Philip M. Morse and the Beginnings

A 50th anniversary issue of Operations Research would be incomplete without a retrospective look at the remarkable contributions of Philip McCord Morse to the establishment of operations research as a field and the starting of the journal. Professor Morse (1903–1985) was a distinguished physicist, a World War II pioneer in operations research, and the first president of the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA), the latter a predecessor of today’s INFORMS. The importance attached to scientific publication by Morse and the scientists who founded ORSA is amply demonstrated by their actions. A scant five months elapsed between the Founding Meeting of the Society in May 1952 and the first issue of this journal in November 1952. We should have such turnaround today! Morse wrote the first paper in the first issue, albeit, a modest two-page introduction to ORSA (Morse 1952). After his inaugural year as president of the society, he published his retiring presidential address “Trends in Operations Research” (Morse 1953). In the first seven years of the journal he wrote seven articles and three notes and letters. Some of these were nontechnical discussions of aspects of the field, but not all, for example: “Stochastic Properties of Waiting Lines” (Morse 1955), “Solutions of a Class of Discrete-Time Inventory Problems” (Morse 1959), and “Dynamics of Two Classes of Continuous Review Inventory Systems” (Galliher et al. 1959). Morse published several other technical papers before his retirement in 1969 and, even after that, another one or two. The last paper in the journal with his byline (Morse 1986) was a compilation of his WWII experiences. It was pulled together posthumously by Hugh Miser from Morse’s autobiography, In at the Beginnings: A Physicist’s Life (Morse 1977). I recommend the paper (and the biography) to those of you interested in the origins of operations research. You will find exciting, high quality, high impact work. Morse’s books were even more influential than his papers. My copy of Queues, Inventories and Maintenance (Morse 1958) is worn and tattered. His Library Effectiveness: A Systems Approach (Morse 1968) won the Lanchester Prize that year. His effort to expand the boundaries of OR into the nonmilitary public arena led to his co-editing Operations Research for Public Systems (Morse and Bacon 1967) and Analysis of Public Systems (Drake et al. 1972). But we should put Morse’s contributions in context by looking more deeply at the man and the roots of operations research in the United States. Phil was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, where his father was a telephone engineer. Phil graduated from Lakewood High School in 1921 as a voracious reader, a violin player, and a prospective chemist. He then went off to the Case School of Applied Science (now Case Western Reserve University). After his freshman year, family finances were in such poor condition that he took a year off to earn money by working in a radio store that he and several friends had started. In his later Who’s Who in America biography Morse describes his role as “salesman,” but I’m sure he wrote this with a smile. First of all, the store’s founders did everything; for example, they assembled many of the radios themselves. Some of the radio sets cost $500 in 1920’s money and were sold after an in-home demonstration that surely required nontrivial selling skills. Morse must have looked back at this as excellent training for the many times in his long career that he found himself selling his ideas and vision to governments, military establishments, other scientists, and eager students. Upon returning to Case as a sophomore, Morse fell under the aegis of the eminent American physicist, Dayton C. Miller, and proceeded to major in physics. Following graduation in 1926, Morse moved on to graduate school at Princeton, receiving a Ph.D. in 1929. While he was at Princeton, he published several theoretical papers with the late Karl T. Compton, who later became president of MIT. We have little idea today of how rare and precious was an academic job in physics during the Great Depression. Compton offered Morse a job as an assistant professor at MIT starting in 1931. In his autobiography Morse reports, “It was easy to say yes.”