It was a cool, crisp March day in Washington, but inside the White House, there was a warm glow. The year was 2000. It was President Clinton’s last year in office. And with his acquittal on impeachment charges 13 months behind him, he was once again focusing exclusively on his presidential duties.

The carefully ordered rows of seats in the East Room had been filling up since three o’clock, and by the time the president strode to the podium twenty minutes later, all the chairs were filled. It was a joyful event for everyone—the president, the guests, and the honorees. It was the presentation of the National Medals of Science and Technology.

With his usual engaging smile, Bill Clinton began by recognizing several members of Congress who were attending, as well as the British Ambassador to the United States. And then he launched into the meat of his speech.¹

With that, the president reached into his pocket and pulled out a small object, hardly visible to anyone not sitting in the front rows. He continued,

It’s likely the only person in the East Room who had seen the coin before was Jeffrey M. Smith, who borrowed it from the Smithsonian and had given it to Clinton to use as a prop.²

The story is just a vignette, but the coin³ itself illustrates how far back in our nation’s history we have to travel to capture the beginnings of American science and technology policy. The 1792 coin was a fitting capstone to the discussions the founding fathers had as they came to closure on the wording of the United States Constitution. Drafted after extensive and often contentious debate in 1787, ratified by eleven states in 1788, and finally becoming a binding document a year later, the Constitution contains the following words in Article I, Section 8.

The words of Section 8 provide the framework and justification for virtually all U.S. science and technology policy since our nation’s founding. That the authors of the Constitution explicitly cited science in Clause 8 might seem surprising in a new country, recently consumed by a war of independence with scant financial resources and separated from the European Age of Enlightenment by a perilous ocean journey that could take 2 months or longer.

But by 1789, the fledgling United States already had almost two dozen institutions of higher learning⁴ and two learned or scholarly societies. Moreover, among the Constitution’s framers, Benjamin Franklin, who closed the 1787 Convention at age 81 and successfully urged its adoption, was a distinguished and world-renowned scientist. John Adams, another framer, and later the second elected president of the United States, had studied under John Winthrop, a noted astronomer at Harvard. And James Madison, a Princetonian and one of the principal authors of the Federalist Papers,⁵ was an elected member of the American Philosophical Society,⁶ the country’s first scholarly organization, which Franklin founded in 1743 for the purpose of “promoting useful knowledge.” Adams was also one of the first members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which the Province of Massachusetts Bay had established in 1779 to “promote and encourage the knowledge of the antiquities and the natural history of America; to determine the uses which the various natural productions of country may be applied; … and, in fine, to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity and happiness of a free, independent and virtuous people.”⁷

Thomas Jefferson, whose devotion and contributions to science were well known to the young nation’s founders,⁸ was notably absent from the convention. In 1785, he had succeeded Franklin as Minister to France and played no direct role in the Constitution’s drafting. But the time Jefferson spent in France would serve him well when he assumed the presidency in 1801, and would be instrumental in America’s first scientific venture.

The Constitution took effect on March 4, 1789, and less than a year later, on January 8, 1790, George Washington delivered the “First Annual Message to Congress on the State of the Union.”⁹ The name is longer than today’s truncated title, “State of the Union Address,” but the speech, extremely short by modern standards, highlighted science and technology as federal priorities.

A little more than a dozen years had passed since the thirteen colonies declared their independence, and America’s founders had already identified science and technology policy as central to the nation’s future. It wouldn’t be long before President Thomas Jefferson would have the opportunity to use that mandate in the first remarkably successful federal scientific venture.

Jefferson, a product of William and Mary, the South’s most prestigious university at the time, returned from France in 1789—the year the French Revolution began—joining President Washington’s Cabinet as the first Secretary of State shortly thereafter. But following protracted arguments with Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, a staunch Northern Federalist with a Columbia University pedigree and a proponent of expansive national powers, Jefferson, an equally resolute anti-Federalist, submitted his resignation in 1793, much to Washington’s displeasure.

Jefferson’s departure from the national stage was short-lived. In November 1796, he was elected vice president of the United States as a Democratic-Republican, having finished second to John Adams, the Federalist nominee, in the general election.¹⁰ The following March, during the same week, he was sworn into office, and he also delivered a research paper on paleontology at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society, to which he had just been elected president.

Jefferson made another run for the presidency in 1800, once more challenging Adams, this time successfully. But the outcome of an extremely ugly campaign ended with a bizarre twist. The framers of the Constitution had not anticipated that political parties would play significant roles in presidential elections, and consequently Article II, Section 1, Clause 3 required members of the Electoral College to cast ballots for two people.¹¹ The top vote getter would become president, as had occurred without incident in the three elections prior to 1800, and the runner up would become vice president. But in the highly partisan and geographically sectarian atmosphere that had poisoned the 1800 election, Jefferson and Aaron Burr, his Princeton-educated Democratic-Republican running mate, both received 73 votes, forcing the House of Representatives to make the final selection. Partisan rancor reached new heights in the House, and it took the chamber 36 ballots before it elected Jefferson president and Burr vice president on February 17, 1801.

Having weathered the constitutional storm, Jefferson was immediately confronted with a foreign crisis in America’s backyard. In less than 3 years, though, he would be able to turn it into the nation’s first significant scientific mission. It is worth a short historical digression to see how that happened, because it illustrates the way in which external events can influence science policy. What was true in the early 1800s remains true today.

The territory of Louisiana,¹² consisting of 827,000 square miles west of the Mississippi River, had been under Spanish control since the 1763 Peace Treaty of Paris that had ended the French and Indian War between Britain and France in the New World. As vice president, Jefferson had been eying it as a possible opportunity for American expansion west. But relations with Spain were good, and there was no obvious imperative for the United States to make an immediate play for it. Jefferson’s calculus began to change as soon as he assumed the presidency.

Napoleon Bonaparte, who had seized power in France in 1799, made it clear he wanted to reestablish France’s footprint in the New World. Within a year, he concluded a secret deal with Spain that transferred the territory back to France in exchange for a small parcel of land in Europe. In 1802, Spain officially agreed to cede control of the Territory of Louisiana and the port city of New Orleans, and Napoleon announced that after the transfer was completed, he would close the Mississippi River as well as the port of New Orleans to American shipping. His plans of reestablishing a major French presence in the New World were bold, but he would soon find them badly mistimed.

It was clear by the beginning of 1803 that the peace treaty, which Britain and France had signed in Amiens on March 25, 1802, was breaking down, and Napoleon had neither the resources nor the will to project significant French power across the Atlantic. Jefferson, who initially had hoped to arrive at a diplomatic settlement that would simply protect the nation’s commercial shipping interests, sensed an opening for a more ambitious outcome. In early January 1803, he asked James Monroe, a close friend and political ally, to travel to Paris as a special envoy and assist Robert Livingston, the U.S. minister to France, in reaching an accord on the Territory of Louisiana.

A few weeks later, even before negotiations with France had started in earnest, Jefferson asked Congress to fund an expedition across the territory, ultimately reaching the Pacific. Jefferson understood that exploring the West was in the best commercial and geopolitical interests of the United States, and he wanted to move quickly following negotiations with France. But he had long harbored an intellectual interest in geographic exploration, and even if the negotiations with France had failed, there is good reason to think he would have pursued such an expedition.

By the time Monroe arrived in Paris on April 12, 1803, French Foreign Minister Charles Maurice de Tallyrand had told Livingston that France was willing to sell the entire Territory of Louisiana and the city of New Orleans. All that remained was haggling over the price. Monroe teamed up with Livingston, and on the last day of April the two of them struck a deal with French Finance Minister François, Marquis de Barbé-Marbois. The purchase price for all 827,000 square miles was $15 million. The Louisiana Purchase, which the U.S. Senate ratified on October 20, 1803, and which officially became part of the United States on December 30, doubled the territory of the young nation.

Jefferson’s ambitious plan for exploring the vast acreage the nation had just purchased was well underway by the start of 1804.¹³ Meriweather Lewis, a former U.S. Army captain, whom Jefferson had chosen to lead the expedition in the spring of 1803, had already completed crash courses in botany, zoology, celestial navigation, and medicine, and had overseen construction of a large keel boat suitable for navigating the Mississippi River. Lewis had also recruited William Clark to help lead the project, and together with a number of recruits, they had established a launching site on the east bank of the Mississippi near St. Louis in December 1803.

The objectives of the Corps of Discovery Expedition, as the plan was officially known when Congress appropriated $2500 for the project in February 1803, extended well beyond boosting commerce and establishing a deterrent to possible land grabs by other nations. The Lewis and Clark Expedition, as it would later be known, would also address one of Jefferson’s passions: scientific discovery. The expedition would investigate plant and animal life, which Jefferson valued as a plantation owner and as a student of agronomy. It would also study geography, geology, and mineralogy. For those reasons, the American Philosophical Society endorsed its mission and helped organize science tutorials for Lewis in Philadelphia during the spring of 1803.

On May 14, 1804, Lewis, Clark, and their recruits broke camp and set off up the Mississippi, reaching what is now Bismarck, North Dakota in late November. A year later, after they had successfully crossed the Rocky Mountains, they caught sight of the Pacific Ocean and began to plan their route back. It would return them to St. Louis on September 23, 1806.

The ambitious expedition, which lasted more than 2 years, and ultimately cost the federal treasury $38,000 (more than $1 million in today’s dollars), supplied Jefferson with everything he had imagined. And despite its hefty price tag, it was a bargain. It unquestionably delivered on two of its primary goals: providing a young America with a legal claim to the land and, through a far better understanding of geography and indigenous tribes, opening up new commercial opportunities for its populace. But it also provided a wealth of scientific information, and it stands as one of the best investments in research the federal government has ever made.

It is unquestionably the first use of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution to justify federal support of science. And in that respect, it stands as a hallmark of American science and technology policy. Demonstrating Jefferson’s extraordinary political savvy, it also illustrates the crucial intersection of science policy with both politics and foreign affairs. We will encounter such connections many times over.

Castles are commonplace in Britain, France, and other nations whose histories are steeped in royalty and aristocracy. But in the United States, finding a castle requires perseverance—unless you’re visiting Washington, DC. Ask any tour guide or reasonably well-versed Beltway denizen, and you will be directed to an idyllic, beautifully landscaped plot of land abutting the National Mall. A striking 1855 medieval revivalist structure in red sandstone with eight crenellated towers and a slate roof occupies the site. It is the headquarters of the Smithsonian Institution, and buried in a crypt within the building are the remains of James Smithson, after whom the institution is named.

The story of the Smithsonian¹⁴ and its eponymous founder is a curiosity of 19th century American science and technology policy and the politics of the day. The year was 1835, and Andrew Jackson was president. The first populist to occupy the White House, he had been swept into office in 1828, capturing 56% of the popular vote. Reelected in 1832 by nearly the same margin, Jackson was far better known for his military exploits, volatile temper, and identity with the common man than he was for any cultural or intellectual pursuits.

Into his lap, 3 years after being reelected, landed a strange bequest from a wealthy English gentleman who had never set foot in the United States.¹⁵ James Smithson, a chemist who was an elected Fellow of the Royal Society, had never married and left the bulk of his fortune to his only nephew when he died in 1829. That is far from curious, but here the story takes a strange twist. His will¹⁶ stipulated that when his nephew, Henry James Hungerford, died, if he left no children of his own, the entire estate was to be bequeathed “to the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.”

Hungerford died childless 6 years later, and the United States government, with Jackson’s support, filed an uncontested suit to secure the Smithson estate. The suit was settled on May 9, 1838, and that fall, a sum of £105,000 was deposited in the United States Treasury. By that time, Martin Van Buren had replaced Jackson, and it was under his watch that Congress began to deliberate what kind of institution Smithson had in mind. Seven years and two presidents later, after many lengthy debates, Congress finally acted. President James K. Polk signed the legislation establishing the Smithsonian Institution on August 10, 1846.

The act created a Board of Regents, which had as one of its first tasks determining the qualifications of a Secretary who would serve as a chief executive officer. The Board’s December 1846 resolution is noteworthy because it set a standard for future federal science and technology agencies, foundations, institutes, and programs. It reads,¹⁷

All that remained was finding a person who met such high standards. The Board already had someone in mind, and there could be few arguments with the choice. Joseph Henry, who was born at the close of the eighteenth century, had distinguished himself as the natural successor to Benjamin Franklin as America’s preeminent research scientist, devoting himself to the study of electricity and magnetism.¹⁸

Henry held a faculty position at the College of New Jersey, as Princeton University was then known. He was also the Secretary of National Institute for the Promotion of Science, which housed a collection of scientific items obtained by the United States Exploring Expedition.¹⁹ With twin objectives of scientific investigation and commercial development, the Wilkes Expedition, as it is commonly called, was a global endeavor that lasted from 1838 to 1842. It was, in many respects, the natural successor to the highly-productive Lewis and Clark Expedition of the early 1800s, and at a cost of $928,000 (more than $25 million in today’s dollars) it represented a 25-fold expansion in federal support of research over the span of less than 40 years.

The story of the expedition begins in 1818, 20 years before Charles Wilkes eventually set sail from Virginia on a four-year voyage that would ultimately cover 87,000 miles. It illustrates the connection between politics and policy and how pseudoscience can sometimes trump science.

John Cleves Symmes, Jr. was the nephew of John Cleves Symmes, a delegate to the Continental Congress, chief justice of New Jersey, and father-in-law of President William Henry Harrison. To say the younger Symmes was connected politically is to state the obvious. While those connections did not help him succeed in business, they did help him gain attention for his hollow earth theory and eventually congressional approval for a polar expedition to validate it.

Symmes was not the first proponent of such a theory. More than a century earlier, in 1692, Edmond Halley, the famed English astronomer, physicist, and mathematician, made a similar conjecture. Halley, most popularly known for the comet he had discovered 10 years before, and which carries his name even today, suggested that the earth was made up of concentric spherical shells.²⁰ He developed the hypothesis in order to account for variations of magnetic compass readings made at different locations around the globe. Despite his stature, his hollow earth proposal engendered almost universal derision.

Symmes, undeterred by the reception Halley had gotten from his scientific colleagues, upped the ante, writing in his “Circular No. 1,”²¹

It took 10 years, but Symmes, with his political pull, finally succeeded in persuading Congress to approve the mission, not only to prove the veracity of the hollow earth theory, but also to find the polar holes he believed led to the earth’s interior. Another decade would pass before the expedition actually began in 1838, and when it concluded in 1842, the president was none other than William Henry Harrison.

Of course, the Wilkes mission never found the holes, but, according to the Smithsonian archives, it did return with more than 4000 animal specimens, 50,000 plant specimens, and countless anthropological artifacts, minerals, gems, and fossils. They made their way into the collections of the National Institute for the Promotion of Science, and in 1855, after the building’s construction was completed,²² into the Smithsonian Institution’s iconic “Castle,” where many of them can still be seen.

Europe was still the unchallenged center of scientific activity, and it would remain so for most of the next 100 years. But the small cadre of advanced thinkers in the young United States was beginning to expand its horizons. On September 20, 1848, 87 of them met in Philadelphia and founded the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).²³

Their goal was stated in the original AAAS Rules and Objectives: “By periodical and migratory meetings, to promote intercourse between those who are cultivating science in different parts of the United States, to give a stronger and more general impulse, and a more systematic direction to scientific research in our country; and to procure for the labours of scientific men, increased facilities and a wider usefulness.” The AAAS expanded the purpose of a scholarly society in two ways. First, it aimed at casting as wide a net as possible across scientific disciplines. Second, it incorporated an objective of providing America’s budding scientific community with better and more accessible research tools.

By the middle of the 19th century, American science had achieved significant success with two major expeditions. Its roster of scholars was growing. It could count at least three scholarly societies. And it had a new institution under construction in the nation’s capital. But it was missing a mechanism to effectively develop and advance scientific objectives that would benefit the nation.

The Lewis and Clark Expedition and the Wilkes Expedition had largely been geopolitical expedients. The establishment of the Smithsonian Institution had been fortuitous. And the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the newly formed American Association for the Advancement of Science all operated outside the sphere of government.

The sole attempt at squaring the science and government circle had ended in failure when an organization called the National Institute²⁴ collapsed in 1846, only 4 years after Congress had incorporated it. Its brief existence carried with it lessons for future efforts.

The National Institute’s life had begun with great promise in 1840, following a meeting at the home of Secretary of War Joel Poinsett, a naturalist at heart who had played a major role in organizing the Wilkes Expedition. Poinsett and the other men who attended the small gathering were motivated by a common desire to find a way of maximizing the scientific benefit of the vast collections they expected the Wilkes Expedition to be returning within the next 2 years. Poinsett, in particular, had his sights set on capturing the £105,000 Smithson had bequeathed to the U.S. government to set up a repository.

Before they left Poinsett’s house, the group reached a consensus on establishing the National Institution for the Promotion of Science. In fairly short order, the Washington-based association grew to 84 resident members—among them a number of congressmen and federal officials—and 90 corresponding members from other parts of the country. But timing is everything, and the 1840 election outcome turned out to be bad news for the Institution’s durability. President Martin Van Buren, a Democrat, lost his bid for reelection to the Whig standard bearer, William Henry Harrison, and as a result, most significantly, Poinsett, the Institution’s guiding light, lost his Cabinet post and a great deal of his Washington influence.

Nonetheless, in 1841, the Institution convinced the new secretary of the Navy, George E. Badger, to request $5,000 from Congress to help prepare for the return of the Wilkes Expedition and its trove of scientific artifacts. Finally, in 1842, Congress took the further step of incorporating the new nongovernmental organization, changing its name to the National Institute in the process. Again, timing is everything, and by then, the Institute’s promoters found themselves in competition with advocates of a different repository for the Wilkes Expedition collections: the Smithsonian Institution.

Congress was wary of both plans, but much more so of the National Institute’s, which carried with it two liabilities. First, although Poinsett had in mind a Washington centric establishment—having successfully made the case for including the entire presidential Cabinet on its board of directors—a number of the Institute’s members were popularizing the notion that it would be truly national in its scope. Second, even though Congress had authorized its incorporation, the Institute remained a private entity.

The die of the Institute’s demise was cast shortly after the Wilkes Expedition returned. Even though Congress allocated $20,000 to the Institute, it accorded itself oversight—through what is now called the Library of Congress—over the entire collection. It did not help the Institute’s cause that a clergyman, Reverend Henry King, who had been assigned the position of curator, quickly proved to be incompetent.²⁵ That gave Ohio Senator Benjamin Tappan ammunition to openly question the advisability, and ultimately the legality, of giving a private corporation control of government property. Within a year, Congress had assumed jurisdiction of the expedition’s collections and put Wilkes, himself, in charge.

Having lost its treasure and treasury, the National Institute slowly withered away. And the first attempt to bridge the gap between government and America’s burgeoning scientific enterprise came crashing down. If anything, the National Institute’s history probably demonstrated that it lacked not only sufficient political savvy, but also the professionalism that science, science policy, and science management required.

Its demise and the decade-long Capitol Hill struggle the Smithsonian had encountered provided an additional cautionary note for scientists of that era: Congress was more interested in science as a practical tool than science for science’s sake.²⁶ Legislators had made their preference clear when they provided the Franklin Institute with a grant to study boiler explosions in 1830, but repeatedly rejected funding for an astronomical observatory until 1844, when the Navy made a successful pitch for a facility that would investigate hydrography, magnetism, and meteorology, as well as astronomy. It would take many more years and a war to get scientists, policymakers, and politicians back on the same page.