Job-Maker

Last week U. S. Science took off its coat, rolled up its sleeves and struck back at the popular charge that its inventions and labor-saving devices were largely responsible for Depression. Millions of jobless felt that, somehow, they would be at work today if Science had not replaced them with machines. Wiser men discussed the possibility of a research holiday, to give economics a chance to catch up with Science. "Science and engineering will destroy themselves and the civilization of which they are a part unless there is built up a consciousness which is real and definite in meeting social problems." Secretary of Agriculture Wallace had cried at assembled American Association for the Advancement of Science members in Boston last December.

Under the crossed banners of the American Institute of Physics and the New York Electrical Society in Manhattan last week met three famed men of Science, with many a lesser luminary, to retort for their profession. One was Karl Taylor Compton of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The other was Robert Andrews Millikan of California Institute of Technology. The third was Frank Baldwin Jewett of Bell Telephone Laboratories. In a telegram to the meeting President Roosevelt took a nicely neutral position: "The value to civilization of scientific thought and research cannot be questioned. . . . The idea that Science is responsible for the [recent] economic ills can be questioned. . . . "Science makes jobs, began Dr. Compton, by creating entire new industries. Some inventions and the number of jobs for which they are responsible:

Automobile 2,400,000

Electrical Equipment 1,000,000 plus

Motion Pictures 389,000

Telephone 357,000

Steamship 217,000

Machine Tools 87,000

Refrigeration 72,000

Airplane 50,000

Ravon 41,000

What, inquired Dr. Compton, would the 10,000,000 persons in the automotive industry be doing today if oldtime carriage-makers had succeeded in scotching the horseless buggy?

Calling attention to the fact that certain NRA codes tend to stifle technological advance, that only -c- of 1% of the Federal budget is earmarked for Science, Dr. Compton predicted that any check on U. S. research would result in calamitous competition from foreign countries not so "short-sighted."

Science in industry was defended by Dr. Jewett, onetime associate of the late great Albert Abraham Michelson. To buttress his defense he had declared that when American Telephone & Telegraph (of which he is a vice president) installed dial telephones, no girls were thrown out of work.

According to Nobel Laureate Millikan "technological unemployment'' was a bugaboo easily driven to cover by census figures: in 1880 34% of the U. S. population was gainfully employed, while after 50 years of sweeping technological advance, 40% of the population was gainfully employed. Critics who accused Science of making war horrible were facing the wrong way: Science had made war so horrible that in the future nations would recoil from it as if from suicide.

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