Research: The Pathfinder of Science and Industry
by
[ Appleton—Century, $2.50]
INDUSTRIAL research has been marveled at by so many popularizers of science that another book about it must be very new in its treatment if it is to justify itselt. To Mr. Boyd, who happens to be a chemist in the research division of the General Motors Corporation, credit must be given for freshening this twice-told tale. Instead of confining himself to the now familiar achievements of the knights of the test tube and pipette, he takes us into the laboratory and explains how research is conducted by the hired scientists of a modern corporation. Yet his is no bald account of technical procedure. but a readable, human story of men organized to conduct scientific investigations which are often highly profitable and which generally change the social environment and therefore affect the business of living.
It is evident enough that the day ot haphazard invention and discovery is over. Industry no longer waits like Mr. Mieawber for something to turn up in the form of a new process or product, but turns it up itself. In other words, research’ is now as much a function of manufacturing as selling. Some $200,000,000 is spent annually on research in the United States even in these lean years. Large as the sum seems, it is lint one fourth of one per cent of the country’s total income in normal times, which proves that we have only begun to realize what the laboratory can do for industry.
If the good old are over when a Goodyear could stumble on the discovery that rubber is vulcanized when it is fried with sulphur on a hot stove, organized research is far from being as dull and unromantic as its corporation sponsorship and discipline would lead one to infer. Chemists depend as much on inspiration as do artists. Mr. Boyd pictures them solving problems in dreams, over the dinner table, on the roofs of buses. Lucky accidents play their part in turning failure to success, as when Perkin tried to dissolve sticky tar from the sides of a dish by means of alcohol only to find the mess turning into brilliant mauve — the first, of the modern aniline dyes.
How the men who are to become chemists and physicists are recruited and appraised, how they are trained and organized, is a story in itself. The relation of the business executives and the board of directors to the laboratory is the subject of a readable sermon on the conflict between the hard headed investor who expects a return for bis money and the director who cannot guarantee results but who lives on faith — faith in himself and in science.
Research conducted by a staff ably directed is bound to earn rich dividends. In the hands of second-raters it is worse than a gamble, because its returns are not likely to be even as good as those of a good poker player at the end of a season of intelligent calling, raising, and passing. In the end it is men rather than delicate balances, spectroscopes, and testing machines that make research what if is to-day men and ideas. Mr. Boyd drives home the lesson with many an apt anecdote and thus produces a book which makes lively reading. Sir Humphry Davy declaring that Faraday was his greatest discovery, von Liebig dancing around a table because he had achieved a technical triumph, Bell experimenting with a dead man’s ear before at last he hit on the telephone, Becquerel carrying a bit of radium in his pocket, discovering that it raised sores and thus pointing the way to a new method of treating cancer — the tales are invariably brought, in not for their own sake but to illustrate a precept.
It is plain that Mr. Boyd had the general public in view when he wrote about laboratories and their methods. Yet his book ought to be read with profit by the technical students who hope to become researchers, and, above all, by those business men who still maintain a Victorian attitude toward organized science in industry.
WALDEMAR KAEMPFFERT