1. D. Pestre and G. Pancaldi have explored the consequences of the first world war on the scientific institutions in France and Italy in papers presented at a conference on “Science, Technology, Institutions in Europe (1900–1920)” that was organized by the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) and held in Rome on the 27th and 28th of November 1990. It is interesting to compare the subsequent history of the various national research councils that were formed during the first world war. In France, Great Britain and Italy these government sponsored and supported organizations had a substantial impact on science policy in the interwar period. In the United States, although influential, the National Research Council remained a division of the National Academy of Sciences, and was supported primarily by the Rockefeller Foundation. See Heilbron and Seidel. For a discussion of Great Britain see Gummett.
2. Ian Hacking, “Was there a Probabilistic Revolution 1800–1930?,” in The Probabilistic Revolution. L. Kruger, G. Gigerenzer, and M. S. Morgan, eds. (Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1987) volume 1, pp. 45–58.
3. T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd edition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971).
4. The presentation in their text was an attempt to resist “what is surely a deplorable trend to substitute a code for a theory, to substitute an oscilloscope display of many curves for a detailed physical understanding of the system.” Their monograph therefore did “less that justice to the many elegant machine computing techniques which are now (1958) in vogue in many nuclear centers.” Wigner and Weinberg also declared: “Let the new generation remember that the first full scale reactors, Hanford, were designed with desk calculators and slide rules.” Alvin Weinberg and Eugene Wigner, The Physical Principles of Nuclear Chain
Reactors, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958).
5. Hendrik W. Bode, Synergy: Technical Integration and Technological Innovation in the Bell System. (Murray Hill, New Jersey. Bell Telephone Laboratories, 1971) Bode credits T. N. Vail, who became the president of AT&T and chief executive of the Bell system in 1907, with articulating as early as 1909 the concepts of the “systems approach.” His slogan was: “One Policy, One System, Universal Service.” Vail reorganized the numerous small autonomous units that constituted AT&T into an integrated and more manageable structure with higher and more uniform standards.