THE ELECTRON: 

 ITS INTELLECTUAL AND SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE ' 



By Karl T. Compton 

 President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 



Within the past 5 years, centenaries, bicentenaries, and tercen- 

 tenaries have been much in vogue. Every town or institution or 

 event which has claim to distinction has sought the excuse of the calen- 

 dar to remind the world of its claims to greatness. Thus we have 

 recently celebrated the centenary of Faraday's discovery of the prin- 

 ciples of electromagnetism and the bicentenary of Watt's invention 

 of the steam engine — discoveries which have introduced the eras of 

 electricity and of mechanical power. The city of Chicago has sought 

 to tell us that the progress of mankind really began with the founding 

 of th&t community, and has led us to spend millions of dollars to gain 

 the impression that there is really some causal relationship between 

 Chicago and world progress. In my part of the country, the city of 

 Boston and its suburbs staged a succession of tercentenary celebra- 

 tions, as proud of their past as Chicago is of its present. Greatest of 

 all was last summer's tercentenary celebration of Harvard University, 

 signalizing the firm basis of intellectual freedom and leadership which 

 is the prime requisite for a free people in a democracy. 



Encouraged by the success of the Chicago Century of Progress and 

 the Harvard Tercentenary, I venture to feature my address as sig- 

 nalizing an anniversary of the discovery of the electron. To be sure, 

 it is only one generation old, and a generation is a sufficiently vague 

 unit of time for my purposes. Yet, in spite of its youth, it bids fair 

 to rival Chicago in its contributions to economic progress, and Harvard 

 University in its contributions to the understanding of this world in 

 which we live. So I venture to assert that no institution or community 

 which has used one of these milestones to take stock of its achieve- 

 ments and plot its future course has stronger claims to intellectual 

 significance and practical utility than I will claim for the electron. 



The history of science abounds with instances when a new concept 

 or discovery has led to tremendous advances into vast new fields of 



> Address of the retiring president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, delivered 

 at Atlantic City on December 28, 1936. Reprinted by permission from Nature, vol. 139, no. 3510, 

 February 6, 1937. 



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