SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXI, Issue 16604, 27 April 1916, Page 4

SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY.

■Scarcity of dyes and of certain drugs, such as aspirin, has brought home to the general public, as well as to manufacturers and traders, the reality of Germany's supremacy in the coal-tar industry. How that supremacy was won has lately beet told in detail by Dr F. A. Ma£on, of the Royal Coilege of Science, South Kensington, -n the last two issu-s of "Science Progress." He has traced the successive discoveries by means of which the industry has been ruift up. and, needless to say, nearly all those discoveries, save the first few, have been made in Germany, and oecojn-i the monopoly of German-firms. Jliey have not been mere chance discoveries, but results nrrived at by the systems tic and persistent application of research to industry. German ma-iif-icir.ier., have been fully alive to the need of employing in their works the best scientific skill they could procure. The coal-tar industry is only a special instance.of what has been going" on in numbers of German industries, and manufacturers all over the world have a forcible object-lesson in this phase of German industrial activity. |iDr Mason gives some remarkable factf, and figures relative to .the research work carried on by the three leading German firms engaged in the c.ial-tar industry—rthe Badische .Company ufc Ludwigshaven, Meister, Lucius and fit Hoechst, and the Bayer ' Company. The Hoechst works employ 350 research chemists, the Badiscbe Company about

° same number, 'and the Bayer-Com-pany nearly as ir^ny—in all about

thousand university-trained chemists, many with the highest degrees. r Thus a great number of highly-trained scientific brains have been constantly en-" gaged m discovering new dyes, etc., and evolving new methods for making old ones. TheHnfluencs of Jfoese chemists upon the development- of. the industry has been preponderating, and the fact" is thoroughly understood by the business men, who have madehu^s sums of money in consequence of these scientific labours. The two firms vt Ludwigshaven and Hoechst were ready to spend nearly £1,000,000 in pure research work connected with the eyh~ thesis of indigo. This shows, as Dr. Mason observes, to what an'extent tbo industry in Germany -was entrusted to -the hands\of research' chemists. In" the annual balaafce sheet of every Ger-

man chemical firm a large proportion of profit is set' aside for research work as a matter of course, and precisely in the same way as other^ portions are reserved for payment of interest, repayment- of loans, and so on In the Hoechst works there is one universitytrained chemist to every 25 or 30 workmen. Taking the various branches' cf German industry as a whole, there is i one such chemist to every fifty worki men.