SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 5, Issue 173, 12 May 1916, Page 4 (Supplement)

SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY.

Scarcity of dyes and of certain drugs, such as asp Tin, 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 bv Dr F. A. Mason, of the Royal College of Science, South Kensington, n the last two issu s of "Science Progress." Ho has traced the successive discoveries by means of which the nelustry has been built up. and, needless to say, near'y ail those discoveries, save the first few, have been made in Germany, and oo.ome the monopoly of German firms. Jiioy have not been mere chance discoveries, but results arrived at by the swtoaiatie and persistent application of resctrch to industry. German ma \if tti \ 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 obiect-les=on in this phase of German industrial activity. Dr Mason gives some remarkable fact; and figures relative to the research work carried on by the three leading German firms enpaged in the coal-tar industry—the Badische Company at Lvdwigshaven, Meister, Lucius and Bruening at Hoechs:, and the Bayer Company. The Hoechst works employ 350 research chemists, the Badische Company about " same number, and the Bayer Company nearly as nviy —in all about thousand univerity-traincd chemists, ninny with the highest degrees. Thus a great number of highly-trained scientific brains have been constantly engaged m discovering new dyes, etc., and evolving new methods for making old ones. The influence of these chemists upon the development of tne industry has bren preponderating, and the fact is thoroughly understood by the business men, who have made huge sums of money in consequence of these .scientific labours. The two firms at Ludwigshavcn and Hoechst were readyto spend nearly £1,000,000 in pure research work connected w.th the syn thesis of indigo. Tins shows, as Dr. Mason observes, to what an extent th«i industry in Germany was entrusted to the hands of research chemists. In the annual balance sheet of every German chemical firm a large proportion of profit is set aside for research work as a matter of course, and precisely in the same way a; other portions ar« reserved for pavment 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 one such chemist to every fifty workmen.