204 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 195 2 



is apt to be a high mortality in the expected achievement ; but valuable 

 end products frequently appear, even when, in the light of a strict 

 appraisal of affairs as represented by the scientific knowledge of the 

 day, it would seem that they never should have appeared. 



The inventor walks in a territory which the man of science has 

 mapped out in regions of assured fertility, dubious fertility, and 

 almost certain sterility. The man of science is inclined to conserve 

 his efforts by walking in the rather limited realm of assured fertility, 

 but the inventor walks with courage everywhere. He sees a pasture 

 which he thinks has promise. The physicist would explain to him 

 that his reasons for expecting something from that region are invalid, 

 and in 90 percent of the cases they are, but the inventor walks never- 

 theless. He walks persistently, so that every now and again he finds 

 some spot which is rich in content, not perhaps for the reasons that 

 he expected it to be, but for other reasons of which he may be only 

 partially conscious. If we should trace these reasons to their origin, 

 they might constitute a set of heterogeneous associations with no very 

 obvious logical connection, but which, through the scheme of profound 

 regularity inherent in nature, have conspired to give a suggestion 

 which is fruitful in spite of the very dubious foundations upon which 

 the suggestion is made. 



It is characteristic of one who concerns himself almost exclusively 

 with the practical needs of a science or art that wide experience should 

 supplement in considerable degree refinement of exact prediction. 

 I have been accustomed to state as my experience that when there 

 is a controversy between an artist — a musician, for example — and a 

 man of science in relation to something which concerns the actual 

 practice of the art, then in 90 percent of the cases the artist is right 

 and the man of science is wrong. However, the situation does not 

 end here, because unfortunately the artist proceeds to give the reasons 

 for what he says. Then everything that he says is wrong and the 

 man of science has merely to sit back and pull him up at the end of 

 each sentence, leaving him completely bewildered, but unconvinced 

 nevertheless. 



There was a celebrated inventor whose employees hung upon the 

 walls of his laboratory a placard which stated : "The poor fool didn't 

 know enough to know that it couldn't be done, so he went ahead and 

 did it." You know, the telephone never should have worked. Think 

 of the impossible situation with which we are presented in this 

 device. Think of the cables that carry the telephone current in the 

 form of electrons. In the absence of the current, the electrons are 

 moving in all directions. As many are moving from left to right as 

 are moving from right to left; and the nothingness which is there 

 is composed of two equal and opposite halves, about a million million 



