History
The National Research Council was organized in 1916 in response to the increased need for scientific and technical services caused by World War I. On June 1, 1917, the council convened a meeting of scientific representatives of the UK and France with interested parties from the US on the subject of submarine detection. The results obtained and the problems in the work were discussed. A further meeting with the British and French was held in Paris in October 1918 at which more details of their work was disclosed. As a result of this, the council recommended that US scientists be brought together to work on the problems. A New York Group worked on "supersonics" as did a San Pedro Group. A New London Group worked on binaural receivers, while Chicago and Wisconsin Groups were assigned various problems in support of the other groups.
Due to the success of Council-directed research in producing a sound-based method of detecting submarines, as well as other military innovations, the NRC was retained at the end of the war, though it was gradually decoupled from the military. The Research Council is currently administered jointly by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine, and its work is overseen by a Governing Board and an Executive Committee.
Read more about this topic: United States National Research Council
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“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
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“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)