THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 5 



new epoch of concerted industrial research dates really from the 

 end of the great war. During all that time I have held some middle 

 position of responsibility between the research laboratories and 

 institutes on the one hand, and the costing and profit and loss 

 accounts on the other, and my impression is that the proportion of 

 work in which the initiation comes from the business end is steadily 

 increasing. In studies of the periods of scientific and industrial 

 gestation respectively, I have elsewhere defined scientific gestation 

 as the time elapsing between the first concept of the idea and its 

 public presentation to society in a form substantially that in which 

 it ultimately finds extensive use without important modification ; 

 and industrial gestation as the period elapsing from this point to the 

 date when in an economic or industrial sense the innovation is 

 effective. Both periods are difficult to determine exactly in practice, 

 but on a broad view, the period of industrial gestation, with which 

 alone I am here concerned, appears to me certainly to have shortened 

 materially, though possibly at greater social cost. It would ob- 

 viously be so if industry is actively encouraging research. ' Faraday's 

 discoveries came at the beginning of the great steam era, and for 

 fifty years there would have been no difference in transport even if 

 those discoveries had not been made,' for the telegraph was the 

 only material influence upon it, and practical lighting was delayed 

 till 1900. 



In nearly every scientific field there is sub-division of labour, and 

 it is rare that the worker who digs out new truth ' at the face,' so to 

 speak, is also responsible for bringing it to the surface for the public 

 use, still less for distributing the new scientific apparatus or ideas 

 broadly, and even less for the profitable exploitation of the whole 

 process. These functions are nearly always distinct, even though 

 they are embraced under the one general popular description : 

 chemist, engineer, etc. But in few cases is it any part of the pro- 

 fessional training in the subject itself, to study how new products 

 or processes affect the structure or welfare of society. I have 

 questioned many scientific workers and find them, of course, keenly 

 alive to the positive and direct beneficial effects of their work, but 

 they have rarely any quantitative ideas as to negative, indirect and 

 disturbing consequences. All these discoveries, these scientific 

 infants, duly born and left on the doorstep of society, get taken in 

 and variously cared for, but on no known principle, and with no 

 directions from the progenitors. Nor do the economists usually 

 acknowledge any duty to study this phase, to indicate any series of 

 tests of their value to society, or even of methods and regulation of 

 the optimum rate of introduction of novelty. These things just 

 ' happen ' generally under the urge of profit, and of consumers' 

 desire, in free competition, regardless of the worthiness of new 



