124 The Stock Market Crash—dAnd After 
Scientific Workers in Industry 
After the war there was an exodus of professors 
capable of scientific research from the universities 
into industry. This was chiefly what may be called 
an accident, due to war inflation. Professors’ sala- 
ries had lost their purchasing power. There was 
a similar exodus from the scientific bureaus of the 
government in Washington. In order to live, re- 
search students and professors turned increasingly 
to the higher emoluments of industry, and industry 
soon found that it had tapped a new and vast 
resource in human ingenuity backed by scientific 
training. For almost the first time science in Amer- 
ica came to be appreciated for its cash value, the 
more so, perhaps, because the war had revealed how 
much farther Germany had made use of such tech- 
nical science and invention than the rest of the world. 
Another accidental cause of accelerating “tempo” 
of invention was that the war left wages I1§ per 
cent above the previous level and the cost of living 
only 70 per cent above it. Employers feared to cut 
wages, lest strikes and diminished output result, and 
they turned to labor-saving inventions instead. Thus 
a by-product of inflation, as in the case of the uni- 
versity professors, was pushed into industry to great 
economic advantage. 
In the past few years the industries have added 
gigantic research laboratories to their equipment. 
In the laboratory of the American Telephone and 
Telegraph Company today there are 4,000 scientific