ABSTRACT
Approximately five hundred years ago the study of nature ceased to be solely a servant of philosophy and became a patron of applied arts and a source of practical invention. The economic development of the Western world has since proceeded at an ever increasing pace; waves of technological change, driven by the surge of scientific discoveries, have followed one another in accelerated succession. The developmental lag between pure science and engineering application has progressively shortened. It took nearly one hundred years for the steam engine to establish itself as part and parcel of the industrial scene, but electric power took less than fifty years and the internal combusion engine only thirty. The vacuum tube was in almost every American home within fifteen years of its invention, and the numerous progeny of Dr. Baekeland’s synthetic plastics matured before we learned to pronounce “polyisobutylene.” At the turn of the twentieth century it was said that “applied science is pure science twenty years later”; today the interval is much shorter—often only five years and sometimes but one or two.
