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THE TECH OLOGY REVIEW, pril, 1939. Vol. XLI, No.6. Published monthly from November to July inclusive at 10 Ferry treet, Concord, N. H.Publication date: twenty-seventh of the month preceding date of issue. Annual subscription $3.50; Canadian and Foreign subscription $4.00. Entered as second-

class matter at the Po t Office at Concord, N. H., under the Act of March 3, 1879.

THE TABULAR VIEW

I a world filled with wars and rumors of wars, thesubject of defense and the mean thereof is one which

few thoughtful men can ignore.As far a the UnitedStates are concerned, discu sion of the imp1 m ntationof warfare focuses now, as it mu t in the future, on in-surance against aggression and on nothing else. Com-mander Henry E. Rossell's article on naval armamentin the January Review (page12.0) considered one a -pect of this problem; another i reviewed currently(page 2.51) by FREDERIC E. GLA TZBERG, '2.7, who, acaptain in the Army Air Corps, brings like expert judg-ment to bear on the importance of aviation in the gen-eral defense program of the country. Writing of courseunofficially, Captain Glantzberg offers an analy is ofthe preludes to Munich, which takes on add dint r tin the light of recent development in Central Europ .([ A sociate profes or of physical m tallurgy at theInstitute, JOB WULFF is pleasantly known to readerof The Review as author of a pioneering presentation,in our December issue (page74), of the important tech-nique of powder metallurgy. nother activity withwhich he has been identified is the concert d study ofthe production of corrosion-resi tant alloy which, incharacteri tic Technology fa hion, i being made by acommittee of cooperators drawn from everal In tituteDepartments. Surveying in thi i sue (pag2.54) thebackground out of which the problem grow, Dr. Wulffcanvasse alloys a a means of d crea ing enormouannual los es due to corro ion and pr ents in con-spectus salient findings of the res arch program continu-ing at the Institute. ([It is the ta k of uch a ection athe Trend of Affairs to report, to comment, to e plain.These functions it should perform with resp ct to theintere ting, the important, the unu ual in it field athe news of th monthdis closes them. reporter, theTrend of Affairs occa ionally will offer the factualstatem nt of orne new thing which lat rde rve m recritical treatment; thu it i with the development offrequency modulation a a new factor in the radioequation. oted in March (page2.00), thi cent r offa cinating peculative po ibilities i expertly exploredin this i ue (page2.57) by Do ALD G. FINK, '33, whowrite with the authority to be expected of the manag-ing editor ofElectronics and with the gu to of one whoha been and gone and seen and hard. His article, inaddition to its value a expo ition of a puzzling ubjectand a timulating Ioreglimps e into a po sible future,afford interesting commentary on the interrelation-hips of ingenuity and industry. ([ The pronouncement

of public men command a pa ing attention auto-matically becau e of the official po ition of their au-thor. But they command ala ting re p ct and remainin memory when they re ult from the vigor of mind andintegrity of spirit which are independent of private orpublic tatus. The Review direct your attention to afar eeing di cu ion of intellectual freedom byKARL T.COMPTON, Pre ident, which appear in the In tit uteGazette (page2.61).

0.15

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MAIL RETURNS

Approximations and Taxonomy

FROM CHARLES H. BLAKE, '25:

The following may have some interest as technical footnotes to mypaper on wood destroyers in the January Review.

Those who do not concern themselves with that branch of biologycalled taxonomy (the clas ification of organisms) berate the taxono-mists for not knowing their own minds and, hence, not achieving atable classification. Actually a stable, andcorrect, classification is the

aim of taxonomist , but since any classification is better than none,we must, in view of the incompleteness of our knowledge, approachthe goal by a series of approximations after the fashion of a pendulumcoming to rest.In the first draft of my paper I spoke of false death-watch beetles (Bostrychidae) and powder-post beetles(Lyctidae). Ihad overlooked the fact that Boving and Craighead had divided thefirst family into two (Bostrychidae and Psoidae) on the basis of char-acters of the grubs. Recently a definitive catalogue of this group ofbeetles by P. Lesne has come to hand, and we find that all threefamilie are thrown together as one(Bostrychidae)!

The mention of Hopkins' equivalent isophane (line of simultaneousappearance) referred to his work on bioclimatics (United States De-partment of Agriculture, Miscellaneous Publication No. 280). Ineffect, an isophane enables us to define the temperature characteristicsof a point on the land by a single figure. Perhaps this may prove to bean oversimplification, but at least it is an attempt to define numeri-cally the ranges of organisms and of certain biological phenomena inusable terms. It is one of the simpler applications of mathematics tobiology. At the other extreme stands Woodger's "Axiomatic Methodin Biology," in which the essentially nonnumerical apparatus ofsymbolic logic is brought to bear on biology. So far as I am concernedthis latter method has no practical value, since I am not convincedthat it leads to increased clarity of either thought or expression.

Lincoln, Mass.

Domiciliar Conversation

FROM EVE WITHERS:

Sulphurous comment about planned economy, as respondents toyour que tionnaire about housing present it (see The Review forMarch), seem to put most of its emphasis upon the assumed hatredof being coordinated. Thus planned communities are attacked aslacking "individual opportunities for the home lover," being "tooregimented," and being populated by people who" are too much likemy own ocial set." All of these statements seem to me to containmuch truth, and no doubt they serve as full reason, in the minds oftheir writers, for the choice of domestic environment which the writershave made. Thus both as outward argument and as inward rationaliza-tion for a given decision, they are effective.

Really, what these writers are talking about is the great difficulty,if not the downright impossibility, of escaping from the house itselfanyway. From my own experience I am convinced that the youngerhome-owning cla - that is, the group who have accumulatedenough of the world's goods, or enough credit, or enough speculativeability in combination with energy, to buy and own, or to build-very ea ily become so engrossed with the house, .or so fatigued by theoutlay of work nece ary to buy it, that they can talk about little else.It i always a ca e of comparing cellars, and arguing about kinds ofinsulation, and agreeing secretly, after the guests have gone home,that one's own decision about roofing materials was the right one and

impkins after all didn't know what he was talking about. Here is thedifficulty with the planned community: It enhances the sameness ofpeople because it imposes on them the task not merely of justifyingin conver ation the purchase of a house which was more or less freechoice but the purchase of a house which, because it is the product of adeliberate effort at efficient perfection, can't escape being a standard-ized thing - neat, clean, smooth, slick, and hence unoriginal, unin-dividual. The only way in which to justify the wisdom of buyingHouse A rather than House B then becomes a pseudoscientific tottingup of material attributes, and conversation degenerates into statisticsof heat los , and the highballs wilt a the long evening wanes.

Winston-Salem, N. C.

(~38 )

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1839 - THE CENTENNIAL OF RUBBER -1939Great beyond all other names in rubber isthat of Charles Goodyear- discoverer justa century ago of the process of'Vulcaniza-tion that made rubber usable to mankind.To honor him The Goodyear Tire&Rubber Company was named long afterhis deathj from his lifelong effort to extendrubber's utility it takes inspiration} andseeks byserviceability to deserve his name.

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THE TECH OLOGY REVIEWTitle Reg. U. • Pat. Offi.ce

EDITED AT THE 1ASSACIJUSETT 11 TIT TE OF TECH OLOGY

VOL. 41, NO. 6 CONTENTS 1939

THE COVER

"Co E "- PAPER DRI KI G CUP

From a photograph by K irby Kean.

LINE, C RVES, AND GLE............ . . . . . . FRO TI PIECEIR POW'ER A D DIPLOMACY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . By FREDERICE. GLA TZBERG

Bombers as Components of a New Factor in the International alculusBLE DS OF OBILITY By JOR W LFF

Wherein Metals and Men Are Different - Values of the Passive - Resear h into lloysFRONI THE MOUNTAINTOP By DONALDG. FINK

How a Neao Technique in Radio Broadcasting May Be a Tocsin to the IndustryTO SERVE PORTS .

Plan of the ew Field House - Efficiency and Effectiveness Combined

fl57

fl59

TAB L R lEW .Contributors and Contributions

MAIL RETURNS . . . . . .Letters from Review Readers

THE TREND OF FFAffiS.News of cience and Engineering

THE INSTITUTE GAZETTE .Relating to the111assachusetts Institute of Technology

fl37

fl38

fl61

EditorFREDERICKG. FA SETT,JR.

PublisherHAROLDE. LOBDELL Business Manager

RALPH T. JOPE

J. E. BUR HARD PAUL CORElTEditori-al Associates

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PUBLISHED MONTHLY FROM NOVEMBER TO JULY I CLUSIVE ONTHE TWE~TY-SEVENTH OF THE MONTH PRECEDING THE DATE OFISSUE AT 50 CENTS A COPY. ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION $3.50; CANADIANAND FOREIGN SUBSCRIPTION 4.00. PUBLISHED FOR THE ALUMNIASSOCIATION OF THE M.LT. H. B. RICHMOND, PRESIDE~T; ARTHUR L.TOWNSEND, RAYMOND STEVENS. VICE-PRESIDE~T ; CHARLES E.LOCKE. SECRETARY; RALPH T. JOPE. TREASURER. PUBLISHED AT

THE RUMFORD PRESS, 10 FERRY STREET. CONCORD. N. H. EDITORIALOFFICE, ROOM 3-219. MA SACHUSETTS IN TITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY,CAMBRIDGE A, MA . ENTERED AS SECOND-CLA MAIL fATTERAT THE POST OFFICE AT CO CORD. .H. COPYRIGHT, 1939, BY THEALUM I ASSOCIATIO OF THE MAS ACHUSETTS I STITUTE OF TECH-NOLOGY. THREE WEEKS MUST BE ALLOWED TO EFFECT CHANGESOF ADDRES . BOTH OLD AND EW ADDRE SE SHOULD BE GIVEN.

(241 )

LI ES, C RVE, D A GLES

The ba e of the Coit Memorial Tower on Telegraph Hill, San Francisco

(242 )

THE

TECHNOLOGYREVIEW

Vol. 41, o. 6 April, 1939

The Trend of AffairsSubatomic Dynamite

PHYSICISTS have been poking at atomic nucleifor some time' now, trying to find a trigger whichwould unleash the energy bottled up inside. Re-

cently they found triggers for two of them - uraniumand thorium. A uranium nucleus, when nudged by slowneutrons of energy less than a volt, sometimes blows up,shooting out fragments with energies of more than ahundred million volts. The exploding nucleus seems tobreak into two pieces of approximately equal ma s, plusa spray of extra neutrons. Similar results have been ob-served with thorium, though the trigger here seems tobe stiffer - neutrons of about a million volts' energybeing needed to set off the explosion. Gold, silver,bismuth, lead, and several other heavy elements werealso tried, with no results.

This does not mean that a way has been found fordrawing energy from nuclei in unlimited amounts. Theefficiency of the new proce s is as yet too low to make itpossible to get more energy out thanis put in to generatethe neutrons. evertheles the new experiments how anenergy output considerably greater than tho e previ-ously known, and they indicate that nuclei can divideinto halves. In all reactions hitherto discovered thenucleus loses only a small piece of itself in the explo ion,acting more like a gun than a bomb. One can peculate atlength on the possibilitie suggested by the new di -covery, but such speculations are premature a yet. Thepresent results, however, show two interesting aspects.

The first aspect of intere t is that the result eem toconfirm the Bohr "waterdrop" theory of the nucleu .Professor Bohr has been insisting for several years thatin their behavior atomic nuclei are very analogou todrops of water. This seems a bit farfetched at firt, fornuclei are hardly dewdrop , being unbelievably malland being held together by forces which are neither

electrical nor gravitational in origin. verth Ie ,Pro-fe sor Bohr' opinion carry wight, for he i a ob IPrize winner and one of the founder of the modernquantum theory.

He pictures the con tituent proton and neutron ina nucleus being held together by a sort of surface t n ionanalogou to the surface ten ion which keep a raindropspherical. Ordinarily, in mo t nuclei, the surface ten ionis large enough so that none of the con tituent particlecan" evaporate." Wh n an extra particle, a proton orn utron, i hot into a nucleu , howev r, the impacttemporarily lowers the surface t nsion and "heats up"the nucl u , making it po sible for one or more particlesto evaporate away. This is the case with the artificiallyradioactive element which are produced today in largevariety and quantity in high-voltage laboratorie allover the world. In these reactions, however, only a smallportion of the nucleu i pla hed out during the colli ionand the energy obtained is small compared to the outputfrom the new experiments.

The natural radioactive elements are explained bysaying that the nuclei of such elements are too large forthe surface tension to hold the particles in. A few of theparticles must evaporate from the surface before thenucleus become stable. In these ca es, al0, only a smallpart of the nucleus comes loose, and a relatively smallamount of energy is released.

The waterdrop theory i obviou ly ju t an analogywhich may be useful in ugge ting further experiment .The new experiments how, however, that the analogyi clo er than had been expected: They how that orneheavy nuclei are un table in the ame manner that largewaterdrops are unstable. A light touch will tart alarge drop oscillating - elongating and fiatt ning pe-riodically - until the elongation i too much for thesurface ten ion and the drop break in two. The analogybetween thi and the recent nuclear result i quite strik-

(243 )

244 THE TECHNOLOGY REVIEW

Government and Research

SO often cited as to make repetition egre-gious, the interdependence of science and

democratic government is a social phenome-non unusually well publicized. Fresh referenceto it is here made merely to suggest thefundamental justification for the recently is-sued set of monographs discussing the relationof the Federal government to research - thefirst volume of a series on the general subjectof "Re earch - A National Resource," whichis being carried on by the ational ResourcesCommittee under the chairmanship of HaroldL. Icke, ecretary of the Interior. This firstvolume, the work of the science committee,includes discussions of research carried on bythe Federal government in the naturalsciences and technology and in the socialscience , Federal expenditures for research,legislative provisions affecting research byFederal agencies, the legislative branch andresearch, the relation between problems of theBureau of the Census and the social sciences,the relation of the Library of Congress to re-search, and research in American universitiesand colleges.

Thi last subject, the committee wellargues, is a matter of direct concern to the .Federal government for several reasons, con-spicuous among which are the functions ofuniversitie as centers in which undergradu-ates are recruited to research, as the chiefcenters of initial training in research, assources of per onnel for temporary appoint-ment in government service, and as centers ofadvanced training for government workers, in

addition to their importance as centers of pure researchand forcing bed in which re earch problem originate.Although in one section the report speaks rather crisplyof the fact that the government "is now spending moreon research than any other one agency, and more thanall the universitie combined," it also present estimatesof re earch disbursements which ignificantly suggestthe importance of the work done by college and uni-vel' itie . For example, expenditures of$50,000,000 bythe universities represent the allocation to research of asmuch as25 per cent to32.5 per cent of the total expendi-ture by orne in titutions. Government normal ex-penditure for re earch i set at about$70,000,000 - ortwo per cent of the regular current expense of the Fed-eral government - which in1936-1937 was increasedby orne$50,000,000 more from emergency funds. In-dustry meanwhile expend on re earch about$100,000,-000 a year - some corporations allocating to this pur-pose as much a four per cent of their gro income.

The employment of this total of$220,000,000 - fromwhich the government' emergency expenditure of$50,000,000 are omitted - engages about50,000 re-earch worker , according to the committee report.

This census is at best approximate but is arrived at bytwo different methods. Since the problem of securingable re earch workers for governmental activity i highly

Ewing Galloway

The soleplate oj a low-speed .ynchronous electricol machine is being stitchedin place by thi welder

ing. There are difference, of cour e: For the drop ofwat I' the divi ion is made without much fu ,but forthe nuclear droplet the change involves a tremendousI' lea e of nergy. Let u hope that a ystematic ex-ploration of the waterdrop analogy will suggest otherfruitful experiment .

The other intere ting a pect of the new di covery isthe rapidity of ch ck and countercheck of experimentsin pre ent-day phy ic . The discovery wa made byHahn and Stra man in Berlin in December.It wasquickly checked and tudied further by Meitner andFri ch, German refugee working in tockholm and inBohr' laboratory in Copenhagen. Bohr brought thenews to thi country, discussing the implications of theresult at a conference in Washington on January26.The February 15 i ue of the Physical Review,journal ofthe American Phy ical oci ty, has announcements ofconfirmation and further detail from four laboratoriein this country: the Bureau of Terre trial Magnetism,Carnegie In titution at Wa hington; John Hopkins;Columbia niversity; and the niversity of California.Anyone who has een the rna s of equipment used in aneutron generator and the tangle of sen itive electricaland photographic gadgetry needed to inve tigate nu-clear reactions will be impres ed at the speed of the lab-oratorie in adapting equipment to the new experiment.