Organization Of Research

It is well to bring before you again the chief purpose of the National Research Council and of this its Division of Engineering, to stimulate others to make researches rather than to make them ourselves, because a given amount of our energy spent in inciting others will accomplish far more than if applied in executing them ourselves. This is because there are scattered through the numberless governmental, educational, and industrial laboratories of the country a very great number of investigators not only capable of being stimulated, but willing to aid in cooperative broadly planned research rather than to follow the haphazard methods of the past. Taken collectively, these laboratories and their personnel can produce an annual crop of knowledge the value of which is of the order rather of billions than of millions of dollars. I invite you to regard this potential product as a crop, to be planned, fertilized, harvested, and distributed with the sane order of statesmanship, the same breadth of view, with which we treat any other great human product or achievement, whether agricultural, industrial, or transportational.