Science: American Association

(See front cover)

Some 5,000 Canadian and U. S. scientists closed their classes and laboratories last week, and hastened to Manhattan for the regular Christmas convocation of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Some 2,000 had papers to read on their 15 specialties.* Reading those papers, the mosaic of 1928 developments in pure and applied science, would place the workers on little eminences among their colleagues. Better, it would put them near the Olympians of their profession who attended sessions with them, men like:

Geologist Bailey Willis, 71, of Stanford, who was to talk through his swaggering mustache and beard on “Continental Genesis.” He knows seismology, has predicted bad earthquakes in Southern California. But his reputation rests more securely on his explanation of the stratigraphy, structural geology and physiography of North America, Europe and Asia as the record of continental developments.

Physicist Arthur Holly Compton, 36, of Chicago, who has the dapper alertness of a business executive. He won the 1927 Nobel Prize for Physics (jointly with Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, 59, of Cambridge University). Professor Compton’s reward was for measuring electro-magnetic waves.

Zoologist William Morton Wheeler, 63, of Harvard, who studied cockroaches, fleas, ants and other insects with more ardor, patience and intelligence than a woman studies another woman’s clothes.

Astronomer Herbert Hall Turner, 67, of Oxford. Professor Turner, swart & burly, resembles a typical, prosperous British factory manager. He has never been in business. His fame is for his formulae for measuring star distance by means of photographs.

Astronomer Harlow Shapley, 43, of Harvard. This autumn he created his popular fame by repeatedly giving talks on stellar organizations. As the complement to the Association’s initial lecture (Professor Bailey’s “Continental Genesis”) President Henry Fairfield Osborn of the Association appointed Professor Shapley to give the final lecture. Professor Shapley entitled his paper “Galaxies of Galaxies—a new study of the super-organization of the Milky Way.”

Photographer Charles Edward Kenneth Mees, 46, of Eastman Kodak Co., prime example of an industrial laboratory director.

Editor-Psychologist James McKeen Cattell, 68, the 1924 president of the Association. His dour look belies his loving-kindness towards scientists. He it is who records their work, as editor of Science weekly, Scientific Monthly, School and Society, American Naturalist, American Men of Science.

Editor-Chemist Edwin Emery Slosson, 63, a man discreetly sought after because his Science Service at Washington rewrites scientific reports in popular language and despatches them to the country’s newspapers.

Chemist Arthur Amos Noyes, 62, of California Tech, retiring president of the Association. His direction of the Gates Chemical Laboratory at Pasadena is a prototype for the successful management of an educational institution.

Zeus of all those Olympians is of course Henry Fairfield Osborn, 71, president of the American Association. That presidency is the highest honor that U. S. and Canadian scientists can give a colleague. Yet its tenure is for only one year and a man must have a permanent post. What such post any one scientist considers best is hard to indicate. Generally the secretaryship of the Smithsonian Institution at Washington is best esteemed. To that secretaryship the Institution elected Dr. Osborn in 1906, upon the death of Samuel Pierpont Langley. Dr. Osborn declined. He preferred to stay on as assistant to the late President Jesup of the American Museum of Natural History.

Under Jesup, Dr. Osborn was in the glory of manifold activities. He searched the Rocky Mountain states for vertebrate fossils; he was making the American Museum’s vertebrate collection the best in the world; he was grouping and arranging exhibits for their best educational value. Outside the Museum he was lucidly teaching biology and zoology at Columbia, scientifically reorganizing the New York Zoological Park, and deftly getting money support from municipal authorities. One vexation he had. Administrative and organization work and the preparation of his paleontological papers prevented his writing the many books whose subjects tumbled through his thoughts.

Then, in 1908, President Jesup died and Dr. Osborn dutifully took his place. The post meant more work. That he recognized was good for him, for it forced him to reorganize his activities. He did so and had time to write his books. In 1910 he wrote three, last year three and in between a half dozen others. They, more than the works of any other recent writer, have served to make unspecialized readers think scientifically.

Leadership is, apparently, an inherited characteristic of Dr. Osborn’s family. His father, William Henry Osborn, was a founder and for many years president of the Illinois Central Railroad. Ancestors were the Osborns of colonial Salem, Mass. On Dr. Osborn’s mother’s side, Nathan Gold and Andrew Ward were active in the Revolution; Reverend Ebenezer Pemberton was one of the three founders of Princeton (where Dr. Osborn later studied and taught); Jonathan Sturges was a president of the New York Chamber of Commerce. Dr. Osborn has an able younger brother. William Church Osborn, 66, Manhattan lawyer and director of rich corporations. William Church was born in rustic Chicago where an Osborn was only a man. Henry Fairfield was born in rural Fairfield, Conn., where an Osborn was decidedly an institution.

What were the 1928 developments in pure and applied science? A partial catalog would include:

Television and cinema broadcasting.

Color cinema.

Carbaloy (tungsten carbide plus cobalt) machine shop tool metal.

Aluminum plating.

Corn paper used commercially.

Sodium nitrate fertilizer hand-made commercially from sodium carbonate and nitric acid.

Sucrose made synthetically from fructose and glucose, bringing closer the commercial synthesis of carbohydrates.

Anthraquinone, raw material for many textile dyes, made cheaply by using furfural as a solvent and by direct oxidation in the presence of a catalyst. Coal tar products multiplied without cease.

It would include:

Coal conference at Pittsburgh, which made businessmen realize more than ever pure science’s money value.

Wilkins’ flying across the Arctic.

Nobile’s rescue in the Arctic.

Byrd and Wilkins’ separate expeditions in the Antarctic.

Andrews’, Roerich’s and Filchner’s separate expeditions in Mongolia; expeditions on all the continents.

Digging in Egypt, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Greece and Mexico.

It would include:

Artificial lightning of 3,600,000 volts.

Electrons shot outside of coolidge tubes.

Helium and nitrogen atoms colliding and producing fluorine, the fluorine exploding into hydrogen and a new kind of oxygen.

Hydrogen atoms colliding to form not only helium, but oxygen and nitrogen.

Primeval microbes found alive in Pre-Cambrian rocks.

* Mathematics Zoology History & Philology Physics Botany Engineering Chemistry Anthropology Medicine Astronomy Psychology Agriculture Geology & Sociology & Education Geography Economics