A stimulating man: Karl T. Compton, 1935 Credit: Courtesy of the MIT Museum

In the fall of 1933, with the United States in the depths of the Great Depression, Karl T. Compton, MIT's president and chairman of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's recently created Science Advisory Board, proposed allocating $16 million of the Public Works Administration's $3 billion budget to fund a "Recovery Program of Science." Its purpose would be to boost depleted research budgets and provide jobs for the legion of unemployed scientists and engineers. The funds were denied because no legislative authority existed for funding research through the PWA.

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