THE PRODUCTION OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE 175 



that sooner or later some other genius working on the subject 

 advanced the available knowledge and gave a new spurt to 

 the development of that industry. Thus, in the early days of 

 the technical industries, the development of new processes 

 and methods was often dependent upon some one man, some- 

 times the owner of the firm which exploited his discoveries. 

 But with the increasing complexity of industry and the paral- 

 lel increase in the amount of technical and scientific informa- 

 tion, necessitating increasing specialization, the work of in- 

 vestigation and development, ^vhich had been performed by 

 an individual, was delegated to a special department of the 

 organization, from which arose the modern industrial research 

 laboratories. 



The organization of research sections in industry first be- 

 came of importance in the dye industry in Germany. After 

 the initial discovery of the synthetic dyes by Perkin in Eng- 

 land, Hofmann and his students made large numbers of dyes 

 from the oils separated from coal tar, and the students of Hof- 

 mann founded manufacturing companies to make the dyes. 

 In this industry, continual research was essential, and very 

 soon gi'oups of chemists were producing a stream of new 

 processes and products, all of them protected as completely 

 as possible by patents. The success of this organization and 

 the expansion of the dye works until they controlled the 

 chemical industry of Germany and a great part of the world 

 inspired others to follow their example. 



Certain other industries were founded by scientific men 

 who had made discoveries, and these also engaged in scien- 

 tific research on a large scale. Research was organized from 

 the very beginning in the telephone companies that Alex- 

 ander Bell founded, and Elihu Thomson brought the same 

 system into the General Electric Company when it was 

 formed. Soon after the beginning of the twentieth century, 

 therefore, industrial research was firmly established in the 

 German chemical and electrical industries, in the American 

 electrical industry, and, to a small extent, in the British and 

 American chemical industries. 



