Apeil 2, 1915] 



SCIENCE 



489 



tions, requiring public franchises and 

 which had to be backed by vast amounts of 

 new capital. In its boards of directors, 

 business men, or financial men and corpo- 

 ration lawyers, became paramount factors 

 and eclipsed in importance the technical or 

 scientific men, who, in earlier days, had al- 

 most exclusively contributed to the devel- 

 opment of the art. 



Following his natural inclinations, "Wes- 

 ton soon abandoned his former business 

 connections in order to entrench himself in 

 a field where individuality, science and 

 technology were of almost unique impor- 

 tance, and which he could develop without 

 the necessity of incurring financial obliga- 

 tions beyond what he could master person- 

 ally. Thus he dropped his connections with 

 the electric light and dynamo enterprises, 

 and we see him now, heart and soul, in 

 another new industry which he created — 

 the art of making accurate, trustworthy 

 and easy-to-use electrical measuring in- 

 struments. Did he foresee at that time that 

 this art would attain the magnitude to 

 which he has brought it to-day? Did he 

 dream that his early modest shop was to 

 develop into one of the most remarkably 

 equipped factories in the world; an insti- 

 tution which seems the embodiment of what 

 industrial enterprises may look like in fu- 

 ture days, when scientific and liberal- 

 minded management will have become the 

 rule instead of the exception? 



In his factory in Newark, Weston seems 

 to have instilled some of his own reliability 

 and accuracy in the minds of the men and 

 women he employs. 



In fact, has it occurred to you that even a 

 man with the widest knowledge and the 

 highest intelligence, who is not scrupu- 

 lously reliable and careful, who is not the 

 soul of honesty personified, could not make 

 honest and trustworthy measuring instru- 

 ments nor create reliable measuring meth- 

 ods? 



What Stas did in chemistry for atomic 

 weights, Weston did for electrical meas- 

 uring ; he created radically new methods of 

 measurement, and introduced an accuracy 

 undreamt of heretofore. Do not forget that 

 his problems were not easy ones. When 

 the British government offered a prize of 

 $100,000 for the nearest perfect chronom- 

 eter, the problem of a reliable chronometer 

 involved considerably less difficulties and 

 fewer disturbing factors than any of those 

 encountered in devising and making elec- 

 trical measuring instruments. But here 

 again, even at the risk of monotonous re- 

 peating, I want to impress you with the 

 fact that the success of the methods of 

 Weston was found in almost every case in 

 the application of chemical means by which 

 he tried to solve his difficulties. 



When he took up this subject, the scien- 

 tists, as far back as 1884, accepted implic- 

 itly the belief that the definition of a metal 

 and a non-metal resides in a physical dis- 

 tinction; that for metals the electrical re- 

 sistance increased with temperature, while 

 for non-metals, their resistance decreased 

 with temperature. This was another one of 

 those readily accepted axioms which no- 

 body dared to refute or contest because 

 they were repeated in respectable text- 

 books. And yet, this unfortunate behavior 

 of metals was the greatest drawback in the 

 construction of accurate measuring instru- 

 ments. Indeed, on account of the so-called 

 temperature coefficients, all measurements 

 had to be corrected by calculation to the 

 temperature at which the observation was 

 made. This seems easy enough, but it was 

 time-consuming and often it is more diffi- 

 cult to make rapid accurate observation of 

 the temperature of the instrument itself. 

 First of all, the thermometers are not accu- 

 rate, and have to be corrected periodically, 

 and furthermore, it is not an easy matter 

 to determine rapidly the temperature of a 

 coil or an instrument. Moreover, by the 



