446 
pigeons and that was near Ithaca, about twenty 
years ago. Very truly yours, 
S. M. RasMUSSEN 
DO WE WANT A GREAT PRIVATE INSTITUTION 
FOR INVENTORS LIKE THE INSTITUTE 
OF FRANCE FOR ARTISTS? 
I am impressed doubtfully by a pretentious 
plan which I have seen for a national labora- 
tory for invention and research. I question 
seriously if inventors want a great, powerful 
group of men in existence who can do them 
just as much injury as good by its hasty con- 
demnation of their so-termed “ useless ” inven- 
tions as by helping them with those which cer- 
tain men, chiefs of proposed bureaus, may see 
something in. 
Let us not forget that Professor Langley 
and Mr. Graham Bell who backed him were 
both ridiculed by the three greatest pioneers of 
their time, Lord Kelvin, Carnegie and New- 
comb. Have times really changed so amaz- 
ingly since then ? 
Men working in laboratories like that of the 
Geophysical and Terrestrial Magnetic Survey 
are virtually research men, given a free hand 
and told to go ahead, as I understand it, 
whereas in this proposed institution the in- 
ventor is taken in as a partner so to speak in 
the institution and runs the danger of having 
his invention black-balled by some committee 
of the institution when a difference of opinion 
arises regarding his work. 
We must remember further that the insti- 
tution would be to inventors what the muni- 
cipal lodging house is to tramps. The institu- 
tion would serve in a measure as an asylum to 
which every man who importunes men of 
wealth to supply him with funds for use in 
his own way would be committed. If the 
amount of money subscribed optimistically by 
private individuals for the purpose of develop- 
ing new inventions were concentrated in one 
institution, such an institution would be a 
colossal affair. Would not the effect of such 
an institution be to check the generosity of men 
of means towards individual inventors and 
make them refer the inventor to that institu- 
tion just as they have by the thousand escaped 
their duty in fostering research by referring 
SCIENCE 
[N. S. Vou. XLVIII. No. 1244 
the importuning individual to the Rockefeller 
and the Carnegie Institutions? 
The laobratory idea is all right as a place 
to work in, but let us encourage rather than 
discourage individual gifts to individual in- 
yentors, for no man is big enough not to haye 
a blind side. Let there be a consulting office 
to which would-be investors in inventions 
could write and get opinions about inventions, 
but don’t let us shut the door on the inventor 
by creating the municipal lodging house idea 
to which those with money will turn in shirk- 
ing from their duty towards the inventors with 
whom they come in contact. With conditions 
as they are, we were getting out the year be- 
fore the war, I understand, many more in- 
ventions than all the other nations in the 
world combined. Individual willingness to 
support inventors must be increasing rather 
than decreasing in America. 
When I think of Langley, the Wrights, 
Curtiss and a host of others, I can not seem to 
fit them into this plan at all. Is it not true 
that the Institute of France, which assumed to 
pass upon the excellence of the work of young 
artists, turned down the great Rodin’s work, 
and that it was only his supreme genius in 
sculpture that enabled him to live down the 
disgrace of its refusal to recognize him, and did 
he not when they wished later to acknowledge 
their error, refuse to allow his name to be pro- 
posed? There is a similarity between the in- 
dividualist stimulus which spurs on both the 
inventor and:the artist, and the question 
might now be raised as to whether a great 
institute for invention, similar to the Institute 
of France for artists, should be created, by 
which “a standard of merit would be placed 
upon any invention whatever, and its seal of 
approval would be equivalent to saying whether 
the invention was good or bad.” 
I wish to challenge the idea of committee 
estimation of inventions. There is a danger 
of no small proportions in it. What body of 
men can sit and read the volumes of claims 
of an unending stream of inventors and not 
become stale, especially if this work continues 
for years? What is more discouraging than the 
cold water of a board’s decision, even though it 
