Ill 



CONTRIBUTIONS OF PHYSICAL SCIENCE 

 ROBERT A. MILLIKAN 



FROM the days of Alexander and Caesar, if not from periods 

 even more remote, the engineer has been a vital adjunct 

 of a successful army ; for war machines have always had to be 

 built and operated, bridges thrown across rivers, roads rendered 

 passable, new terrain surveyed and new fortifications designed 

 and constructed. These and their* like have been from the 

 earliest times the standardized operations of the Engineer Corps 

 of every army. But there is another and a quite distinct role 

 which the physical sciences played in the great war. For never 

 in the history of warfare up to the year 1914 had the whole 

 scientific brains of any nation been systematically mobilized 

 for the express purpose of finding immediately new ways of 

 applying the accumulated scientific knowledge of the world to 

 the ends of war. 



It is not my purpose in this chapter to deal with the standard- 

 ized operations of the technical corps of the army and navy 

 during the great war. For this I have no competence. I shall 

 endeavor rather to pass in rapid review the most significant 

 of the newer developments which were due in large measure 

 to the organized activities of scientists who, until the great war, 

 had no association with things military. Many of these scien- 

 tists, like the writer, became connected during the war either 

 as officers or as civilian employees with the military depart- 

 ments of the Government. But whatever our official connec- 

 tion with the military service, we were all associated in our 

 scientific activities through the National Research Council, 



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