MR. WRIGHT.-In answer to your question, the vocational education act provides for the federal board to make or cause to have made studies, investigations, and reports with particular reference to their use in aiding the states in the establishment of vocational schools or classes and in giving instruction in agriculture, trades and industries, commerce and commercial pursuits and home economics. Such studies, investigations, and reports shall include agriculture and agricultural processes and requirements upon agricultural workers; trades, industries, and apprenticeships, trade and industrial requirements upon industrial workers, and classification of industrial processes and pursuits; commerce and commercial pursuits and requirements upon commercial workers; home management, domestic science, and the study of related facts and principles; and problems of administration of vocational schools and of courses of study and instruction in vocational subjects.

If the school you have organized in Detroit is managed entirely by your concern; if the teachers are paid by the company no federal funds should be used for reimbursement since the school is not under public supervision and control. Only through advice and assistance in the way of publications could

we co-operate.

MR. SCHOEN. The committee on foundry training consisted of Dr. Moldenke, Messrs. Steele, Dosey, Kennedy, Hoffman and others. Mr. Steele and Mr. Dosey and a number of other men have compiled a large number of excellent question sheets and it was deemed advisable to print a number of pamphlets covering these standard question sheets that every apprentice ought to know pertaining to his work. Now the question comes up as to who would bear the expense of these pamphlets.

MR. WRIGHT--I regret that our printing fur budgetted for the We would be unable to the matter of T s year. It would be certain conditi budget for th

THE CHAIRMAN, DR. C. B. CONNELLEY.-I think that inasmuch as Mr. Schoen is training men for foundry work, if the committee is lacking funds, we might through the industrial committee of the association be able to have your report covered and distributed to the members of the association. We must have this report now and we want to produce it now because of the unrest and the conditions of American foundrymen. I venture to assert that the American Foundrymen's association will see to it, when the report is ready, that it is printed.

MR. PORTER. I would like to ask Mr. Calder in choosing his executives, foremen, or higher up men, what weight he puts onto the different qualifications of the men?

MR. CALDER. The subject of selecting personnel is entirely foreign to the paper which I gave. It is a very large subject, and the picking out of men by the manager or the higher executives is not delegated even to them but to people who have made a specialty of it. I don't think the average business executive of a plant can put himself in a position of doing much of that kind of work, but if your man is, say a foreman of an assembling department where machine operations don't count for a great deal, but where manual dexterity and carefulness on the part of the worker has a great deal to do with the quantity and quality, then the man you would put in charge of that group would have to be mentally in his habits. of observation and thoroughness, concentration and judgment, a much better man than a man who simply was a foreman of a group of machine hands. The relative weights, of course, have to be figured out to some scale, but I don't think I could give any offhand opinion on the question as asked.

MR. E. T. MILLER.-May I ask whether you have had any experience in having groups of shops in your foremen's schools, or whether they were always confined to one shop?

MR. CALDER.-Yes, where the individual shops are small. We never have a class of less than 25, and they run up to 200. I would prefer that they shouldn't run over 100, but where in a city like Buffalo, Springfield, Hartford, or New Haven there are groups of foremen under 25 in numbers in various small

industrial plants, we have had public classes with anything from 70 to 150 men in them, and these groups of foremen met in the same way, but you can never get the same amount of interchange, and certainly you can't get the amount of private talk with the foremen in a public class as you would in a private class.

We have combination classes, but the greatest benefit of the course is derived where the group is not so large, where all know one another and where they have to work together and co-operate. This result is still obtainable where the public group is all from one industry, such as founding and all interested in the same material and human problems. They meet together on a common ground at these meetings with experienced men and talk about present day economic and industrial questions. We believe that education isn't pumping in; it is drawing out, and then in the discussion of the subject you can keep it going for half an hour or so or until the interest is exhausted.

THE CHAIRMAN, DR. C. B. CONNELLEY.-In the state of Fennsylvania we are handling many men in industrial work. I attended a conference not long ago where I said I believed that the narrowness of the workingman as well as of the manufacturers is due to the literature they read. I said to the workingmen that if they would get out of the rut of reading one kind of literature and would try to get a broader sense of the work in which they are engaged and get the views of different people in the country, that they would be much better informed. I was trying to get the equalization on a 50-50 basis between the manufacturing and laboring concerns.

An Association for Research on Alloys

By HARRISON E. HOWE, Washington, D. C.

The last four years have surely emphasized the dependence of material progress upon science and co-operative effort. We have even come to the point where something of benefit can be seen in the pooling of our technical practice and experience, while in some lines we have found that in revealing trade secrets we have been surprised how often we have gained more than we have given in the exchange. We have come to comprehend the truth of the prophecy made some years ago that the industrial progress or trade supremacy of a nation will be in proportion to the thoroughness with which science is utilized by the nation. This has been appreciated more fully by some countries than by others, but the war has thrown into bold relief those places where science has not been fostered as it should have been, and particularly those nations unable to organize and mobilize their scientific agencies. The rapidity with which scientific industrial research has been organized in the British empire, the United States, Japan and Italy. together with the results achieved, is one of our modern wonders, and, realizing that the same raw materials, methods and processes enter into the manufacture of both war and peace materials, the various countries have adopted the policy of establishing permanent research agencies. The extent to which this has been done is pointed out in National Research Council bulletin No. 1.

Great Britain Encourages Research

Great Britain has been active in officially encouraging research and has formed a government department of scientific and industrial research.

Industries or groups of related industries are being encouraged to form research associations and the British government stands prepared to furnish one-half the required funds. In all. nearly 30 such projects are on foot and of these at least three

have been licensed while six others are ready to apply for licenses. The subjects covered range from alloys to wool.

An extreme example is to be found in the association formed by the iron manufacturers who, in order to be free from the control which is inseparable from the use of public funds, have themselves provided the necessary money and, in addition to sharing mutually in all results of the research, propose to pool their experience and present information, even including trade secrets.

Progressive Work Necessary in United States

It scarcely seems necessary to further emphasize the necessity of similar progressive work being undertaken in the United States if we are to continue in the favorable position we have proverbially occupied in industry. With the possible exception of Germany, America has led in industrial research through the efforts of individual manufacturers, government departments, fellowships, research institutions and various commercial laboratories, but where one concern has been prepared to consistently and continuously support research, of a fundamental type, thousands have done nothing and have been content to draw upon sources of knowledge created by others.

We have many examples here in America of what research means to an industry. As Dr. C. E. Kenneth Mees has said, the incandescent lamp industry, which originated in the United States with the carbon lamp, would have certainly been lost to the United States when the tungsten filament was developed but for the research laboratory of the General Electric Co. That laboratory literally fought for the prize and held first place in the development of the first drawn tungsten wire filament. This has been followed by the inert-gas-filled incandescent lamp bulb, which, it should be noted, was really the result of research in pure science begun without immediate reference to its industrial application. A very considerable list of researches which have paid for themselves many times over could be compiled, and an English authority has pointed out that the investment made in the researches of the German dye firms has perhaps been the best investment the world has known.