SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA 



In boyhood he was a diligent and omnivorous reader, and to some 

 extent he keeps up this habit. He has not confined himself, however, to 

 scientific works; and often, when some book entirely literary in char- 

 acter is mentioned, he will surprise the listener by speaking of it with 

 evident familiarity. As for the scientific works, he has collected a large 

 library of them, and does not affect disdain for their accumulations of 

 knowledge. "Yet, somehow," he says, "I don't seem to find what I want 

 in books." I once asked him, also, how he made his calculations. The 

 answer was: "I don't know exactly; but I can't do them on paper. I have 

 to be moving around." That he does them efficiently, however, is shown 

 by the results. I have also in mind at this moment the incident of a- well- 

 known physicist of my acquaintance, a man of high scientific rank and 

 rare mathematical attainments, who had done an immense amount of 

 figuring on some point which he mentioned to Edison, without being 

 able to reach a satisfactory conclusion. Edison at once, though having 

 only a few minutes for consideration, gave him the result and convinced 

 him of its accuracy, much to his surprise and admiration. 



C. 



ELECTRICAL RESEARCH IN THE EARLY 

 TWENTIETH CENTURY— IRVING LANGMUIR 



CEdison lost control of his electric light in the early 1890's, and out 

 of the merger of his interests with those of several others came the 

 General Electric Company. By early in the new century. General Elec- 

 tric was pioneering in the development of the institution which was to 

 become the major vehicle of science in industry — the industrial research 

 laboratory. Because the whole domain of electricity was largely inacces- 

 sible to man before basic scientific research revealed it, the electrical 

 industry in all its forms was more a congenial home for science than 

 those industries, such as steel, which were based on centuries of empirical 

 practice. Compare the attitude of Irving Langmuir, one of the bright 

 stars of the early General Electric laboratory, with that of Edison when 

 he talks of basic science. But consider also that Langmuir does not find 

 that basic science is an automatic cure for industrial problems and that 

 the conversion of theory into practice — the heart of the new relation- 

 ship between science and technology — is by no means a simple process. 

 What is the professional connection of the men doing the innovating in 

 the early General Electric laboratory as compared to those connected 

 with the Bessemer process? (Irving Langmuir, "Fundamental Research 

 and Its Human Value," Scientific Monthly, XL VI [1938], 358-62.)] 



Until the beginning of the present century, applications of science 

 had almost always been made by inventors and engineers who had uti- 

 lized the stock of scientific knowledge available to them and who did 

 not themselves contribute to fundamental science. Pure science was 

 mainly the outgrowth of work carried on in universities by those who 

 were not primarily interested in the applications. Newton, the great 

 French mathematicians and physicists Laplace, Ampere, Poisson, the 



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