RELATION OF DISCOVERY AND INVENTION

Improvements in transportation developed the worldgranaries of Argentina, Canada, and the MississippiValley. The acreage of cotton was increased to feed theNew England and British mills from the Southern andGulf States, from Egypt and India. The investments inmining stretched over continents. Chilean nitrates werebrought to American farms, and fresh investments weremade in works that extracted nitrogen from the air. Thecoal deposits of the world were made to release solarenergy stored up for millions of years, and the oil wellsof Oklahoma and Baku became sources of new wealth andinvestment to supply a motor-driven age. Investmentsin machines, factories, railways, highways, warehouses,sewers, and in the ramifications of urban and suburbandevelopment enlarged the opportunities for surplus fundsto an almost limitless extent. Reconstruction of devas-tated countries after the World War gave opportunity forthe investment of billions of American dollars abroad,with flotations of foreign loans in the United States , in1927 and 1928, averaging a billion and a half each year.

§6. Mass Production of Inventions

Moreover today we are organizing invention and dis-covery as we organize everything else. Experimental lab-oratories have spread from universities to governmentbureaus and commercial concerns. Millions are now spenton research where thousands or hundreds were spenta generation ago. And inventors are thus led not onlyto more intensive effort but to cooperate and pool theirideas. Mr. Hoover, before he was President, took stepstoward a greater organization of scientific work lookingtoward invention.

During 1929, the Engineering Foundation launched a

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