674 



SCIENCE 



[N. 8. Vol. XXXIII. No. 853 



technical advances are being made. Few 

 realize how the way of this advance has 

 itself advanced. I might make this more 

 clear by an illustration. 



Consider for a moment the increasing 

 uses of chemical elements and compounds. 

 New combinations in alloys, medicines, 

 dyes, foods, etc., and new uses and new 

 materials, are being produced daily. For a 

 more simple comparison, consider only the 

 advances in our technical uses of the me- 

 tallic chemical elements. 



Copper, iron and five other metals were 

 known and used at the time of Christ. In 

 the first 1,800 or 1,900 years of our era, 

 there were added to the list of metals in 

 technical use (pure or alloyed) about eight 

 more, or a rate below three a century. 

 There has been so much industrial advance 

 made within the past twenty to thirty 

 years that fourteen new metals have been 

 brought into commercial use within this 

 period. This is abnost as many in our 

 quarter century as in the total preceding 

 age of the world. Of course this rate, as 

 applied to metals, apparently can not con- 

 tinue, but there is no reason to question the 

 possibility of the general advance it indi- 

 cates. For centuries a single metal was 

 made to serve for all uses which that metal 

 could fill. Then two metals divided the 

 field, each being used where it was pre- 

 ferred for any reason. Alloys began to dis- 

 place metals to a limited extent. While 

 the engineer still uses iron for his railroad, 

 iron for his buildings and iron for his tools, 

 these irons are different and have been 

 specially developed for those uses. The 

 electrical engineer prefers copper for his 

 conductor, certain irons for the frames of 

 apparatus, other special irons and steels for 

 the shafts, the magnetic fields, etc., and the 

 specialization to best meet specific wants is 

 still under way. I suppose that this kind 

 of complex development is largely respon- 



sible for research laboratories. 



A research laboratory is a place where 

 men are especially occupied with new prob- 

 lems, presumably not too far in advance of 

 technical application. By this group de- 

 voting its entire attention to the difficulties 

 of realizing already well defined necessi- 

 ties, or of newly defining and realizing to- 

 gether, the efficiency of these processes is 

 increased. Men specially trained for this 

 very purpose are employed and they are 

 usually just as unfitted for successfully 

 manufacturing as those who efficiently re- 

 produce are of discovering or inventing. 

 It is merely an extension of the principle of 

 the maximum efficiency. A man with his 

 entire attention devoted for months or 

 years at a time to the difficulties of a single 

 problem should be better able to reach a 

 solution than the man who can devote only 

 irregular intervals to it. He should then 

 also be the better prepared for a second 

 problem. 



A research laboratory is also a place 

 equipped with apparatus especially de- 

 signed for experimental work. In a busy 

 manufacturing plant, if a foreman has an 

 idea pointing towards an improvement of 

 his product he frequently has great diffi- 

 culty in finding the time, the necessary idle 

 apparatus, the raw materials and the incen- 

 tive to try it. In the laboratory aU of 

 these are combined and there is added a 

 system of cooperation, of permanently re- 

 cording results and an atmosphere of re- 

 search. 



The mathematics of cooperation of men 

 and tools is interesting in this connection. 

 Separated men trying their individual ex- 

 periments contribute in proportion to their 

 numbers, and their work may be called 

 mathematically additive. The effect of a 

 single piece of apparatus given to one man 

 is also additive only, but when a group of 

 men are cooperating, as distinct from 



