viii INTRODUCTION 



compatible with the "profit motive" which is supposed to dominate in- 

 dustry. As a matter of fact, these researches were not the result of planning 

 but came from a series of discoveries that could not have been foreseen. 

 The incentive was a deep rooted curiosity regarding the fundamentals of 

 science and the work was carried out for the "fun of it." 



The idea of establishing a new type of industrial laboratory originated 

 with A. G. Davis and E. W. Rice of the General Electric Company in 1900. 

 The basic knowledge upon which the electrical industry has been built had 

 been acquired slowly during the 19th Century by the great pioneer scientists 

 who, for the most part, were associated with universities throughout the 

 world. The industries had applied this knowledge to useful ends, but had 

 not attempted to contribute to the basic knowledge. Mr. Rice and Mr. 

 Davis, on the other hand, visualized a laboratory, primarily designed not 

 for the solution of known problems but rather for obtaining new funda- 

 mental knowledge in broad fields associated with the work of the company. 



Dr. W. R. Whitney was chosen as director of this industrial laboratory 

 although his work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had been 

 in physical chemistry. 



By 1909 when I joined the laboratory, I found that there was more 

 "academic freedom" than I had ever encountered in any university. 



During the first three years I studied chemical reactions that take place 

 when various gases are introduced into evacuated glass bulbs containing 

 heated tungsten filaments, and unexpectedly made the discovery that the 

 molecules of hydrogen gas at the high temperatures that can be obtained 

 with this new material, tungsten, break apart to give hydrogen atoms which 

 have very extraordinary properties. The quest for more knowledge regard- 

 ing this atomic hydrogen finally led to the invention of the gas filled tung- 

 sten lamp. This resulted in an improvement of the efficiency of incandescent 

 lamps and made it possible to construct lamps of much greater size or 

 higher candle power. The history of this early work is given in Chapter 

 Seven in the article entitled "Atomic Hydrogen as an Aid to Industrial 

 Research." The title may be aptly paraphrased "How Curiosity Regarding 

 Atomic Hydrogen Served as an Incentive in Industrial Research." 



Just about the time that the development of the gas filled lamp seemed 

 to be possible, I began to be puzzled by the fact that in the older vacuum 

 type of incandescent lamp no large currents flowed across the space between 

 the two ends of the lamp filament. To learn why we did not experience any 

 difficulty on this score I began to spend more of my time on the study of 

 the flow of electrons in high vacuum and in gases. This led to work in 

 fields "E" and "F" listed in the bibliography. The article in Chapter 

 Thirteen entitled "Metastable Atoms and Electrons Produced by Resonance 

 Radiation in Neon" is one of the many papers that resulted from this work. 



