Whither Technology

Whither Technology?

No light summer reading was the 450,000-word document which President Roosevelt took with him last fortnight on his weekend cruise down the Potomac. The bulky treatise was entitled Technological Trends and National Policy, Including the Social Implications of New Inventions. Under the direction of lean-jawed Sociologist William Fielding Ogburn of the University of Chicago, the report had been prepared by a subcommittee of the science committee of the National Resources Committee. Last week with considerable fanfare and President Roosevelt's blessing it was made public.

Whether the pace of invention and technological improvement is beneficial or harmful to society as a whole, is a large subject which lends itself to long-winded diatribes and has already been debated to a frazzle. Secretary Wallace has warned Science that it had better consider taking a holiday. Scientists, including Caltech's Millikan, M. I. T.'s Karl Taylor Compton and Bell Telephone's Frank Baldwin Jewett have retorted that Science makes jobs by creating new industries. One of the most telling thrusts which defenders of Science have made against the bogey of "technological unemployment" is that after a half century of sweeping technological advance, a higher percentage of the U. S. population was gainfully employed in 1930 (40%) than in 1880 (34%).

The National Resources Committee was established by an Administration order in July 1934. It was allotted $800,000 from the Emergency Relief Act appropriations of 1935. Professor Ogburn's subcommittee was told off to appraise current technological trends and their probable impact on society. This group included President Frank Rattray Lillie of the National Academy of Sciences, President John Campbell Merriam of the Carnegie Institution, President Edward Charles Elliott of Purdue University, a handful of economists, educators and one mathematician. The subcommittee admitted that "invention is a great disturber," but also agreed with the defenders of Science that it creates new industries, new reservoirs of employment. Professor Ogburn suggested that if in 1900 the U. S. had had national planners who foresaw the development of the telephone, the airplane, the cinema, the automobile, the radio and the rayon industry, the pattern of society today might be different from what it is. The report recommended establishment of a board which would keep trad; of developments in and try to foresee the sociological impacts of 13 new technologies which seem to be gathering headway for a booming future. The 13:

1) Synthetic rubber.

2) Automobile trailers.

3) Plastics.

4) Artificial cotton and woolen-like fibres from cellulose.

5) Prefabricated houses.

6) The mechanical cotton picker. Most successful of such pickers is the machine devised by John D. and Mack Rust of Tennessee, social-minded brothers who are resolved to cushion the impact of the machine on Southern labor but are selling and demonstrating their pickers in Soviet Russia. After several demonstrations U. S. cotton men are still divided as to the Rust picker's practicability.

7) Air Conditioning. This is commonly touted as the next big job-making industry. The Ogburn committee also pointed out that it may affect industrial distribution in hot sections of the U. S.

8) Television: arrived at a satisfactory technical stage (441-line definition) but fearful of taking the economic plunge.

9) Gasoline produced from coal. The process (hydrogenation) employs high heat and pressure, has already made a start in Germany and England, remains in the experimental stage in the U. S. which has oceans of oil.

10) Facsimile transmission: the art of transmitting photographs, drawings or printed messages by radio. In the RCA-Victor method, a radio-controlled stylus recreates the image by moving over a strip of carbon-backed paper. RCA-Victor spokesmen have painted the possibility of radio newspapers, transmitted during the night, awaiting the reader by his bedside when he wakes up in the morning.

11) Steep-flight airplanes. Craft able to take off from or land on small areas such as flat roofs in the hearts of cities.

12) Tray agriculture: the technique of growing plants in tanks of water containing nutrient chemicals. Dr. William Frederick Gericke, University of California, has shown that lush crops can be grown in tanks without interference from drought, floods, freezing, erosion, insect pests, soil exhaustion (TIME, March 1).

13) Photoelectric cells: the "electric eye" which opens doors, sorts out defective products on factory conveyors, keeps elevator doors open until passengers are in or out. "That it will cause unemployment is obvious, but it will also lighten the tasks of the workmen. Indeed it brings the automatic factory and the automatic man one step closer. It may be used to regulate automobile traffic, to measure the density of smoke, to time horse racing, to read, to perform mathematical calculations."

As for its point of view in time, the Ogburn committee declared itself thus: "It has been thought best to focus on the near future, which is defined as the next 20 years; but any blinders that cut off sharply the present, the more distant future, or even the recent past, would mean an inadequate investigation. . . ."

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