The Press Friday, January 20, 1928. Secondary Industries and Research.

Press, Volume LXIV, Issue 19213, 20 January 1928, Page 8

The Press Friday, January 20, 1928. Secondary Industries and Research.

We hope the Canterbury Manufacturers' Association and the other bodies allied with it will obtain from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research as much real assistance as they expect, but it is to be feared that they may not. The Department is not in a position, and has not the equipment, to solve such problems as are troubling our manufacturers. The president of the New Zealand Manufacturers' Association, Mr Sutherland Ross, believes that although various firms and companies have their own laboratories for research work and naturally wish to keep for themselves, as they ought to do, the useful proceeds of this research, there are "many "problems concerned with what he "might describe as general principles " where the spread of further informa"tion among the members of a given "trade would be beneficial to one and "all." This will strike most people as a very strange thing to say. If one eliminates from the problems of any industry those which are investigated in the laboratory—problems of chemistry and mechanics—there is nothing much left except problems of organisation and administration. If our secondary industries are, in respect of these last-named problems, in such a position that they must go to the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, then they are almost past help. This, because the Department will never know as much about office and shop conduct as is known by competent works managers. Indeed, the idea of the Department teaching the "general principles" of business is almost comic. Manufacturing businesses which have good men working for them, and which are keen on improving their efficiency and technique, have their own means of keeping abreast of the latest developments in their particular trades, and they are unlikely to get from the Department anything that they have not got already. At the best the Department can bo no more than a reference library. In that capacity it can, indeed, serve a useful purpose enough, and anything it can do to supply such information as it I collects is all to the good. But that [can scarcely be called industrial research. The Department can really [assist our secondary industries only through genuine research in the field 'of chemical and mechanical processes, tbut the range of its assistance- is ! limited, and we are afraid that the Manufacturers' Associations will be dis- | appointed when they find how limited lit is. The first duty of the Department is to concentrate on primary industries, as we pointed out a year ago in words which later "were endorsed with resounding emphasis by Sir Frank Heath and the Prime Minister. Its business is to grapple "With the problems of grain and grasses, of meat and wool, of forests, and of fuels and minerals, which are native and peculiar to the Dominion. The secondary industries have not yet reached a stage at which they stand in need of any finer fruits of scientific research than are daily used already by technicians in industry abroad. '