(4 of 7)
Nevertheless, the companies that have delved most deeply into fundamentals have in most cases come up with the richest booty. Du Pont's nylon came from basic research into molecular structures started in 1927 by Du Pont's late famed Scientist Wallace Carothers. When Dr. Carothers found a way to simulate the long-chain molecules found in natural silk, Du Pont applied his findings to the development of nylon, which reached mass production in 1939, after five years and $27 million for applied research. European scientists were quick to capitalize on Carothers' findings, developed other synthetic fibers. When Du Pont used Carothers' research to produce Dacron and other synthetic materials, the U.S. company found that it had to buy manufacturing rights from European concerns. Du Pont's latest dividend from Carothers' research is rubberlike urethane foam, used in a wide variety of end products from furniture to falsies. Urethane production has increased tenfold in the past year, should reach the 100 million-lb. mark by 1960.
By giving top scientists the widest latitude, Bell Telephone Laboratories, the $113 million-a-year research arm for American Telephone & Telegraph Co. and Western Electric, has struck some of the biggest pay lodes in industrial history. In 1948 Bell Mathematician Claude Shannon, projecting earlier studies by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Norbert Wiener, published Communication Theory, a complex mathematical scheme for measuring information content in communications, as well as evaluating the performance of systems that transmit words and pictures. The theory opened new horizons in telephone and TV transmission, has already found its way into the Air Force's Distant Early Warning (DEW) radar fence.
Another Bell breakthrough in 1948 was the discovery, after years of basic research into the structure of matter, that a solid metal such as germanium or silicon (earth's most abundant solid element) can be made to act like a vacuum tube, i.e., it will amplify an electric signal. Result: the flea-size transistor−and a king-size new industry. Thirty-five manufacturers have already turned out 7,000,000 transistors v. 1 billion vacuum tubes now in use in the U.S., are doubling output each year. Transistors will multiply the speed of future telephone exchanges 1,000 times; they have infinitely refined and compressed the performance of electronic computers.
Through patent-licensing, most big U.S. companies share the fruits of basic research. RCA has earned enough income from royalties and Government contracts since 1947 to make its research program selfsupporting. Thousands of patents developed by Bell Labs may now be used by other companies without charge, as a result of the trustbusting consent decree signed last January by A. T. & T. and Western Electric. Eastman Kodak estimates that at least one-third of 1,800 basic studies published by its researchers have benefited industry as a whole.