill Principal Arthur Currie discussed putting the Eddy bequest, the fpl budget and the cppa’s contributions into one pot.³⁸ Although so ambitious a scheme was premature, McGill and the Association did agree to remunerate a new professorship in chemical engineering. McGill made use of income from the Eddy bequest for its half while eleven firms jointly provided the industry’s share.³⁹

When the first choice, former fpl researcher Bjarne Johnsen, declined the offer of the new chair, he suggested Harold Hibbert. The English-born Hibbert, a former Du Pont research chemist, had helped found the Division of Cellulose Chemistry of the American Chemical Society while he was an assistant professor of chemistry at Yale. In spite of Hibbert’s limited familiarity with pulp and paper manufacture, he had the support of a leading Canadian paper industry executive, C. Howard Smith. In 1925 Hibbert accepted the appointment to the new chair of cellulose and industrial chemistry at McGill.⁴⁰

This marked a dramatic change in the pulp and paper industry’s acceptance of scientific research. In 1913 the fpl’s supporters had hastened to assure the pulp and paper industry that the laboratory would be staffed by practical engineers and not persons "anxious to investigate the obscure properties of the cellulose molecule."⁴¹ Scarcely more than a dozen years later industry supported and lauded the selection of a scholar who frankly admitted his lack of qualification to teach pulp and paper making but who was North America’s leading expert on the properties of the cellulose molecule.⁴² This striking volte-face had to do with industry’s changing perception of itself, its technology, and of the role of Canada’s universities in the Canadian economy. It also reveals something about interwar business strategies in Canada.⁴³ Industry, in particular through the vehicle of trade associations, looked to the Federal government to pick up some of the overhead costs of industrial research and, if possible, of training a new workforce to design and superintend new productive technologies.

If industry observers saw these events as a great breakthrough, the creation of the new chair was only one step. Attempts to provide further industry support in the form of fellowships for Hibbert’s students enjoyed little success. The Canadian Pulp and Paper Association (cppa) Technical Section’s Educational Committee’s summer work programme for science and engineering students was moribund.⁴⁴ Even the final 1926 agreement to create the Pulp and Paper Research Institute of Canada (parican) had limited scope. It would house the Pulp and Paper Division of the fpl, the Hibbert (or Eddy) chair and the cppa’s cooperative research in a single building. Ongoing funding came from the three parties to the paprican agreement. But it was a physical rather than an administrative structure. Not until 1940 with the appointment of McGill’s Otto Maass would the Institute have on over-all Director.⁴⁵ Still, the cppa raised funds for the Institute’s physical plant in an atmosphere of great self-congratulations.

More or less polite jousting began at once to define institutional relations within and without the paprican framework.⁴⁶ At stake were spheres of research responsibility, funding, patents, and publications. Personal appeals to friends in the industry by Hibbert, and the personal interest of some in the industry in the new institution and its programme, together defined its function and accomplishments just as much as any legal document or organizational chart. The poor relations between Hibbert and the fpl on the one hand and the nrc, its head H.M. Tory, and Deputy Minister Cory on the other are notorious and well documented, even if the reasons for their differences are open to debate.⁴⁷ In practice, high-level bickering did not prevent day to day cooperation. Similarly, private and government laboratories agreed that although they would not obstruct career mobility, neither would they try to poach each other’s staff.⁴⁸ It is striking how little conflict arose in the operations of this "hybrid," as Etzkowitz would have it, institution. Doubtless, the mediation of the interests of individual firms by the industry’s trade association greatly assisted.

Just how much support did industry have for science, for research, and for this particular institution? Even if the money for paprican was a major one-time commitment of funds by industry, it was less than the cost of a single newsprint machine.⁴⁹ In-house spending on research by industry dwarfed the sums committed to extramural programmes whereas Federal support for the Research Institute was twice that of the industry.⁵⁰ But where science boosters had once been urging firms simply to hire university qualified personnel, they now urged establishment of intramural research units. Where once they urged industry to appreciate the output of undergraduate classrooms and teaching laboratories, they now counselled use of the output of the research system. Where once the question had been whether university graduates could understand the language of the mill, now it was a question whether mill workers could understand the language of the laboratory. By the late 1920s the demand for university-trained personnel in the mills exceeded the supply and correspondence and night school courses for workers were well subscribed.⁵¹ The early graduates of Hibbert’s programme and doctoral students who chose to work on pulp-and-paper topics at McGill with Otto Maass found ready employment.

employment of mcgill graduates from pulp and paper courses (1937)⁵²

Notes: Hibbert = M.Sc. & PhD graduates from the Industrial and Cellulose Chemistry Department, 1927–1933.

Maass = PhD graduates in pulp and paper related topics from the Department of Physical Chemistry, 1929–1933.

Scarcely had the back-slapping and cork-popping at the opening of paprican ended when the Great Depression struck. Eventually—and sooner rather than later—almost all the Canadian newsprint industry would be in receivership or conditions amounting to it.⁵³ The industry’s commitment to scientific research would be tested and, in important measure, found wanting. The contrast was particularly sharp when compared to McGill’s and the Federal government’s continued funding, under difficult circumstances, of the facility.

In the first place, only about twenty percent of the paprican operating budget originated with the cppa in 1930. Extracting even a few thousands more from individual firms to support the work of Hibbert and his students was a major and frustrating undertaking.⁵⁴ The circumstances were grim. cppa Technical Section Membership declined, in part due to let-go technical personnel. Even Abitibi Power and Paper fell victim either to the temptation or to the imperative to cut back on the search for new applications of science. With its large in-house research programme of the 1920s, Abitibi had warm relations with McGill, paying for fellowships in Hibbert’s Department, receiving technical advice, and even coordinating some research. This arrangement came to an abrupt end as the giant northern Ontario firm gutted its own research programme.⁵⁵

Supporters of industrial science advanced every possible argument to sustain industry funding. Investment in research would lead to economic stimulus. Basic research underlies practical application. Competitive advances elsewhere must be met with innovation at home. The amounts needed were small—tiny—in the context of the overall value of the industry’s products. Cutting back on research represented false economy.

The most spectacular success story that pro-research science boosters could cite in this period came with the development of a method of extracting vanillin from pulp mill waste. This came from PhD research by George Tomlinson II under Hibbert with the support of the Howard Smith company of Cornwall.⁵⁶ This proof of the vanilla pudding did not sway an industry looking instead to government action, cartellizing, improvements in the international situation, or perhaps divine intervention for survival.

The fpl side of paprican did rather better. It maintained its own funding and programme, regularized arrangements for access to its facilities by third parties, grew as a source of service bureau work for industry, and did research for other government bodies including the National Research Council.⁵⁷ Meanwhile McGill had to cobble together funding for the Eddy Chair from the Eddy fund, which was assured; the cppa grant, albeit a reduced one; nrc fellowships, studentships and special research grants; fellowships from individual Canadian and US firms and even United States National Research Council money. Hibbert nonetheless found it necessary to use part of his own salary to subsidize his laboratory’s research.⁵⁸ The assertion that "[i]n the 1930s, most academics rejected government funding of research" is not supported in this instance.⁵⁹ The cppa’s share, supposedly as assured as McGill’s Eddy bequest, had to be arranged ad hoc each year and depended on the individual action of firms and the extent to which each perceived the worth of research. With few PhDs yet in the mills, industry exposure to and commitment to science had not yet been matched by that to research.

As an illustrative episode in the history of technology, the development in Canada between 1913 and 1938 of government and industry support for fundamental and applied research in the pulp and paper industries, invites a simple, if narrow conclusion. In the creation of paprican, institutional change followed changes in the knowledge base underlying the forest products industries’ productive processes. These changes would survive the challenge of the Depression, though suffering some rather tough times. But we can get much more out of this story.

Szostak, looking principally at the United States, has argued that the Depression marks an end to the second industrial revolution and indeed is a phenomenon of it. Industry, after a period of new process innovation and little new product innovation, had become efficient at producing what people already owned. The consequence was a huge labour surplus and then massive unemployment.⁶⁰ Bernstein however has said that the ability to use innovation to induce demand allowed some firms to find at least a partial technological fix during the Depression. The innovation did not necessary mean the development of new products but rather of new uses for existing products.⁶¹ Were Canadian pulp and paper firms typical in not keeping up their commitment to research and development during the Depression? Certainly some Canadian firms did innovate successfully during the Depression.⁶² But if the latter were the exceptions then this may have been the moment when Canadian industry began to go off the high-tech rails.

The Pulp and Paper Research Institute of Canada, as well as being a hybrid government-university-industry institution had also a federal character. The British North America Act assigns authority over education to the provinces. By 1930, all had authority over their natural resources. Yet it was the Dominion government that sent its scientists and dollars to the McGill campus. As Gibbons has pointed out,

Canadian governments collaborate more than they fight… a web of programs, agreements, committees, and conferences draws the governments together in a common collaborative enterprise.⁶³

Scientific research, graduate science education, and vocational training and technical standards all brought the two levels of government together to support the goal of greater industrial efficiency and international competitiveness.

Martha Moore Trescott, in her fine study of the American electrochemical industry along the Niagara River, saw educational institutions responding well to that industry’s evolving need for knowledge-bearers.⁶⁴ So too, apparently, did McGill to the eastern Canadian pulp and paper industry. But surely this way of seeing the past is to beg the question. If industry changed its mind about needing people "to study the obscure properties of the cellulose molecule," what explains that change? If the industry’s knowledge base changed, why did it change?

If education changed to meet the needs of industry surely it was because industry had been changed by the institutions of education. Louis and Anderson are correct in directing our attention to the values of science as relations between university and industry change, though they deal only with changes in the universities.⁶⁵ The factory got more than hired guns from the faculties of science. Science policy experts have explained how the university graduate is the major vector carrying university research out into the wider world. The values, skills, attitudes, ideas and discourse of those chemists originally hired from the universities by industry to analyze lubricants and test for moisture content surely prepared the way for acceptance of and demand for more and better science in the 1920s. They also created institutions to press this case from within industry. This made the call for more government-supported academic science part of the strategy of Canadian capitalism, mostly voiced by trade associations, in the 1920s. It led specifically to industry’s initial commitment to McGill for paprican.

That industry is not academia, that even science-based industry is not a confederation of laboratories, showed up in the flagging of support in the 1930s This story is a cautionary tale for those who mouth ill-considered platitudes about universities and the marketplace. We cannot generalize about industry and the state, about private firms and government, and about the relations of all to the academy from one example. Governments too can and do betray their commitments. But if the State does not necessarily have a longer time horizon than the firm nor greater vision can we not at least depend on inertia? And certainly we can see that universities that base their plans for education on the present needs of future employers end up serving no one at all very well.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Material in this paper was variously presented at the meetings of the Canadian Science Technology Historical Association (Kingston), Canadian Historical Association (Edmonton), Canadian History of Education Association (London) and the Okanagan University College Arts Colloquium (Kelowna). The comments of participants at those meetings as well as those of the editor of this journal and two anonymous referees have greatly improved this paper.

Funding from the Grants in Aid Committee and Professional Development Fund of Okanagan University College is gratefully acknowledged.

NOTES

1. Ian M. Drummond, “Ontario’s Industrial Revolution, 1867–1941" Canadian Historical Review 69 (1988): 283–314. For the concept of a second industrial revolution, see James P. Hull, “From Rostow to Chandler to you: How Revolutionary was the Second Industrial Revolution?” Journal of European Economic History 25 (Spring 1996): 191–208.

2. Harry W. Paul, “Apollo Courts the Vulcans: The Applied Science Institutes in Nineteenth Century French Science Faculties,” in Robert Fox and George Weisz, eds., The Organization of Science and Technology in France 1808–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 155–81.

3. See, for instance, J.F. Donnelly, “Getting Technical: The Vicissitudes of Academic Industrial Chemistry in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” History of Education 26 (June 1997): 125–43; Thomas J. Misa, “The Changing Market for Chemical Knowledge: Applied Chemistry and Chemical Engineering in the Delaware Valley, 1851–1929,” History and Technology (1985): 245–68; Harry Woolf, “Basic Research and Industrial Enterprise” Minerva 22 (Summer 1984): 183–95.

4. Donnelly, “Getting Technical,” op. cit.

5. H. Etzkowitz and L. Leydesdorff, “The dynamics of innovation: from National Systems and ‘Model 2' to a Triple Helix of university-industry-government relations,” Research Policy 29 (2000): 109–23.

6. Loet Leydersdorff and Henry Etzkowitz, “Emergence of a Triple Helix of university-industry-government relations,” Science and Public Policy 23 (October 1998): 279–86.

7. Benoit Godin and Yves Gingras, “The place of universities in the system of knowledge production,” Research Policy 29 (2000): 273–8.

8. Karen Seashore Louis and Melissa S. Anderson “The Changing Context of Science and University-Industry Relations,” in Henry Etzkowitz et al., eds., Capitalizing Knowledge (Albany, 1998), 73–91. The authors further assert that before the twentieth century most significant scientific advances occurred outside of universities; we may hope that the work of, for instance, Galileo and Newton are important exceptions to this extraordinary claim.

9. Cooper H. Langford and Martha Whitney Langford, “The Evolution of rules for access to megascience research environments viewed from Canadian experience,” Research Policy 29 (2000): 167–79. See also Cooper Langford et al., “The ‘well-stirred reaction’ evolution of industry-government-university relations in Canada,” Science and Public Policy 24 (1997): 21–7.

10. Yves Gingras, Physics and the Rise of Scientific Research in Canada, trans. Peter Keating (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), 7.

11. Wilfrid Eggleston, National Research in Canada (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1978).

12. The importance of these to the development of graduate studies at Canadian universities, especially Toronto and McGill, has been argued in Yves Gingras, “Post-Graduate Finance and Science Research,” in Paul Axelrod and John G. Reid, eds., Youth University and Canadian Society (Kingston and Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), 301–19.

13. See the correspondence on this subject between McGill’s L.V. King and the University of Toronto’s Lash Miller in the L.V. King Papers, McGill University Archives, MG 3026, c.1, file #695.

14. Ruttan, with a group of Montréal engineers, organized the Canadian Engineering Standards Association in 1919. Now the Canadian Standards Association, it began, like the nrc, as a wartime committee.

15. Quoted in Mel Thistle The Inner Ring (Toronto: University Press, 1965), 36.

16. The following discussion is based on Special Committee Appointed to Consider the Matter of the Development in Canada of Scientific Research (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1919).

17. Henry Etzkowitz and Andrew Webster, “Entrepreneurial Science: The Second Academic Revolution,” in Etzkowitz et al. Capitalizing Knowledge, 21–46.

18. Cf. John W. Servos, “The Industrial Relations of Science: Chemical Engineering at MIT, 1900–1919,” Isis 71 (1980): 531–49.

19. Etzkowitz and Webster, “Entrepreneurial Science,” Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, “Dynamics of innovation,” Leydesdorff and Etzkowitz, “Emergence.”

20. W.A.E. McBryde, “Ontario: Early Pilot Plant for the Chemical Refining of Petroleum in North America” Ontario History 79 (September 1987): 203–30; Donald Macleod, “Miners, Mining Men and Mining Reform: Changing the Technology of Nova Scotia’s Gold Mines and Collieries 1858 to 1910,” PhD thesis, Toronto, 1981, 56, 228; Dianne Newell, Technology on the Frontier (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986), 49; James Otto Petersen, “The Origins of Canadian Gold Mining: The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Tool Production to Machine Production,” PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 1977, 217–21.

21. The more or less official history of the university in this period is Stanley Brice Frost, McGill University for the Advancement of Learning, vol. 2 (Kingston and Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1984).

22. Fred Stevens, “Ménage à Trois Celebrates Golden Wedding” Pulp and Paper Magazine of Canada (hereafter cited as PPMC) 54 (May 1953): 163. Similarly, Canadian General Electric helped to equip the first electrical engineering laboratory at the University of New Brunswick in 1893, Raymond D. Findlay, “Electrical Engineering and Technology Education” in Electricity the Magic Medium (Thornhill: IEEE, 1985): 122–63.

23. R.V.V. Nichols, Notes for a History of the Department of Chemistry 5 ms McGill University Archives

24. FPL Personnel Advisory Committee (hereafter cited as Committee) NAC RG 39 v. 113, file 40683.

25. NAC RG 39, V, 279-285, file 40567, fpl Supervision—Reports (hereafter cited as Reports) February 1915.

26. Ibid., January 1917, July 1919.

27. Committee.

28. The Committee’s Proceedings of 13 May 1919 contain Ruttan’s testimony (see note 15 supra).

29. McGill University Archives RG 2 c67 file 1920–1926 Chemistry memorandum of R.F. Ruttan to Acting Principal F.D. Adams.

30. NAC RG 39 v.113, file 40683 Minutes of the General Advisory Committee 22 April 1919.

31. Reported in Canadian Chemical Journal 2 (August 1918): 205–07.

32. Reports, March 1917, July 1918, September 1920.

33. S. Wang History of the Sulphite Process in Canada (Hawkesbury, 1948), unpublished pamphlet.

34. This is recalled by industry researcher C.F.B. Stevens in a private communication to the present writer, 2 July 1984. Other chemical industries reached similar conclusions. The American Petroleum Institute for instance sponsored a major investigation in fundamental chemistry of that raw material. Yakov M. Rabkin, “Chemicalization of petroleum refining in the United States: The Role of Cooperative Research, 1920–1950" Social Science Information 19 (1980): 833–50.

35. James P. Hull, “From the fpl to paprican: Science and the Pulp and Paper Industry” hstc bulletin 23 (1983): 3–13. Compare C.B. Schedvin, Shaping Science and Industry (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 102–10.

36. Principal Currie’s correspondence on the moving of the fpl is in McGill University Archives RG 2 c67 file 1920–1926 Industrial Chemistry–PL. See also the PPMC editorial of 18 January 1923, 51–2.

37. “Pulp and Paper at McGill” PPMC 16 February 1922, 113.

38. File 1920–1926 Currie to Bates 29 November 1923, Ruttan to Currie 26 November.

39. The Order-in-Council approving these arrangements is PC 357 of 12 March 1925. See also the editorial “Industrial Research Advanced” in PPMC 19 March 1925, 289.

40. The relevant correspondence is in McGill University Archives, RG 2 c67 file Chemistry—Hibbert Application For Hibbert’s biography see Melville L. Wolfrom, Harold Hibbert 1877–1945 (New York, 1958).

41. R.H. Campbell, Canada’s New Forest Products Laboratories” Pulp and Paper Magazine of Canada (15 June 1913): 417–18.

42. McGill Archives RG c67 File “Chemists—Hibbert Application.”

43. Tom Traves, The State and Enterprise (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 73–100.

44. Reported in PPMC, 7 January 1926, 3-4.

45. Charles A. Sankey, PAPRICAN (Pointe Claire, 1976), 19

46. This may be following in the McGill University Archives Hibbert Papers. See in particular his memorandum “Organization Co-Operative Research Staff” January 1928.

47. See Mel Thistle The Inner Ring (Toronto, 1965), 273–94.

48. These issues can be followed through the Minutes of the Joint Administrative Council of PAPRICAN.

49. This was pointed out editorially in PPMC 1 July 1926, 755.

50. Hibbert Papers Hibbert to Harold Crabtree 7 April 1930. See also the address of John Bates reported in PPMC 4 July 1929, 3 et seq.

51. James P. Hull, “Strictly by the book: textbooks and the control of production in the North American pulp and paper industry,” History of Education 27 (1998): 85-95.

52. Source: W.G. Mitchell Review History of Pulp and Paper Research Institute of Canada 1925–1937, unpublished ms., McGill Archives.

53. C.P. Fell, “The Newsprint Industry” in H.A. Innis and A.F.W. Plumptre, eds., The Canadian Economy and its Problems (Toronto: Canadian Institute of International Affairs, 1934), 40–53.

54. Minutes of the paprican Joint Administrative Council 6 January 1930, 14. April 1930, Hibbert Papers Hibbert to Dr. Johnson (March 1930?).

55. James P. Hull, “Research at Abitibi Power and Paper” Ontario History 79 (June 1987): 167–79.

56. George Herbert Tomlinson II, “The Formation of Vanillin From Lignin Sulphonic Acids and Its Relation to the Structure of Lignin,” PhD thesis, McGill, 1935.

57. See the memorandum of H. Wyatt Johnston 15 June 1934 held at the paprican library (unclassified). Compare the policies of the National Research Council in this period as described in W.E. Knowles Middleton, Mechanical Engineering at the National Research Council of Canada, 1929–1951 (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1984), 32.

58. McGill University Archives RG2 c66 file 1927–1933 Department of Chemistry Appointments and Staff. Also in the Hibbert Papers Alton C. Hill to Chairman Technical Section cppa, 5 December 1938.

59. Etzkowitz and Webster “Entrepreneurial Science,” op. cit.

60. Rick Szostak, Technological Innovation and the Great Depression (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995).

61. Michael A. Bernstein, “The Response of American Manufacturing Industries to the Great Depression” History and Technology 3 (1987): 225–48.

62. Martha Whitney Langford, “Shawinigan Chemicals Limited: History of a Canadian Scientific Innovator” PhD thesis, Montréal, 1987, 152.

63. Roger Gibbons, Conflict and Unity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 223.

64. Martha Moore Trescott, The Rise of the American Electro-Chemicals Industry, 1880–1910 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981). A similar point is made by Alan Dransfield, “Applied Science in a University Context, Metallurgy at Manchester 1875–1906,” PhD thesis, Leeds, 1985.

65. Louis and Anderson, “Changing Context,” op. cit.