Westinghouse Electric opened a new research laboratory near the company’s main factory in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1916. Located in the suburban borough of Forest Hills, the laboratory was set up to provide scientific knowledge for the older materials testing and product development laboratories at the factory. Unlike its industrial counterparts, however, the Forest Hills laboratory was dominated by a strong engineering research tradition that disrupted efforts undertaken in the 1920s and again in the 1930s to build and sustain a diversified fundamental research program. Whereas Eastman Kodak, DuPont, AT&T, and General Electric had successfully integrated fundamental research into their corporate laboratories, the Forest Hills laboratory remained the site of recurring tensions between two cultures of innovation—one based on fundamental science, the other on engineering research. Although such tensions often resulted in competing research strategies, managerial conflicts, and mismatched corporate priorities, the long-standing culture of engineering research contributed far more to Westinghouse’s strategic growth than even the most advanced fundamental research. More generally, the interactions between the cultures of engineering and science that characterize the early history of industrial research at Westinghouse highlight the evolving and sometimes conflicting patterns of technological innovation and organizational change in American industry before World War II.

In 1927 the National Association of Life Underwriters collaborated with Professor Solomon Huebner of the University of Pennsylvania to found the American College of Life Underwriters, an institution devoted to establishing and maintaining professional standards for the nation’s life insurance salesmen. Their work sheds light on the new politics of expertise and associations that emerged in the 1920s. While many historians have portrayed the period’s experts as purveyors of new, technical knowledge and apolitical agents of an inevitable modernity, Huebner in fact brought little real knowledge of insurance to his work. Instead, he introduced the industry’s prevailing ideology of public service into his classroom, and it informed his professionalization project as well. The professor worked as a campaigner for professionalism, attempting to persuade life insurance salesmen, industry executives, and the American public to accept the notion that salesmen could become professionals. Ultimately, Huebner’s career shows how a Progressive expert worked directly with a trade association representing a disorganized industry. But instead of merely seeking to build new capacity for economic planning and stabilization, Huebner and the association boldly positioned their industry as a voluntary and private means of providing Americans with basic social welfare benefits and paved the way for the growth of the modern financial services industry.

This article considers the neglected legacies of the Lancashire cotton industry and their impact on the U.K. outdoor trade. Studies of the decline of the Lancashire cotton industry after the Second World War have concentrated on the collapse of coarse cotton spinning and weaving, largely ignoring the impact of the knowledge and skills related to the finishing trades. The examination of the evolution of rainwear, coatings, and high-performance fabrics in the nineteenth century provides a backdrop to a study of the innovation process that emerged in the U.K. outdoor trade after 1960.