404 
gations of the future; and yet it is doubtful if 
it would have been discovered for many years 
to come if a particular chemist had not been 
asked by the military officers to help them. 
As I trust you have already discovered, my 
thesis to-night is the importance of the work 
of the trained man of science in this war, with 
emphasis upon the fact that his great useful- 
ness should not be a matter of surprise, as it 
is to most Americans. The best way of dem- 
onstrating this is to give a few illustrations, 
chosen from a wide field and not limited to 
the scientific work of any one country. Nat- 
urally I can refer only to those matters which 
have been revealed to the public; but I trust 
that many of them will be new to this audi- 
ence. I have this confidence because so far the 
newspapers of this country have not believed 
that these questions would make what is 
called a “story.” 
It is not easy to make a selection of the sci- 
entific problems, nor to arrange them in any 
logical order. There are two subjects upper- 
most in the minds of every one: the airplane 
and the submarine. The scientific questions 
which have arisen in regard to each are most 
varied. The airplane itself is an engineering 
structure; and we have confined ourselves in 
this country largely to the design and produc- 
tion of an engine. This does not really come 
under my general subject, but every one is so 
interested in it that I feel justified in referring 
briefly to what we have done. Our task was 
to produce on a great scale a powerful, effi- 
cient engine. This is now being done. The 
so-called Liberty 12-cylinder engine does not 
have its superior in the world, and further, it 
was so designed that it could be manufactured 
on an enormous scale, at least 1,500 a month. 
This engine has over 400 horse-power and 
weighs close to 800 pounds, and therefore it is 
useful for seaplanes, two-seater machines and 
bomb-droppers, but not for small machines. 
When the same engine is made with 6 cylind- 
ers, developing about 220 horse-power, and 
weighing about 400 pounds, we will have an 
ideal engine, not equalled by any now in exist- 
ence, for speed scout machines. We could not 
have followed any plan more useful to our- 
SCIENCE 
[N. S. Vou. XLVIII. No. 1243 
selves and the Allies than to make this concen- 
tration of effort. Our eminent success is a 
cause of pride to every American. With re- 
gard to the airplanes, considered apart from 
their engines, a few statements of fact must 
suffice, but they are facts. The best airplanes 
in service to-day, for each and every purpose, 
are those of British and French design. This 
is the result of real scientific investigation. 
The resistance offered by wings of different 
sections, the stability of the airplane, the 
character of the covering surfaces have all been 
investigated, and the finished product is the 
result of the knowledge thus acquired. We 
are doing similar scientific work in this coun- 
try to-day, and, as we have engineers and 
manufacturers unsurpassed in the world, the 
time is not long distant when a truly Ameri- 
can airplane will be made. We shall suffer, 
however, one serious detriment during the 
war; we are so far away that it will be ex- 
tremely difficult for us to make the alterations 
in design which the varying conditions of 
modern war impose. Difficulties of transpor- 
tation are great, and it is a serious question 
whether it would not be best for us to remove 
bodily our most important airplane shops di- 
rectly to the Continent. From a scientific 
standpoint the most important questions aris- 
ing in connection with airplanes are instru- 
ments of navigation and methods of signalling 
to and from the ground and each other Each 
machine should have for ordinary flights an in- 
strument to indicate height above the ground, 
another to give the speed of flight through the 
air, another to tell how steep is the ascent or 
the descent, and many others. For long-dis- 
tance flights a compass is necessary, and other 
instruments as well. The design of each of 
these is a distinct scientific problem. Think 
of the requirements for a compass to be used 
with an airplane; for a ship on the ocean the 
problem is complicated, but how much more 
so for a vessel which turns rapidly, revolves in 
spirals, and which practically never keeps a 
constant course. In practise even more difi- 
culties arise. The whole question of airplane 
instruments is still unsettled to a certain ex- 
tent; many essential instruments have not as 
