HIGHWAY TO THE HORIZON 



ment research cannot possibly achieve workaday re- 

 sults that the American people must have if we are to 

 advance our material status. 



Inherent in public research are conditions that in a 

 democracy sterilize its efforts. No matter how compe- 

 tent the staff, how elaborate the laboratory, how ample 

 the funds, practical results must always be pitiful. Two 

 insurmountable obstacles block the way to progress. 



Pioneering research is a gamble. If one project in a 

 hundred hits the commercial target, the marksmanship 

 is in the sharpshooter class. Even when an industrially 

 feasible discovery is made, it takes from five to eight 

 years to bring it from test tube to sales counter. Risk 

 and time are so inevitably prerequisites that the sharp 

 phrase "patient money" has been coined to describe the 

 venture capital needed to finance research programs. 

 No democratic government has this kind of funds avail- 

 able. Tax money is not patient money. 



Moreover, every discovery of the laboratory threatens 

 some vested interest. A million and a half is a picayune 

 in this year's federal budget. But what Congress would 

 vote even this trifling sum for eight consecutive years 

 to create a competitor for our established rayon factor- 

 ies and our distressed cotton plantations? Yet in years 

 and dollars that was the initial cost of the development 

 of nylon. The answer is ludicrously self-evident. 



Just to clinch the point, rayon cord is demonstrably 

 better and safer than cotton duck in heavy-duty tires 



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