Battelle Memorial Institute

Battelle Memorial Institute is a non-profit science and technology organization founded 1925.

Battelle Memorial Institute (Battelle), established in 1925 through the will of Gordon Battelle [1], is a non-profit organization based in Columbia, Ohio. It supports and promotes science and math education, and conducts research and development through contract research, laboratory management, and technology commercialization. It donates 20 percent of its net income to the communities in which it works.

History

Gordon Batelle (1883-1923), American metallurgist and steel industrialist established the Battelle Memorial Institute (Battelle) through his will. His mother added additional funding.

Originally focusing on contract research and development work in the areas of metals and material science, Battelle became an international science and technology enterprise that explores emerging areas of science, develops and commercializes technology, and manages laboratories for customers.

Work related to documentation

During the 1950s Battelle developed a large staff, had numerous projects, and operated several information analysis centers. The BASIS automated retrieval system was developed, became operational in 1970, and soon provided dial-in access to numerous files. It was the first online service to provide access at any time to more than a million records. Marketed through Science Information Association (SIA), it became a profitable commercial service competitive with Lockheed's DIALOG and the System Development Corporation's search service. Battelle, however, was legally a non-profit, so the BASIS service became restricted to specialty files and private files for limited groups of users. The BASIS software was widely installed. (Bourne & Hahn 2003, 315-20).

In 1953-1955 Madeline M. (Berry) Henderson, Allen Kent, and James Whitney Perry worked briefly at Battelle on a mechanized retrieval system for ordnance reports of Development and Proof Services and, with CIA funding through the American Society of Metals, on their semantic factors indexing method. (Burke 2018, 241-4).

Battelle conducted most of the basic research in the development of xerography with Chester Carlton.

Persons involved

Madeline (Berry) Henderson; Allen Kent; Ben-Ami Lipetz; John W. Murdock; James Perry; Herbert M. Ohlman; and Gustavus Simpson.

Further reading

• "Batelle: Our history." [Batelle Website] [2]. Includes timeline.
• "Battelle Memorial Institute". Wikipedia [3]
• Bourne, Charles P. & Trudi Bellardo Hahn. (2003). A history of online information services, 1963-1976. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 0 262 02538-8.
• Burke, Colin. (2018). America's Information Wars: The Untold Story of the Information Systems in America's Conflicts and Politics from World World War II to the Internet Age. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 9781538112458.