Stratton and Edison

Dr. Samuel Wesley Stratton, for 22 years director of the U. S. Bureau of Standards, was inaugurated President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during commencement week at the Boston school. Sharing interest with him was Thomas Miller Edison, son of the inventor, who was graduated from the Institute.

Dr. Stratton succeeds Dr. Ernest Fox Nichols, former President of Dartmouth and Director of pure science in the Nela Research Laboratories, who served as President of Tech for a few months in 1921 but was compelled to resign on account of ill health. In the interregnum the Institute has been administered by Elihu Thomson, famed inventor of electric welding, who is one of its trustees. M. I. T. has specialized in electrical engineering and is the chief training school for the general staff of the industry in America. Stratton will cause no break in the succession of electric experts He was born in 1861, educated at the University of

Illinois, taught physics at Chicago for several years, and was called to Washington in 1901, where he built up perhaps the lowest-paid corps of first-rank scientists ever assembled by any government. The business of the Bureau is to compare and test the standards of weight, length, power, heat, resistance, etc. used in American laboratories, commerce, and universities, with the official standards of the government. Here are kept under glass at even temperature the platinum-iridium bar one meter long and the kilogram of the same material on which our weights and measures are based.

In Dr. Stratton's inaugural address on " The Effect of Science in the Evolution of Industry," he demonstrated the economic wisdom of generous support for research in pure science. He said that the automotive industry must find a substitute for gasoline, on which the elder Edison commented that the electric storage battery has already filled the bill. Edison looks for all transportation and industry to be electrified: " You never saw a motorman tinkering around under his streetcar! "