Peaceful Arts

Many U. S. leaders in scientific applications to human needs were last week studying their affairs so that they might leave in the near future for a study of arts and crafts museums in Europe. These men will travel and study to fulfill the last wishes of the late Henry R. Towne, engineer, head of the Yale & Towne Mfg. Co. (locks and hardware), who was the personal friend of most of them.

Engineer Towne bequeathed $1,000,000 to establish in Manhattan a Museum of the Peaceful Arts. In his will he called attention to the fact that "the United States is the greatest industrial nation in the world, and we have many magnificent museums of ancient and modern art. We do not possess any permanent exposition of American achievements in the peaceful arts, including agriculture, animal industry, forestry and wood working, mining and metallurgy, transportation and communication, engineering and architecture, industrial chemistry, electrical mechanisms, aeronautics, textiles, building trades, all of these including products, processes and implements."

Splendid museums of this type exist in London, Paris, Vienna, Munich, Berlin, Prague, Nuremberg, Rotterdam and Budapest. To study these and also still uncollected industrial applications of scientific resources, Elmer A. Sperry, electrical engineer, inventor of the gyroscope and many another device, and a member of the Naval Consulting Board, sailed last week. His special study will be airplanes, gyro-compasses, ship stabilizers and gas engines. As he left he promised that upon his return he would exhibit a gyroscope which with absolute accuracy would reflect the rotation of the earth.

Other important men will follow to make investigations within their own fields: Dr. J. W. Lieb, engineer and vice president of the Edison Co., to study light, heat and power exhibits; Calvin W. Rice, secretary of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers; Dr. Samuel W. Stratton, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who for more than ten years was Director of the Federal Bureau of Standards, and who will investigate especially exhibits bearing upon ship models and ship and airplane navigation; Dr. H. Foster Bain, secretary of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, and formerly Director of the Bureau of Mines, who will attend the International Geological Congress in Madrid; Dr. Ambrose Swasey, who founded the Engineering Foundation fund and who, as a member of the firm of Warner & Swasey, has constructed the framework for many of the largest telescopes in the world; Dr. Louis Livingstone Seaman, an authority on sanitation and hygiene and on world diseases and the methods of combating them, who will aid the project here by studying those and kindred subjects as illustrated in the European museums."

Once the museum is established, an ample fund will remain to exploit its educational values.