the scientific communityby james taylor

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The Scientific Community by James Taylor Review by: ROBERT PRESS Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 121, No. 5207 (OCTOBER 1973), pp. 755-756 Published by: Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41371154 . Accessed: 28/06/2014 15:27 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Royal Society of Arts. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 141.101.201.139 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 15:27:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: The Scientific Communityby James Taylor

The Scientific Community by James TaylorReview by: ROBERT PRESSJournal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 121, No. 5207 (OCTOBER 1973), pp. 755-756Published by: Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and CommerceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41371154 .

Accessed: 28/06/2014 15:27

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce is collaborating with JSTOR todigitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Royal Society of Arts.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 141.101.201.139 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 15:27:09 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: The Scientific Communityby James Taylor

OCTOBER I973 NOTES ON BOOKS

'Naturkräfte lassen sich nicht beseitigen, aber gegen einander ausspielen'*, the aged Count wrote some few years before he died in 1917. He spoke perhaps more truly than even he knew, for C. P. Burgess (1888-1951), the American mathematician responsible for stressing the first USA Rigid Airship ZRi, admitted that 'there was actually little more than a blind faith that an incalculable source of strength offset an equally incalculable source of strain'; and Peter Brooks comments that 'it seems in retrospect that this was indeed the position in the case of all the adaptations by other designers at this time of the basic Zeppelin designs'.

No engineer will be surprised at Burgess's verdict when he reflects that there must be several hundred redundancies in the framework of a large rigid airship, and many is the night that the present writer has sat up struggling to devise a method of approximation that would give a reasonable hope of safety.

And indeed the bitter truth remains that only the Germans and the British have succeeded in saving their lives, their example lending point to the statement that the design of rigid airships must be learned from the elementary beginnings upwards. For we can point to the three ships designed and built in USA - Shenandoah , Akron and Macon . But why, oh! why has Mr. Brooks included on Plate 14 a handsome picture of the one tragic British failure, the R.101, when on page 45 (Figures 26 & 27) he can show rather dull pictures of the greatest British success, the R.100, which flew to Montreal in 193 1 and after touring over Canada and the USA for some two weeks returned triumphant to England, only to be wilfully destroyed after the abandonment of their Airship Programme by the British Govern- ment ? Once again we see how a small group of men, none of whom had ever designed a rigid airship in all their lives before, lost them through sheer lack of experience.

In view of the many succesful and spectacular flights listed by Brooks can it be said that we have abandoned the rigid airship too soon ?

Has a new light been thrown on the fearsome problems presented by redudancy by the advent of the computer? What would Burgess and Brooks say if, once the basic programming had been done, they could modify the structural strength until every single part was at its mini- mum weight with a known factor of safety? True we should be putting our 'blind faith' in a box of electronic tricks, but one that could be relied upon to speak the truth. Who will be the first man to use this ultra-modern designer's aid, and what will be the outcome of this new adventure? Mr. Brooks has shown us clearly and with great skill all that has been accom- plished in the past. Who will show us the future ?

♦ Count Zeppelin, Friedrichshafen, May 1914. (The forces of nature canno t be eliminated but they may be balanced one against the other.)

BARNES WALLIS

The Scientific Community By Sir James^ Taylor London^ Oxford University Press , 1973 £1.05 This review is republished. On its first appearance, in the last issue of the Journal, its concluding paragraph was, most regret- tably, omitted. - Ed. In this book, Sir James Taylor has reviewed a long period of organizational evolution in re- markably small space. Given the nature of the story, its philosophical elements, and the accelerating rate of development, many readers will wish that the Engineering Policy Series could have allowed the author more pages to achieve the objectives he set out in the pen- ultimate paragraph of his Preface. These were presumably treated in depth in the lectures to which he refers, and, in this respect, members of the Royal Society of Arts will have had the ad- vantage of access to such of those lectures as have been published in the Journal.

The specialist reader, and certainly anyone with a knowledge of Sir James's personal ex- perience, will regret that many of his character- istically forthright statements are not developed at greater length in this book so as to enable the reader to make his own judgement on some of the issues raised. These include questions such as whether we are 'at the beginning of changes as important as those initiated in the classical Era of Greece, or the New Learning of the Elizabethan period' : why was the development of the physical sciences originally regarded by the old universities as alien; were the new scientific studies and the earlier higher learning in the universities the pursuit of a single objec- tive truth or of different truths; and was accep- tance of the former really 'responsible for the present dichotomy and fragmentation of science and technology' ? On the other hand, readers for broad historiad interest only - and this series may be primarily intended for such - may well find sufficient fascination and their purpose satisfied in a very brief and readable coverage of the growth and organization of the scientific and technological community, from the early Greeks to the current disenchantment with science and technology.

The author presumably felt it necessary to lead in to 'the ferment which finally produced the industrial revolution', but limitation of space would have justified him in commencing with the proliferation of societies to meet the growing public appetite for science in the nineteenth century. Trained initially as a physicist and having spent his working life in the chemical industry, Sir James has had unique opportunity to observe the scientific community's motiva- tions, functions, and aspirations to professional status. He is eminently qualified to deal histori- cally with the growth of their societies, pro- fessional and qualifying associations, during the past century, as the central part of the book.

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Page 3: The Scientific Communityby James Taylor

JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS OCTOBER 1973

Perhaps as a result of compression, some state- ments covering interaction with the 'ruling classes' strike one as over-simplified. To some extent, a similar comment might be applied to some references to central Government activity, but the author rightly concludes that the various Government bodies, to which he referred, have collectively constituted an important factor in the institutionalization of science.

Members of the Royal Society of Arts will note, with particular interest and satisfaction, the significant part played by the Society in the evolution of the Scientific Community. Formed in 1754 'for the Encouragement of Arts, Manu- factures and Commerce', the Society is shown to have taken impressive initiatives in both the early stages of the industrial revolution and, later, in the more technological phases. Even though formed as a generalist body, the Society did not shrink from setting up specialist commit- tees as necessary, and one of these eventually became a major specialist society in its own right - the Chemical Society (1841). In more recent times, the Society is seen to have been interested in the creation of a body for the special recog- nition of outstanding technologists and indus- trialists but to have eventually considered it inappropriate to go beyond its already estab- lished Faculty of Designers for Industry.

Looking to the future, and believing that there never has been and never will be a clear-cut differentiation between arts, crafts, technology and science, the author urges a fuller develop- ment of inter-disciplinary work and a greater readiness than hitherto on the part of the scien- tific community to participate in the processes of Government, in order to find solutions for our present social and industrial ills, in terms of hard technology and economics. Very interes- tingly and significantly, from one of Sir James's wide experience, the book concludes by fore- seeing a return of the day of the generalist society - full circle in the evolution of a com- munity which numbered about 500 strong in 1851 and had grown to 175,000 in 19 66. In this connection the Royal Society of Arts, as the first amenity society, is itself seen to have gone full circle, from offering prizes (in 1763) for 'devices to swallow smoke from factory chim- neys in London' to a continuing responsibility for conservation matters stemming from the conference on 'The Countryside in 1970'.

ROBERT PRESS

W. B. Yeats and the Designing of Ireland's Coinage New Yeats Papers III Edited by Brian Cleeve Dublin , Dolman Press , 1973 I London , Oxford University Press £1.2 5 net' It is surprisingly rare for any country to acquire at a stroke an entirely new coinage. Such an event occurred when, following the creation in

1922 of the Irish Free State, the new govern- ment in Dublin enacted the Coinage Act of 1926, which empowered its Minister of Finance to issue coins in silver and other metals. In earlier times coins and tokens had been issued in Ireland; but the last of these were the pennies and half pennies of 1822 and 1823. The occasion therefore offered a fine opportunity to mark the birth of the Irish Free State; this well printed book tells how successfully that opportunity was seized. It is a re-issue, with some additional matter, of the official account of the new coinage published by the Stationery Office, Dublin, in 1928.

The designs of the new coins - eight in all - were the responsibility of the Minister of Finance. As might have been expected, he appointed a committee to advise him; but he gave that committee a framework of bold deci- sions within which they were to work. First, he required that no effigies of modern persons should be used; second, that the obverse design of all the coins should if possible be a harp ; and third that any inscriptions should be in Irish, with the denominations shown in numerals.

The Chairman of the committee was W. B. Yeats, by whom the stimulating first chapter of the book was written. Under his leadership the committee pursued its task with zest and with a refreshing unconcern for established idesa. Out of the window went sentimental patriotic al- lusions, the bogus piety of religious symbolism, and the current platitudes of heraldry. Instead, the committee went back for their inspiration to the coins of classical antiquity; and they chose for each denomination an animal typifying some aspect of Irish life. In retrospect some of their reasoning seems quaint - for instance, the link- ing of hound and hare on the sixpence and three- pence as joint symbols of Irish sport. But for the most part they chose shrewdly, carefully weigh- ing artistic opportunities and the practical needs of the coinage.

They found their designer by a competition; but they were sensible enough to make it a limited competition and to seek a good deal of advice before sending out their invitations. The designs they received were presented anony- mously to the committee which, however, was astonishingly unanimous in preferring the work of Percy Metcalfe, a young English artist. He was relatively unknown then, but had more ex- perience than the other candidates as a medallist and coin designer. His original bull, horse and pig had to be altered because they did not de- pict ideally the breeds favoured by the Irish Ministry of Agriculture; but otherwise bureau- cracy was kept under firm control and Metcalfe's designs went forward as a satisfying entity to be struck at the Royal Mint.

Metcalfe's work for Ireland brought him wider recognition; but strangely enough he was unsuccessful with the coinage of the United Kingdom. His modern St. George and the

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