Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/346

340 counts for something. There are scientific investigators who can not pursue their work if troubled by the question of ulterior applications; there are others no less truly scientific who simply can not work without the definiteness of aim that is given by a practical problem awaiting solution. There are Willanses as well as Regnaults; there are Whitworths as well as Poissons. The world needs both types of investigator; and it needs, too, yet another type of pioneer, namely, the man who, making no claim to original discovery, by patient application and intelligent skill turns to industrial fruitfulness the results already attained in abstract discovery.

There is, however, another aspect of the relation between pure and applied science, the significance of which has not been hitherto so much emphasized, but yet is none the less real—the reaction upon science and upon scientific discovery of the industrial applications. For while pure science breeds useful inventions, it is none the less true that the industrial development of useful inventions fosters the progress of pure science. No one who is conversant with the history, for example, of optics can doubt that the invention of the telescope and the desire to perfect it were the principal factors in the outburst of optical science which we associate with the names of Newton, Huygens and Euler. The practical application, which we know was in the minds of each of these men, must surely have been the impelling motive that caused them to concentrate on abstract optics their great and exceptional powers of thought. It was in the quest—the hopeless quest—of the philosophers' stone and the elixir of life that the foundations of the science of chemistry were laid. The invention of the art of photography has given immense assistance to sciences as widely apart as meteorology, ethnology, astronomy, zoology and spectroscopy. Of the laws of heat men were profoundly ignorant until the invention of the steam engine compelled scientific investigation; and the new science of thermodynamics was born. Had there been no industrial development of the steam engine, is it at all likely that the world would ever have been enriched with the scientific researches of Rankine, Joule, Regnault, Him or James Thomson? The magnet had been known for centuries, yet the study of it was utterly neglected until the application of it in the mariners' compass gave the incentive for research.

The history of electric telegraphy furnishes a very striking example of this reflex influence of industrial applications. The discovery of the electric current by Volta and the investigation of its properties appear to have been stimulated by the medical properties attributed in the preceding fifty years to electric discharges. But, once the current had been discovered, a new incentive arose in the dim possibility it suggested of transmitting signals to a distance. This was certainly a possibility, even when only the chemical effects of the current had yet been found out.