Editorial January 26, 1946 Issue

Research into Reality

Paul Stark Seeley

The Commissioner of the United States Patent Office in 1844 then said, "The advancement of the arts from year to year taxes our credulity, and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end." Yet he had scarcely seen the beginning of that advancement in human thought and invention of which he mistakenly believed he could see the end.

Soon Howe invented the sewing machine; Goodyear discovered how to vulcanize rubber; McCormick made the first mechanical reaper; Kelly in America and Bessemer in England found a cheap way to make steel. In the years that have followed, discoveries and inventions have been so numerous that the fact becomes increasingly clear that instead of human improvement coming to an end, it continues at an ever-increasing pace. Progress has no bounds.

Consider the developments in chemical research. Chemists are converting oil into rubber, cotton fibers into photographic film, glass into ladies' stockings, coal into butter, skim milk into buttons, beans into buckles, sawdust into sugar, and we are told that only a start has been made in this field of endeavor.

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