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CIAO DATE: 4/00
Learning to Keep Secrets: The Military and a High-tech Company
Alec Shuldiner
Secrecy and Knowledge Production
Judith Reppy, Editor
Peace Studies Program, Cornell University
Occasional Paper #23
October 1999
Introduction
All companies have secrets–employee data are often proscribed by law, the hierarchical structure of most business organizations entails unequal access to information internally, a superior market position may be achieved by keeping a competitor in the dark, and so on–but high-tech companies, are particularly interested in secrets, most notably the technical secrets that are the ideal product of their R&D. If these secrets can be held as the exclusive preserve of that organization, it will likely be able to reap a far larger percentage of their fruits. This effort to contain knowledge may be aided by legal constructions such as patents, but as any student of intellectual property (or S&TS for that matter) knows, in practice there is no such thing as perfect disclosure in a patent application or elsewhere, and secrecy (not just tacit knowledge) remains an important part of high-tech industrial practice, even in companies that make their knowledge available to the public or their competitors.
How an organization of any size can keep a secret is not, however, immediately obvious. A company must create protocols for defining secrets and for deciding when and with whom they should be shared; it must also find a way to judge how well those procedures are working and to detect when a secret has been improperly divulged. Secrecy is, simply stated, a serious organizational challenge for commercial enterprises of this sort. This challenge is shared by any organization, commercial or otherwise, that wishes to manage the flow of information within and through its boundaries.
An obvious example of this latter sort of organization is the United States government, and in particular the U.S. military, which is centrally concerned with controlling information and preserving secrets. As recent scholarship has shown, the development of American industry has been significantly influenced by military examples, from interchangeable parts manufacture (the “American System”) and the logistics of railroad management to machine tool development and the creation of modern business planning systems (most famously PERT). 1 In light of this, and of the military’s expertise in secrecy, it seems not unreasonable to suppose that here, too, managers have taken their cues from majors. The question then–and the subject of this paper–is to what extent, in the American context, have secrecy protocols and practices transferred from the military to high-tech commercial enterprises?
My answer falls within certain limits. Most important, I rely exclusively on a single example of a high-tech company: Corning, Inc., a maker of specialty materials located in Corning, NY; this paper is a case study with the usual strengths and weaknesses that implies. 2 Furthermore, I do not explore the distinctions between NASA, the AEC/DOE, and the DOD, as a more complete analysis would require. Last, I do not consider the power of the military’s example as an indirect factor in the formation of corporate secrecy practices (e.g., how widespread use of classification by the military has made the keeping of secrets in general a more acceptable practice among American businesses); though important, such historical work is beyond the scope of this project.
These qualifications not withstanding, my findings may be broadly stated thus: commercial high-tech companies (as opposed to companies engaged primarily in military contracting, the inner circle of the military-industrial complex) are not particularly likely to alter existing corporate secrecy practices in general as a result of exposure to military secrecy requirements and procedures. Though any high-tech company accepting military contracts is expected to adopt certain specific secrecy practices as part of its contractual agreement with the military, Corning at least has intentionally worked to limit the impact of military secrecy requirements and practices within the firm as a whole, and, to some extent, has been abetted in this effort by the nature of military secrecy requirements themselves. This, I argue, is likely to have been the case at other companies of this sort.
I begin with a short history of secrecy at Corning. Two episodes from that account are then more closely considered: Corning’s experience with the military during World War II, and the case of Edward U. Condon (Corning’s Director of R&D from 1951 to 1954). I conclude with a necessarily brief discussion of Corning’s Canton facility–its most extreme instantiation of military secrecy requirements–and the assertion that a misfit between military and commercial secrecy practices did exist at Corning, and is likely to exist at similar companies, such that relatively little practical exchange normally occurs between the two.
A Brief History of Secrecy at Corning
Corning has never been a major defense contractor (with the important exception of its work for the government during World War II), but it has maintained a variety of military and commercial product lines simultaneously since the early 1940s. Corning has also long thought of itself as an industry leader in R&D, and considers its intellectual property holdings an essential part of its competitive capabilities. In terms of glass technology in particular, it is arguably the preeminent research-producing organization in the world, and is notable as having founded one of the very first industrial research laboratories in the United States.
Placing glass production on a modern industrial basis involved the divulgence and subsequent codification of very closely-held secrets. Neither were easy tasks: the knowledge of the gaffer (or master glassworker) was not casually shared nor were the practices of such craftsmen often directly translatable into either laboratory terminology or mechanical operation. Corning, from its founding in the mid-1800s, was forced to be conscious of the importance and complexity of secrecy in the industrial context.
Corning did not, however, have any notable contact with the military until World War I. The British naval blockade at the beginning of that war halted the flow of German glassware into the United States and gave Corning its opportunity to begin production of scientific glassware for the American market (the beginning of its famous Pyrex line). This same blockade also cost the United States access to high-quality optical glass, and without such glass, production of binoculars, fire control equipment, range-finding instruments, and other crucial military goods was halted. The Department of War decided to help establish domestic production in order to command sufficient stocks of optical glass during the coming conflict.
That effort, which from 1917-1919 closely managed upwards of ninety percent of America’s optical glass production, was led by Arthur L. Day, at the time the Director of the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Geophysical Laboratory. Day initially turned to Corning for assistance in this undertaking: he knew the company’s capabilities well, having helped establish its first laboratory in 1908 with a former colleague of his, Eugene Sullivan, as that lab’s director. Sullivan, however, felt that the job would be an unprofitable use of scarce resources. “We are not in a position to spend money on optical glass experimentation at the present time,” he wrote to Corning president A.B. Houghton, “unless the Government is willing to take its share of the outlay. . . .” 3 The government was not, and absent either opportunities or obligations, Corning chose not to act.
World War II was a very different story. The lessons of the Great War having been ignored, in 1939 the U.S. found its optical glass supplies once again threatened. With German sources foreclosed, the American military was forced to turn to domestic suppliers, who, it was discovered, had once again largely exited the market in the face of German competition. This time Corning led the effort to meet Allied military demand for optical glass and contributed crucially to radar and other important wartime projects. In some cases, in particular that of radar, strict secrecy regimes were imposed on Corning and other companies engaged in military work.
World War II provided a precedent for the Korean War’s rearming and the subsequent creation of the Cold War’s military-industrial complex. Both of these later developments were accompanied by an increasingly strict regime for the determination and maintenance of secrecy on the part of the government in general and the military in specific. Companies working on defense contracts were required to subscribe to carefully defined and sometimes onerous secrecy requirements. Corning, busy with projects for the Department of Defense, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, had a more than casual acquaintance with these procedures. The company was, however, careful to limit its exposure to the rapidly forming military economy.
Even absent military work, however, Corning’s management remained deeply concerned with keeping secrets. The infamous Glass Trust, of which Corning was a key member, was based in large part on interlocking intellectual property [IP] agreements. Like many such arrangements, it was characterized by the gentlemanly sharing of proprietary R&D information within the trust and the jealous withholding of that same information from those unfortunate enough to be excluded. The busting of the Glass Trust in 1946 revealed that the sharing of personnel and practices between the members of that trust–secrecy as tacit knowledge–was in some respects an even greater obstruction to competitors than were exclusive IP agreements. In any case, both intellectual property and the hoarding of tacit knowledge within the company continued to play a key role in management’s strategic planning. Corning engaged in extremely expensive efforts to protect its IP position in glass-ceramics and optical waveguides in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, and both projects, as well as others, were at various points considered highly secret by the company while under development.
Still, the most carefully hidden of Corning’s secrets was the direct product of government contracts: the Canton cell. Located in Canton, NY, government contracts requiring “Top Secret” clearance were largely relegated to this R&D facility. Radar delay lines, satellite optics, and similar undertakings dear to the Cold War heart were the lifeblood and justification for Canton, which was intentionally sited deep in the woods of upstate New York. Yet throughout this all, Corning remained a relatively small company, in comparison both to other glass manufacturers and to other major industrial performers of R&D. As a result, with the only partial exception of the Canton cell, personnel involved in military work were generally also occupied in part with commercial projects, often along similar lines. The company has never had either the resources or the taste for a duplication of research efforts.
Corning, the Military, and World War II
As noted above, Corning’s relationship with the military effectively began with World War II. Indeed, that war represented not only Corning’s introduction to military contracts, but also the most intensive encounter the company would ever have with the peculiar needs and requirements of the military. In retrospect the degree of Corning’s involvement in the war effort seemed inevitable:
If anyone doubted ‘Corning Means Research in Glass,’ such doubt has been erased by the wartime requirements placed on our laboratory and production organizations. Countless projects have been solved for the various agencies of the Government. . . . Corning had built its reputation on doing in glass that which others could not do. Naturally then, in this most scientific of all wars, the Government turned to us for vital and new products. 4
Yet previous to the war Corning had thought of itself (not unhappily) as too small and specialized to be of much concern to the authorities in Washington. This self-image, and the relative ignorance of military imperatives that it implied, was to change rapidly.
In 1939, Corning’s chairman, Amory Houghton, was tapped to be a member of the War Production Board, one of a growing army of Dollar-A-Year men called to Washington to help the national mobilization effort. Among other things, this gave him access to large amounts of data about his and related industries, as well as knowledge of projected military needs. Ironically, Houghton’s position did not immediately translate into a high priority ranking for Corning, and the company was left painfully vulnerable to materials shortages and manpower losses.
This situation was eventually rectified, even while Corning embarked on an intensive and almost all-consuming research program at the government’s behest. A 1945 list of R&D projects actively connected to the war effort shows that the company was working on improved products or processes in optical glasses, filter glasses, lighting ware, electric lamps, electronic devices, atomic energy, triggering devices, projectiles, landmines, chemical warfare, silicone products, and more. The list includes projects undertaken for all branches of the military as well as many companies and organizations, including instrument makers, oil companies, and university research laboratories, that subcontracted work to Corning. 5
Corning’s ability to respond to a surge in manufacturing demand was also tested. Its role in producing cathode ray tubes, the large vacuum bulbs that lay at the heart of radar display systems, was critical to the war effort and accounted for something like two-thirds of the company’s wartime production capacity. A second wartime production role considered to be vital to defense needs was the production of optical glass, for which the government built Corning a plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia. With the addition of this 100,000-pound-capacity plant, Corning became one of the two largest producers of optical glass in the country and unquestionably its most efficient. The Saturday Evening Post reported in 1944 that “Corning is tied into war jobs by 75 per cent of its capacity,” a figure that did not include indirect work for other government contractors. 6
Yet despite its absorption in the war effort, Corning worked to maintain some degree of independence, especially in its research division. It differed during the war from most other research-performing companies in that it took no money in support of R&D from the Office of Scientific Research and Development, and very little from the various branches of the military that sought its help. 7 This was in marked contrast to many of its major customers in the radio industry: Westinghouse, RCA, General Electric, and Zenith all received between five and ten million dollars in OSRD funding alone. Corning eschewed direct funding intentionally as a precaution against future claims that it had any obligation to share its proprietary technology with other government suppliers.
This independence was emphasized by Corning’s postwar behavior, itself based on decisions made as early as 1942. By any measure, the company’s most important wartime efforts had been the development of mass production techniques for the manufacture of CRT bulbs for radar sets and the greatly improved melting processes for optical glasses used in all manner of military products. Both eventually led to postwar military contracts (Corning’s work on massive optical elements for the Air Force’s wind tunnel and geodetic survey projects was particularly successful), yet radar also grew into television, and military optical glass demand came to be dwarfed by Corning’s ophthalmic business. For Corning, wartime work would prove to be first and foremost a source of new commercial opportunity in the civilian sector, in distinction to other companies that used the war as a chance to become permanent defense contractors.
Though marked by and largely remembered for its string of successes, Corning’s wartime experience was not entirely positive. While petitioning to have its priority rating raised, Corning lost 3,000 of its employees, many of them technicians, supervisors, and people with special skills. When new plants came on line and production requirements increased at old ones the company scrambled to find 7,000 new employees, 4,000 to staff new positions and the remainder to fill existing ones. Finding workers with appropriate skills was impossible. Many of the replacements and virtually all of those staffing new plants were women who had never had exposure to the typically all-male preserve of the glass industry, much less training in glass production techniques. 8
In retrospect it is evident that there were cross-fertilization benefits that resulted from bringing in new people, especially in a company which had enjoyed the sort of employment stability that Corning had. Many of the recruits came from other major companies with greater or different production experience, others came from college and university engineering departments. However, at the time the loss of know-how at so many levels was keenly felt, and the benefits of outsider knowledge and new forms of expertise did not begin to compensate for the loss sustained. This was especially true because wartime contracts placed a much higher emphasis on high volume production than Corning had previously encountered. In view of the need to produce to tight military specifications, and to schedule, there was no chance to do the kind of work with new compositions where much of the company’s research expertise had previously focused.
Lastly, and in some respects most painfully, the war necessitated unfortunate sacrifices of intellectual property:
War needs have meant, too, that much of our know-how has been given to competitors or to other firms engaged in war activities. Examples of giving away methods to other manufacturers include formulae and manufacturing methods for radar, electric sealing, method [sic] of strengthening tumblers. 9
Sullivan, who continued to direct Corning’s labs throughout the war, was torn between satisfaction with the company’s accomplishments and resentment at the government’s power to disrupt his carefully planned research agenda. The military, he recalled,
. . . insisted on Corning undertaking their glass problems, and these problems in many cases were such that it seemed almost fantastic to expect glass to meet them, yet in general some sort of solution was worked out. Glass bullets were an example. Optical glass was forced upon us although we had never made a pound while others had been in the business for years. 10
Sullivan was, of course, writing from the perspective of the lab, but it is clear that his sentiments were shared elsewhere in the company. Certainly it is the case that Corning, conscious of the mixed blessings of government contracts, decided to keep the military at arm’s length following the war. This decision was represented and reinforced by Corning’s hiring of Edward U. Condon as its research director in 1951.
Condon
Nowhere would the consequences of Corning’s independent post-war stance, or the difficulties of maintaining it, be as clearly spelled out as in its experience employing this controversial new Director of Research and Development. Condon had spent the war on loan from Westinghouse to the government, first at MIT’s Radiation Laboratory and then at the Manhattan Project. For a short time he had been Oppenheimer’s second in command at Los Alamos. Like his more celebrated colleague, he had later been branded a security threat by rightist elements in the Congress. Following the war, Condon accepted the position of Director of the National Bureau of Standards. As an outspoken advocate of internationalism and the sharing of nuclear “secrets,” Condon became the target of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which declared him “one of the weakest links in our atomic security” in 1948. Condon weathered this initial charge, but a second such attack decided him against further public service. He announced both his resignation from the NBS and his intention to join Corning on 10 August 1951. The atmosphere in the nation’s capital had grown increasingly ugly since the 1948 atomic explosion in Russia, and Corning’s offer suggested a welcome change of scene.
Corning, long accustomed to adopting government scientists and more than comfortable with mavericks, welcomed Condon with open arms. His experiences at the heart of the new military/scientific order, his standing in the research community, and his own background as a nuclear physicist all recommended him to the job. It was one he was to perform brilliantly. Condon swiftly demonstrated his ability to articulate a research philosophy to upper management, to represent and link Corning to the broader research environment, to analyze and react to developments in the political, scientific, and industrial spheres, and to monitor and contribute to the day-to-day work of his research colleagues. But though Corning treasured him, ultimately it was not able to provide him with a safe haven.
Condon had come to Corning with his governmental security clearance intact (HUAC’s charges had been mostly innuendo; their “investigations” had never uncovered material sufficient to warrant revocation of Condon’s clearance), but the company’s management was well aware that their decision to hire Condon was at best a neutral one vis à vis the maintenance of military connections. Condon was a popular figure in the scientific community and had been recently elected President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Furthermore, President Truman had publicly exonerated him following HUAC’s attacks, taking the opportunity to warn of the evil that irresponsible charges could do to a valuable reputation and career. Nevertheless, Condon was publicly skeptical of the growing Cold War hysteria and of the military’s increasingly central role in American politics and the U.S. economy. This stance made him an enemy of the architects of the postwar military-industrial complex, and, potentially, Corning with him.
Two years after leaving the NBS, Condon lost his military security clearance automatically and, as Corning was involved with classified research, applied to have it reinstated. He was cleared for access by the Eastern Industrial Security Board in June of 1954, but when news of the EISB’s action reached the Washington newspapers in October, 1954, the Secretary of the Navy personally revoked Condon’s “Q” clearance. Vice President Richard Nixon claimed credit for the Secretary’s action, which gives some sense of the forces aligned against Corning’s chief scientist. Initially, Condon appeared ready to contest these charges as he had the others, but late in 1954 he declared that he was, after all, unwilling to fight this battle yet again.
The matter of Condon’s revoked security clearance left Corning in an awkward spot: their Director of R&D was no longer able to direct, or even to know of, some of his own research projects. Though classified research was a small part of the company’s total R&D activity, the position was clearly untenable. The issue was resolved by Condon’s resignation–likely both his suggestion and decision–late in 1954.
Though Condon was with Corning for only a few years, those years were critical ones, and the policies that he established were maintained and strengthened by his hand-picked successor, William Armistead. Furthermore, though no longer Director of Research and Development, Condon remained a consultant with Corning for several decades, and continued to advise the company on a wide range of R&D-related decisions. His commitment to openness among researchers had been the source of his troubles; that same commitment was reflected in his management of Corning’s R&D efforts, and was his most important legacy to the company.
Canton
Given then that Corning’s World War II experience led the company to hold the military at arm’s length, a decision institutionalized by its choice of Condon as head of its R&D program, it is hardly surprising to discover that Corning has not applied secrecy practices learned from postwar military contracts to commercial R&D efforts. In order to see this absence of links in practice, one must begin with the history of Corning’s Canton plant, which since its construction in 1966 has housed most of the company’s classified work, both R&D and production. 11
In 1965 Corning received a sizable order for mirror blanks, one too large to meet with existing capacity. It was decided to construct a new plant and to dedicate it to this sort of work. Corning was at the time also involved in producing mirror optics for satellites, highly secret work that demanded its own set of security precautions, including a research and production area physically separated from the rest of the company. The construction of the Canton facility thus solved two problems at once: it supplied needed capacity and allowed the company to build an appropriately isolated working area from scratch.
The plant was intentionally sited in an isolated part of New York State, far to the north, bordering on the Adirondack State Park, and separated by several hours’ drive from the main body of the company. The main justification for this rural location, however, was not enhanced security, but the fact that the fused silica production process used for this sort of work generated clouds of hydrochloric acid fumes. Construction began in 1966, and by 1969 all of the company’s fused silica work had been shifted to Canton, along with most of its telescope mirror blank production. 12 The plant’s existence was guaranteed in 1973 when upper management decided to transfer most of the rest of the company’s government contracts to Canton, including orders for radomes, aircraft windshields, and instrumentation tape reels. Later that year the plant obtained a multi-million dollar contract for the Space Shuttle windows.
This range of products suggests the depth of technical capability necessary to do this work, and it is no surprise, therefore, to learn that Corning’s military production drew on a great deal of commercially developed know-how. Research knowledge transferred from the central labs to this northern outpost and, to a lesser extent, vice versa. Corning in the 1960s and 1970s was simply too small a company to be duplicating its own research; indeed, given that it was valuable to the military precisely because of its specialized knowledge it would have made no sense at all to establish divisions between its military and commercial work that prevented the one from benefitting from the other altogether.
Nevertheless, Canton did contain within it a secure cell, and if information made its way from that cell to the plant’s other facilities it did so only in a highly partial, sporadic, and circumstantial fashion, a fashion quite in contrast to the flow of information within the company as a whole. Similarly, the transfer of knowledge from Canton to the rest of the company was inhibited by its physical and cultural isolation. Such knowledge would, of course, also include information concerning security practices themselves. The plant became an amalgam of Corning’s corporate culture and Canton’s local one, the one reinforcing the other in that most plant employees were already long native to the area.
Conclusion
While the example provided by Corning may be unique in its details, it is hardly unreplicated in its broader outline, and there are good theoretical reasons why this should be so. A great many fundamental differences exist between military and commercial secrecy at its most general. There are differences in what is at stake in each instance, in what the common default (secrecy or openness) is, and in when and how exceptions to that default may be made. Furthermore, in any company that creates a secure cell for military work, one will note important features in how that cell is managed and connected to the larger organization. A list of who has access to the cell and, within it, to the work that is being done looks quite different than does a similar list of people who commonly have access to even the commercially secret parts of the main body of the organization. (See diagram, next page.)
But more important than any of these differences is the fact that secrecy practices are not self-contained protocols that work regardless of their context; to the contrary, the adoption of such practices necessitates an ancillary commitment to entire complexes of behavior, or, put another way, the assumption of a culture in which such practices can function efficiently and reliably. Corning’s research tradition had long been opposed to secrecy of any sort within the corporate walls. The company’s earliest R&D efforts were directed at setting aside individually-held craft secrets. Arthur Day had been an outspoken advocate of this program: “secret processes,” he claimed, “are generally a cloak to cover ignorance rather than great wisdom.” Glassmaking had been too long “dominated by secret formulas and tricks of personal experience which followed no law and formed a part of no system of generalization,” and it was up to science, and Corning scientists in particular, to make that tacit knowledge explicit. 13
From that day R&D at Corning has generally been carried out in an atmosphere of openness, one marked by persistent efforts by those managing research to encourage, and even to require the sharing of ideas, methods, and discoveries, both within the lab and between it and the shop floor workers, the patent lawyers, the marketing executives, and others. Information generated by the R&D process is routinely gathered, centralized, and redisseminated via internally circulated publications, regular lecture series, and occasional conferences; such practices have been the norm at Corning ever since its lab grew too large for daily contact to serve this unifying purpose (that is to say at least since the 1930s). This culture conflicts with a culture of research secrecy of the sort that contractual military work demands, and it is for this reason, as well as to satisfy military requirements, that Corning encapsulated and isolated such work at a remote facility in Canton.
One might comment at this point that a similar atmosphere of freedom characterizes some of the national laboratories performing highly classified work for the military (Los Alamos or Lawrence Livermore, for example), but note that the contact that companies like Corning have with the military is not, as a rule, with the military’s research centers, but with individual contract officers demanding adherence to certain protocols. This secrecy regime is likely all that such a company will ever learn of military practices of this sort, even if within military labs themselves a different secrecy regime exists. The protocols that the contract officer bears in hand are more easily encysted than absorbed, and the lessons learned in fulfilling those contracts, in the end, are likely to be ones of isolation not integration.
Postscript: Secrecy and the Scholar
The data upon which this paper is based are the product of an on-going research project between the Winthrop Group, Inc.–a company offering professional historical services–and Corning, Inc. which is focusing on the history of R&D at Corning. As one of the historians working on this project I have signed a non-disclosure agreement with the Winthrop Group that could potentially limit my ability to speak on this subject. In exchange, I have been given remarkably free access to Corning’s archives, research centers, and personnel. This paper was written with the knowledge that Corning would have the final say as to what may be divulged in a factual sense, which lends a certain irony to the entire undertaking.
I mention this not so much as a warning–my material has not, in fact, caused the company any concern, though the reader should always suspect self-censorship under such circumstances, especially when confronted with a paucity of footnotes and a lack of specific details–but rather to highlight a meta-analytical problem that must at the very least provide a subtext for a conference of this nature. Some secrets lie beyond the analyst’s reach, others may be discovered and published with impunity, and between these two extremes lie a very great many secrets that may be explored only partially, or perhaps solely, under certain restrictive conditions.
All scholars are familiar with the necessity of choosing what to say and what to leave silent. Such choices are commonly made in accordance with professional standards, personal taste, and the stylistic demands of the forum in which publication is sought; the knowledgeable reader will have some sense of what choices have been made and thus of what got cut but never again pasted. Secrecy requirements–whether a product of corporate non-disclosure agreements or military classification–force the scholar to make yet another set of such choices, but in this case the reader is far less likely to be able to reconstruct a more complete story. Lacunae may remain unbridged and unbridgeable by the reader, a fact that testifies to the tenacity of secrets.
Endnotes:
Note 1: See Merritt Roe Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980); Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1977); David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York: Knopf, 1984); and Harvey M. Sapolsky, The Polaris System Development: Bureaucratic and Programmatic Success in Government (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), respectively. Back.
Note 2: This paper is drawn from a chapter of a book on the history of R&D at Corning that I am co-authoring with Margaret Graham, a partner at the Winthrop Group (see the Postscript for more information on this project). Though I have reworked all of the material in this paper, many points of analysis were originally, and in essence remain, the product of our collaboration. My thanks to her here, as well as to all those at Corning who have made this project possible. Back.
Note 3: Eugene C. Sullivan, letter to A.B. Houghton, 29 March 1917 (Department of Archives and Records Management, Corning, Inc. [hereafter DARM], box P-4, folder “Optical Glass”). Back.
Note 4: N.a., no title, n.d., p. 1 (DARM, box G-8, folder “Postwar Planning”). Back.
Note 5: W.W. Shaver, “Corning Glass Works Research and Development Projects Actively Connected with the War Effort,” 1945 [DARM, box 9, folder “War Products (Priorities)”]. Back.
Note 6: Arthur W. Baum, “They Live in a Glass House and Like It,” Saturday Evening Post (19 August 1944), p. 26. Back.
Note 7: W.W. Shaver, “War Problems for Which Financial Assistance from the Government Might be Justified,” 2 September 1942 [DARM, box 9, folder “War Products (Priorities)”]. Back.
Note 8: Interview with John Munier conducted by Meg Graham, March 1997 (Winthrop Group transcripts). Back.
Note 9: N.a., no title, n.d., p. 1 (DARM, box G-8, folder “Postwar Planning”). Back.
Note 10: E.C. Sullivan, no title, 4 May 1951 [DARM, box G-9, folder “War Products (Priorities)”]. Note that Sullivan is not being particularly careful with his language here; by any definition Corning had been engaged in optical glass production previous to World War II, though hardly extensively. Back.
Note 11: Material for this section was found in DARM. It has not, to date, been cataloged, but consists of a few brief chronologies for the Canton plant. Back.
Note 12: Fused silica is a form of glass that exhibits virtually no expansion across a wide range of temperatures, and optical elements formed from fused silica will accordingly not distort images as the temperature of the observing chamber changes. It is, however, an extremely expensive material; most telescope blanks are made out of one of several other ultra-low-expansion glass formulae instead. Back.
Note 13: Arthur L. Day, “Natural and Artificial Ceramic Products,” Bulletin of the American Ceramic Society 13 (April 1934), p. 91. Back.
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