INVENTIONS AND SOCIETY

Evening Star, Issue 22524, 17 December 1936, Page 6

INVENTIONS AND SOCIETY

Whatever else is happening in the world, the inventors still go on inventing. The latest of their products which have found their way into the news are a mysterious liquid for extracting energy from the sunshine and a machine for picking cotton. - For the liquid Avocholor it is claimed that it can transfer heat from the. sun’s_ rays to water and so run a steam enginethat it could, in fact, replace coal as a source of power. The cotton-picking machines can apparently pick as much cotton as 150 men. It happens that mining coal and picking cotton are two of the most back-breaking tasks that flesh is heir to. The prospect of eliminating them ought to be hailed as a benefit to humanity. Instead, it is likely to appear in the guise of a catastrophe.' The wholesale substitution of Avocholor for coal is hardly yet to be taken seriously. The displacement of several million negroes by an apparatus of whirling spindles would seem by the reports to be a less remote possibility. If it happens, it will precipitate one of the biggest social problems that any modem country has yet had to deal with. It is said that the inventors of -the machine (two brothers of the name of Rust) are seriously upset at the prospect, and talk of “ establishing a foundation, supported from the profits of their invention, to study the. problem of social adjustment . . . and to assist in lessening the shock.” But the difficulty is too deep-rooted in the modem world to he met by the sporadic conscientiousness of individual inventors. It is (as Sir Joshiah Stamp pointed out to the British Association) one of the main problems which society of the future will have to face.