“Encouragements” from the French Académie des Sciences, 1831-1850. The earliest recorded grant system was administered by the Paris-based Académie des Sciences following a large estate gift from Baron de Montyon. finding itself constrained in its ability to finance the research of promising but not-well-established savants, the academy seized on the flexiblity afford by the Montyon
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“Encouragements” from the French Académie des Sciences, 1831-1850.
The earliest recorded grant system was administered by the Paris-based Académie des Sciences following a large estate gift from Baron de Montyon. finding itself constrained in its ability to finance the research of promising but not-well-established savants, the academy seized on the flexiblity afford by the Montyon gift to transform traditional grands prix into “encouragements”: smaller amounts that could broaden the set of active researchers. Even though the process was highly informal (the names of the early recipients were not published in the academy’s Compte rendus), it apparently avoided suspected or actual cases of corruption…Throughout the 19th century, however, the academy struggled to convince wealthy donors to abandon their preference for indivisible, large monetary prizes in favor of these divisible encouragements.
That is from the Pierre Azoulay and Danielle Li essay “Scientific Grant Funding,” in the new and highly useful NBER volume Innovation and Public Policy, edited by Austan Goolsbee and Benjamin F. Jones. (But according to the book’s own theories, shouldn’t the book be cheaper than that?)
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