October 28, 1920] 



NATURE 



'271 



thousands, of men who fought the war behind the 

 front so splendidly in the Department of Ex- 

 plosives Supply there is not one who did not 

 look up to "K. B. Q." as the great inspirer and 

 organiser, or who failed to realise what the 

 nation owed to his genius, personality, and inde- 

 fatigable labour. 



Mr. Quinan was also a great educator. One 

 cannot explain this better than by quoting from 

 the excellent preface to the present book. 



"Mr. Quinan introduced methods of studying 

 the various problems which arose and setting out 

 the results, which were clear and very helplul to 

 all who were connected with the erection of the 

 plant and works, or the subsequent manufactures 

 carried out. . . . Mr. Quinan insisted that the 

 steps in a calculation by which certain results 

 were obtained should be set forth so distinctly 

 that they could easily be followed, and that the 

 author himself might be able to trace the line of 

 his reasoning and action after the matter had 

 passed from his attention, without having to rack 

 his brains to see how he had obtained his results. 

 He thoroughly believed in the advantage of letting 

 all those who were engaged in directing and carry- 

 ing out work have the fullest possible understand- 

 ing of what they were doing, and this policy bore 

 excellent fruit in the results obtained at the works 

 managed by the Factories Branch, which were 

 carried on under the initial disadvantage of staff 

 and workers largely without expert knowledge of 

 the work they had to do." 



In pursuance of this policy, every working draw- 

 ing was accompanied by a well-reasoned descrip- 

 tion of the purpose and function of the various 

 parts of the apparatus or plant, and the technical 

 staffs at the various factories were constantly 

 engaged, at Mr. Quinan 's instigation, in studying 

 the working of their plant, carrying out labora- 

 tory and plant researches, and vying with each 

 other in a continuous process of improvement in 

 the efTiciency of the plant and in their understand- 

 ing of the scientific principles underlying its design 

 and operation. 



It can well be imagined that, as a result of 

 these mcth(jds, Mr. Quinan accumulated a vast 

 amount of material, scientific and technical, of 

 the greatest value to the nation, and especially 

 to the young men who are destined to become the 

 technical workers and the leaders of the next 

 generation. It was Mr. Quinan 's earnest wish 

 that as much as possible of this material should 

 be edited and published after the war for the 

 benefit of the scientific institutions of the country 

 and for all those young men who are already 

 engaged in the chemical industries of the British 

 Empire. It is extremely fortunate for the suc- 

 cessful execution of thi.s great work that the 

 Government has entrusted it to Ntr. William 

 NO. 2661, VOL. 106] 



Macnab, who was a member of the Department 

 of Explosives Supply throughout its whole exist- 

 ence (and of the original Committee of the War 

 Office from which the Department sprang), arid 

 very closely connected with its development and 

 with every phase of Mr. Quinan 's work. 



The present volume is published under the aegis 

 of the Ministry of Munitions, but the continuation 

 of the work has been entrusted to the Department 

 of Scientific and Industrial Research, which will 

 publish a number of other volumes. It would be 

 impossible to. exaggerate the national importance 

 of this work. To apply scientific principles and 

 data to the development of industrial plant and 

 processes requires just as much scientific method, 

 research, and intellectual labour as the discovery 

 of the general principles and data of science. A 

 failure to realise this, an all-too-narrow inter- 

 pretatiofi of the words "science" and "re- 

 search," accounted for many errors in the past 

 and for much of our unpreparedness when the 

 stress of war came so swiftly upon us. There 

 was, however, another factor, and one of cardinal 

 importance. There existed few, if any, examples, 

 accessible to all, and drawn from real practice, of 

 the methods employed by the great scientific de- 

 signers and creators of industry. How does one 

 design a plant, a process, or a works? Who was 

 there to answer that question? How did the 

 Glovers, Deacons, Hurters, and Monds — to men- 

 tion only a few great names drawn from chemical 

 industry — set about their work? There were 

 plenty of books on chemical technology, but not 

 a word 0:1 the real thing, the method of research, 

 the way to go about it. It is a supremely diffi- 

 cult thing to apply science scientifically and suc- 

 cessfully. You are not free to choose your vari- 

 ables, or to eliminate unpleasant ones. The 

 whole universe is on the top of you. You cannot 

 say that you are a chemist and, therefore, do not 

 intend to worry about the physical and engineer- 

 ing aspects of the problem. Unfortunately, a 

 chemical plant is a bit of Nature, and includes, 

 therefore, all the sciences. And Nature is not 

 particularly concerned with the limitations of one's 

 education or one's particular tastes and tempera- 

 ment. It is no doubt perfectly true that a man 

 can learn to be a real technical chemist only by 

 long practical experience in works. But it is of 

 the greatest importance for the training of young 

 men in the later stages of their work at the uni- 

 versities and higher technical schools that those 

 whose capacities and temperaments incline them 

 to industrial work should have the possibility of 

 studying some first-class examples of how scien- 

 tific principles and data are utilised and developed 

 in tVr i-reation of processes and plant. 



