BIG DIVIDENDS

Evening Star, Issue 25868, 12 August 1946, Page 10

BIG DIVIDENDS

RESEARCH PAYS IN HEAVY SAVINGS If a business could show an annual dividend four times as great as the investment, it would be regarded as a good proposition. That is a modest estimate of the return on research. The National Physical Laboratory, Britain’s biggest research institution, costs £2BO,OCX). a year, but in one department—shipbuilding research—work on fuel consumption of. ships alone has produced a saving of over £1.000,000 a year, wrote Ritchie Calder, in the “ News Chronicle.” Even that is being stepped up. In the past year tests on model ships have produced a fuel saving of another 25 per cent, in the performance of the finished ship. Nowadays more than 80 per cent, of all new mercantile ships are tested in the research tank before building starts. Millions of pounds were lost through the lightning upsets of transmission lines, resulting in breakdowns in the electricity supply and damage to transformers. This problem has now been largely solved by another department of N.P.L. in co-operation with the Electrical Research Association. ITEMS ON PROFIT SIDE. These are items in the profitable balance sheet of the research stations of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. The Fuel Research Station which costs £170,000 a year, has by its work on the efficiency of heat appliances made possible savings of fuel consumption of over £30,000,000 a year. By preventing spontaneous combustion in coal dumps, 'it has prevented losses of at least £1,000,000 a year. And, if its work on smoke pollution of the atmosphere could be applied, it would prevent damage and waste of some £40,000,000 a year. Road research, which costs £111,500 a year, has reduced the cost per mile of road by about one-third. SAVING ON POTATOES. Food investigation, costing £105,000 a year, can save <,on one item alone—potatoes—£4,ooo,ooo a year. Torry Research Station has shown how £3,340,000 a year can be saved by the proper preservation of white fish. We used to import over £200,000 of sand for optical glass manufacture; the geological survey, which cost £92,000 a year, has replaced that with sand of even greater purity from Scotland. Building research (£143,000), apart from its work involving new materials, has paid for its cost one hundred times over by producing a mixture for concrete from blast-furnace slag. The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research will cost £2,391,000 this, year, compared with £1,405,000 last year.