290 



SCIENCE 



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



provements in airplane photography, 

 another on the mapping of the highways 

 of the upper air in aid of aviation, another 

 upon balloon problem.';, such as the devel- 

 opment of non-inflammable balloons con- 

 cerning which you have read in the papers, 

 another on aviation instruments, com- 

 passes, speed meters, etc., and producing 

 the best there are in the world, and finally 

 a chemical group on new sources for ace- 

 tone for airplane coverings, new sensitizing 

 dyes for long wave-length photography, 

 etc. Let me sekct for special comment 

 but one or two of the seventy odd prob- 

 lems which these groups alone were ac- 

 tively engaged upon at the signing of the 

 armistice. 



Throughout the whole of the war bomb- 

 ing was done in a very inaccurate, a very 

 hit-or-miss way. At Langley Field a 

 group of able scientific men were set upon 

 that problem — and there are only a few 

 men in the country who have the requisite 

 training for handling the difScult prob- 

 lems of stabilization wliich are here in- 

 volved. That group, headed by Dr. Duff, 

 improved the accuracy in bombing so far 

 as the main error was concerned, which is 

 in the determination of the vertical, by 

 more than three-fold, and when it is re- 

 membered that a three-fold increase in the 

 accuracy of placing bombs is exactly the 

 equivalent of a three-fold multiplication 

 of the pi-oduction of bombing planes, it 

 will be realized how important it is to de- 

 vote the small funds necessary to get sci- 

 entific men to solving these problems, and 

 not to confine attention merely to the 

 problems of production. 



Or, take again the problem of airplane 

 photography. The developments of the 

 war have completely revolutionized the 

 whole art of surveying, for a camera in an 

 airplane can now take in a few seconds a 

 complete map of any locality, even from a 



height as great as 25,000 feet. It is only 

 necessary to have a few fixed points on 

 the photograph which are determined by 

 the old triangulation methods and, by 

 simply measuring up the photograph you 

 have all that it used to take years of 

 time to get by the old-time methods. 

 Proba;bly the finest airplane cameras in 

 existence were developed by the American 

 group assigned to that task. 



Or, look at the work of the Meteorolog- 

 ical Section of the Science and Research 

 Division. It developed long-range propa- 

 ganda balloons, capable of flying more 

 than one thousand miles in the upper re- 

 gions of the air where the prevailing 

 winds are practically always from west to 

 east and have speeds of 30, 40, 50 or even 

 100 miles an hour. It also mapped these 

 upper regions in aid of aviation, an under- 

 taking the importance of which can be 

 seen from the fact that an aviator above 

 the clouds who knows nothing of the di- 

 rection of the winds will move toward his 

 objective 200 miles an hour faster if he 

 is helped by a 100-mile wind than if he is 

 opposed by it. 



These are merely samples of the results 

 which were obtained in extraordinarily 

 rapid time by the group-method of attack 

 upon the scientific problems of the war, 

 and these are merely a few of the develop- 

 ments which came under the writer's im- 

 mediate attention. 



In the Chemical Warfare Service equally 

 rapid and equally important work was 

 done in the development of new gases and 

 in the development of means of absorbing 

 enemy gases in gas masks. I am quite 

 happy to be able to say that Professor 

 Lamb, who was at the head of the Offen- 

 sive G-as "Warfare activity, has assured me 

 that the key to the development of the 

 American gas mask came from the work 

 which Dr. Lemon has for years past been 



