G.— ENGINEERING. 133 



promoters and the financial side of the business must have taxed their 

 resources to the utmost. But at last they succeeded and their range- 

 finder is now the standard instrument in our Army and Navy and in other 

 countries as well, and has been the foundation of one of our best firms of 

 scientific instrument makers in the country. As student or as assistant 

 I had the honour to serve under both Professor Barr and Professor Stroud, 

 both of them great teachers, versatile inventors and most lovable men, and 

 I am happy to be able to pay this small tribute to them and to their great 

 achievement. 



It is unfortunate for Leeds that the transference of Professor Barr to 

 Glasgow in the early stages of this invention should have deprived Leeds 

 of a new industry, and also robbed her later of Professor Stroud as well. 

 Leeds also seems to have been unlucky in regard to at least one other 

 inventor, for Sir Charles Parsons started his life's work in Messrs. Kitson's 

 in Leeds and developed while there his epicycloidal rotary engine, the 

 precursor of the steam turbine which has done so much for British industry 

 in general and for the mercantile marine and navies of the world. I 

 feel sure, however, that Leeds will join with this Association, and with 

 this section in particular, in rejoicing that Sir Charles's great work has 

 recently earned for him, as he so rightly deserves, the highest honour 

 that this country can confer on a scientist, the Order of Merit. 



I feel sure that the early history of Sir Charles Parsons' work on the 

 rotary engine and on the steam turbine would form a valuable addition 

 to the scientific history of invention, but it has never been written and is 

 passed over in a few lines in the introduction to Mr. Richardson's excellent 

 treatise on the Parsons' Turbine. From the little that is written, however, 

 it is easy to see that Sir Charles's task was no easy one. 



The Difficulties oi Invention and their Remedy. 



I wish it to be understood that where I have used the word ' invention ' 

 I am dealing with the great inventions, and not with the thousand and one 

 minor and comparatively unimportant, though useful, inventions which 

 flood the Patent Office every year. The latter are generally simple affairs, 

 a minor improvement in a known mechanism or a new way of performing 

 an old simple function. I do not wish to belittle these minor inventions 

 in any way. They serve their purpose in our everyday lives, and all are 

 traceable more or less directly to some major invention of the past, but 

 the distinction which I wish to draw is that in very few cases is their 

 manufacture or development a matter of difficulty. I am therefore 

 dealing solely with the big inventions and their development, and it is 

 to the question of the obstacles that are too often encountered in their 

 development that I wish to draw particular attention. This question of 

 difficulty is as old as the history of invention itself, and many of the 

 obstacles have required new discovery or fresh invention to surmount them. 

 I wish now to examine the question of how to eliminate or at least minimise 

 these difficulties that obstruct the inventor and so retard the march of 

 progress. 



The first way that suggests itself to me is by means of education. Our 

 educational policy in schools on the scientific side deals with physical 

 laws as facts, and the teacher generally deals only with phenomena with 



