In the mid‑1940s the first professional "futurist" consulting institutions like RAND and SRI began to engage in long-range planning, systematic trend watching, scenario development, and visioning, at first under World War II military and government contract and, beginning in the 1950s, for private institutions and corporations. The period from the late 1940s to the mid‑1960s laid the conceptual and methodological foundations of the modern futurology field. Bertrand de Jouvenel's "The Art of Conjecture" in 1963 and Dennis Gabor's "Inventing the Future" in 1964 are considered key early works, and the first U.S. university course devoted entirely to the future was taught by the late Alvin Toffler at the New School in 1966.