How the U.S. Became the Leader in Science and Technology

Prior to WWII the U.S was a distant second in science and engineering. By the time the war was over, U.S. science and engineering had blown past the British, and led the world for 85 years.

What was behind this surprising result? It happened because two very different people were the science advisors to their leaders with radically different views on how to use their country’s resources to build advanced weapon systems. Post war, it meant Britain’s early lead was ephemeral while the U.S. built the foundation for an innovation ecosystem that led the world – until now.

China’s leadership has spent the last three decades investing heavily to surpass the U.S. in science.  With the cutbacks of U.S. government support, the long run of U.S. dominance in science is likely over.

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The British – Military Weapons Labs
When Winston Churchill became the British prime minister in 1940, he had at his side his science advisor, Professor Frederick Lindemann, his friend for 20 years. Lindemann was a headed up the physics department at Oxford and was the director of the Oxford Clarendon Laboratory. Already at war with Germany, Britain’s wartime priorities focused on defense and intelligence technology projects, e.g. weapons that used electronics, radar, physics, etc. – a radar-based air defense network called Chain Home, airborne radar on night fighters, and plans for a nuclear weapons program – the MAUD Committeewhich started the British nuclear weapons program code-named Tube Alloys. And their codebreaking organization at Bletchley Park was starting to read secret German messages – the Enigma – using the earliest computers ever built.

As early as the mid 1930s, the British, fearing Nazi Germany, developed prototypes of these weapons using their existing military and government research labs. The Telecommunications Research Establishment built Radar, critical to Britain’s survival during the Battle of Britain, and electronic warfare to protect British bombers over Germany. The Admiralty Research Lab built Sonar and anti-submarine warfare systems. The Royal Aircraft Establishment was developing jet fighters. The labs then contracted with British companies to manufacture the weapons in volume. British government labs viewed their universities as a source of talent, but they had no role in weapons development.

Under Churchill, Professor Lindemann influenced which projects received funding and which were sidelined. Lindemann’s WWI experience as a researcher and test pilot on the staff of the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough gave him confidence in the competence of British military research and development labs. His top-down, centralized approach with weapons development primarily in government research labs shaped British innovation during WW II – and led to its demise post-war.

The Americans – University Weapons Labs
Unlike Britain, the U.S. lacked a science advisor. It wasn’t until June 1940, that Vannevar Bush, ex-MIT dean of engineering, told President Franklin Roosevelt that World War II would be the first war won or lost on the basis of advanced technology electronics, radar, physics problems, etc.

Unlike Lindemann, Bush had a 20-year-long contentious history with the U.S. Navy and a dim view of government-led R&D. Bush contended that the government research labs were slow and second rate. He convinced the President that while the Army and Navy ought to be in charge of making conventional weapons – planes, ships, tanks, etc. — scientists from academia could develop better advanced technology weapons and deliver them faster than Army and Navy research labs. And he argued the only way the scientists could be productive was if they worked in a university setting in civilian-run weapons labs run by university professors. To the surprise of the Army and Navy Service chiefs, Roosevelt agreed to let Bush build exactly that organization to coordinate and fund all advanced weapons research.

(While Bush had no prior relationship with the President, Roosevelt had been the Assistant Secretary of the Navy during World War I and like Bush had seen first-hand its dysfunction. Over the next four years they worked well together. Unlike Churchill, Roosevelt had little interest in science and accepted Bush’s opinions on the direction of U.S. technology programs, giving Bush sweeping authority.)

In 1941, Bush upped the game by convincing the President that in addition to research,  development, acquisition and deployment of these weapons also ought to be done by professors in universities. There they would be tasked to develop military weapons systems and solve military problems to defeat Germany and Japan. (The weapons were then manufactured in volume by U.S. corporations Western Electric, GE, RCA, Dupont, Monsanto, Kodak, Zenith, Westinghouse, Remington Rand and Sylvania.) To do this Bush created the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSR&D).

OSR&D headquarters divided the wartime work into 19 “divisions,” 5 “committees,” and 2 “panels,” each solving a unique part of the military war effort. There were no formal requirements.

Staff at OSRD worked with their military liaisons to understand what the most important military problems were and then each OSR&D division came up with solutions. These efforts spanned an enormous range of tasks – the development of advanced electronics, radar, rockets, sonar, new weapons like the proximity fuse, Napalm, the Bazooka and new drugs such as penicillin, cures for malaria, chemical warfare, and nuclear weapons.

Each  division was run by a professor hand-picked by Bush. And they were located in universities –  MIT, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Caltech, Columbia and the University of Chicago all ran major weapons systems programs. Nearly 10,000 scientists and engineers, professors and their grad students received draft deferments to work in these university labs.

Americans – Unlimited Dollars
What changed U.S. universities, and the world forever, was government money. Lots of it. Prior to WWII most advanced technology research in the U.S. was done in corporate innovation labs (GE, AT&T, Dupont, RCA, Westinghouse, NCR, Monsanto, Kodak, IBM, et al.) Universities had no government funding (except for agriculture) for research. Academic research had been funded by non-profits, mostly the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations and industry. Now, for the first time, U.S. universities were getting more money than they had ever seen. Between 1941 and 1945, OSR&D gave $9 billion (in 2025 dollars) to the top U.S. research universities. This made universities full partners in wartime research, not just talent pools for government projects as was the case in Britain.

The British – Wartime Constraints
Wartime Britain had very different constraints. First, England was under daily attack. They were being bombed by air and blockaded by submarines, so it was logical that they focused on a smaller set of high-priority projects to counter these threats. Second, the country was teetering on bankruptcy. It couldn’t afford the broad and deep investments that the U.S. made. (Illustrated by their abandonment of their nuclear weapons programs when they realized how much it would cost to turn the research into industrial scale engineering.) This meant that many other areas of innovation—such as early computing and nuclear research—were underfunded compared to their American counterparts.

Post War – Britain
Churchill was voted out of office in 1945. With him went Professor Lindemann and the coordination of British science and engineering. Britain would be without a science advisor until 1951-55 when Churchill returned for a second term and brought back Lindemann with him.

The end of the war led to extreme downsizing of the British military including severe cuts to all the government labs that had developed Radar, electronics, computing, etc.

With post-war Britain financially exhausted, post-war austerity limited its ability to invest in large-scale innovation. There were no post-war plans for government follow-on investments. The differing economic realities of the U.S. and Britain also played a key role in shaping their innovation systems. The United States had an enormous industrial base, abundant capital, and a large domestic market, which enabled large-scale investment in research and development. In Britain, key industries were nationalized, which reduced competition and slowed technological progress. While British research institutions like Cambridge and Oxford remained leaders in theoretical science, they struggled to scale and commercialize their breakthroughs. For instance Alan Turing’s and Tommy Flower’s pioneering work on computing at Bletchley Park didn’t turn into a thriving British computing industry—unlike in the U.S., where companies like ERA, Univac, NCR and IBM built on their wartime work.

Without the same level of government support for dual-use technologies or commercialization, Britain’s post-war innovation ecosystem never took off.

Post War – The U.S.
Meanwhile in the U.S. universities and companies realized that the wartime government funding for research had been an amazing accelerator for science, engineering, and medicine. Everyone, including Congress, agreed that the U.S. government should continue to play a large role in continuing it. In 1945, Vannevar Bush published a report “Science, The Endless Frontier” advocating for government funding of basic research in universities, colleges, and research institutes. Congress argued for five years on how to best organize federal support of science.

By the end of the war, OSR&D funding had taken technologies that had been just research papers or considered impossible to build at scale and made them commercially viable – computers, rockets, radar, Teflon, synthetic fibers, nuclear power, etc. Innovation clusters formed around universities like MIT and Harvard which had received large amounts of OSR&D (MIT Radiation Lab or “Rad Lab” employed 3,500 civilians during WWII and developed and built 100 radar systems deployed in theater,) or around professors who ran one of the OSR&D divisions – like Fred Terman at Stanford.

In 1950 Congress set up the National Science Foundation to fund all basic science in the U.S. (except for Life Sciences, a role the new National Institute of Health would assume.) In the meantime the Atomic Energy Committee spun out of the Manhattan Project and the military services took back advanced weapons development. Eight years later DARPA and NASA would also form as federal research agencies.

Ironically, Vannevar Bush’s influence would decline even faster than Professor Lindemann’s. When President Roosevelt died in April 1945 and Secretary of War Stimson retired in September 1945, all the knives came out from the military leadership Bush had bypassed in the war. His arguments on how to reorganize OSR&D made more enemies in Congress. By 1948 Bush had retired from government service.

Divergent Legacies
Britain’s focused, centralized model using government research labs was created in a struggle for short-term survival. They achieved brilliant breakthroughs but lacked the scale, integration and capital needed to dominate in the post-war world.

The U.S. built a decentralized, collaborative ecosystem, one that tightly integrated massive government funding of universities for research and prototypes while private industry built the solutions in volume. This U.S. university/government research model would become the blueprint for modern innovation ecosystems around the world.

Both systems were influenced by the experience and personalities of their nation’s science advisor.

Summary
By the end of the war, the U.S. and British innovation systems had produced radically different outcomes.

• Britain remained a leader in theoretical science and defense technology, but its failure to commercialize wartime innovations meant it lost ground in key industries like computing and consumer electronics.
• The U.S. emerged as the global leader in science and technology, with innovations like radar, computing, and nuclear power driving its post-war economic boom. The university-industry-government partnership became the foundation of Silicon Valley, the aerospace sector, and the biotechnology industry.
• This is the model that China has emulated