Overview

On April 3, 1953, bouquet of two dozen carnations bound with a white bow appeared at the front gates of the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) in Washington, DC, with a card reading, “In memory of Dr. A. V. Astin and the traditions of the National Bureau of Standards.” Allen Varley Astin, the bureau’s director, had been fired a few days earlier. Sinclair Weeks, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s newly confirmed Secretary of Commerce, judged that the bureau “had not been sufficiently objective” in its testing of an aftermarket additive for car batteries, a packet of salts named “Battery AD-X2.” The bureau had repeatedly tested the product, sold by the charismatic and politically astute California entrepreneur Jess M. Ritchie, and deemed it useless. When Weeks exercised his prerogative to remove the NBS director, the American scientific community was incandescent. The mournful bouquet was just one small, local expression of protest in a rapidly organized national campaign launched by dozens of scientific organizations, professional societies, and prominent individuals that would ultimately force Weeks to relent. Astin was reinstated and would serve the rest of his career at the bureau’s head. To this day, he remains a messianic icon of scientific integrity for employees of what is now the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The AD-X2 affair was a definitive moment, not just for the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), but for the American scientific community as a whole as it found its footing after World War II. It was a striking political victory in a battle fought on the basis of the supposedly apolitical nature of scientific expertise. The victory came at a time when scientists’ political engagement on nuclear issues had revealed sharp limitations to their influence. It reinforced an ideal of basic research and scientific self-governance that had emerged after World War II but whose security was uncertain after the transition to the first new Presidential administration since the war’s end, and the first Republican administration in two decades. The AD-X2 affair thus illuminates how the American scientific community translated its newfound notoriety into a stable political influence and cultural authority, and how the purported apolitical nature of science itself grew into a potent political tool.

Moreover, the AD-X2 affair is a sensitive instrument for calibrating a host of historiographical tools key to assessing Cold War science. The dispute turned on value judgments about the place of scientific advice in democratic governance. The challenges the NBS had communicating why its battery tests were reliable shows how the distinction between laboratory and field sciences had real consequences in policy contexts. The NBS was a recognized leader in statistical analysis, which was still emerging as a standard practice in experimental procedure, but the bureau had difficulty projecting its own trust in numbers outside the scientific community. Astin’s public persona, as an undemonstrative, steadfast civil servant was less flashy than other scientific personae that have been studied in this period, but was key his success, just as Ritchie’s carefully cultivated reputation as a self-made inventor was key to his. The controversy involved the purported unfair treatment of a small business by the NBS, driven by concerns over its relationship with big battery manufacturers, provoking fresh questions about the relationship between science and commerce. The affair played out in the public sphere, garnering ample newspaper and radio coverage and shedding light on science and the media during the early Cold War. And it intersects powerful themes in American history about entrepreneurship, role of the state, and trust in government institutions. This one incident thus provides a deep and rich reservoir of insight into a crucial transitional moment in American science, politics, and civic life.

Assault and Batteries confronts this thematic bounty through the category of boring science. A remarkable feature of the incident is that a major political embroglio, which generated months front-page newspaper coverage, sprung from the unheralded practices of battery chemistry and routine testing—and it did so at the dawn of the Atomic Age. The boring sciences have three distinguishing features. First, they have a negligible popular profile. They are (ordinarily) unlikely to generate news headlines, feature in popular science books, or inspire television programs. Second, they are comparatively low prestige. Their practitioners are less likely to be considered for the most coveted prizes, their publications less likely to generate excitement. Third, they tend not to be novelty oriented. They aim not to overturn established theories, but rather to explore the features of existing ones to their greatest extent.

“Boring” is often used as pejoratively, but that is not its role here. Boredom opposes state excitement or interest, but it is also the opposite of instability, threat, and distress. Boringness is often a desideratum. It implies safety and surety, and offers the possibility to plan. For some enterprises, boring is the point. No patient going under the knife ever asked for a maverick anesthetist. It is in the spaces where the excitement generated by rapid change and uncertainty are vices, not virtues, that the boring sciences operate. They do not seek to disrupt—quite the opposite. They aim to produce the conditions that permit stability. And that stability provides the foundation for the accomplishments of the less boring science, and their prestige and acclaim.

Incidents that provide insight into the political stakes of the boring sciences are crucial because they lay bare processes that are otherwise hidden. In this case, the baseline stability—a crucial virtue for policymakers—provided by the sort of boring science conducted at the Bureau of Standards was the tool American scientists used to secure the prestige and influence won in part by the efforts of flasher science. This project explores how.

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Research supported by the Friends of the History of Physics, American Institute of Physics