Industrial Insides

One night early last week in Manhattan half a hundred solid businessmen, bankers and journalists assembled on a Hudson River pier, piled aboard the night boat for Albany. Loud wails went up when it was discovered that the ship's store was closed, sending cigarets to a premium. There was steak for supper, however, and a visible abundance of Scotch & soda. Immediately ahead was the prospect of tumbling pouch-eyed off the boat at 7 a. m., to be whirled by bus to Schenectady. Ahead for the week was the prospect of a good look at the inside workings of scientific industrial research in five cities.

This laboratory inspection tour of tycoons and sub-tycoons was arranged by the National Research Council. Travel expenses were paid by the tourists themselves or their companies. Travel arrangements were managed by American Express Co. Explained Director Maurice Holland of the Council's division of engineering and industrial research:

"Sixteen hundred industrial research laboratories are spending nearly $750,000 a day to improve processes and develop new products. The men on this tour are investing $250,000 to see what science can do for business. This sum represents their travel expenses and the salary value of one week's time."

The party included Technical Director William Irving Westervelt of Sears, Roebuck; President Frederick Beck Patterson of National Cash Register; President Walter Jodok Kohler of Kohler; President Alvan Tracy Simonds of Simonds Saw & Steel; President James Henry Rand Jr. of Remington Rand. There were executives from International Harvester, Coca-Cola,

Worthington Pump & Machinery, Phelps Dodge, Pittsburgh Plate Glass, Procter & Gamble, Allis-Chalmers, Diamond Match, American Locomotive, Crane, Hammermill Paper, White Rock Mineral Springs, three dozen others. There was a man from the U. S. Navy Department and one from Standard Statistics.

Schenectady. At General Electric Co.'s research headquarters, slick-haired Researcher W. E. Ruder showed the junketeers a small permanent magnet made of a new iron alloy containing aluminum, nickel and cobalt, hence called "Alnico." This stuff is so powerfully magnetic that it lifts 60 times its own weight, as was demonstrated when a 55-lb. radio cabinet swung from an Alnico disk of less than a pound. Alnico is being groomed to displace small electromagnets in motors, transformers and loudspeakers, lowering cost and simplifying construction.

Dr. Saul Dushman exhibited a tiny mercury lamp, two inches long and thinner than a lead pencil, which emits a 200-candlepower glare. Its light results from vaporization of a pellet of mercury imbedded in a capillary tube. The little lamp may find use in composing rooms and photographic studios, may replace electric arcs in cinema projectors.

Obviously, however, General Electric was going to show no discoveries in the actual process of coming to birth. The tour of its laboratories turned out to be a march past a row of closed doors. Some of the tourists privately complained that they were seeing nothing new, that the Alnico magnet was originally a Japanese find, that the little lamp was a Dutch invention, that GE was puttering with both under license. Good cheer returned, however, when the visitors came upon a garbage-grinder which may revolutionize "kitchen waste" disposal by chopping it fine, flushing it down the sink drain (TIME, Sept. 9). With crows of delight the tycoons stopped, played with this gadget.

Rochester. Scientists are traditionally supposed to be humble because they realize how much they do not know. Not at all humble is Charles Edward Kenneth Mees, longtime research director of Eastman Kodak's laboratories. Urbane, smooth Dr. Mees, who speaks four languages and knows more than any other man about photography, last week told the touring tycoons:

"The best person to decide what research work shall be done is the man who is doing the research. The next best is the head of the department. After that you meet increasingly worse groups. The first is the research director, who is probably wrong more than half the time. Then comes a committee which is wrong most of the time. Finally there is the committee of company vice presidents who are wrong all the time." "Manufacturing is something unnatural," he continued, "something based on the best utilization of material with the least effort in the least time. Research is something natural. Like anything natural, it must be prodigal in time, money and effort. A herring lays a million eggs of which only one may be hatched. The sun is a spendthrift when you consider that only a minute fraction of its light & heat ever reaches anything in space. "So must research be lavish." Many an unhampered experiment at Eastman tends to stray from the field of photography. In a vacuum of one-millionth atmospheric pressure, Dr. Kenneth Claude Devereux Hickman is distilling pure Vitamins A and D from animal oils. An X-ray device has been developed which tells genuine from imitation leather, and which reveals the minutest internal details of insects, down to embryonic skeletons in unlaid eggs. A method of developing sensitized paper by heat may find its industrial application in making wrappings for fruit, to warn consignees when shipments have not been kept below spoiling temperature. Akron. The tourists did not show up at the B. F. Goodrich rubber plant looking like janitors but they were obviously not wearing their best clothes. Reason: they had been forewarned that what clothes they wore through the plant would be thoroughly impregnated with the odor of rubber and soapstone.

Said Dr. James W. Schade, director of Goodrich research: "The cost per mile of automobile tires is today one-tenth what it was before the scientists tackled the job of improving the rubber. Formerly the manufacturer was taking a chance in guaranteeing 3,000 miles per tire. Today the customer is dissatisfied if he does not get more than 15,000 miles. Meantime the weight has been reduced 35%.

"Great savings have been made possible in other ways. Organic accelerators for speeding up the curing process and at the same time improving the rubber resulted in a saving of $40,000,000 to the industry and $50,000,000 to the consumer."

Ice that menaces airplanes usually forms on the leading edge of the wings. Goodrich has developed a "deicer" consisting of a pair of rubber tubes which ordinarily lie flat against the wing. When ice formation begins the tubes are pulsated by an air pump. This movement cracks the ice coat, lets the wind blow it away .The "deicer" is already in use on some transport planes, is slated for thorough experiment on military aircraft.

At Akron Executive Vice President Herbert Kohler of Kohler Co. decided to speak a semipolitical piece on research which his fellow travelers seemed to enjoy immensely: "Science and research are very unlike the New Deal. When you are engaged in scientific research work you know where you have been and where you are going. It is the first-line defense of Capitalistic dynamic economy as opposed to a static planned economy."

Pittsburgh. The Mellon Institute is a nose-to-the-grindstone organization which pays its own way. A manufacturer stumped by a technical problem may turn it over to the Institute by buying a fellowship for a minimum of about $10,000 of which some 20% goes to the Institute for overhead, the rest to the researcher for salary and equipment. Most but not all of the Institute's output is highly specialized of interest mainly to the client it benefits' Sodium metaphosphate was for a century considered a chemical curiosity. Then an expert on boiler waters discovered it was a potent water-softener. The Mellon Institute investigated possible uses. Now the onetime curiosity is used in vast quantities by textile mills and laundries as a soap-saver; in hotels for dishwashing; for cleaning shrubbery and bathing dogs.

The metaphosphate story was narrated to the 50 sightseers last week by the Melon Institute's Director Edward Ray Weidlem, 48, co-author of Science in Action, who next week will receive the Chemical Industry Medal for 1935. They saw samples of Columbian Carbon Co's carbon black for lacquers, which, ground to particles .000001 centimetre in diameter, is so black that it makes other blacks look brown. If any of them had neglected to shave before breakfast, he could have accepted the free-shave offer of the research man for Schick Dry Shaver, Inc who shaves twelve men everyday to learn what he can about beard problems. P: At Harmarville, Pa., near Pittsburgh Gulf Refining Co.'s research subsidiary has built a group of roomy, attractive buildings for its colony of scientists. Most of the touring businessmen had heard of modern oil prospecting by "artificial"' earthquakes and other geophysical methods. At Harmarville they saw how it was done. A charge of dynamite in the ground was detonated. The earth tremors were recorded on a seismograph mounted on a truck some distance away. From the shock record the speed of the tremors was deduced, and from that the geological character of the ground. Also on view were gravity instruments so sensitive that they detect the moon's tidal pull on the earth. With such equipment, said Research Director Paul Darwin Foote, the chance of a drill striking oil has been increased from 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 10.

Manhattan. The Bell Telephone Laboratories, on the swarming downtown waterfront, have the most powerful microscope in the world, through which specks 150 molecules in diameter can be made out. Through this last week the touring troupe saw the microscopic structure of metal. The laboratory until recently also had a few sheep which, because their internal organs are much like those of humans, make good subjects for studying the effects of electric shock and methods of resuscitation.

Welcoming the visitors, cheery, slow-spoken Director Frank Baldwin Jewett spoke well of adversity: "The Depression is a good thing because it has made possible the doing of much work that we would not otherwise be doing for five or ten years. We have probably done more important things during the Depression than during any period of our history."

On view was the "telephone of the future," not slated for general service until two years hence. It is a self-contained unit, eliminating the black box screwed on the wall. On top of a small metal housing, shaped like a truncated pyramid, is a fork carrying the transmitter. Inside the housing is the ringing mechanism, two musical gongs which may be rung emphatically with a metal clapper or softly with a wooden one at the subscriber's whim. Recessed into the housing is the dial, which operates almost noiselessly.

Weary & wise, the 50 inspectors of industrial science at its best closed their tour with dinner and speeches at the Waldorf-Astoria.

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