The Second World War

The Second World War and the events surrounding it – the rise of the Nazi regime and the economic trauma of the 1930s – were crucial for economics. In the 1920s, though American economics had grown rapidly since the turn of the century, European economics remained dominant. The generation that had shaped economics as it entered the twentieth century, many of whose members died in the 1920s, was overwhelmingly European. In the 1920s and 1930s, a high proportion of the most innovative work was still done in Europe – Alfred Marshall's Cambridge, the London School of Economics (LSE), Karl Menger's seminar in Vienna, Stockholm, and Lausanne.

By the end of the Second World War, the situation was completely different. Hundreds of European economists, many Jewish, had been forced to emigrate and, though some stopped in Britain, most ended up in the United States (Hagemann 2000), joining those who had left Russia and Eastern Europe after the 1917 revolution. Many rapidly achieved influential positions: Harvard had Joseph Schumpeter (from Austria) and Wassily Leontief (from Russia via Germany); Jacob Marschak (Ukrainian, via Germany and Britain) was at the Cowles Commission in Chicago, along with many other émigrés; Fritz Machlup (Austrian) was at Johns Hopkins. The extent of this migration is shown by the fact that in 1945, half the articles in the American Economic Review (AER), the journal of the American Economic Association (AEA), were written by economists born outside the United States, but holding positions in U.S. universities.

The Social Sciences and Their Histories

In the past decade or so, there have been a number of retrospective surveys of the histories of the social sciences. For instance, to mark the centenary of the American Political Science Association, the American Political Science Review, widely viewed as the premier scholarly research journal in that field, published a centennial issue of some twenty-five articles on the “evolution of political science” with special emphasis on the period since the Second World War. Likewise, to celebrate its hundredth anniversary, the American Sociological Association sponsored Sociology in America (Calhoun 2007), a 900-page volume that, as one reviewer (Geary 2008) put it, placed more emphasis on the history of the discipline than on its current state. These volumes attest to the depth of research being undertaken on the history of these disciplines; however, interest in the histories of other disciplines may be less. For example, the American Economic Association did not choose to mark its centenary two decades ago in a similar way, and it seems unlikely that its leading journal, the American Economic Review, will devote an issue to historical reflection on its first hundred years. Nonetheless, there is a significant amount of work being undertaken on the recent history of the discipline.

Historical work on what Ross (1993, p. 99) has called the “core social sciences in the U.S.” has been undertaken, despite the fact that history has increasingly been seen as irrelevant to the shaping of theory.

RICHARD TREVITHICK (1771–1833)

Throughout his life, the mechanical engineer Richard Trevithick was dogged by misfortune and never achieved worldly success, He was born at Pool in the parish of Illogan, Cornwall on 13 April 1771; he had four sisters, but no brothers. His father held the responsible position of manager at the important Dulcoath mine. While he was still a baby, the family moved to Penponds, just outside Camborne, where he went to school and learned the three R's. He grew up into an immensely strong young man, capable of lifting heavier weights than anyone else around. While still quite young he was appointed engineer, responsible for erecting and servicing the steam engines that pumped out water from the pits. In those days, the alternative to the Newcomen engine was the one supplied by the firm of Boulton and Watt.

In 1797, Trevithick's father died and his 26-year-old son became sufficiently well-off to marry. His bride was Jane Harvey, daughter of a local businessman. A woman of strong character who spared him domestic worries, she stood by him through thick and thin, despite the fact that with him work took precedence over family life. Trevithick was convinced of the need to increase the efficiency of steam engines to cope with the increasing depth of the pits but, like many others, was held back by Watt's master patent, covering every conceivable innovation, and Watt was opposed to the use of steam at much more than atmospheric pressure.

FERDINAND BRAUN (1850–1918)

Germany enjoyed a period of exceptional prosperity in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The country overtook France in many ways, and engineering was one of these. Electrical engineering was a German speciality. Ferdinand Braun was born on 6 June 1850 at Fulda, a Catholic enclave in a Protestant region not far from Frankfurt. His father was a minor civil servant, who married the daughter of his superior. Ferdinand, their youngest son, had, altogether, four brothers and two sisters. After leaving the local gymnasium, Braun began studying physics at the minor University of Marburg but he soon moved to Berlin, where he received his doctorate in 1872. Like Heinrich Hertz later on, he became a protégé of Helmholtz. Two years later, as a young gymnasium instructor in Leipzig, he wrote his first book Der Junger Mathematiker und Naturforscher. He then progressed up the academic ladder, being außerordentliche professor first in Marburg and then in Strasbourg, then ordentliche professor first in Tübingen and then back to Strasbourg, where he remained for almost the whole of the rest of his career, during which time the city was in German hands.

Braun was the first to investigate the rectifier effect in semiconductor crystals, the phenomenon behind most solid-state electronics. In 1897, he invented, but refused to patent, the cathode ray oscilloscope, which became the basis for the television tube, computer terminals and many other electronic devices.

PETER AKIMOVICH PAL'CHINSKII (1875–1929)

Russia has produced some great engineers, who had to contend with political as well as technical difficulties. The first to be profiled here, Peter Akimovich Pal'chinskii, became one of the victims of Stalin's paranoia. His father, Akim Fedorovich Pal'chinskii, a land surveyor and estate appraiser, married twice and had five children by his first wife, Aleksandra, seven by his second, Olga. Born on 3 October 1875, Peter was the oldest son by Aleksandra. As a child, he lived with his mother in Kazan, along with his brother Fedor and his three sisters Anna, Sophia and Elena, while the children of the second marriage lived with their parents in Saratov, further down the Volga.

Peter was an energetic youth and a bright student. After the age of eight, when his parents were divorced, he saw his father rarely. He confided primarily in his mother, a member of a socially prominent but impecunious family. She greatly influenced his early education. Under her tutelage, he became a good pianist, despite his lack of natural talent for the instrument. She also encouraged him to use the extensive family library, where, as well as works of literature, Peter read books on popular science and history. He also learned French and German; later he added English and Italian.

DENNIS GABOR (1900–1979)

The future scientist, engineer, inventor, humanist and Nobel laureate Dennis Gabor, in Hungarian Gábor Dénes, was born in Budapest on 5 June 1900. The eldest in a family of three boys, he was followed by George, who died in 1935, and then André, born in 1903. Dennis knew his paternal grandfather, who had been born in 1832 of parents who had settled in Hungary at the end of the eighteenth century, having come from Russia and Spain. The family were tall, fair blue-eyed people, thought by the family to have been descendants of one of the Russian tribes, the Cerims or Kuzri, who adopted the Jewish faith centuries earlier. The boys' father Bertalan (or Bartholemew) came from the Hungarian town of Eger in 1867. He had been a gifted and ambitious child who hoped to go to university and qualify as an engineer, the profession followed by several other members of the family: unfortunately, his father's business failed and as a result he had to leave school early and take a clerical job at the age of 17. Nevertheless, he worked his way up and succeeded in becoming director of the largest industrial enterprise in Hungary. Their mother, Adrienne (née Kalman), was an actress who gave up the stage when she married. Her father was a highly skilled watchmaker and the son of an excellent tailor, but Dennis knew very little of his mother's forebears; he thought they were probably Sephardic Jews who settled in Hungary in the eighteenth century.