Frederick Gardner Cottrell, the founder of Research Corporation, had a difficult time learning languages. Although he spent two years studying chemistry in Germany, Cottrell is reported to have acquired only a passing knowledge of the language. One fellow student reported that Cottrell’s German completely dispensed with the problem of assigning nouns to their proper gender by rendering them all as feminine.
As early as 1902, Wilhelm Ostwald, Cottrell’s mentor at the University of Leipzig, interested Cottrell in the development of an international language for communication between people whose native languages differed. Cottrell and his wife, Jesse, began studying Esperanto, which he was convinced was the easiest of the proposed international languages, around 1915. Jesse may have been a somewhat unwilling student; Cottrell noted in his diary, “Read Esperanto to Jess until she kicked.”
In 1921, Cottrell became chairman of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Technology of the National Research Council (NRC), the working arm of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. In 1919, representing the NRC, he attended meetings in Europe where he proposed forming a committee on International Auxiliary Language. Cottrell was named chair of the committee, a position he held until 1936.
In 1921, Jesse Cottrell and Alice Vanderbilt Morris became friends while the two were resting at a sanitarium in New Jersey. Alice Morris was a granddaughter of the capitalist Cornelius Vanderbilt; her husband, Dave Hennen Morris, was a New York City lawyer and diplomat who would be appointed U.S. Ambassador to Belgium by President Roosevelt in 1933. As a result of the friendship forged by Jesse and Alice, Dave served on the Research Corporation board of directors from 1923 until 1944, serving some of that time as the Foundation’s treasurer.
Fred Cottrell introduced the Morrises to Esperanto, promoted their interest, and encouraged them to establish the International Auxiliary Language Association, for the purpose of “widespread study, discussion and publicity of all questions involved in the establishment of an auxiliary language . . .” The Association was founded in 1924, following organizational meetings at which Cottrell was the principal speaker. Joining the Morrises in support of their endeavor were several other prominent New Yorkers including: Earle B. Babcock, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at New York University and Director of the European Center of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; John Dewey, a philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas reformed education in the U.S.; Stephen P. Duggan, president of The Institute of International Education and director of the Council on Foreign Relations; John H. Finley, president of the College of the City of New York; Alfred N. Goldsmith, an electrical engineer who was RCA’s chief broadcast engineer; and Herbert N. Shenton, professor of sociology at Columbia University.
Funded annually by Research Corporation, and by grants from the Carnegie Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and by generous gifts from the Morrises, the work of the IALA was carried on under the guidance of Alice Morris, advisers, and by the organization’s research staff. During the 1930s the IALA sponsored numerous international meetings, conferences, and congresses of linguists in what became an unsuccessful attempt to achieve a consensus among linguists for a base language or languages on which to construct an artificial language.