Jobs & Energy

While Dr. Albert Einstein declared from the S. S. Belgenland last week that a better balance between producer and consumer was the world's most pressing problem in 1930 (see below), the man whom he was coming to visit, Dr. Robert Andrews Millikan, chairman of California Institute of Technology, said the same thing in a speech to the 24th annual meeting of the Association of Life Insurance Presidents, meeting in Manhattan. Cause of Unemployment, he recited, is overproduction, inevitable result of the War. Although Science, the builder of machinery, has often been held responsible for taking men's jobs from them, Dr. Millikan refused to let Science take the blame. He argued that Science has created more new work, more new demands than it has destroyed. Let industrialists study Unemployment as scientifically as they do their factory equipment, urged Scientist Millikan. He warned the insurance presidents to inaugurate a plan of industrial insurance before the Government does.

Said he: "The task of science is to supply as many legitimate human wants as possible with one foot-pound of energysb... to extract the maximum of satisfaction to the race of our present reserves of energy." When coal and oil are gone, Science will turn to sunlight as man's source of energy. Reassuring to the insurance presidents was it to hear Caltech's Millikan, Nobel Prizeman of 1923, student of the Cosmic Ray and of subatomic energy (both of which he rules out as practical energy sources for mankind) declare: "Only the economic reason that coal and oil and gas are abundant and accessible prevents us from utilizing sunshine directly now."

The energy required to raise one pound one foot.

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