NATURE 



141 



THURSDAY, APRIL 24, 1919. 



THE NATION'S DEBT TO SCIENCE. 



T^HE noble record of the universities and 

 schools of England in the recent war may 

 •one day come to be written. It is doubtful if 

 anyone has realised as yet how great will be its 

 full extent. There is one page in particular which 

 will contain more than is grasped even by 

 those who have had the best opportunities of 

 doing so. It will tell of the special work of the 

 men who have been trained in the scientific and 

 technical laboratories. 



The war has called for every ounce of scientific 

 knowledge and effort. It could not be otherwise 

 when great nations have been straining their 

 utmost, and when the advantage has so often 

 gone with the best use of every help that modern 

 knowledge could give. The scientific battle has 

 been fought by the laboratory men. 



The mastery of the air, for example, has de- 

 pended on the skill and courage of the pilot, but 

 also, very vitally, on the perfection of his machine. 

 The latter, in its turn, has depended on the know- 

 ledge gained with infinite care by those who have 

 tested out each detail of design. The engine 

 itself with its many complicated parts, the form of 

 the struts and planes, the covering fabric and 

 the varnish applied to it, the recording instru- 

 ments, the photographic gear, the signalling ap- 

 paratus, the machine-guns, the bomb-dropping 

 arrangements, each of these has been the subject 

 of experimental research requiring the highest 

 technical skill. Each was improved beyond all 

 belief during the war : by how much labour and 

 devotion only those intimately connected with the 

 work can tell. Some of our finest men of science 

 lost their lives in this service. Yet on all this 

 improvement the success of air warfare depended, 

 for it was the last additional strength or trust- 

 worthiness, quickness of manoeuvre, or power of 

 flight that gave the pilot confidence and superi- 

 ority ; and the staff who carried out this work, 

 whether at Government experimental stations or 

 at the National Physical Laboratory, or elsewhere, 

 were for the most part drawn from the labora- 

 tories of the universities and technical schools. 



So, too, with the brigade of chemists, who did 

 so much in the war. Professors and lecturers 

 became senior officers in the brigade ; junior 

 officers were drawn from the students. They 

 fought the German gas, devising the protective 

 masks and instructing the Army in their use; they 

 worked out the processes for manufacturing gases 

 on a large scale for the use of our own armies. 

 The huge industry of the manufacture of ex- 

 NO. 2582^ VOL. 103] 



plosives required the solution of chemical 

 problems, which they accomplished, and so saved 

 the nation vast sums of money, and made it pos- 

 sible to supply the Army with all that it wanted. 

 They produced the smoke-screens, and the special 

 bullets that brought down Zeppelins and observa- 

 tion balloons. They solved innumerable problems 

 involved in the great business of supplies; they 

 were constantly the advisers of the Munitions 

 Department, of the health authorities, of the In- 

 telligence, and in a thousand-and-one ways they 

 were indispensable to the progress of the war. 

 The nation has indeed cause to be grateful to its 

 chemical laboratories. 



A body of keen young physicists, drawn from 

 various universities of the Empire, developed the 

 methods of sound-ranging until it became possible 

 to locate with extraordinary accuracy the positions 

 of enemy guns, even during the continuous roar 

 of the Western front ; they were responsible for 

 a great part of the locations on which artillery 

 work depended. The same methods applied to 

 under-water work by the Admiralty experimental 

 stations made it possible to locate with accuracy 

 explosions occurring hundreds of miles from the 

 shore, and incidentally have furnished the hydro- 

 graphers with a means of shortening enormously 

 the work of charting the seas. Much of the work 

 of the Admiralty stations, especially that which 

 related to anti-submarine defence, may not, of 

 course, be discussed in public. It can only be 

 noted that here also the universities and technical 

 schools were largely represented on the staffs. 



It is imf)ossible even to enumerate the various 

 branches of scientific service. There was the 

 highly efficient and most important gauge work 

 of the National Physical Laboratory ; the work of 

 the men who listened for and located the under- 

 ground operations of the enemy miners ; the wide 

 range of most important optical work, from the 

 submarine periscope to the aeroplane camera ; the 

 research work on wireless telegraphy, which was 

 so immensely advanced during the war; the 

 meteorological work which was of such great 

 service to the air forces ; the geological work of 

 the front ; the bacteriology ; and so forth. It is 

 impossible to give the barest recital of all the 

 scientific work involved in the immense problems 

 of the medical service. In every section of the 

 operations by land, by sea, and in the air urgent 

 experimental work was carried on, results were 

 obtained which were of the highest importance, 

 and the first-class scientific work which was 

 required was carried out mainly by the men 

 already mentioned, the science teachers and 

 students of the universities and technical institu- 

 tions. 



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