CHAPTER II Men of Research and Their Development I F we make a broad and careful analysis of the very complex conditions under which we live, it is certain that we will come to the rather inspiring conclusion "6 That the world knows not its greatest men." It is not the object to list here famous inventors or meritorious achievements of the past, for that would virtually require a very bulky catalogue of the industries, but to make some references to what competent scholars have said, to offer some suggestions of my own and to touch upon certain brilliant accomplishments in such a manner as may arouse an awakening to higher efficiency in those whom the world should know. Why doesn't the world know its greatest men? It will be the endeavor, by incorporating the views of others who have given much attention to the subject, to answer as far as practicable these vital questions in the present chapter. There are, in this connection, at least two methods of classifying men, by reputation, and according to natural gifts. The first classification is by reputation and is a misleading one, and the second classification is obviously very difficult of achievement. A man's success in many fields depends upon opportunities and upon natural power of intellect, and sometimes he must possess both of these factors. It is where small men become "6 "great" through opportunity alone that it is regrettable. The saying "The survival of the fittest" has always been a very irritating one to the writer, since many, many cases of the survival of the unfit have come under his notice. Since, according to our quotation," the greatest admirals have gone down in their ships" and the soundest thinking minds have not come to the light of recognition, if in dealing with the subject I take a different point of view from the one of customary praise, one which I believe to be better for the immediate future of our country, I hope that I may not be misunderstood as unsympathetic or in the least unpatriotic. Professor Simon Newcomb, the preeminent genius of American science, wrote relative to the comparatively few men who have demonstrated the profoundest ability in the field of research: "It is impressive to think how few men we should have to remove from the earth during the past three centuries to have stopped the advance of our civilization. In the seventeenth century there would have been only Galileo, Newton, and a few contemporaries; in the eighteenth, they could almost have been counted on the fingers; and they have not crowded the nineteenth. Even today, almost every great institution for scientific research owes its being to some one man, who, as its founder or regenerator, breathed into it the breath of life. If we think of the human personality as comprehending not merely mind and body, but all that the brain has set in motion, then may the Greenwich Observatory of today be called Airy; that of Pulkowa, Struve; the German Reichsanstalt, Helmholtz; the Smithsonian Institution, Henry; the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, Agassiz; the Harvard Observatory, Pickering." But Professor Newcomb was listing great institutions and their subsequent world influences rather than men perhaps, so under this interpretation, I may, without presumption, add the following names in alphabetical order, as standing for, in many instances, equal brilliance with those supplied: Archimedes, Avogadro, Becquerel, Berthelot, Bessemer, Bell, Brashear, Cavendish, Charles, Coulomb, Crookes, Davy, Dumas, Daguerre, Darwin, Dewar, Dulong, Edison, Ericsson, Faraday, Franklin, Gay-Lussac, Henry, Joule, Kelvin, Kepler, Langley, Lavoisier, Le Chatelier, Myer, Mendeleeff, Maxwell, Morse, Newton, Newcomb, Oersted, Ohm, Pascal, Ptolemy, Pasteur, Priestley, Ramsay, Rayleigh, Thomson, Tesla, Tyndall, Volta, Wheat stone. If more references are made to England, France, and even to Germany than to America in the following pages, I shall still ask for the reader's broader view, his full sportsman's view, for in books on invention and research in the past we have rather formed the habit of emphasizing, if not actually boasting, of American work, and left as a background the older, and in many instances the more fundamental foreign achievements. This national habit among certain classes of people who believe that we invented everything in sight, is a bit analogous to the belief among our more ignorant and over-enthusiastic Americans who claim, and really believe, that we have just won the world war, practically singlehanded, without fully appreciating the heroic valor of the Belgians and the French, and that old England, against which nation stupid school books have wrought a regrettable prejudice, went in at the drop of the hat, and that she held the German battle fleet like a granite wall, until her merchant marine carried our armies over-seas to reinforce her seven million men with her extra equipment in guns and other munitions to spare. Let us be the sportsmen that we are in conceding merit everywhere and ever strive toward higher and higher efficiency at home. We have expanded from internal and local modes of thinking and acting, into international methods of thought and action, and the successful research worker and inventor should now awaken fully to the broader view by extending his horizon and area of contact as much as possible by the study of contemporary literature and by as much travel as practicable. The sooner the average inventor can abandon ingrowing habits of thought, the more rapid will be his development. There are many able scientific men in America whom the world should and would know if only they could be relieved from the strain of heavy routine executive work, or be allowed, or forced out from the narrow confines of their own laboratories and shops, and mentally stretch and look about them and compare notes with others. There is another class who have been accustomed to the praise and applause of immediate friends and misleading admirers in a little community, and who do not appreciate how limited are their horizons, and remain self-satisfied and complacent in the often damaging applause. I find the average American mechanic usually |