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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



the chances of our doing a great work would be increased a hundred- 

 f okl ? The problems we have to solve are hard enough ; give us means 

 to employ the best men and we will answer thtm, starve us and then 

 quote our failure as showing the uselessness of science applied to 

 industry. There is some justice in the criticism of one of our technical 

 papers. I have recently been advertising for assistants, and a paper 

 in whose columns the advertisement appeared writes: 



The scale of pay is certainly not extravagant. It is however possible that 

 the duties will be correspondingly light. 



I have thus summarized in a brief manner the aims of the labora- 

 tory and have indicated the effect which the application of science 

 to industry has had on one branch of trade in Germany. And now 

 let me illustrate these aims by a more detailed account of some of the 

 problems of industry Avliieh have been solved by the application of 



MAIN BUILDING /OF DIVISION H 



Kek'}isan8talt, Technical Buii-ding. 



science, and then of some others which remain unsolved and which 

 the laboratory hopes to attack. The story of the Jena glass-works is 

 most interesting ; we will take it first. 



An exhibition of scientific apparatus took place in London in 1878. 

 Among the visitors to this was Professor Abbe, of Jena, and in a report 

 he wrote on the optical apparatus he called attention to the need for 

 progress in the art of glass-making if the microscope were to advance 

 and to the necessity for obtaining glasses having a difEerent relation 

 between dispersion and refractive index than that found in the ma- 

 terial at the disposal of opticians. Stokes and Harcourt had already 

 made attempts in this direction but with no marked success. In 1881 

 Abbe and Schott at Jena started their work. Their undertaking, they 

 write five years later in the first catalogue of their factory, arose out of 

 a scientific investigation into the connection between the optical proper- 



