Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
from the nation's scientific elite, Science Service derived a substantial
portion of its income from syndicating news stories to newspapers and
periodical publishers. Organizational sustainability depended upon posi-
tive audience reaction and thus continually shaped the decision-making.
This section outlines aspects of the organization's naissance and orig-
inal direction which are relevant to understanding how it operated during
the 1930s. No comprehensive history of Science Service yet exists; this
discussion relies therefore on new archival research as well as on work
by David Rhees and other historians whose research has focused on the
group's early years.
4
The idea for the organization developed during an era when the scien-
tific establishment had considerable concern about its public image but
few practical ideas for how to polish it. The plans of various eminent sci-
entists for establishing popular magazines had been hindered by their
lack of real-world experience in the publishing business (see Burnham
1987, Kevles 1978, Tobey 1971). In 1903, millionaire newspaper pub-
lisher E.W. Scripps (1854-1926) became intrigued with the holistic and
humanistic approach to science embraced by a University of California
zoologist, William E. Ritter (1856-1944). With his sister Ellen, Scripps
endowed a new oceanographic institute, and Ritter became its first direc-
tor and a close friend of Scripps (Thone & Bailey 1927). By 1919, the
two men had begun to imagine a new entity to foster public communica-
4
The absence of a comprehensive history of Science Service relates both to the com-
plexity and size of its records and to an earlier failure by historians to recognize the
importance of these records and how they might illuminate the history of science as
well as its public presentation. The organization's multiple parallel filing systems in-
termingled editorial, business, and personal correspondence with drafts, notes, photo-
graphs, and other ephemera for hundreds of projects and activities. Records generated
between 1921 and the early 1970s were donated to the Smithsonian Institution in sev-
eral phases, but not all records were transferred, not all those were housed in the same
location, and not all remained intact. The surviving records, located in the Smith-
sonian Institution Archives and in curatorial collections throughout the Smithsonian
museums, comprise many hundreds of cubic feet of papers and photographs, much of
it still without comprehensive finding aids and some still incompletely processed. For
decades, only a small portion of the early records had been processed. In 2005, the
author wrote a brief historical summary of Science Service's first forty years for a
Smithsonian Institution Archives finding aid to Record Unit 7091, available online at
<http://siarchives.si.edu/findingaids/FARU7091.htm>. Documents relating to the his-
tory of the collection are preserved at the Smithsonian Institution Archives, as part of
the control files for Record Unit 7091.
