Science: Benefits of Private Research

These days the scientific headlines all seem to spring from the multimillion dollar Government contracts that send one spaceship after another into orbit and beyond. But all the advances in military weaponry, all the new moves into space, require more than Government money; they dip deep into man’s slowly accumulated capital of basic scientific research. And nowhere is that capital reaccumulated more earnestly than in the private laboratories of U.S. industry.

Just how well those U.S. labs accomplish their self-appointed task was spelled out last week when Physicist Sir John Cockcroft delivered a stern lecture to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. “We have a good deal to learn from some American organizations who have a consistent record of success in developing new products by objective basic and applied research,” said Sir John, who spoke with the authority of a Nobel Laureate (1951) and an Atoms for Peace Award winner (1961). As an example, he singled out the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York and New Jersey, where 4,400 assorted scientists and engineers under the leadership of Physicist James Fisk spend up to $155 million of their company’s money each year on research and development. Examples: ∙TRANSISTORS. “Twelve years or so ago, I visited the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey and saw scientists drawing single crystals of very pure germanium from a molten mass. These very pure crystals were seeded with small quantities of vital impurities and then cut up to form the transistors. Their influence on the development of electronics has been very great. Without them, space science and space travel would hardly have been possible.” ∙SUPERCONDUCTORS. “Until very recently, the phenomenon of metals losing their resistance to the passage of electrical current at temperatures near absolute zero—the phenomenon of superconductivity—was an academic subject, pursued almost entirely in university research laboratories. The Bell Telephone Laboratories discovered that an alloy of tin and niobium remains superconducting in strong magnetic fields.” And it is in just such extremely strong magnetic fields that scientists need to conduct sophisticated experiments in controlled nuclear fusion.

∙MASERS. “Another important application of solid-state physics, the optical maser.

has come from Bell Laboratories. The principle of atoms being raised to excited states by absorption of radiation, and subsequently being stimulated by radiation to give out their stored energy, has been known in science for a very long time. The maser consists of a synthetic ruby crystal containing chromium ions which can absorb and store light in excited states of the chromium atoms. After a time the stored energy is emitted in a powerful short flash, which in some cases has reached the, equivalent of 1,000 kilowatts in intensity. Already this has been used to illuminate an area of two-miles diameter on the moon.” In the face of such Bell-style research achievements, Sir John warned his British colleagues: “We are losing too high a proportion of our best scientists to America—20% of our Ph.D.s in physics—and this proportion is likely to increase as the U.S.’s giant space travel program accelerates.”