101

32

REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT

that enabled him, as a practical statesman in the critical period, to
guide the framing of the constitution of the United States. Hertz,
the German research scholar, standing on the pure researches of the
English professor, Clerk Maxwell, discovered the idea out of which
Marconi, the Italian, invented the mechanism for wireless telegraphy.
The researches and hypotheses of Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler
helped to make possible the theory of gravitation which came from
the integrating mind of Isaac Newton, or as President Walter Dill
Scott calls him, Professor Newton of Cambridge University. The
American Professor Michelson, by his researches, helped to prepare
the way for the revolutionary theory of the German Professor
Einstein.

3. The Utility of Scientific Research

If we were to recapitulate with President Scott the list of the
names of the men whose researches in pure science have not only
explored the far reaches of the universe and the inside of the atom
but have also discovered the scientific principles on which is erected
the technological structure of our modern industrial civilization, we
would call, for the most part, the names of college professors and
quiet relentless seekers for truth in university laboratories. He has
estimated that college and university research make possible in a
normal time the production of more wealth in America in one year
than has been spent on all the colleges and universities since John
Harvard founded the college under the elms in Cambridge. It has
also been estimated that the results of college and university research
in the pure sciences as the basis for sanitary and hydraulic engineer-
ing, personal and public health, save in America the lives of one
million people a year.

4. The Graduate School and Organized Research

In the complicated modern world it was inevitable that research
should be organized in institutes, councils, and big industries. Mr.
Vernon Kellogg has pointed out that the research organizations are
dependent on the colleges and universities for manning and recruiting
their staffs. The graduate school is par excellence the training ground
for research, organized and unorganized. In graduate research there
is no immediate profit motive, and the student has the unadulterated
scientific freedom necessary for training in research. Deeply spe-