THE VALUE OF THE USELESS
Harding, T. Swann
The Value Of The Useless By T. SWANN HARDING CAPTIOUS CRITICS often cite what appears to them to be a piece of perfectly useless research and ask what good it is. The classic answer to this is:...
...In 1924 there was published in the Journal of Agricultural Research, issued by the Department of Agriculture, an article on the daily fluctuations of the carbohydrates in the leaves of corn and sorghum...
...When he got through, what did he have...
...Then the workers came across the paper just mentioned...
...Then, in 1891, the first pearl button was cut from the shell of a fresh water mussel...
...But about a decade later the dairy department of a university began to find that the silage it made varied markedly in acidity from time to time, and it couldn't find out why...
...Michael Farraday's discovery of electro-magnetic induction came to him by way of pure reason...
...Catalysis was discovered by the pure intellectual work of numerous scientists, but it now performs many industrial miracles...
...Astronomy, a seemingly useless science, gave us optics, navigation, aviation, surveying, and the spectroscope—just to mention a few of its benefits...
...After Koch and Pasteur invented the science of bacteriology, Paul Ehrlich's fooling-around came in handier than ever...
...Yet, insofar as it fills out some corner of that immense picture puzzle called science, it may later have value when least expected...
...Pasteur could attack a practical problem and solve it, as he did in the fields of beekeeping and wine making...
...Many years ago some scientist busied himself studying the life cycle of the American fresh water mussel...
...Technicians can work with materials intelligently only when they understand their molecular structure...
...But, en route, he usually worked out some broad general principle of great potential value as a sort of unearned increment...
...When a scientist appears to be just fooling around he may be adding enormously to the sum total of human knowledge...
...A mathematical equation devised by Clerk Maxwell gave us radio and television, for Marconi was inevitable after Maxwell...
...Within a decade depletion threatened the destruction of the Mississippi River mussel beds and the government was asked for aid...
...As a result Erhlich developed dye-staining methods and technics used today in all hospitals and clinics...
...But what good was it all after it was done...
...No properly performed research carried on by competent investigators of keen insight can ever be regarded as valueless...
...Yet, on this discovery hinged synthetic dyes and industries innumerable...
...Work on hydrogen ions is so complex and abstruse that it can scarcely be explained to a layman, and some years ago William Mansfield Clark devoted years to them in the Department of Agriculture...
...2) basic research, which is fundamental, but lacks an immediate practical objective, though it may have a distant one...
...Therein he depicted how he had reputedly turned cotton cloth into pure chlorine by gradual substitution of atoms and molecules...
...The Value Of Research The Wright brothers certainly experimented with flying not to gain profit, but to know how it could be done...
...Importance Of Molecules The Joule-Thompson effect, which deals with the expansion of gases as affected by pressure, underlies modern refrigeration methods...
...Dumas, a French chemist, got to playing around with wax and the gas, chlorine, one day...
...It is also practically useful in the bread, paper, silk stocking, textile, plastics, and rubber industries, or where-ever the substance made essentially consists of compressed giant molecules...
...Progress Is Often Slow The progress from pure to applied science is often slow, devious, and unexpected...
...Ultimately artificial propagation of the mussels had to be undertaken and you know where they got the knowledge on which to base that without my telling you...
...Good research workers rarely consider profits...
...Valueless activity under the spur of pure curiosity and without thought of gain often turns out to be invaluable to humanity...
...This was a classical chemical discovery leading to much knowledge of practical industrial value, but Wohler, also a distinguished scientist, wrote a mocking, ironical paper in reply to Dumas' which actually appeared in a leading German chemical journal...
...He concluded that the chlorine replaced some of the hydrogen in the wax, and so reported...
...Wilhelm von Waldemyer observed a young student named Paul Erhlich, just fooling around, but he let him fool...
...He was just curious and wanted to know...
...Pure research apprehended a cold-resistant alfalfa in Siberia and the investigation of the electrochemical equivalents of metals and alloys yielded data underlying the canned-food industry...
...Work on genetics of supreme importance to human beings has been done on mice and banana flies, on sweetpeas and primroses, with entire indifference to economic gain...
...All are needful...
...Had they wanted profits they would have gone into something more likely to produce them...
...The classic answer to this is: What is the use of a baby...
...Prof...
...That just isn't safe, for the stone discarded today may be the keystone of the arch tomorrow...
...He worked the thing out as well as he could, bundled it up in a paper and published it...
...This knowledge was complete in 1866, and there it lay dormant...
...Research is essential of four kinds: (1) Background research, with no practical objective conciousr ly in view...
...It would be difficult to see what practical value would ever come of knowing that corn and sorghum leaves contained more or less sugars and starches depending on the time of day...
...The motion of the moon led to Newton's discovery of gravitation...
...Roemer first discovered the velocity of light by observing the eclipses of Jupiter's satellites, and that was essential to Maxwell's calculations...
...He later applied his work with dyes to the conquest of syphilis...
...Of course, in staking such investigators, it is a good idea to see that you have hired workers of competence, for scientific drones exist who carry around a doctor of philosophy degree all their life and expect it to atone for their sterility...
...The scientists simply followed their bent, made their experiments, published them, and turned to other things...
...all are of value...
...Photoelectric effects were discovered by Hertz and Hallwachs in 1887 and 1888, respectively...
...They were just curiously hunting around, trying to find out something, but their discovery underlies the modern motion picture and television...
...More Gains For Humanity The knowledge about the arrangements of molecules in various substances has not only explained why hair curls, why wool cloth will hold its shape when pressed, and why muscles stretch and contract...
...Since the amount of carbohydrates in the plants from which the silage was made, sorghum and corn, governed the final acidity of the silage, it was simple to control this by controlling the time of day when the silage and corn were cut...
...But he made a mistake and, in time, his error provoked opposition and further investigation...
...He had knowledge that ultimately applied to almost any industry you care to name in the most practical, monetarily valuable way...
...He had no practical objective in mind...
...It seemed a silly, harmless bit of knowledge too, but it enabled us to harness electricity for heat, light, and power...
...Willard Gibb's phase rule, a product of pure reason, underlies much of modern metallurgy and made possible most modern alloys...
...none can safely be neglected...
...4) pilot-plant research, which is required to translate laboratory findings into full-scale commercial practice...
...3) research which deals with an immediate objective or seeks to solve a specific problem...
...In good time even the last mystery of the mussel's life was cleared up, however...
...Priestly (or Lavoisier, or Scheele), when he discovered oxygen, and it depends on your nationality as to which did it, for all did it about the same time, surely thought neither of modern medical therapy nor the acetylene blowpipe...
...Nothing could have seemed more useless than the investigation of the rare inert gases, neon, helium, argon, krypton, and xenon, but this brought us lighter-than-air navigation, electric signs, tungsten electric bulbs, and many therapeutic aids, to mention only a few of the results...
...But it is a fact, of course, that a great deal of research turns out to be very little good, at least in the average lifetime...
...They regarded their flying experiments as an expensive hobby carried on,out of profits they made in the bicycle business...
Vol. 8 • January 1944 • No. 3
