Correspondence, memoranda, diaries, minutes, speeches, writings, reports, oral history transcripts, subject files, legal documents, printed matter, photographs, and other papers relating primarily to Bowles's career as an engineer and consultant in private industry and in government as well as to his association with research universities. Documents his work with Raytheon Company; Whitin Machine Works, later White Consolidated Industries, and its subsidiaries; the U.S. War Dept. during World War II; the U.S. Dept. of Defense during the Korean War; and the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development National Defense Research Committee (NDRC). Includes material concerning Bowles's association with Bentley College, Kodály Musical Training Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), and other educational facilities.

Also documents his work as a private consultant for companies and individuals securing or defending patents including Radio Corporation of America, Samson Electric Company, Sperry Gyroscope Company, inc., Stockton Profile Gauge Corporation, United Artists Corporation, Ernst Fredrik Werner Alexanderson, Edwin H. Armstrong, Walter G. Cady, Alexander McLean Nicholson, and George Washington Pierce.

Subjects include Bowles's youth in Westphalia, Mo.; the NDRC Radiation Laboratory; M.I.T.'s electrical engineering program, Round Hill Research Division, and School of Industrial Management, later the Sloan School of Management; military research and strategy, anti-submarine warfare, and development of radar, torpedoes, and other weapons; reform of the patent system; Rand Corporation and Project Rand (United States. Air Force); Raytheon Company's Submarine Signal Division; telephone systems and Bell Telephone Company; television frequency allocations; and individuals such as Vannevar Bush, Carlo Luigi Calosi, K.T. Compton, C.S. Draper, Ernst A. Guillemin, Ernest Joseph King, Samuel Eliot Morison, David Rines, and Sir Robert Alexander Watson-Watt. Includes papers of Gleason Leonard Archer, George A. Campbell, Hammond Vinton Hayes, and Harry E. Yarnell. Correspondents include Charles F. Adams, Henry Harley Arnold, Harold Gardiner Bowen, Vannevar Bush, Carlo Luigi Calosi, Alfred L. Loomis, Julius Adams Stratton, and Sir Robert Alexander Watson-Watt.