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Show "Bringing them to America and putting them to work, made this country independent and secure. It destroyed monopolies in such materials as campher, nitrates, silk and others which nature had granted to certain parts of the world. It broke up exclusive control, by ether friendly or unfriendly un-friendly countries, of important techniques, skills and processes. It brought down prices. It is not too much to say that bringing these ' chemical inventions to America in the years of peace, helped materially to make 'our miracle of production' possible." In view of the facts enumerated by Mr. duPont, rather than castigate cast-igate the American industry for having gone afield in search of inventions, we should be eternally grateful to American industrialists industrial-ists for their wisdom in having made it possible for this country to be self-sufficient nation that it is today. Those ideas, imported from abroad, definatly are playing play-ing a tremendous part not only toward winning the war but in hastening its end D1PORTED IDEAS HELP WIN WAR By GEORGE PECK There has been a great deal of discussion about business agreements agree-ments entered into between American Am-erican industries and forgien corporations cor-porations or inventors. Some short sighted or uninformed Americans have read these "foreign agreements, agree-ments, something . sinister and inimical to the welfare and safety saf-ety of the American people. Contrary to this erroneous belief, be-lief, these foreign "horse-traders" have been the means of giving to the American people many gadgets and conveniances that they would not have enjoyed, had it not been for the far-sighted policy of American business men to search the world for inventions in-ventions and ideas, and to act upon that policy by making those inventions and ideas available to the American people. Further, many of these imported ideas are giving us the "edge" over our Axis enemies. For instance, take the field of chemistry. At a recent meeting of the Society of chemical Industry, held in celebration of the 200th anniversary of Lavoisier, the distinguished dis-tinguished French chemist, Lam-mot Lam-mot duPont, chairman of the board of E.I. duPont deNemours and Company, pointed out that when Lavoisier picked up the scientific pieces and put them together into modern chemistry, "he did not find them all in one place or one country." "He found them in many lands," continued Mr. duPont. "For the creative mind has no national, political or . geographic boundries. The man with an idea may be an Englishman, a Frenchman, French-man, a German, a Swede, a Ducti-man, Ducti-man, anybody. And it's up to us in business, if we don't want to fail our country and mankind, to find that man whenever he may be, get his idea, and bring it back home to our labratories and put it to work: That is what Lavoisoer I did I The American chemical indus-I indus-I try made itself fit to cope with j the war emergency by its own J originality and BY ACQUIRING DEVEIOPMENTS FROM ELSEWHERE, ELSE-WHERE, just as Lavoiseir did back in the, 18th century. Mr. du Pont informed his listeners that while more than 50 of the present duPont products were developed in duPont laboratories, the bringing bring-ing to this country of chemical developments help to make the nation secure. Mr. duPont pointed out that America learned her lesson of chemical insuffiency during the First World War, when Germany practically had a corner on chemicals. chem-icals. "In 1941, when war came again," Mr. duPont said, "The United states had the chemical situation well in hand. We had plastics, nylon and atrabine in production and ready to take the place of certain stregic materials, silk and quinine. We had thousands thous-ands of other chemical products that could be derived from the things of peace to the tools of war." Mr. duPont gave in detail a long and important list of ideas that had been brought to this country from forgien lands. "We learned about these foreign inventions," said Mr. duPont. "We found they were available. We investigated and decided to see what could be done with them here at home. The whole process was orderly, legal, a matter of public record. The Americal chemical industry came into possesion of these inventions in-ventions by licensing the patents, by buying them outright, or by trading scientific data. |
