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To hasten the flow of technology from laboratory to living room, some 3,000 U.S. companies today have their own research facilities, employ 500,000 research workers, including 100,000 scientists. Across the U.S., new research plants are springing up almost as fast as factories. In the past two months alone, General Motors dedicated its $100 million Technical Center in Detroit; U.S. Steel opened a $10 million laboratory at Monroeville Pa.; Union Carbide & Carbon Corp. moved into a $6,000,000 Parma (Ohio) research complex; General Electric completed a $5,000,000 Cleveland laboratory for the study of "psychological and physiological effects of lighting on humans, animals and plants." Other multimillion-dollar research centers are being blueprinted by Ford Motor, General Dynamics' General Atomic Division, Westinghouse Electric, Koppers, Gulf Oil.
From the starveling stepchild of industry, scientific experimentation has become an industry in itself−perhaps the key industry. By constantly creating new products, and thus new markets, research has added a dynamic new force to the economy to help keep the boom rolling. Once industries competed for a market that seemed clearly limited by consumers' needs, and the basic needs varied little from decade to decade. Periodically, the needs were so nearly filled that the market and industrial activity declined. In the age of research, industries compete constantly to create new needs, expand their markets and increase production. Says General Electric's Research Director C. Guy Suits: "To an increasing extent, we will determine what discoveries need to be made−and then make them."
The U.S. today is spending $5 billion a year for research, or more in one year than in all the years from 1776 to 1933. Research expenditures by the Government, inconceivable in 1900, now total more than the entire cost of Government in that year. There were only two nonprofit scientific organizations in 1936: Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio and Pittsburgh's Mellon Institute for Industrial Research, with an annual volume of $1,100,000; now such institutions total 48, take in $100 million yearly. Moreover, the total U.S. research effort is growing at the rate of 10% to 12% a year v. an average annual increase of 3% in the gross national product.
The power behind the research race is industry's new-found ability to harness science and invention to production, systematize the search for knowledge by pressing the scientists into service in the industrial laboratory and project team. The swift spread of research has caused a redrawing of the traditional picture of the lone scientist or inventor experimenting in his own workshop and, with his own flash of genius, discovering a new principle and founding a new industry. Now task forces that may number hundreds are thrown into a project; with the help of such research-developed equipment as computers, they can explore in a few weeks problems that would take an unaided worker years. In Detroit, where Henry Ford once puttered with his new car in an old stable, while his wife held the lantern, Chrysler Corp. has 200 scientists and engineers assigned solely to gas-turbine engine development.