THE RELATION OF SCIENCE TO INDUSTRY 46 1 



possible by the discovery of the laws of force and motion 

 by Gahleo and Newton. That states the relationship of 

 pure science to industry. The one is the child of the other. 

 You may apply any blood test you wish and you will at 

 once establish the relationship. Pure science begat modern 

 industry. 



In the case of the radio art, the commercial values of which 

 now mount up to many billions of dollars, the parentage 

 is still easier to trace. For if one's vision does not enable 

 him to look back 300 years, even the shortest-sighted of men 

 can scarcely fail to see back eighteen years. For the whole 

 structure of the radio art has been built since 1910, definitely 

 and unquestionably upon researches carried on in the pure 

 science laboratory for twenty years before anyone dreamed 

 that there were immediate commercial applications of these 

 electronic discharges in high vacuum. 



It is precisely the same story everywhere in all branches 

 of human progress. I suspect it would be difficult to find a 

 single exception. Here is the latest illustration that came to 

 my attention less than a week ago in a letter from the Air Re- 

 duction Sales Company. It reads as follows: "We take pleasure 

 in handing you herewith a complete set of luminescent tubes, 

 each containing in the pure state one of the elements of the 

 air, namely, nitrogen, oxygen, argon, hydrogen, neon, helium, 

 krypton and xenon. It seems to us worthy of note that at 

 the beginning of this century these gaseous elements as 

 such had practically no commercial significance. Today 

 the estimated value of the plants and equipment that have 

 been created either to manufacture or to use and handle these 

 gases in industry amounts to three hundred million dollars. " 



The writer of this letter might have added that the chain 

 of discovery which led up to this result started in the most 

 "useless" of all sciences, astronomy; for helium, as its name 

 implies and as everyone knows, was first discovered in the sun 

 with the aid of the spectroscope, and thirty years later it was 

 its discovery in minute amounts in our atmosphere, also with 

 the aid of the spectroscope, that set us looking for the other 

 inert gases of which the letter speaks and which have 

 recently found such enormous application in neon tubes and 

 the like. 



