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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. L. No. 1291 



as the representative of the Eeseareh Coun- 

 cil was appointed by the Secretary of the 

 Navy one of the four advisory members of 

 the Anti-submarine Board, which was the 

 board charged "ndth the direction of the 

 anti-submarine experimenting in the United 

 States. A little later, when it was finally 

 decided that the supply and development 

 work for the American Army was not to 

 be carried on as in England by a civilian 

 organization headed by a minister of muni- 

 tions, but was to be eonducted by the bu- 

 reaus and corps of the Army itself, like 

 many others who had been intimately asso- 

 ciated with the work of the Council of Na- 

 tional Defense I was placed inside the Army 

 and given charge of the so-called Science 

 and Research Division of the Signal Corps. 

 I had held this office for about a month 

 and had been passing back and forth in the 

 Munsey Building in a major's uniform, 

 when one morning there appeared in the 

 Washington Post an editorial entitled ' ' The 

 Unconquerable Spirit. ' ' This editorial was 

 inspired by the appearance of two books, 

 of one of which I had been the unfortunate 

 author, while the other was from the pen 

 of Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn. The 

 one dealt to some extent with the evolution 

 of matter, and the other with the origin and 

 evolution of life on this earth, and the editor 

 having had his attention directed to these 

 two books sat him down and opined about 

 as follows : ' ' Here is a world at war and yet 

 there are found two detached, imperturb- 

 able souls, one of whom is still dreaming 

 about the origin of matter and the other 

 about the origin of life, all unconscious of 

 the cataclysmic events which are taking 

 place in the world in which we live. ' ' This 

 editorial was penned in the building ad- 

 joining that in which I had been going back 

 and forth in soldier clothes for as much as 

 a month and in civilian clothes for three 

 months more. Mrs. Millikan, whose pride 



was more or less touched by the incident, 

 suggested that the editorial was improperly 

 named, that it should have been entitled not 

 "The Unconquerable Spirit" but "The 

 Contact of the Press with Reality" or 

 "Asleep on the Post." I am sure I should 

 be glad to accept the emendation and I pre- 

 sume Professor Osborn would also, if the 

 editor of the Post would agree. But in any 

 event the incident gives an altogether cor- 

 rect picture of the conspicuousness of the 

 role which I played in Washington affairs 

 during the period of the war. 



A wise man learns even more from his 

 failures than from his successes. One of the 

 most dismal failures of the war was made 

 in the endeavor by all of the principal bel- 

 ligerents to utilize the inventive genius of 

 the average citizen. Every major belliger- 

 ent had a board of inventions and research 

 to which every man with an idea was asked 

 to communicate that idea. All of these 

 boards had precisely the same experience, 

 in England, France, Italy and the United 

 States. They all agree that not one sug- 

 gestion in ten thousand which came in in 

 this way was of any value whatever, and 

 that the occasional worth-while idea which 

 was presented to these boards was in gen- 

 eral arrived at earlier in other ways. It 

 may then be set down as a fact fairly well 

 established by the experiences of the Great 

 War that rapid progress in the application 

 of science to any national need is not to be 

 expected in any country which depends, 

 as most countries have done in the past, 

 simply upon the undirected inventive 

 genius of its people to make these applica- 

 tions. 



And yet every one of the aforemen- 

 tioned countries actually did make during 

 the war extraordinarily rapid progress in 

 applying new scientific methods to the 

 problems of submarine detection, of avia- 

 tion, of signalling, of gas warfare, of me- 



