of marketing and eventually with not only shoe and groceries, but with other commodities.2

But, after all, the material that has so far been obtained and is so far being sought by the bureau is really modes, whether of specific figures or of general practice. The bureau's schedule for shoe retailers states that, apart from the figures desired, the object of the general questions is "to bring out the character, experience, policies, and tendencies" of each store. The mode of the practices of stores with the most efficient records would be the best practice. Furthermore, these modes are based on a unit of time of not less than six months, and frequently a year is a still sounder foundation. And although a standard so based can be applied before the results it is measuring are six months old, still a considerable lapse of time is necessary before fruitful comparison can be assured.

In other words, the bureau, like the advanced selling organizations, is still dealing with averages and types, although through its non-competitive confidential position it has access to a much greater variety of experience. This work is worth while; it can even be called scientific in the sense that it is constructing an organized body of knowledge, but it is by no means scientific to the degree of the scientific management of production.

How far can the scientific management of production be applied to marketing? In production, the great fundamental problem is to determine the proper task. The storing, the routing, the greater standardization, the time studies, the improved methods and processes all relate fundamentally to the task, and this task once determined can be definitely reckoned on as long as the conditions remain unchanged, and these conditions either do not change or if they do their change can be measured and allowed for.

Similarly, in marketing, tasks are beginning to be searched for and set, but a very much longer unit of time is necessary and the given conditions change, and the change and its effect is difficult to estimate. If the bureau were to pursue the methods of scientific management in exact analogy it would take complete charge of a shoe store, measure every dimension, keep careful records of stock

Further material of the Harvard Bureau of Business Research will be found in its own Bulletins 1-4, and some account of it has also appeared in the American Economic Review of December, 1913, and in Papers and Proceedings of the American Economic Association, March, 1915.

and sales, of salesmen and customers, correlate the selling more with buying, make the best selling stock most accessible to the fewest steps, take time studies of sales to various customers, and so on. As

a result it might redesign and relocate the store, and change its buying and selling methods. Much could be done; much could be learned. How much would that knowledge apply to another store, and how much to the same store a year later?

What specialization and standardization are possible in marketing? How far can the experience of one section be applied to the methods of another? How much of the marketing problem is human and how much of this human factor is determinable and measurable? Must marketing always have its practice guided by general data, averages, modes, proportions-mass phenomena? What reorganization is desirable and possible in the present system of marketing, or is a new system developing? These are absorbing questions. Society has permitted a large margin for marketing cost and now society is investigating to see how this margin is used. Here is a tremendous field for research. Its potentialities are hard to overestimate.

THE RELATION OF RESEARCH TO THE PROGRESS OF

MANUFACTURING INDUSTRIES

By W. R. WHITNEY,

Research Laboratory, General Electric Company, Schenectady, N. Y.

We humans can never quite appreciate the incredible applicability and utility of new facts of nature. We are repeatedly shown by our experience, but each new example only augments our stock of wonderment or bewilderment. A very few months ago a certain well-known scientific investigator (Lord Rayleigh) found a slight difference in the density of nitrogen taken from air and nitrogen derived from other sources. He felt obliged to know about this little difference. In coöperation with Sir William Ramsay, he discovered argon. This was present in the atmospheric nitrogen and had always escaped detection. It formed less than one per cent of the air. It was discovered to be entirely inert and chemically inactive. This was an apparent promise of great chemical uselessness. At that time it was also exceedingly difficult to separate it from the air, and except for its scientific interest, it seemed destined to be left inactive. Newly discovered methods of liquefying air and of combining nitrogen for fertilizer, as in the cyanamid process, have just made the argon available commercially. Other pure scientific research had shown the value of such a gas in incandescent lamps, and it is just at this time being used to produce the most efficient incandescent lamps of our knowledge. It was the recently discovered differences between this gas and other gases which made this lamp possible. When its existence and properties were known, its application was relatively simple and easy.

Our American people are quick to see the value of new things where value exists. They are given, in this era, to actively utilizing every scheme which means better health, greater safety, greater pleasures, greater profits, and greater economies. We can hardly conceive of a people devoting their lives to inactivity and idleness. To better living conditions, to improve and extend manufacturing industries, and to conserve resources is quite generally the life aim of our ablest men.

A nation or a race does not stand still. It either advances or falls behind its neighbors. Knowing more has been the means of every nation's advance.

Research is a convenient word which covers the pioneer work upon which advances are founded. It is significant that as life becomes more and more complex, it is ever less possible for advances to be made by accident or by the designs of an individual working for short periods on different subjects. The day of that inventor is past who discovers an animal carrying a new hide, who modifies the shoe machinery or devises a new button or buttonhole. Each of these and a thousand other such details are now the fertile fields in which groups of trained experts are at work. We want shoes badly and there are many of us. We want them to wear well, even to the enamel on the brass eyelets. The fact that we are collectively willing to pay hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars for some slight improvement in a shoe or additional economy in the manufacture, indicates not only that we are many, but that we want actively every possible improvement and economy.

A Benvenuto Cellini lived and left the impression that he did all the work of an army of artists, inventors, soldiers, politicians, murderers, and I may as well add-biographers. Besides his autobiography, he wrote books on the goldsmith art, sculpture and bronze, foundry practice, architecture, and poetry. There are none extant like him.

A Franklin wrote equally advanced discourses on electricity, on coal stoves, on the recently united states of America which he represented, on economy, on philosophy, and many other subjects. We have few Franklins and Cellinis today.

Today the research chemist, with his analytical methods, the metallographist, with his microscope, the physicist with his pyrometer, the mechanical engineer with his tensile strength apparatus, and the coke, gas, oil and electric furnace experts are each separately working on the still wonderfully complex cast iron of which a stove is made. Certainly they will not be satisfied, nor will we, the people, be satisfied, with any final state, so long as we can conceive of a better one. Iron must cast better, must rust less, be stronger, be permanent in the grate bar, be cheaper, keep an unaltered color, and so on.

The entire work involved in developing such new devices and

processes may be called research, but there is a part of it which deserves more careful attention than the rest. This part is sometimes called pure research. Most people mean by this term the search after new knowledge, without reference to its utility. Others mean the search for new and useless knowledge. There certainly are searchers after new truth who do not wish to see the usefulness of their disclosures. But facts of nature or true principles of science live forever and are sure to be useful. The attempt at worship of pure research for its own sake, as is often done, is merely the tipping backward of those who wish to stand erect, unbent by sordid aims in their search after truth.

Bergson points out that the essential object of science is to enlarge our influence over things. He says:

Science may be speculative in its form, disinterested in its immediate ends; in other words, we may give it as long a credit as it wants. But however long the day of reckoning may be put off, some time or other payment must be made. It is always then, in short, practical utility that science has in view.

A fair example of scientific research lies in the history of our talking at a distance. First, we called out as loudly as we could and the strongest voice was the best telephone. The use of some new knowledge which was not immediately or obviously connected with the voice was later put to use, and a tin or iron pipe was used for short distances as a speaking tube. After this idea was disclosed, plumbers, tinsmiths, or pipe fitters could do the rest. Then, later, the possible application of formerly entirely undreamt of principles to the increase of the speaking distance was tried. Those to which I refer were the electromagnetic principles which, in short, produced the telephone transmitter and receiver. These changed the short, thick pipe into a long, thin wire. I regret that I cannot go into detail to point out the extended researches which, without the slightest premonition of telephony, had to be made before the knowledge was at hand to enable Bell to contribute his part. Joseph Henry, for example, studying in the basement of an Albany school, had to wind wires with insulation and study the properties of the magnet, and this had to be followed by the studies of many others for half a century. To the early art, in the pipe stage, the telephone wire may have looked merely like a more refined pipe of the same material, but it was not. There were entirely new, and