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National Resources Planning Board 



these devices were made possible largely by the method of 

 empirical practice, by trial and selection: many lives were lost 

 by the explosion of steamboilers before the safety-valve was 

 generally adopted. And tliough all these inventions would have 

 been the better for science, they came into existence, for the 

 most part, without its direct aid. It was the practical men in 

 the mines, the factories, the machine shops and the clockmakers' 

 shops and the locksmiths' shops or the curious amateurs with a 

 turn for manipulating materials and imagining new processes, 

 who made them possible." 



Although the "practical men" and the "curious 

 amateurs" continue to make their contributions to the 

 technical progress of the country's industries, the 

 importance of their work, compared with that done by 

 trained scientists and engineers cooperating in organized 

 laboratories, has, for the last 50 years, been steadily 

 diminishing. In the universities and in industry, 

 trained chemists, physicists, metallurgists, mathemati- 

 cians, and biologists have been continually pushing 

 outward the frontiers of science. The detailed history 

 of the electric light, telephone, camera, aeroplane, 

 radio, of paper, rubber, chemicals, alloys, and plastics 

 could not be written without repeated reference to 

 science and the industrial research laboratory. No 

 longer can the knowledge upon which further important 

 technical advances depend be supplied b}' the "clock- 

 makers" and the "locksmiths." Even though more 

 great inventors of the stature of Edison, Diesel, and 

 Sperry appear, as they unquestionably will, "the results 

 of extensive research will be the raw materials upon 

 which their inventive work will be exercised." *'' 



No comprehensive account of the economic and social 

 importance of the industrial research laboratory can 

 be written until the many developments that have 

 emerged from it have each been studied in great detail. 

 These developments are so numerous and often so far- 

 reaching in their effects, as in the case of the incandes- 

 cent light, the internal-combustion engine, or the radio, 

 that a complete account will probably never be possible. 

 Nevertheless some of the more obvious and immediate 

 economic and social results of industrial research can 

 be observed. 



The application of science to industry has helped to 

 remedy some of the less desirable consequences of tech- 

 nical change: Natural resources have been conserved 

 and former waste materials have been turned into useful 

 products through organized research. Simple analyses 

 by a trained chemist made valuable the enormous piles 

 of flue cinder and roll scale that had been discarded from 

 the heating furnaces and mills in the iron industry. No 

 longer do millions of gallons of naphtha, for want of a 

 demand, flow into the creeks and rivers to evaporate. 



" MumlorJ, I.«wis. Tochnlcs and civilization. New Yorit, Harcourt, Brace 

 and Co., 1?34, pp. 215-216. 



" FiTTis. J. P. Ites«arrh for iDdustrial pioneering. Mechanical Engineering, S(, 

 249 (April 1932). 



No longer do the meat packers bury in the swamps 

 carloads of bones and heads or pollute the streams with 

 blood and tankage from their slaughterhouses. 



In 1907 nearly seven-eighths of the coke made in the 

 United States was produced in beehive ovens, where 

 only the fLxed carbon of the bituminous coal was saved 

 and all volatile constituents were wasted. That same 

 year, however, 5,607,899 tons were produced in byprod- 

 uct recovery ovens, and the value of the gas, tar, and 

 ammonia obtained from them amounted to $7,548,071. 

 At the prices which prevailed in 1907, the value of the 

 byproducts wpsted in beehive coke ovens has been 

 estimated at a little over $55,000,000.*' 



The manufacture of the type of powder used by the 

 United States Army in 1918 required great quantities 

 of alcohol and ether which, because of their volatility, 

 were largely lost during the powder manufacturing 

 process. Industrial research made it possible to devise 

 methods which, at the scale of operation in 1918, 

 resulted in a saving of 50,000,000 pounds of these sol- 

 vents each year. Similar changes in the process of 

 making guncotton saved 45,000,000 pounds of nitric 

 acid, an economy particularly important in the days 

 when nitric acid had to be made almost entirely from 

 Chile saltpeter. 



A more recent example of the economic benefit re- 

 sulting from industrial research is found in the petro- 

 leum industry, where in 1936 the cracking process made 

 it possible for the refineries of the world to conserve 

 1 ,865,000,000 barrels of crude oil. Without this process 

 it would have required 3,607,000,000 barrels instead of 

 the 1,742,000,000 barrels of crude oil actualh' refined 

 to have supplied the world's need for gasoline.** 



New processes originated in the research laboratory 

 have brought lower costs of production and improved 

 products. James Gayley's invention of the dry-air 

 plant eliminated the weather as a troublesome variable 

 in the production of pig iron and brought a saving of 

 from 50 cents to $1 in the cost of producing each ton, 

 which for the j'car 1912 meant a saving of from 

 $15,000,000 to $29,000,000. 



Ten years ago it was estimated that the replacement 

 of the carbon filament lamp by the more efficient tung- 

 sten filament, gas-lillod lamp was saving the consumers 

 of electric light in the United States about $2,256,000,- 

 000 a year.'" Although probably inaccurate, this 

 figure does give some hint of the magnitude of the 

 savings which can come through industrial research. 

 ^Vbolly beyond calculation, however, are the social 



" Sadtler. S. P. Conservation and the chemical engineer. .4mer/can InttUuie of 

 Chemical Engineer!. Traruaelioni, i, 109 (1909). 



•• Pioneers In research. Olland Oai Journal, 36. ii-H (May 27, 1937). 



•• Carty, J. J. Science and progress in the industries. {Reprint and CirctjJar Series 

 of the National Rueaich Council, No. 89.) Washington, D. C. National Research 

 Council, July 1929, p. 3. 



