THE 1956 SIR ALFRED HERBERT PAPER

THE DEVELOPMENT OF

TECHNOLOGICAL EDUCATION

IN EUROPE, AMERICA AND ENGLAND

by Dr. B. V. BOWDEN, M.A., M.I.E.E.

Presented to the Institution in Manchester, on 14tf/i November, 1956

Dr. Bowden was appointed Principal of the College of Technology {nowthe College of Science and Technology) in 1953. He had previously spentthree years with the Ferranti company, introducing digital computers to theEnglish market.

Throughout the Second World War, he was engaged in radar research,and immediately after the War, he joined the firm of Sir Robert Watson Waitand Partners, Consulting Engineers.

From 1931 to 1934, Dr. Bowden worked in Cambridge, in association withLord Rutherford.

TT is astonishing how slow we have been in this•^-country to follow the advice and heed the warningsof our great men. In 1570 Sir Humphrey Gilberttried to found an academy where men could " tryout the secrets of nature." He said that " thereshould be no gentleman in England but is good forsomewhat, whereas now the best part of them aregood for nothing." He admonished his countrymento eschew foreign luxuries and to exploit their crafts-manship. Sir Francis Bacon found it strange that " allthe Colleges are dedicated to the professions (Law,Medicine, and the Church) and none to the Arts andSciences at large . . . It is esteemed," he said, " akind of dishonour to learning to descend into an en-quiry upon matters mechanical." He tried to establisha great institution (to be called Salomons House) forthe advancement of science and technology; he in-sisted that the purpose of knowledge should be togain " power over nature", though the universitiesobstinately ignored the application of science toordinary life. Had it not been for the outbreak ofthe Civil War, the Government might have foundedsome such institution, and created a university inManchester. If King Charles the First had not lost

his head, there might have been a technologicalinstitution in Manchester 300 years ago.

Throughout the 18th century English universitiesbecame completely detached from practicalaffairs ; they confined themselves almost entirelyto the study of ancient texts and only 16,000 studentswent to Cambridge in the whole of the 18thcentury—less than half as many as had been there inthe preceding 100 years for, as a contemporaryremarked " intelligent persons could not fail to observethat the subjects to which their attention was directedhad no relation to any profession or employmentwhatever, and that the discussions connected withthem had no analogy to those trains of thinking thatprevailed in the ordinary intercourse of society".

After Newton left Cambridge the study of mathe-matics in the university was sadly neglected. WhenThomas Young went up in 1798 after some years inGottingen he was "ashamed to find how much theforeign mathematicians have surpassed the Englishin the higher branches of the sciences ". Ten yearslater Babbage found, as a self-taught undergraduate,that he knew more algebra than his tutor.

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In Oxford the classical authors were unchallenged;Aristotle reigned supreme in philosophy, science wasentirely neglected, and the exercises and examina-tions wore all the appearance of a solemn farce.

" In the universities " wrote Adam Smith in TheWealth of Nations, " the youth are neither taught,nor always can find proper means of being taught,the sciences which it is the business of those in-corporated bodies to teach ". No wonder Hobbes feltimpelled to say " If I had read as much as other men,I should have known no more than other men";and that Gibbon should have regarded his universitycareer as the most idle and unprofitable period of hislife.

The First Chair of ChemistryCambridge University appointed its first Professor

of Chemistry as long ago as 1702 ; this was the firstChair of Chemistry in England and it was awarded(without a stipend) to an itinerant lecturer who hadbeen giving courses in the university for some years.His laboratory was a small room in Trinity College,but his successor had to work in a room that hadbeen abandoned by the University Printer in 1716and that " was of no use to the University for anyother purpose ". One can assess the importance thatthe university attached to experimental science inthose days from the career of Richard Watson, whobecame Professor of Chemistry at the age of 27 inthe year 1760. He said when he was appointed thatlie knew nothing at all of chemistry and had neverread a syllable on the subject nor seen a single experi-ment in it. He sent to Paris for an " Operator " andstudied for a year before he felt qualified to lecture,but his most important achievement was to persuadethe authorities to give him a salary of £100 a year.After seven years as Professor of Chemistry, Watsonwas translated to the Regius Chair of Divinity. Heafterwards became Bishop of Llandaff and made aconsiderable fortune from a new method of manu-facturing gunpowder.*

We may smile at our ancestors, but only 20years ago Bertrand Russell attributed the bitternessand cynicism of many university students to their" consciousness that their work had no real import-ance ", and an Oxford Don found that " manythoughtful undergraduates are growing very wearyof pursuing half-heartedly a course of study that theyknow to be none too good, and vaguely attemptingto supplement it with occasional gems picked up fromthe side-shows ".

If one were to judge the university courses inengineering in England 30 or 40 years ago bythe comments of some of the most successful engineersin this district to-day, one might almost believe thatthe universities had been little more use to them thanOxford was to Gibbon. It would be a mistake toassume too confidently that they are all abovecriticism today.

* The Cock Inn in the village where Watson was born wasrechristened " The Bishop of Llandaff" in his honour.A neighbouring publican adopted the name of the " Cock "and indignant local pride was responsible for the noticewhich was so famous in the Lake District for many years." The Bishop of Llandaff is the real old Cock."

Despite the indifference of the old universities,many Englishmen made great efforts to encouragescience and the new learning. Several learnedsocieties were founded, the most famous of which is,of course, the Royal Society of London, whichoriginated in the meetings of Gresham College. TheLunar Society of Birmingham was frequented byBoulton and Watt, Wedgwood and Erasmus Darwin,who defined a fool as " a man who has never donean experiment in his life ". The Royal Society of Artsplayed a most important role in developing scienceand agriculture and was patronised by merchants,manufacturers and nobility alike. When Dr. Johnsontried to speak there, he found that the company wasso distinguished that all his flowers of oratory forsookhim.

Because the universities refused to admit studentswho were not members of the Church of England,the Dissenters (particularly the Quakers) establishedseveral academies; most of them have long since beenforgotten, but they provided education of the higheststandard at a time when the English universities werenearly as palsy-stricken as the Church.

In the academies the terms were longer and thesyllabus of lectures was much heavier than at Oxfordor Cambridge. None of the academies neglectedscience. During the latter half of the 18thcentury and the whole of the 19th century, aman had about 30 times more chance of beingelected to the Royal Society if he were a Quaker orof Quaker descent than if he belonged to the generalpopulation. That great chemist Joseph Priestleytaught in Warrington Academy (near Manchester)which became known as the Athens of the North;for 30 years or more it exerted a greater influencethan either of the old universities. Priestley was inWarrington when Richard Watson was Professor inCambridge.

The Manchester Literary and Philosophical Societywas founded in 1781 by Dr. Percival who had beenthe first student to enrol in Warrington Academy.Later in life he helped to establish a College of Artsand Science in Manchester. John Dalton taught inthe Dissenters' Academy in Mosley Street, Man-chester, and was very closely associated with our ownMechanics' Institute; he was President of the Man-chester " Lit and Phil" for many years. The Societyplayed a most notable part in promoting both scienceand technology and did so by bringing them and theirexponents together. Joule, who discovered andmeasured the mechanical equivalent of heat, was amember of the Society; so were Roscoe and RobeitOwen (the father of English Socialism) as well asPlayfair and Calvert, both of whom became famousas chemists before they made their fortunes inindustry. —

Science Teaching in AmericaOther frustrated Englishmen tried to develop the

teaching of science in America during the 18thand 19th centuries, and endowed professionalchairs at Harvard and Yale. The largest " bevatron "in the world to-day is in Berkeley, a city in Californiawhich owes its name to an English bishop, who tried

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in 1730 to found an enlightened university in Americato do what the old establishments had failed to do inthis country.

The English public schools, like the universities,were slow to shake off the traditions of the MiddleAges; apparently some of them have failed even yetto realise that it can be more important for a school-boy to understand something about the tools ofmodern industry than it is for him to learn aboutJupiter's love-life, or to study the properties of Greekand Latin verbs which, to the delight of thepedagogue, are irregular to the point of improprietyin their behaviour.

This extraordinary failure of our educational systemled to a most extraordinary result. The industrialrevolution made this country rich and great; thetechnological developments that were responsible forit are our greatest national contribution to the wealthand welfare of mankind, but it was made almostentirely by self-taught men, by Dissenters who werekept out of the universities by statute, and by studentswho had been to private academies. For nearly 100years the most important technological developmentsin this country were made quite independently ofthe universities and sometimes in the teeth of hostilityfrom both University and Church.

Attitude of the Ruling ClassesJane Austen's novels show how the ruling classes

despised and ignored the industrialists and merchantswhose efforts had produced the wealth upon whichthe whole country depended. Educated menapparently thought that inventive genius and tech-nological progress were bound to happen quitenaturally in England, and that it was right andproper that the gentry should profit by them andqualify themselves to do so by studying the literatureof ancient Rome. " In England," wrote Babbageabout 1830, " those who have hitherto pursuedscience have had no very reasonable ground for com-plaint, for they should have realised that there wasno demand for it, and that it led to little honour,and less profit. It is lamentable that a country,eminently distinguished for its mechanical and manu-facturing ingenuity, should be indifferent to the pro-gress of inquiries which form the highest departmentsof that knowledge on whose more elementary truthsits wealth and rank depend."

The industrial north was then in an intellectualferment; skill and productivity in manufacture in-creased faster than they had ever increased before inthe history of the world. In less than a century anarea about 50 miles in radius centred on Manchesterbecame the workshop of the world, but the officialeducational system of the country remained sunk incomplete stagnation or devoted itself to those sophisti-cated intellectual' exercises which produced theOxford Movement*.

In 1824 half a dozen Manchester business men

* " A knowledge of education is the common property ofcivilised Europeans with the exception of the SouthernEnglish, and the English Governing Class "—

Sir William Mather.

founded the Mechanics' Institute from which ourCollege has grown ; 30 years later John Owenfounded the University of Manchester in RichardCobden's house in Quay Street.

But what has been happening abroad in the18th and 19th centuries ? Other countrieswere envious of the prosperity the IndustrialRevolution brought to us, and were determined toovertake us. They had already improved the qualityof instruction in their universities and schools; thesewere to be the instruments of enlightenment.Germany took the lead in introducing science intoher universities ; our own King George II foundedthe University of Gottingen in 1734 and from thefirst it had a flourishing Faculty of Science. Severalother modern universities were founded at about thesame time in other parts of Germany.

Although the Continental universities acceptedscience readily enough, many of them were unwillingto teach technology. Continental governments refusedto be influenced by academic prejudices against thesubject and so they founded a series of specialinstitutions to perform the vital functions for whichthe universities had refused to make themselvesresponsible.

Technological institutions were founded inBrunswick in 1745, in Freiberg in 1756 and inClausthal in 1775 ; these were really superior "craftschools;:, and the first technological institution ofuniversity rank was the Ecole Polytechnique. whichthe National Convention had to establish in Paris in1794 because the French universities were devotingthemselves at that time exclusively to library andabstract studies. Ever since then " Poly technicians "have dominated French industry and much of thecivil service.

The Technische Hochschule in Berlin was foundedin 1799 ; the School of Structural and CivilEngineering, which was the first part to open, under-took the practical and theoretical training ofsurveyors and engineers. The curriculum taughtthere in 1800 includes many subjects that are studiedin a modern school of civil engineering. Some of theleading engineers in Germany were appointed to thestaff of the College, for the authorities knew thatunless they had adequate scientific knowledge thestudents of the Hochschule would not be engineersat all, but only craftsmen ; moreover, the PrussianGovernment founded a Trade School of Crafts andProfessions in 1821, so that the Hochschule couldconcentrate entirely on advanced work. Nevertheless,the University of Berlin would not admit engineeringto its curriculum because the other faculties con-sidered that it was "non-scientific". In 1875 theHochschule was granted a Charter and it thenamalgamated with the old " trade school", whichhad ceased to concern itself with elementary work.This great institution achieved complete equality withthe other German universities before the end of thecentury. In 1930 it had 4,500 students and therewere then more than 22,000 full-time students in theother Technische Hochschulen in Germany. Therewere about 4,500 university students of technology inthis country in 1930.

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Technical UniversitiesMuch confusion and some difficulty have been

caused in England by the popular misconception thatthe Technische Hochschulen' can be described as"Technical High Schools". They are in fact, aswe shall see. Technological Universities of a typewhich does not exist in this country. In Americathey are usually called " Institutes of Technology ".The distinction between a " Hochschule" and a" Universiteit" has nothing to do with technology assuch — there are Hochschulen for agriculture andeconomics, for example. The institutions have thesame intellectual standards and may be the same size.A "Hochschule" has less than four Faculties, a" Universiteit" must have four or more.

When the Great Exhibition of 1851 showed thiscountry what foreign industry could do, we had torealise that we no longer had a virtual monopoly ofskill in manufacture, although the superior abilityof our engineers and craftsmen was still complacentlytaken for granted ; many of our industrialists learnedfor the first time that they would have to meet strongcompetition from abroad. German and Americanengineers were available in large numbers and it wasplain that " no further triumphs awaited mere vigourundirected by knowledge ".

Introduction of ReformsThe University Commission of 1850 began the very

necessary reforms of our educational system. Oxfordand Cambridge were slowly recovering from theintellectual ebb of the previous century ; less than400 students matriculated in either University thatyear and the only other university education to befound in England was in the two Colleges in Londonand one in Durham. Mathematics in Cambridge wastriumphantly resurgent, but it was not until 1861 thatundergraduates were able to take the National ScienceTripos, and the University had no laboratory for theexperimental study of physical science until theCavendish Laboratory was opened in 1874 by JamesClerk Maxwell *.

The anxiety of our industrialists and the enterpriseof the Prince Consort led to the suggestion that anIndustrial University should be founded in thiscountry ; the profits of the Great Exhibition wereused to buy those estates in Kensington where theImperial College now stands. The Trustees wererequired " to increase the means of industrial educa-tion, and to extend the influence of science and artupon productive industry ".

Nevertheless, despite all that the Prince and theCommission could do, other countries were still pro-gressing much faster than we were.

There were six Universities in Holland, most ofwhich had Faculties of Science, but the University ofAmsterdam refused to teach Engineering or even toadmit that it was a subject which could properly betaught at university level elsewhere, so the Govern-

* Members of Senate maintained that because manyuniversity lecturers were ordained clergy of the Churchof England, it would be impious of undergraduates todemand experimental verification of the theory theylearnt in their classes.

ment of the Netherlands founded a TechnischeHochschule in 1870 in Delft to provide courses inscience and technology. The institution achieved"university status" in 1905, and it received a newRoyal Charter in August, 1956. There are now morethan 5,000 students in Delft, but despite a magnificentbuilding programme which has been undertaken sincethe end of the war, it is so overcrowded that anotherTechnische Hochschule is to be established in Eind-hoven next year, in order to help to educate about11,000,000 Dutchmen.

The Technische Hochschule in Zurich was foundedin 1855. It now has 2,700 undergraduates ; aboutas many, as the Imperial College, London, ManchesterCollege of Science and Technology and the RoyalTechnical College, Glasgow, put together. Thepopulation of Switzerland is only 5,000,000 — aboutas many people live within 25 miles of Manchester,yet there are half a dozen universities in Switzerland,most of them have flourishing faculties of science ;the great school in Zurich concerns itself with bothscience and technology1. The skill of their engineershas enabled the Swiss to achieve a standard of livingwhich is second to none in Europe.

The early American settlers attached greatimportance to university education. At the beginningof the American War of Independence there werenine universities in the States ; we then had two, andwe had to wait for an American to found the RoyalInstitution " to facilitate the general introduction ofuseful mechanical inventions and improvements andteach the applications of science to the commonpurposes of life ". The Federal American Govern-ment granted land to endow a university in eachstate and expected in return that these institutionswould play their proper part in the development ofthe techniques upon which the prosperity of thecountry depended. Most American universities (asdistinct from their Liberal Arts Colleges) haveengineering schools. Nevertheless the Americans wereinfluenced by developments in Europe and theyestablished several special institutes of technology, ofwhich the most famous was founded in 1861 byBarton Rogers in Cambridge, Massachusetts2. Therewere 1,200 students there by the turn of the century.In 1951 M.I.T. had 3,000 undergraduates and 2,000postgraduate students. In the same year (1951) only270 postgraduate degrees were awarded in the wholeof England in all branches of technology.The Most Serious Struggle

The lessons of the 1851 Exhibition were drivenhome yet again at the Great Exhibition in Paris in1867 ; the English exhibits were described as" slovenly intruded heaps of raw materials mingledwith pieces of rusty iron ". Many Englishmen thenbegan to be seriously alarmed and in 1878 ThomasHenry Huxley wrote " We are entering now uponthe most serious struggle for existence to which thiscountry was ever committed. The latter years of the1 Einstein was a lecturer in Physics in Zurich when he

announced his Theory of Relativity.2 Rogers knew and admired the Mechanics Institute in

Manchester ; he called his new foundation MassachusettsInstitute of Technology.

78

century promise to see us in industrial war of farmore serious import than the military wars of itsopening years. To those of us who remember thecotton famine and reflect how much more serious acustomer famine could be, the situation appears grave."

There were then 25,000 university students inGermany ; we had only a fifth as many. Sevemlmore Hochschulen were founded in the '70's andeducated Germans reached China in large numbers.Liebig remarked that " Everywhere but in Englandit is regarded as necessary to incorporate science intouniversity courses." The German Government sub-sidised research in the Hochschulen, in universitiesand in industry ; long before the end of the 19thcentury the Germans led the world both in chemistryand in the manufacture of precision optical equip-ment, despite the fact that aniline dyes werediscovered in England in the '50's, and John Dollandhad made achromatic telescopes for the Duke ofWellington. The manufacture of organic dyes in thiscountry was a flourishing industry for a few decades,but it declined and almost disappeared because Britishscientists and technologists showed no interest eitherin the technology of dyestuffs or in teaching andresearch in organic chemistry.* Huxley was familiarwith the first of that melancholy series of scientificideas which originated in this country and werebrought to fruition abroad.

An Unsuccessful AttemptTo remedy this deplorable situation, John Scott

Russell tried unsuccessfully in the '70's to persuadeMr. Gladstone to found a National University forIndustrial and Scientific Training. Russell himselfwas an outstanding example of the academic turnedengineer. He was Professor of Physics at 24 ; hethen became an ironmaster and built the GreatEaster7i. He had graduated in Scotland — in thosedays the Scottish Universities were far more enter-prising than ours. Mr. Gladstone once declared thatpoverty was no concern of the House of Commons,so he could not have been expected to understandand sympathise with demands for expensive newfacilities for technological education. Mr. Gladstonedid nothing, and the prebendary of Durham obviouslyspoke for many of his countrymen when he remarkedcomplacently that " the advantages of a classicaleducation are two-fold ; it enables us to look withcontempt upon those who have not shared its advan-tages, and it fits us for places of emolument, both inthis world and in the next".

At the end of the 19th century an Englishironmaster complained to Andrew Carnegie, " It isnot your wonderful machinery, nor your unequalledsupply of raw materials that we have cause to envy;it is something worth both of them combined, theclass of young scientific experts who manage everydepartment of your works. We have no such classin England." We then had fewer universities in pro-portion to our population than any other civilisedcountry except Turkey ;f once again it was proposed

* The first Chair in Organic Chemistry was founded inManchester in 1874.

f This astonishing fact was pointed out by Ramsay Muirin 1901.

that an enormous technological institution should befounded to train engineers. John Stuart Mill suggestedthat the Church of England should be converted intoa great Mechanics' Institute, and Lord Haldaneurgently counselled his countrymen to follow the ex-ample of their competitors — particularly the Ameri-cans and the Germans — before it was too late. Hehad been greatly impressed by the achievements of theHochschulen. " He would be a pedant," he wrote," who thought that education alone could determinethe commercial position of a nation. Yet more thanever, as science tends increasingly to reduce nature tosubjection, education becomes important. . . Courage,energy, enterprise, are in these modern days of littlemore avail against the weapons which science canput in the hands of our rivals in commerce than wasthe splendid fighting of the Dervishes against theshrapnel and maxims at Omdurman . . . Throughoutthe industrial world of Germany one finds scienceapplied to practical undertakings by men who havelearned it in the universities and Hochschulen . . .We are rapidly being left behind . . . The double aimof the German university system is pure culture on theone hand, and on the other the application of thehighest knowledge to commercial enterprise."

The outbreak of the First World War showed allthe allied nations how dependent we had becomeupon Germany for many of the most important pro-ducts of scientific manufacture; a note of alarm wassounded in this country, but nothing could be doneat the time. Immediately after the War, the univer-sity population of Great Britain went up from about203000 to 36,000; it remained approximately constantfor the next 20 years. After the last War theshortage of scientists and technologists led the BarlowCommittee to suggest that the number of graduatesin these subjects should be doubled, and that in orderto preserve the balance of the universities, all otherfaculties should increase correspondingly. Our univer-sity population is now about twice as big as it wasbefore the war, but it is only too clear that we arestill desperately short of scientists and technologists.

No technological institution of university rank,comparable in size to the great European Hochschu-len, has been developed in this country, but engineer-ing schools have grown up in all our universities.This practice was deliberately rejected on theContinent, for the Continental universities themselvesdisliked the idea, and the authorities felt that theacademic traditions of the universities might inhibitprogress and prevent the free and proper develop-ment of these modern and " practical" subjects.*In Oxford University, for example, there are 14

* The possibility of combining M.I.T. and Harvard wasstill being discussed 50 years ago (they are only a mileor two apart). The constitution which was then proposedfor the amalgamated institution seems to have been inmany ways similar to that which governs our own associa-tion with Manchester University. It is interesting tospeculate on the possible development of this greatInstitution had this change been made. Harvard is like anEnglish University in that it has a flourishing engineeringschool, but we have nothing in England like the HarvardBusiness School, nor have we anything to compare withM.I.T.

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Harvard Graduate School of BusinessAdministration — The Baker Library.

Harvard Graduate School of BusinessAdministration — The Faeulty Club.

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Environs of Manchester College of Scienceand Technology.

Professors of History, 12 Professors of Science,11 Professors of Classics and one Professor ofEngineering. In Cambridge there are six Professorsof Classics, eight Professors of History, nine Professorsof Physics and Chemistry and five Professors ofEngineering. The first Professors of Electrical Engin-eering and Chemical Engineering were not appointeduntil after the last War. Manchester University, al-ways enterprising, appointed its first Professor ofEngineering in 1868. There are now three Professorsof Engineering among the 18 Professors in theFaculty of Science. There are 23 Professorsin the Faculty of Arts. Two years ago there were fourProfessors in the Faculty of Technology in this Col-lege ; we now have 10. In 1955 there were 65ordinary Professors in the Technische Hochschule inAachen and eighty in Delft.

Enlargement of Existing CollegesThe Government has been urged (particularly by

Lord Cherwell) to found a completely new Instituteof Technology, and a site near Ascot was once desig-nated for its development. After prolonged debateand discussion it was decided to enlarge three existingColleges of Technology—Imperial College, London,this College in Manchester, and the Royal TechnicalCollege, Glasgow. Each of these institutions is quitesmall by Continental standards, and each is veryclosely associated with a university. The Governmenthas also announced its intention of spending about£70,000,000 within the next five years on the expan-sion of technical education throughout Great Britain—Lord Hives is presiding over a National Council fortechnological awards; eight technical colleges, one ofwhich is the Royal Technical College, Salford, have

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been designated colleges of advanced technology, andthey are to prepare their students for a new award—the Diploma in Technology, which will be of thestandard of a university degree.

Seventy million pounds may seem to be an enor-mous sum of money, but let us try and get it intoperspective. It is about twice as much as the annualbudget of the U.G.C. from which the whole of ouruniversity system has to be financed. We spendnearly four times as much in advertising every yearand at least 12 times as much on liquor. The Govern-ment is in fact proposing to spend the equivalent of30/- a head of the population in five years on tech-nological education. This sum of money would buy30 cigarettes a year for every man, woman and childin the country. Is it likely to be adequate to makeup for the neglect of half a century and put us in aposition to compete with confidence with otherindustrial countries?

Our position is now very much worse than that ofeither America or Russia or even Western Germany,which has developed both education and industryin a quite extraordinary way since the end of the War.in the winter of 1946 students in the Hochschule inAachen were sitting on planks in unheated rooms inbroken, ill-equipped buildings, but nevertheless theywere earnestly and enthusiastically pursuing theirstudies. Before the war Aachen was one of the smallest

TABLE SHOWING NUMBER OF FIRST DEGREES (BACHELORSDEGREES IN SOME COUNTRIES, DIPLOMAS IN OTHERS)AWARDED IN " PURE SCIENCE " AND TECHNOLOGY IN 1954

Country

U.S.S.R ...U.S.A.West GermanyFranceU.K.Italy-Switzerland

Pure Science

Totalfirst

degrees

12,00023,5003,4501,7605,2002,436

215

No. permillion

population

561446741

1055144

Technology

Totalfirst

degrees

60,00022,5004,4502,9882,8002,200

399

No. permillion

population

2801378670574582

The standards of these degrees are all about the same,although it is difficult to compare them in detail. ManyEuropean technologists—perhaps the majority, are M.Sc,rather than B.Sc, by our standards. The figures do notinclude such qualifications as Higher National Certificates.Large numbers of candidates take such diplomas every yearin England, in Germany, in Holland and in Russia, but notso many do so in America. If we make allowances for themour position relative to some other countries is slightlyimproved. There were about 240 fewer graduates intechnology in England in 1954 than there had been in 1950.

of the Hochschulen and had between 800 and 1,000students. After the war Gharlottenburg was in-accessible, so it was decided to enlarge the school inAachen, which has now been rebuilt and expanded toaccommodate more than 6,000 students. Let us re-peat it, in the last ten years the Germans have built

an almost entirely new Technological University com-parable in size to the University of Cambridge, whichis devoted entirely to the education of scientists andtechnologists. There are no colleges, of course, andthere is only one small hall of residence for about300 students; the buildings are not all finished yet orcompletely equipped, but lecture rooms and labora-tories have been built and 6,000 students are usingthem. The Government of Westphalia made thenecessary funds available, for they knew that theirwhole economy depended on their engineers.

TABLE SHOWING POST GRADUATE DEGREES IN SCIENCEAND TECHNOLOGY IN 1954 (PH.D. IN ENGLAND AND

AMERICA, " GANDIDAT " IN RUSSIA).

U.S.S.R.

U.S.A.

U.K.

4,500

3,500

900

There are now eight Hochschulen in Western Ger-many, with a student population of about 30,000.The country was almost bankrupt in 1946 and itsindustry was in ruins. To-day Western Germanyholds dollar reserves greater than those of the whoiesterling block. German exports increased by 18 percent, between 1954 and 1956, ours increased by only7 per cent. Why?

Sir John Mountford, speaking to the Court ofLiverpool University in 1955, said "The one thingof which we have been starved has been the pro-vision of buildings in which to carry out our work.Our experience has been one of continuous dis-appointment and frustration; within the foreseeablefuture, unless drastic action is taken now, the situationfor the universities will become unmanageable andfrom a national point of view quite disastrous."

American productivity and the American standardof living are the envy of the world. The Americansare spending what to us seem to be almost incrediblesums of money on university education; in someStates more than half the young people go to college.In the whole of the United States there are about18 undergraduates per 1,000 of the popula-tion—we have only two. In Russia there are eight;there are four in Scotland and six in Australia.Despite all that the Americans have been able to do,they estimate that their industry desperately needed40,000 fully trained engineers last year, but only22,500 graduated. The shortage is an acute handicapto the development of private industry, but it hasbecome a matter of vital importance to the verysurvival of the country because of its impact onmilitary research.

82

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Graduates per year in all scientific fields, includingMedicine, in the United States, Soviet Union and

Great Britain.

The Americans are now becoming extremelyanxious about their failure to match the recentprogress of the Russians. In April 1956 PresidentEisenhower established a National Committee for theDevelopment of Scientists and Engineers; he in-structed it to " foster the development of more highlyqualified technological manpower". It has beenfound that 60 per cent, of the best qualified studentsin secondary schools do not go to advanced institu-tions and half of those who go do not get a degree;only a small percentage obtain a Doctorate. More-over, although 12 per cent, of all College studentsstudied Engineering in 1950, less than nine per cent,did so last year. Twenty years ago 10 per cent, ofAmerican undergraduates read Science; last year lessthan six per cent, did so. If the present trend contin-ues for a few more years, the Americans will be doinglittle better than we are now. All this is true,although for at least 20 years the Americans havesent nearly nine times as many of their young peopleto the universities as we do in this country.

This unexpected and catastrophic decline in thenumber of American engineers should be a warningto us in this country. It seems to have occurred,despite the magnificence of the American universities,because of the shortcomings of American schools.Science masters in American schools are grosslyunderpaid : they can easily double or treble theirsalaries by working in industry, and most well quali-fied science masters left the teaching profession yearsago. Despite the glamour and publicity with whichscience and technology are surrounded in America,it has become clear that schoolboys who are nevertaught science and mathematics properly at schoolare unlikely to become scientists or engineers, andonly four-and-a-half per cent, of American HighSchool students studied physics last year. Moreover,the Americans have discovered that a salary scalethat treats all their schoolmasters alike, however wellor however badly qualified they may be, is boundsooner or later to drive the best schoolmasters fromthe profession, leaving it manned entirely by its leastuseful members. This result would not have sur-

prised Thomas Gresham, who announced 300 yearsago that if two kinds of money are simultaneously incirculation, one of which is good and one of whichis debased, " the bad money drives out the good ".

The table* below shows the number of reasonablywell qualified men who are teaching arts on the onehand and science on the other in 66 secondary schoolsin this neighbourhood, tabulated as a function ofthe age of the teachers.

TABLE SHOWING NUMBERS OF ARTS GRADUATES ANDSCIENCE GRADUATES TEACHING IN 66 GRAMMAR

SCHOOLS IN THE NORTH-WEST OF ENGLAND

Year of Birthof Graduate

Before 1900 ...

1900-1910 ...

1910 1920 ...

After 1920 ..

ArtsGraduates

1st and2nd

ClassHons.

50

124

195

244

Total

117

189

256

333

ScienceGraduates

1st and2nd

ClassHons.

36

82

85

62

Total

82

145

151

160

Science asPercentage of

Arts

1st and2nd

ClassHons.

72

66

43

25

Total

70

77

60

48

Three-quarters of the ablest young schoolmastersare non-scientists. They must inevitably persuadehundreds of their pupils to follow in their footsteps,although many of them might do well in science ifthey had a chance. The situation is likely to getrapidly worse.

Each Girls' Grammar School in England is nowable (on average) to recruit one good honours grad-uate physics mistress once every 100 years ; wehave never had many women technologists in thiscountry.

A comparison between the salaries that can beearned by English science graduates in industry andtho.ce that their contemporaries command as school-masters shows at least one reason why science mastershave become so scarce in England. By the time he is40 a science graduate in industry or the scientificbranch of the Civil Service can expect to earn at least50 per cent, more and probably twice as much ashe would have earned as a schoolmaster. Goodscience masters are a dying race in England; thespecies is almost extinct in America, though itflourishes in Germany where grammar-school masterscommand adequate salaries; moreover, their profes-sion is still admired and respected by the public.

This is not the place to discuss the shortcomingsof our secondary schools or the inadequacy of theirbuildings; more than half of them have no properlaboratories for their sixth forms, most of them areoverfull and have no hope of additional buildingsfor several years to come.

* Egner and Young, The Staffing of Grammar Schools—Liverpool, 1954.

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Manchester College of Science andTechnology. Plan of development areas.

A Deeply Rooted ProblemThe whole problem is very deeply rooted in our

educational system. Many a child who has beentaught arithmetic badly at school is frightened ofscience for the rest of his life. There is a shortageof mathematics and science teachers in our primaryschools, yet the average women teachers' trainingcollege devotes nearly ten times as long to the studyof arts and crafts as it does to mathematics and nearlythree-quarters of the colleges have no " education "lecturer who is qualified in this vitally importantsubject. A survey* has recently shown that about50 times as much effort in all training collegesgoes to arts and crafts as is devoted to physics orchemistry; and this at a time when our whole nationaleconomy depends entirely upon applied science andtechnology.

We may well ask ourselves if the Government'splans for increasing our national output of technolo-gists are realistic unless something is done to helpthe schools. Before the war the teaching of sciencein the sixth forms of English schools was probably thebest in the world. Shall we have to watch this greatnational asset being cast away? Nothing but thesuperb specialised education in science and mathe-matics that has been traditional in our schools has

* The Supply of Mathematics and Science Teachers—Methuen, 1956.

made it possible for our graduates—who have threeyears at a university — to compete with their Con-tinental contemporaries, who usually have five or evensix years university training. We should find appallingdifficulty in introducing the Continental universitysystem here, but we may have to do so if our schoolscan no longer maintain their standards in their sixthforms.

The expansion of technological education in Russiahas been extraordinarily rapid. The Russians copiedthe example of the Germans a hundred years beforethem, and based their whole industrial expansionupon an enormously expanded educational pro-gramme, but they have bettered their masters. Forexample, the Baumann Institute in Moscow wasfounded as a trade school in 1830, when it was verymuch like this College had been in 1824. By 1924it had grown so much that it was necessary to makeit into a " Monotechnic", which specialised in theeducation of mechanical engineers. In 1934, 450students graduated there and the Institute has grownrapidly ever since. It now houses a staff of 750 andthere are 10,500 students who are taking courses ofstudy which involve about 5,000 hours of instructionspread over five-and-a-half years. (Most Englishundergraduates have about 2,500/3,000 hours of in-struction in three years.)

There are 30 other engineering schools in Moscowwhich accommodate altogether nearly 150,000

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students, about one-third of whom are women. TheRussians are certainly producing far more technolo-gists than the whole of the Western World puttogether.

In their anxiety to increase the number of engineersthe Russians have not neglected the pure sciences.Moscow University now has 24,000 students (of whom16,000 are taking internal degrees and 8,000 externaldegrees); 65 per cent, of these students are takingdegrees in science and 35 per cent, in the humanities.Six thousand students live in hostels.

The Russian students spend about eight months inindustry and they write a thesis during the last sixmonths of their course. The standard they achieveseems to be very good; they are not as well preparedas ours when first they reach the university, but be-fore they complete their course they have a goodgeneral education and ample time for specialisation.

The reconstruction of the University of Moscowmust have cost more than the British Treasury hasspent on the expansion of all our universities since theWar. It stands in the very heart of the city on a300-acre site that was ruthlessly cleared only fiveyears ago. But this is not the end of the buildingprogramme in Moscow, nor is Moscow the onlyRussian university that is growing rapidly; Leningradhas an enormous university, and the University ofTiflis in Georgia has been expanded to accommodate16,000 students of science and engineering. Allstudents have a maintenance grant that is independ-ent of the income of the parents. No student ofscience and engineering has to do military service.One-third of all graduate scientists become teachers—the profession is sufficiently well paid to make itattractive to them. The whole of Russia's educationalsystem is based on science and technology as firmlyas the English system was based on the classics 70years ago. It was once almost inevitable that a cleverboy in a good English school would study classics;clever boys in Russia to-day almost as inevitably doscience. Most intelligent children (both boys andgirls) can successfully learn any subject which isproperly taught to them in school.

Need of DevelopmentRussian industry has developed at a speed that is

without precedent in history and it is undoubtedlythe entry of so many well qualified men and womeninto the industry that made it possible for it to growso fast. They had to make industrial workers outof an illiterate peasantry in a hurry, and they didso by giving them a formal education. The result isthat they have, for example, a dozen times as manymetallurgists as we have for every ton of steel theymake. Our steel is as good as theirs and as well made,but their output of steel increased by 60 per cent.during the last five years. We expect to double ouroutput in 20 years; after the end of the War theRussians doubled theirs in seven years. They alreadymake more than twice as much steel as we do andthere is no doubt that an industry manned by grad-uates will be more versatile and more receptive ofnew ideas than one like our own, in which most ofthe operatives have come up " the hard way" and

learnt their trade on the shop floor, though theseare the men on whom British industry relies to-dayas it has done for a hundred years.

The Russians will in future be able to supplyqualified technologists to all those countries in Africa,South America and Asia that are trying to developtheir own industries. These men are the missionariesof our modern age; they will have enormous influenceon those many countries now watching the cold warbetween Communism and the Western countries withgreat interest but with some measure of detachment.How are we to compete?

Extent of Russian InfluenceThere is no doubt that if we allow ourselves to be

out-distanced technologically by Russia and if therest of the world discovers that we can now give less.than Russia can, then the rest of the world will tendmore and more to fall under Russian influence. Ourown culture may be forgotten after it has beenswamped by Soviet technology. The fate of thewhole world may be determined in the end by placeslike the Baumann Institute and not by hydrogenbombs. The effect of inadequately trained staff onan industry is insidious and most difficult to assess.No one can possibly say what a firm might haveachieved had it recruited more technologists in thepast. British industry is finding more and moiedifficulty in competing in the world. We may yetlose our markets one by one. We may end with awhimper and not with a bang. Though if our youngpeople have a chance to show what they can do, thiscountry may prosper as never before.

Which are the first things that should come first?When Mr. Malenkov visited this country he saw somemodern English housing estates; he expressed hisamazement—there is nothing like them in Russia;the Russian housing programme is miserably inade-quate as compared with our own, but Malenkov re-marked that inadequate though Russian housing maybe, he proposed to cut the housing programme stillfurther in order to spend more on education.

We may well ask ourselves how British industryhas survived at all in view of the fact that the univer-sities have failed to provide it with enough recruits.It is not surprising that some of our industries arebackward, but it must appear to be almost a miraclethat they are left to us and that some of them arethriving. We sell aeroplanes to America and we stillhold all the world's speed records on land, sea andair. How have we done it ?

Before we congratulate ourselves too warmly on ourmysterious gift for survival in spite of all the prob-abilities, let us recall the fact that we had manyyears' start over any other country in our develop-ment as an industrial power. Throughout the wholeof the last century we were easily pre-eminent, butour principal competitors are passing us one by one.The disaster that threatened our industry if we failedto educate more technologists was foretold in a greatmeeting in this College in 1912; the inadequacy ofour educational system has become more and moreobvious ever since.

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If the industrial revolution was made in this coun-try by seJf-taught men, and by men who had beenkept out of the universities by the Test Acts, it isequally true to say that much of British industry isrun today by men who have never been near auniversity. They may have been kept out by poverty,by apathy, by tradition, by their strongly developedand instinctive preference for a practical training, orby their failure to satisfy the requirements of theJoint Matriculation Board. The many forms of train-ing which they may have received are described indetail in Dr. Venables' comprehensive treatise ontechnical education. The system as a whole has longbeen the despair of academicians, one wonders if wehave a system at all; is it not rather chaos, roughlyorganised ?

In this part of England, there is a long-establishedtradition that a man who wishes to succeed in some

"industries can best qualify himself by leaving schoolat about 16 and spending some years "goingthrough the works" while he learns his theory atnight school.

Fifty years ago a distinguished visitor to this Col-lege told us that " Excepting only the private board-ing schools, which we know as Public schools, thereis no department of English Education in which suchconspicuous success has been achieved as in theTechnical Evening Classes."

Many of the leaders of local industry were educatedin evening classes in this great College and othersimilar institutions throughout the country, " whoseneglect by the authorities," said Lord Eustace Percy," is surely one of the worst examples of waste in alleducational history ". However strongly we may feelthat this practice has been made obsolete by the marchof time and by the progress of science, we have toaccept the fact that it will be with us for many yearsto come.

Any observer of the industrial scene of Manchestermust be struck by the enormous variation betweenthe scientific and technological standards that havebeen achieved by different local industries. Chemistryand electrical engineering, for example, have alwaysbeen based on a rapidly developing scientific back-ground, whereas textiles, paper making, printing andbuilding, which are just as important, have developedfrom traditions hundreds of years old, and the skilland traditions of their craftsmen are still all-important.

Meeting the Needs of IndustryAn educational system that provided recruits for

one industry might be quite inappropriate for another.All industries need more skilled men, but whereassome of them could take all the Ph.D's. we couldprovide, others can make use of very few universitygraduates. I believe we should educate the mosthighly qualified recruits that each important industryneeds.

The Barlow Committee reported in 1946 thatfour-fifths of the young people in this country whohave sufficient intellectual ability to take a degreenever come to the universities. We do not wish to" invest a ten-thousand-dollar education in everyten-cent child" any more than the Americans do,

but only one-third of our children continue theirfull-time education beyond the age of 15; only10 per cent, stay on at school after their17th birthday. Four per cent, of our 20-year-olds are at the University, and 14 per cent, ofthe rest take part-time courses of one kind or another.What a waste of human talent is concealed in thesefigures!

It is of course true that nothing is ever quite sopractical as a good theory, but many of our mostsuccessful engineers have been men whose wholeexperience has taught them to question the value ofthe academic approach. They always speak of book-work as " mere" bookwork, and they regard thewords " academic ", " theoretical" and " impractical"as synonymous. One can appreciate and sympathisewith this point of view, for there is much evidenceto justify it. The industrial north still remembersthe traditions of the last century, and often pridesitself on its ability to develop and even to flourishwithout any help from the theories of the univer-sities. Industry has always had at least as much tocontribute to the universities as the universities haveto industry. The history of all educational systemssuggests that there is an all too common tendencyon the part of academicians to divorce their teach-ings and their studies from the harsher realities of life.Despite the extraordinary successes of Greek science,it failed to develop as it might have done becauseof the complete lack of contact between the theoryof the schools and the practice of the craftsmen whowere ignored, misunderstood and despised by thescholars. Because neither scholars nor craftsmencould advance alone, both science and technologystagnated for nearly 1,000 years.

Any scholar who claims that his work is basedupon an understanding of what he himself has de-cided are eternal verities, must find it humiliating inthe extreme that a conclusion which may have beenarrived at by processes of impeccable logic based uponquite plausible postulates, may be shown up as afarrago of nonsense by a direct experimental test ofits consequences. If he refuses to concern himselfwith problems which admit of this acid test, thescholar may happily devote himself to mental exer-cises of extreme beauty, great sophistication, and ofno practical use whatsoever. It is precisely this possi-bility which has coloured our educational system for200 years or more ; unless we are sufficiently en-lightened to make good in a few years the neglect of acentury, it may even yet bring us down in economicruin. For this deplorable divorce between theory andpractice the universities must accept most of theblame. It was a don who propounded the doctrinethat there are two types of mathematics — " funda-mental work " which is of no use to anyone, and" trivial mathematics" which may have greateconomic importance. Neither he nor his colleaguesever had the slightest doubt that it would be almostreprehensible for a man to devote himself to mathe-matics which might have major economic significance.

It is undoubtedly true to say, as Sir J. J. Thomsononce remarked, that " If applied science makes im-provements, pure science makes revolutions", but

86

pure science by itself is not enough, and an under-emphasis of the difficulty and importance of itsapplication can be and has been dangerous. Thesame academic tradition which made our universitiesunwilling to accept science has made our scientistsfail to appreciate the importance of applied scienceand technology—and underestimate the significanceof what industry calls "development work". Theglamour of research in pure science has obscured thefact that until the technologist has made his contribu-tion, the discoveries of the pure scientists may haveno economic significance whatever. The admini-strators who realised this more than 100 years ago andestablished great technological institutions in Europeand America built better than they knew.

Unfortunately, in England very few scientists havebeen as enlightened as Lord Kelvin, who, throughoutthe whole of his long life taught that pure scienceand technology flourish best in close collaboration.He saw on the one hand that the study of technologythrows up many problems which should exercise andinstruct scientists and, on the other hand, that theproblems of the technologist can often be solved onlyby the help of pure science. Kelvin knew, for example,that Watt would never have invented the steamengine had it not been for the help that he receivedfrom Professor Black. The reciprocating engine whichpowered the industrial revolution was developedalmost entirely by self-educated engineers. For manyyears the science of thermodynamics owed more tothe steam engine than the steam engine owed tothermodynamics. No fundamental development inthe principles of steam engines was introduced untila Cambridge mathematician named Charles Parsonsinvented the steam turbine. The early work ofParsons had to be supplemented by an immenseamo""* of expensive time-consuming developmentwork before his engine had any practical application.*It is in the very best English tradition that the gasturbine and the jet aero engines were invented byhalf a dozen young men (directed by Sir FrankWhittle). All the members of this team had first-classdegrees in Engineering. The subsequent developmentof the engine has been in the hands of the greatengineering firms, but (and this is a point which mustbe emphasised) the gas turbine was invented by asmall team and has since been developed by largeteams of engineers all over the world. The work ofall these men has been equally necessary to its success.

The First Nuclear FissionThe pioneering work which led to the first nuclear

fission was done in England, France, Germany andAmerica — the very first artificially induced nuclearreaction was achieved by Rutherford in Manchesterabout 35 years ago. I doubt if there were more thana few hundred nuclear physicists in the world in 1939.Before the end of the War an entirely new industry

* Many fundamental measurements on the properties ofthe nozzles and blades in Parsons' turbines were made inthis College by Professor G. G. Stoney, F.R.S., whosubsequently became Research Director of the ParsonsCompany.

had been developed ; most of the technical problemswhich had to be solved were entirely novel, and theindustrial effort which had been required by theAtomic Energy Authority was comparable to thatwhich would be needed to rebuild the entire Americanrailway system. Why, therefore, should so manyacademicians believe the fundamental work to beall important and regard the development as . . ." mere development " ?

Where the Nation has FailedWhile our scientific workers have been concerned

with work which they felt would have great ultimatesignificance, we have failed as a nation to providefacilities whereby the results they have won could bemade to produce their proper impact on society.Although we can accept the truth of Thomson'saphorism, we must always remember that the costof the work which has to be done to develop ascientific discovery into something which can bemanufactured on a large scale is always many timesgreater — often hundreds of times greater — than thecost of the initial discovery upon which the workultimately depends. Moreover, the fundamental dis-covery can be made in any part of the world, but thedevelopment work must be done where the ultimateproduct is to be made and used. The pure scienceof this country has been of service both to thiscountry and to the world as a whole, and has broughtglory to the universities where it has been done.Nevertheless, the fact remains that we have had tobuy the goods which resulted from our own scientificwork from America, and we have had to pay for theright to use patented processes which were developedby the Americans from our scientific work.

We have always given due recognition to ourgreat men, but we have failed to realise that muchresearch depends at least as much upon man hoursand money as upon individual genius. Very few men,even the most eminent, are ever more than a fewyears ahead of their time. A Newton could be 100years in front of his contemporaries, but we cannotrely on a regular series of Newtons. In this countrywe have never understood the American technique ofsolving problems by " trampling them to death ".

It is most interesting to recall nowadays that al-though America has always endowed applied research,neither Government support nor private endowmentwas available in the United States for the promotionof pure research until late in the 19th century.Whereas in Europe almost all Governments supportedscience directly, Congress turned a deaf ear to allproposals for creating scientific institutions whichwere not content with limited utilitarian objectives.Washington's plan for a national university wasstrenuously opposed by the older universities. The firstconsiderable sum for the support of pure science inAmerica came from an Englishman, James Smithson,with whose bequest Congress created the SmithsonianInstitution.

At the end of the War, Dr. Vannevar Bush wascommissioned by President Roosevelt to make pro-posals for the development of American science andindustry. Bush remarked that for very many years

87

American industry had relied upon the scientific workwhich was done in Europe for the discoveries uponwhich the prosperity of the country ultimatelydepended. All the fundamental scientific work whichis done in the world is freely published and it isavailable to everyone; the Americans had not sufferedany material loss because they were not doing enoughbasic work for themselves:

" Our national pre-eminence in the fields of appliedresearch and technology should not blind us to thetruth that with respect to pure research — the dis-covery of fundamental new knowledge and basicscientific principles — America has occupied asecondary place. From Europe came the formulationof most of the laws governing the transformation ofenergy, the physical and chemical structure of matter,the behaviour of electricity, light and magnetism. Inrecent years the United States has made progress inthe field of pure science, but our efforts in the fieldof applied science have increased much faster, so thatthe proportion of pure to applied science continues todecrease."

Bush concluded that it was imperative that theamount of pure research which is done in Americashould be materially increased, in order that thestandard of living of the American people shouldcontinue to rise. He felt that a nation which borrowsits basic knowledge from others will be hopelesslyhandicapped in a race for innovation, and, moreover,that men who have been educated as pure scientistsoften develop into most valuable technologists. Thisis indeed a pragmatic assessment of science ; butshould we not accept it? Should we not conclude,moreover, from Bush's analysis that we need moreapplied science just as much as America needed morepure science in 1944 ?

For very many years trade and industry have notreceived in this country the regard that is their due.The business man and the engineer have always beenmore respected on the Continent and in Americathan they have been in England. Here it has usuallybeen assumed that the professions were in some waymore valuable to the community and that they offereda better career to a young man of high ideals. The

profit motive has been suspect and industry has beenaccused of blind materialism. Fortunately, thistradition has almost vanished and the public under-stands that many people can contribute more to thepublic well-being by working in industry than theycan in any other, way.* Almost everyone realisesnowadays that a man can expect a perfectly satis-factory career in industry (even if he is highly paid).It is essential that our industry should attract its fairshare of the best brains of the next generation ; itsrecruits must be adequately educated if they are tobe fitted for their life's work. They will have to leainScience or Technology — or Russian.

One can understand the idea of "Art for Art'sSake ". One can support " Science for the Sake ofTruth and Understanding", but we must haveTECHNOLOGY for the sake of survival.

* " The hope of commercial gain has done nearly as much forthe cause of truth as even the love of truth." — BOVEE.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The greater part of this material has been incorporated ina book called " The Future Development of the ManchesterCollege of Science and Technology", now published bythe College.

LIST OF REFERENCES

Armytage, Civic Universities.Alex Wood, Thomas Young—1954.H. McLachlan, English Education under the Test Acts.Goodlet, "Russia," Engineering — February, 1956.Willis Jackson, Education and Training of Russian Tech-

nologists, Journal Institution Electrical Engineers —February, 1956.

Bowden, Faster than Thought.The Manchester Guardian.Vannevar Bush, Frontiers of Science.Venables, Technical Education.Wellens, Education and Training in Industry.Graham Hutton, " We, too, can Prosper."Brindley, The Soul of Manchester.The Historical Register of the University of Cambridge to

the year 1910.Haldane, Education and Empire — 1902.

" THE CHALLENGE OF THE AGE "

(concluded from page 74)

researcher to the retailer, for the progress of the commodities that play so large apart in determining our standard of living. A chain is as strong as its weakest link,and in the future the sums spent on research and the skill devoted to the developmentof new products will not earn their full returns unless the markets for theseproducts can be quickly opened up and efficiently supplied. It would be misleadingif I gave the impression that solutions for all these problems are easy to find orimmediately successful in their application, but our experience has been that in thelong run clear thinking, careful planning and a constant search for newer andbetter methods are well rewarded.

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