Inventors at Work, with Chapters on Discovery

by George Iles

Research in Physics and Chemistry.

“A few weeks ago I was talking with an electrician who has made several very interesting and important inventions. I asked him of how much importance he conceived that the scientific men of the closet, the original investigators, so-called, had been in working out the great inventions of electricity during the last fifty years—telegraphs, cables, telephones, electric lighting, electric motors; and whether these achievements were not in reality due mainly to practical men, the inventors who knew what they were after, rather than to the men of science who rarely applied their work to practical use. He said, ‘The scientific men are of the utmost importance; everything that has been done has proceeded upon the basis of what they have previously discovered, and upon the principles and laws which they have laid down. Nowadays we never work at random—I go to my laboratory, study the application of the principles, facts and laws which the great scientists like Faraday, Thomson and Maxwell have worked out, and endeavor to find such devices as shall secure my aim.’ As Tyndall said, ‘Behind all our practical applications there is a region of intellectual action to which practical men have rarely contributed, but from which they draw all their supplies. Cut them off from that region and they become eventually helpless.’”

Research is golden only when brought to fruit by co-operation. To quote Professor Tyndall:—

“To keep science in healthy play three classes of workers are necessary: (1) The investigators of natural truth, whose vocation it is to pursue that truth, and extent the field of discovery for its own sake, without reference to practical ends. (2) The teachers who diffuse this knowledge. (3) The appliers of these principles and truths to make them available to the needs, the comforts, or the luxuries, of life. These three classes ought to co-exist and interact.”

Concerning the larger problems of engineering research, Professor Osborne Reynolds, of Owens College, Manchester, says:—

“Every one who has paid attention to the history of mechanical progress must have been impressed by the smallness in number of recorded attempts to decide the broader questions in engineering by systematic experiments, as well as by the great results which, in the long run, have apparently followed as the effect of these few researches. I say ‘apparently,’ because it is certain that there have been other researches which probably, on account of failure to attain some immediate object, have not been recorded, although they may have yielded valuable experience which, though not put on record, has, before it was forgotten, led to other attempts. But even discounting such lost researches it is very evident that mechanical science was in the past very much hampered by the want of sufficient inducement to the undertaking of experiments to settle questions of the utmost importance to scientific advance, but which have not promised pecuniary results, scientific questions which involved a greater sacrifice of time and money than the individuals could afford. The mechanical engineers recently induced Mr. Beauchamp Towers to carry out his celebrated researches on the friction of lubricated journals, the results of which research certainly claim notice as one of the most important steps in mechanical science.”

Lord Rayleigh has said:—

“The present development of electricity on a large scale depends as much upon the incandescent lamp as the dynamo. The success of these lamps demands a very perfect vacuum—not more than one millionth of the normal quantity of air should remain. It is interesting to recall that in 1865 such vacua were rare even in the laboratory of the physicist. It is pretty safe to say that these wonderful results would never have been accomplished had practical applications alone been in view. The way was prepared by an army of men whose main object was the advancement of knowledge, and who could scarcely have imagined that the processes which they had elaborated would soon be in use on a commercial scale and entrusted to the hands of ordinary workmen.” He adds:—“The requirements of practice react in the most healthy manner upon scientific electricity. Just as in former days the science received a stimulus from the application to telegraphy, under which everything relating to measurement on a small scale acquired an importance and development for which we might otherwise have had long to wait, so now the requirements of electric lighting are giving rise to a new development of the art of measurement on a large scale, which cannot fail to prove of scientific as well as practical importance.”

Regarding the territory likely to yield most fruit to the researcher, he observes:—“The neglected border land between two branches of knowledge is often that which best repays cultivation; or, to use a metaphor of Maxwell’s, the greatest benefits may be derived from a cross-fertilization of the sciences.”