Basic and applied engineering research

PAUSING to look back over your shoulder at the last quarter century is an interesting experience, but it is also a little unsettling. If you start with recent copies of Electrical Engineering, for example, and gradually work your way back into the past, you find some strange sensations sifting out from between the pages of the big bound volumes. As you move back through the 40´s, into the 30´s, you find yourself in a world in which men are asking themselves, with some anxiety, how the Nation can best lift itself out of the Depression … where engineers are properly impressed with the complex electrical system of a twin-engined DC-3 … and where the floodlit buildings of the great World´s Fairs, glowing with exotic colors, seem dedicated to a search for light-hearted amusement.