Repository: UIHistories Project: Dedication - New Chemistry Building [PAGE 33]

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organic compound could be produced in a laboratory. I t was he also who made the first metallic aluminum. The picture was taken in 1856, about as early as decent photographs were possible. Every year since 1856, t h a t G6ttingen laboratory, among others, has been training chemists in research. T h e y have gone into fields of infinite chemical variety. Each man has been a center in some distant place, and around this center there has often been built some kind of growing chemical structure. M a n y became teachers, and their students in turn became experimenters a n d teachers. M a n y followed industrial chemistry a n d extended the field of t h e ever-increasing a r m y of chemists. In my particular photograph is one man who in 1866 became the Professor Goessman of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and was later professor a t Amherst and very prominent for years in t h e Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture. Since 1856 t h e same seeking for knowledge b y renewed groups of such men has been continually going o n in m a n y "foreign laboratories. I t is only slowly being t a k e n up in our country. Is it not t i m e t h a t we awakened t o t h e fact t h a t , as research chemists, we are still in our infancy? If we are ever t o be a leading country in industrial chemistry, research is absolutely necessary. If such research is done elsewhere, t h e n t h e major p a r t of the advantage will lie elsewhere also. Scientific research, or research in t h e n a t u r a l sciences and in t h e industries, might be defined as t h e pioneer work of the developed country. In this light it is easy t o see t h a t our t u r n has come. Not long ago o u r pioneer work was of another kind. I t was opening u p the undeveloped land. I t was actively and well done. B u t the work must chan ge because ou r requirements have altered. Carl Helffereich, Director of t h e Deutsche Bank a n d now Secretary of t h e Treasury of G e r m a n y , writing before t h e war, said: "All economic labor aims at making external nature contribute to the needs of man. It is as true of the primitive gathering of roots and berries as of the production of cyanamide or calcium nitrate. The enormous progress of modern economic technique is due to the splendid development of the natural sciences and the systematic application of scientific knowledge to economic labor. Physics, chemistry and electricity have outvied each other in their influence upon economic technique." Speaking of t h e scientists, he says: "Our hermit poets and thinkers converted themselves more and more dining the past century into practical creative workers,

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