RESEARCH FOR AERONAUTICS—FARREN 253 
the practical questions thrown up by continuous contact, on the one 
hand, with those who design and build aircraft and, on the other, with 
those who use them. In my experience it has been this intimate rela- 
tion between the three parties which has made this work so continu- 
ously exciting and, I believe, profitable. On looking back I cannot find 
any example that convinces me that we should have moved more 
quickly or more certainly had work on the fundamentals been divorced 
from that on problems of the moment. 
It is true that at times, while we were developing our theory, we 
had the advantage—and this adds to my point—of individual work 
going on in flight, under conditions which I now believe to have been 
ideal. When I was one of the team who worked on these subjects at 
Cambridge, we often felt that we could do more, or do it more quickly, 
if only we had more of something—men, airplanes, workshops—but 
chiefly more hours in the day. In truth, I think we did as much as was 
physically possible without enlarging our organization, and, if we had 
done that, our work would have changed in character and would, I 
believe, have been less effective. That it had effect, and quickly, was 
due to our close relation with the establishments that had the necessary 
resources to exploit it for practical purposes with which they were 
intimately acquainted. They seized it and rapidly developed it. Its 
practical effect can now be seen not only in many aircraft but in the 
research equipment and programs of work. 
You will remember Sir Melvill Jones’s first Wright Brothers lecture, 
in which he described some of the work I have just referred to on the 
boundary layer. From my own share in that work I can say that we 
were profoundly excited by the problems themselves and by the fasci- 
nation of trying to solve them by experiments in flight. But we were 
stimulated, and all our discussions were illuminated, by the realization 
of the potential application of their results. This we obtained from 
our constant personal contacts with the experimental establishments 
and with aircraft designers. 
Thus my experience leads me to the conclusion that, while there 
should be no explicit attempt to divorce work on basic problems from 
that on immediate ones of narrower range, the fullest encouragement 
and practical support should be given to independent workers. What 
form this should take I hesitate to define. My own preference is not 
for large endowments to institutions in the hope that they may attract 
good men. I would rather make generous finance available through 
some semi-independent advisory organization when the need is made 
clear by the development of the work. This may be either in cash or 
in kind. We at Cambridge had very little money, but the country 
supplied us with airplanes and maintained and renewed them. My 
only concern is that the ponderous workings of the machinery of gov- 
