126 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



would be better able to appreciate the difficulties of the inventor and to 

 co-operate fully with him. 



No one would dream of putting a general in command of an army who 

 had not previously studied the art of war either in Staff College or in the 

 field, nor would they put an engineer to construct a bridge unless he had 

 some experience in bridge-building ; yet in the development of an invention 

 some seem to think that no previous experience is necessary and the work 

 is frequently left to the inventor himself, who may have no knowledge of 

 the practical or commercial side of development, or it may be given to 

 someone who has no previous experience of similar development but who 

 is supposed to be a good practical man, though devoid of scientific know- 

 ledge of the principles to be followed. 



In the development of inventions no general rules can be laid down 

 because inventions take so many different forms, and the expert in de- 

 veloping inventions, say, in the chemical industry, would not offer an 

 opinion on the development of inventions in complicated mechanism. 

 Why is it that chemical reactions which work well in the laboratory on 

 the small scale in vessels of glass or platinum so frequently go wrong 

 when tried on a larger scale in works in vessels of porcelain or the baser 

 metals ? The expert in developing inventions in the chemical industry 

 has had much experience in overcoming these difficulties, but little of 

 that valuable experience has been published. 



In every industry one finds that the experience thus gained in develop- 

 ing the inventions of the industry is guarded as a most valuable secret. 

 The result is that this knowledge is not recorded and often dies with the 

 individuals who possess it. Future workers even in the same industry 

 have to pass through the same or similar experience to regain the lost 

 knowledge and the whole condition is economically unsound. The expense 

 to the nation which it entails must be enormous. It retards progress, 

 it adds greatly to the time and expense of developing other inventions, 

 and it brings invention into disrepute because so many firms have lost 

 money in trying to develop inventions which have had to be abandoned 

 simply through inexperience. 



The value of experience in any particular line of invention is that 

 it puts the owner of the experience in the position, when called upon to 

 express an opinion on a new invention, to form an estimate of the type 

 of difficulties likely to be encountered and the time and expense likely to 

 be required to surmount them. The novice always underestimates both 

 the difficulties and the cost of development, and many failures are due 

 solely to this underestimation, while the man who has once been bitten 

 tends to overestimate them and to suspect difficulties where there are 

 none, with the result that the development of the invention is unnecessarily 

 delayed. 



Nursing an Invention. 



So far I have dealt with the sequence of operations of discovery, 

 invention, and the financial and technical assistance in development, but 

 the process does not stop there. Once an invention has been developed 

 and made a commercial article, it merely enters upon a new phase during 

 which it requires the most careful attention. It requires nursing. It 

 may be sold to users who are free to submit it to any use or misuse they 



