A very good illustration is one discussed in another chapter, that of securing useful information about an individual. In a stable community with aggregations of population little larger than a village an individual becomes generally quite well known even to his minute idiosyncrasies. The requirements of the tasks which he or she is sought to perform are also generally known. The situation is quite different in a complex society undergoing rapid change with large populations and a good deal of mobility. There is thus an urgent demand to know more about individuals. So there are psychological tests, school grades, fingerprints, lie detectors, case history records, vocational guidance agencies, etc. The influences of these various inventions all flow into the same groove leading toward more information about the person concerned. It is the social need that determines the groove. From this point of view it would appear that social influence creates invention as truly as inventions have social influences. Such is the case. Social valuations do help to produce inventions but it must be recognized that there are limits to the power of necessity to bring forth invention. The discovery of effective cures for insanity has yet to come despite the long-standing need. On the other hand an invention will not be used if there is no need or if a desire for it cannot be stimulated. There must be some receptivity for a discovery before its influence can be felt, particularly the primary influence. The derivative influences are not however the result of the need of the invention itself and sometimes occur not only when they are not needed but when they are harmful, as in the case of automobile accidents. Workmen's compensation is a derivative influence of the use of dangerous machinery but such an insurance was not the necessity which helped to encourage the use of fast moving machines.

If then a survey of a number of inventions points toward one social end, there is more assurance in looking forward toward such a result as a probability. This conclusion is not however the basis of organization of this report to the National Resources Committee. That is to say, the contributors who are specialists in technology and science do not choose such topics as satellite cities, vocational guidance, isolation, marketing, the home, and try to trace out the inventions whose influences are flowing in on them to see whether there is an accumulation or not. A program of research of this nature would be, though, a very desirable one to undertake with the proper time and support. The basis of organization of this report is rather to canvass the new inventions in the different fields of technological advance as a basis for tracing outward the influences that flow from them. The first step in such a plan is to secure experts in the different fields

to report on the probable technological developments in these fields. These reports can then be the basis for attempts to ascertain the social implications.

The Time Lag Between Innovation and Social Effect

Some time elapses before the full effects of an invention are worked out. This time element furnishes an opportunity of studying and forecasting what the social consequences may be.

Some of the effects take place after only a very short delay. The talking pictures threw the orchestras of the moving picture theaters out of work quickly. Similarly the tractor when it had been made suitable to the farm brought unemployment to horses quickly. The automobile affected the carriage manufactures soon. In these cases the effect on a single unit is almost instantaneous. The woman who uses an electric washing machine does not use the old hand washtub. But one case does not make a social situation. Many tractors must be used before the transfer of lands from horse feed to other uses will affect the prices of agricultural products. The displacement of one orchestra by the talking picture adds only a few to the unemployed but after a time ten thousand or more may be thrown out of work. The social significance of an invention depends on the frequency of its use. One automobile will not congest a city street, but a sufficient number will necessitate traffic police and signal lights.

It is not only the frequency of a single type of use of an invention that indicates its social significance, but also the variety of its uses. Thus the automobile forced city governments to abandon the old fire horses. But there was a delay. The city governments did not always make the change as soon as the opportunity was presented. In these cases it is not unreasonable to expect that it could have been foreseen that fire engines would be driven by combustion engines rather than by horses. So also one might have foreseen the greater use of traffic police because of the automobiles, though such a prediction would necessarily have to be based on a consideration, among other things, of the future price of motorcars, which would present difficulties.

The derivative effects of inventions are more difficult to anticipate than the primary effects, but there is also more time for studying them, for the derivative effects are delayed longer. The effect of the tractor on agricultural prices because of the shift in uses of the land takes some time, partly because of the influence in volume of use, but also because agricultural price is a derivative influence.

These derivative influences are delayed because there are usually a number of other determining factors

affecting them than the one of invention alone. Thus agricultural prices are affected often in a world market by many other factors such as climate, business cycles, volume of credit, and so forth. These other factors tend to minimize the magnitude of these derivative influences of an invention and also to slow them up. The cotton gin increased the production of cotton, and this greater yield might have been foreseen. The derivative influence of increasing the number of slaves is less easily seen, for the number of slaves depends upon their availability through purchase from other lands, for which capital was required, or from natural increase, which took time. That the Civil War could have been foreseen as a derivative influence of the cotton gin is extremely doubtful, for there were too many factors other than the cotton gin causing the war, many of which were subject to human control.

Derivative influences of inventions do not seem necessarily to be inevitable, as the term is generally used. Such, theoretically, was the case of the Civil War. There was an element of choice or will power. Another illustration. Modern industrialism and the inventions leading to the growth of intangible property have rendered inadequate the general property tax, still common, however, as a source of State revenue. These inventions should have made this tax obsolete, but it is a derivative effect far removed. Human action, based on will, is needed to change the general property tax. The delay in this case is measured in terms of centuries.

Delays of this nature are sometimes occasioned by the difficulty of making a collective choice. Concerted action requires more time than that of a single individual and meets with more obstacles. Thus modern transportation, together with some other recent inventions, has rendered the size of counties less suitable as an administrative unit in many areas, especially where the counties are small. In some States a citizen can ride in an automobile on a paved highway from his home to the State capital in as short a time as he could drive in a horse and buggy over the bad roads from his farm to the county seat when the county system was founded. Many county governments cannot provide the necessary social services. Yet delays occur in either widening their boundaries or providing other adequate machinery. These delays are due in part to the difficulty of collective action, particularly as the local politicians have great influence with the voters. There are, no doubt, other influences, such as local pride in being a county seat. But whatever the factors, this adjustment of local administrative units to proper boundaries is not made because of the difficulty of collective action.

These lags in the derivative effects of technologies then precipitate the issue of values, whether one effect is desirable or not. In the case of the general property tax and of the county government there is general agreement that the delay is undesirable but in other cases there is no such unanimity of agreement. Such is the illustration of closer contacts with Europe brought about by the transportation and communication inventions. Some observers would make the choice of further isolation for the United States while others would propose one or more of various types of closer relationship. In the case of these derivative effects of invention, delays are long, collective choices are difficult, and the issue of policy is raised.

While the delay between the origin of an invention and its various social consequences may be quite long and thus allow time for the anticipation of these social consequences, planned action may not necessarily follow even a successful anticipation, for planning means choice and a decision to act on the plans. Thus it becomes desirable to extend the discussion of technology with its delayed social effects into considerations of planning.

Policy, Planning, and Technology

A

One important lag in connection with the policy of society toward invention lies in the rate of adoption of new invention in the place of existing machinery. conspicuous trait of the dynamic age in which we live is to be seen in the rapid pace at which existing capital equipment is made obsolete by technical inventions and other innovations in the design and construction of consumption and capital goods. Economists and business men have always been aware of the effects of this rapid rate of change in bringing capital obsolescence. But special attention has been focused on the obsolescence of capital equipment by the industries making new equipment. Trade journals and industry associations have stimulated study and collected data on the extent of obsolescence. In 1934, the trade journal Power made a study of 454 "better-than-average" industrial power plants constituting nearly 10 percent. of industrial primemover capacity and found 62 percent of the equipment was over 10 years old while 25 percent was over 20 years. Some of the older equipment was presumably used as standby plant for emergencies, but the bulk of the older equipment was regarded as obsolete to such an extent that, by replacing it by facilities of the most advanced design, 50 cents could be saved, on the average, out of each dollar spent in the older plants for industrial power. In 1935 the American Machinist made a study of the obsolescence of metal-working equipment, concluding that, because of the rapid improvement in machine design, metal working equipment was as a rule obsolete

if not produced within the last 10 years. It took an inventory of the age of such machinery and found that 65 percent of all the metal-working equipment in the country was over 10 years old and presumably obsolete. The Interstate Commerce Commission records indicate that 61 percent of the steam locomotives in the country were built over 20 years ago. These figures suggest the magnitude of capital obsolescence.

Further light on the magnitude of capital obsolescence is thrown by the estimates of the potential machinery requirements of all industry made in 1935 by the Machinery and Allied Products Institute. This institute made an extensive survey, sampling the requirements of industries covering over 85 percent of all industry, and on the basis of this survey estimated that the potential machinery requirements of all industry amounted to over 18 million dollars worth. Of this amount over 10 billion consisted of new equipment to replace old equipment which was for the most part obsolete.

Obsolescence surveys like the ones above referred to clearly indicate the magnitude of capital obsolescence. Yet the social implications of capital obsolescence have received very little study and a whole series of questions are waiting to be answered. When equipment becomes obsolete and therefore loses value who suffers a loss? Does obsolescence involve a social cost or only a business cost? Is capital obsolescence a cause of industrial maladjustment? Does the existence of extensive obsolete equipment prevent the using of better industrial techniques? Can the risks of capital obsolescence be reduced without impeding the use of better techniques? Should the losses due to capital obsolescence be distributed throughout industry? So little is known of the actual impact of capital obsolescence on industrial activity that no answer can be given to these questions. Yet they are questions forced on us by our rapidly improving technology and deserve the most careful study. Capital obsolescence and all that it involves needs to be extensively studied if the full social implication of current trends of improving technology are to be appreciated and the problems presented by improving technology are to be met.

But after inventions are adopted, the social effects do not come immediately as has been shown in the preceding section. There would thus seem to be time to consider the social implications of inventions. The difficulties in planning lie in other directions.

One of these difficulties is the unwillingness to admit the great role which so material a thing as technology plays in causing problems in society. It is only recently that one would admit that a man was unemployed because a machine had destroyed his job. The explanation, all but universal, was that a man was out of work because he wouldn't work. The forces of

society were wholly moral. The driving forces that changed things were great ideas. With the requisite great men and the proper leadership, all problems could be solved. Solutions were seen in terms of moral conduct, the proper choices and the necessary will power. That a nation could not be a great power without coal and iron was not readily admitted for it posited a materialistic limitation. But with machines all about us during our daily life in this the great machine age, their great influence cannot be gainsaid. Such an awareness of material things makes no denial of the power of ideas, of ethics, of will power, of great leaders. But it does insist on the necessity of taking into consideration in planning the great influence of machines and scientific discoveries. The planned use or distribution of natural resources of any nation are of little value without knowledge of what uses technologies will make of them. Will oil be made from coal? Will plastics take the place of wood? Will alcohol be used as a motor fuel? Will more food stuffs be produced chemically? These questions suggest the importance of a knowledge of scientific development in any planning in regard to natural resources.

Social institutions as well as natural resources are affected by technology as has been shown. The home was changed because a steam engine and the machines it drove were too large for a dwelling. Now there has come a new source of power readily available for home use, electricity. Will it restore to family life something of its former glory before steam reduced its functions? Another illustration is war, a function of all states in the past. It is affected by the discoveries of poison gases as a weapon of military offense particularly their distribution among civilian populations by airplanes. Such technological developments must be considered by governments for they affect the very life and death of states.

Granting that sound plans must be based on technological knowledge, and granting that technological development is sufficiently slow to permit time for study and planning, the task still remains very difficult. Also the task of forecasting a trend within a limited period, say the next 20 years, is a more difficult assignment than to have an unlimited time. And since plans are expected to be carried out in a definite time, what is needed is not to say that something will occur in the future, but within a definite time limit. The difficulties in forecasting the social influences of mechanical inventions and scientific discoveries and the status of the effort at this time should not be considered as obstacles so great as to make the method useless for the very practical task of governmental planning. Indeed, the experience gained from this first attempt at describing the technological trends of the near future is such as to give confidence that

further efforts will be more fruitful and that much information increasingly reliable can be made available for governmental executives and legislators.

What, of course, is needed is a group of thinkers who will make it their business to devote a continuing study of some duration to future trends, and whose work will be given adequate recognition. The movement to study future trends would be furthered by the aid of new scientific journals devoted to this field or else by the granting of adequate space in the existing scientific publication media for studies of forecasting of both technological and social trends. In the world of social change of today, such a division of labor and specialization is altogether reasonable. Indeed it is more, it is essential for adequate attack upon the problems ushered in by social change. A decade of organized effort devoted to such inquiries into future trends would result in contributions of the utmost value to the formation of governmental policies and plans.

How the governments will act on the basis of such contributions is another question. For presenting conclusions is different from acting on the basis of those conclusions. Plans of action involve policies which are based often on values and choices. Governments are very often at the crossroads of important decisions. Government is not a passive agent molded by the forces evolving from technology.

For these reasons the effect of invention on the State is often longer delayed than is the case with other social organizations. For instance, it is obvious that modern transportation carries its freight and passengers across State boundary lines much more frequently than in the early history of the Nation. Los Angeles is now as close to New York as Philadelphia was at the time the Supreme Court was founded. Industry transcends State lines and the market for most economic goods is Nation-wide. Though these things be true, yet the people and the Government are not decided as to just what policy to follow in regard to the reduction of distances by the transportation inventions. There are some who would try to keep business small and within bounds manageable by the 48 different States. But there are others who feel the need of one strong centralized government to deal with industries, so many of which it is claimed are extending in influence beyond the boundaries of any one State. This illustration shows that though the growth of transportation is well recognized and that its effect on State boundary lines and local government may be seen, yet decisive action on the part of Government may be delayed.

In other words, even though changing technology may give information about future social conditions which may be used as the basis of planning, such

knowledge may not be acted upon. For successful planning rests upon other factors than knowledge, particularly unanimity of purpose, the will to act. The place which a knowledge of technological trends occupies in planning is only to furnish information without which plans are likely to be uncertain. Even though unanimity of purpose exists and the will to act is present, without knowledge as to what is likely to happen in the future, such plans as may be made will be to that extent defective.

At the beginning of the twentieth century it was shown that the Nation stood on the threshold of a great development of important inventions, such as the telephone, the airplane, the radio, the motion picture, the automobile, and the manufacture of artificial fibers which were to affect profoundly all phases of national life. The Nation faces now the second third of the twentieth century. What may be expected in technological development?

How far reaching will be the effects of the mechanical cotton picker? Will the surplus labor of the South flood the northern and western cities? Will the governments plan and act in time, once the spread of this invention is certain? The influence on Negroes may be catastrophic. Farm tenancy will be affected. The political system of the southern States may be greatly altered.

In another field, science has gone far on the road to producing artificial climate in all its aspects, which may have effects on the distribution of population, upon health, upon production, and upon the transformation of the night into day.

Then again television may become widely distributed, placing theaters into millions of homes and increasing even more the already astounding possibilities of propaganda to be imposed on a none too critical human race.

Talking books may come as a boon to the blind, but with revoluntionary effects upon libraries and which, together with the talking picture and television, may affect radically schools and the educational process.

The variety of alloys gives to metals amazing adaptabilities to the purposes of man.

The use of chemistry in the production of new objects in contrast to the use of mechanical fabrication on the basis of power continues to develop with remarkable rapidity, in the production of oil, of woolenlike fibers, of substitutes for wood, and of agencies of destruction.

So the immediate future will see the application of new scientific discoveries that will bring not only enticing prospects but uncertainties and difficulties as well. This report is offered as a first study of the basis of the impending changes which shape the Nation's course in the future.

In dealing with the predictability of inventions a first step obviously is to turn to past experiences, where considerable time has elapsed between the predictions and their success or failure as shown by actual events. A long list of inventions which had been foretold aright could be drawn up easily. But particular predictions from anyone's pen might be right through sheer accident, whereas other predictions by the same writer might be mostly wrong.

Can Inventions Be Foreseen?

A surer proof of the fact that prediction may be carried on with a high average of success can be found by considering all the predictions within a given category, perhaps all those in a single book, or in articles by certain writers. A great number of books and articles can be found whose forecasts have been highly mistaken. Some of their authors, like Jules Verne, were not seriously trying to predict the nearer future; others may have been using wrong methods. Careful examination of the work of writers who have repeatedly predicted inventions with a high percentage of success, may lead to successful imitation or even improvement of their methods.

2

In the Scientific American of October 1920, there appeared a long editorial article, The Future as Suggested by the Developments of the Past 75 Years, by A. C. Lescarboura and others. It was aimed not more than 75 years in the future, and commonly less, and reads today as a very reasonable, clear-sighted preview of the developments of the past 16 years, and of those that we would still predict today. It is hard to measure the degree of correctness, from the difficulties of counting prophecies, evaluating those whose possible fulfillment is still in the future, and taking account of conditional and hesitant predictions. Still we may say that, of the 65 definite predictions of invention in this article, 38 percent have been already verified; 20 percent are nearly certain to be verified, according to the writer's opinion today; 8 percent have been proved wrong; 3 percent will be proved wrong, in the writer's opinion; and 22 percent are doubtful. Separating the doubtful equally between right and wrong, and adding the classes, the writer would say that probably 78 per

1 Formerly Curator of Social Sciences, Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, Ill., and author of The Sociology of Invention.

2 Sci. Am., v. 123, pp. 320–321; Oct. 2. 1920. By Austin C. Lescarboura with collaboration of J. B. Walker on civil engineering and J. M. Bird on science.

Some limitation of the alternatives facing the forecaster appears in the cases where he chose only to say that the trend would be in a certain direction, as toward more canals, or progress in overcoming static. There were 14 technical predictions of this sort, not counted above, in the article, and all were right.

There were no gross blunders in this article, and no evidence of lack of technological competence. But there were two striking failures to foresee first, radio-telephonic broadcasting, whose beginning is usually taken as KDKA's, just one month later, in November 1920. Radiotelephony is not even mentioned in the article, although an old art, and one cited elsewhere in the same issue. We shall note later how its broadcast possibilities were overlooked by almost everyone. The article under study gave 6 percent of its space to radiotelegraphy and phototelegraphy, and correctly predicted broadcasting-"subscribing to concerts and motion pictures for the home, the service being distributed over the usual telephone lines by a central studio", thus managing to predict broadcasting due to the important principle of equivalent invention, to be discussed later.

The other most important invention introduced in the period covered, the talking picture, was likewise omitted, with the movies, from this article. Yet the talking picture had been realized since about 1887, and had been a favorite item for prophets since 1890. In the same issue of this 1920 journal a cautious writer on photographic inventions says that talking and color movies have been created and expected by some, but are hardly needed. Failure to foresee the uses and

It would be very helpful if we could estimate the number of possible forecasts, among which choice was made; for the greater the range of possibilities, the less is the chance of a hit by sheer luck. One might artificially restrict the number of chances by a questionnaire, asking various competent people to mark the status, say, of radio control 20 years hence, as either nothing, slight, considerable, or vast; then reexamining the questionnaires 10, 20, and 50 years hence, study statistically how nearly people were right, and what sort of predictions were correct and why. This would be an easy and excellent inquiry to start now, for future utility-the measurement of foresight. It might improve prediction as much as other arts have been bettered, once statistical and exact measurement was introduced. But with other arts the measurement was promptly useful, whereas with prediction we must wait for years to test our experimental data.

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