Qualifications of the medalist

The question as to how old the application of science to industry is I do not propose to ask, for attempting to answer it might prove tantamount to trying to pick a date so early that no one else could think of an earlier one. But while the date of the first application of what we might reasonably denote as scientific knowledge to practical affairs is undoubtedly lost in antiquity, the date at which industry first realized the practical importance of scientific knowledge sufficiently clearly to go out in active search of such knowledge, is surprisingly close at hand. In fact, I think I should be committing no great exaggeration if I said that it falls within one man´s active life, and that man our 1940 Edison Medalist. I do not say that American industry was the first industry to organize itself for the discovery and application of such knowledge as would be particularly useful in its chosen field; certainly I do not wish to imply that the laboratory which George Campbell joined back in 1897 was the first industrial laboratory of applied science. But it was certainly one of the very earliest, and I have no fear of being contradicted when I say that the venture upon which he embarked was to carry him into what was then an utterly uncharted sea. Indeed, to most people at the time, it appeared not only uncharted, but decidedly threatening. To many it was absurd and some even were frankly hostile — just why I never knew.