THE AGE of RESEARCH
IN a South Side Chicago building, three miles from the stadium where the world's first atomic pile went into action 14 years ago, a shrilling alarm bell signaled the birth last week of U.S. industry's Atomic Age. As a white-smocked scientist twisted the knobs on a control panel outside a monolithic concrete cubicle, a lighted dial flashed: REACTOR ON. Thus the world's first nuclear reactor devoted exclusively to industrial research went into operation at the Illinois Institute of Technology's Armour Research Foundation.
The $700,000 reactor, owned jointly by the Armour foundation and 24 companies whose interests extend from food preserving to watchmaking, will hasten the new knowledge on which U.S. industry is building an Atomic Age technology. In the atomic furnace, physicists will explore the structure of metals, search for new plastics, investigate new ways of refining oil, new uses for rubber. Radioisotopes from the 50,000-watt reactor will be used by industry as tracers to track friction damage in machinery, test new chemical carriers for cancer therapy, hunt new manufacturing techniques in fields ranging from rubber to building materials.
The Chicago reactor is a concrete-shielded symbol of an economic force more far-reaching even than atomic energy. The force: research in industry. In the past 15 years a torrent of technological change has brought the U.S. greater material advances than any other nation has experienced in all history. With every breakthrough in the laboratory, industry has turned the new knowledge into new products for a society whose inventiveness has made achievement the bright converse of obsolescence.
From the test tube have come drugs that helped add eight years to life expectancy in the U.S. (from 62 to 70 at birth) since 1941, boosted population. At the same time, to the discomfiture of Malthusians, new fertilizers, insecticides and other chemicals have helped pile up the greatest food surpluses ever. Man has learned to cruise undersea on nuclear power, fly at supersonic speeds; research has trebled the number of metals used by industry, made diamonds from common carbon (see cut), and conjured up thousands of new products.
The revolution in living wrought by research is just beginning. Within a few years these things will be available:
¶ Houses with centrally controlled pushbutton windows, electronic heating, cooling and refrigeration systems that work without moving parts, electroluminescent lighting from sheets of glass and metal.
¶ Food sterilized by atomic radiation so that it will keep indefinitely without refrigeration.
¶ Chemicals that will kill all plants in a field except those the farmer wants to grow.
¶Telephones with automatic worldwide dialing, TV screens for face-to-face phone conversations.
¶ Electronic computers that will design bridges and highways, specify the construction materials, estimate building costs and future revenues from tolls.
¶ Home laundry equipment that will automatically pick up, sort, clean, iron and fold the wash; cleaning machines that will wash, rinse and dry a kitchen floor in minutes.