The Award of the Research Corporation Prizes Source: The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 33, No. 6 (Dec., 1931), pp. 571-574 Published by: American Association for the Advancement of Science Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/15238 . Accessed: 02/05/2014 01:21 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . American Association for the Advancement of Science is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Scientific Monthly. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 130.132.123.28 on Fri, 2 May 2014 01:21:10 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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The Award of the Research Corporation PrizesSource: The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 33, No. 6 (Dec., 1931), pp. 571-574Published by: American Association for the Advancement of ScienceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/15238 .
Accessed: 02/05/2014 01:21
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
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FOR effective scientific research, un- dertaken wit;hout thought of personal pecuniary benefit, two scientists-one American, the other Swedish-have each gained the Itesearch Corporation prize of $2,500. It was awarded through the Smithsonian Institution. The mnen are Dr. Andrew Ellicott Douglass, director of Steward Observatory of the Univer- sity of Arizona, and Dr. Ernst Antevs, of the University of Stockholm. Each will likewise receive the Research Cor- poration plaque for their outstanding contributions to science.
Though in no way related, the achieve- ments of the two prize winners are curi- ously similar in results and in method; they have succeeded in dating the pre- historic past of the earth by what are unquestionably the two most original and the only exact methods yet devel- oped, and they have reconstructed a picture of the changes in the earth's weather year by year for the thousands of years that they have been able to date.
Dr. Douglass, who is primarily a physicist and an astronomer, used as his chronometer the rings that mark the an- nual growth of trees. Living amidst the pine forests in the bracing climate of northern Arizona, he was led to think of the connection between climate and tree growth. In 1901 he began collecting records of tree growths as pictured by annual rings in cross-sections of the trunks. A comparison of some 10,000 such records with records of precipita- tion in northern Arizona showed that the ring formed by a tree each year varies in wi(dth in direct proportion to the amount of rainfall. Here, evidently, was an almost infallible record of weather and climate of the region in which the natural chronometer grows. Trees in the same clirnatic area would show sim- ilar response to the same weather con- ditions in their annual rings; that is, a scale of the proportional widths of the
annual rings of one tree for a definite series of years would approximately fit any other tree in the same area for the same series of years. Dr. Douglass found this to be so -for trees over fairly wide areas, and this rendered possible their dating on a common scale with practical certainty.
Thanks to this fact, Dr. Douglass has been able to extend back tree growth records in the giant sequoias of Cali- fornia for 3,000 years. He has also connected all the linlks in the tree growth chain from the, present time backward without a gap to 700 A.D. That is, lie has created an unbroken annual calendar for that period. Unexpected benefits have resulted from the development of this perfect time scale. Thus, by a study of timbers taken from pueblos built by the prehistoric Indians, Dr. Do-uglass has been able to give exact dates to events in their history, such as the building of Pueblo Bonito, as far back as the eighth century. There is no reason to suppose that the application of the method can not be carried nuLch farther back in human history.
However, the major fruits of Dr. Douglass' achievements are probably the light they have cast on the past climate of the earth and on the correspondence between weather and solar activity. Dr. Douglass found that trees grown in the wet climates of northern Europe give admirable records of sun-spot numbers; he found several cycles in climate to be multiples or submultiples of the eleven- year sun-spot cycle. This shows indis- putably that solar variation exerts a pro- found influence on weather.
Dr. Antevs used the laminated clay deposits called varves as his time-piece and has traced a series of clay layers up the Connecticut Valley of New England, which mark approximately 4,000 sueces- sive years. Dr. Antevs is a pupil of Baron de Geer, student of glacial chro-
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nology and founder of the Stockholm Geochronological Institute, and to de Geer belongs the credit for the use of varves as time-pieces of glacial activity.
That nature should have left, and man interpreted, so detailed a record of yearly climates in the soil is no less amazing than the record and interpreta- tion of tree rings. Varves are thin layers of very fine clay which lie one on top of another so that a cross-section of them exposed looks like zebra stripes on the earth. They record the annual erosive influence of melting glacial water. In the Ice Age glaciers of great thickness covered the whole of northern Europe and America as they now cover the peaks of the Alps. When for some rea-
son the earth began receiving more heat from the sun, the latter was able each summer to melt more than the accumu- lations of the previous winter 's snow and ice, and the glaciers began slowly to dis- appear, retreatingf to the north and to high altitudes. The melting ice passed through glacial fissures and issued in streams at the bottom of the glaciers, bearing mud and gravel. The finer sedi- ment would be carried farthest-into glacial lakes, where, in the quiet of the following winter, it would settle down into a layer or varve, superposed on that of the previous year. Since the finest particles would stay suspended the longest time, each varve would vary from coarse at the bottom to fine at the top, so
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that there would be a visible demarcation corresponding to each successive year. Furthermore, the varves varied in thick- ness from year to year, just as do tree rings, and for comparable reasons. That is, a thick ring would mean a greater supply of water-carrying sediment, and that would mean a hotter summer. In consequence, the thickness of the varves would represent in some measure the power of the sun rays during the sum- mer. As the varves often accumulated to many feet in depth, and as those formed in one lake can be correlated with those formed in another, they con- stitute a record of thousands of years of solar activity.
Dr. Antevs helped Baron de Geer and
other assistants to work out the "Swed- ish time scale," believed to give approxi- mately in years the time elapsed since the culmination in Sweden of the last Ice Age. In 1920 Antevs accompanied de Geer to America to make a study of American varves with a view to cor- relating in time American with Euro- pean glaciation. Antevs has remained in America to become the leading au- thority on North American glaciation. Besides tracing out a series of clay layers which mark approximately 4,000 succes- sive years up the Connecticut Valley, he has worked out successive positions of the receding ice border, and assigned to each deposit its proper date with refer- ence to a certain point in the glacial
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period. The measuring of clay layers has been only a small part of his work. As Dr. Goldthwaite, of Dartmnouth, says:
Equally at hoame in physiography, Pleistocene botany and zoology, and eager in his study of climiates of the past, he has never lost sight of the large geologic and geographic problems, such as the registration of changes of tempera- ture and of rainfall by sedinelents, by tree rings, and by migrations of plants and animals, the nature and cause of crustal warping during the withdrawal of the ice, the emnergence and sub- iuergence of the coast and of the interior low- lands as a result both of crustal movemlents and of the exchange of water between ocean and glacier.
The awards to Dr. Douglass and Dr. Antevs are the fourth and fifth of their kind made by the Research Corporation. The first, in 1925, went to Dr. John J. Abel, of the Johns Hopkins University, for his work on ductless glands, animal tissues and fluids. The second, in 1929, went to Dr. Werner Heisenberg, of the University of Leipzig, for his contribu- tion to matrix mechanies and for his ex- position of the principle of indetermi- nance; and the third, also in 1929, to Dr. Bergen Davis, of Columbia University, for the coiltribution of the Davis double x-ray spectrometer and other brilliant achievements in the field of atomic physics.
The Research Corporation is probably the only organization of its kind in ex- istence. It sprang from the desire of a scientist to have the fruit of his scien- tific labors capitalized for the promotion of research. In 1911, Dr. Frederick G. Cottrell, then chief physical chemist, later director of the U. S. Bureau of Mines, and his associates offered their invention for the electrical precipitation of suspended particles to the Smith- sonian Institution, for the benefit of sci-
ence. As the institution could not well undertake the development of a matter so likely to have commercial and legal complications, Dr. Charles D. Walcott, then secretary of the Smithsonian, un- dertook with Dr. Cottrell to enlist the aid of public-spirited men of New York City to organize a non-profit-sharing cor- poration for the developinent of the pat- ents, and in 1912 the R-Zesearch Corpora- tion was formed.
Its purposes are to acquire inventions and patents and make them more avail- able in the arts anid industries, while using them as a source of income, and, second, to apply all profits from such use to the advancement of technical and sci- entific investigation and experimenta- tion. The Research Corporation has suc- ceeded financially so that it has built up a reserve and given large funds to sci- entific work. Among grants made by the corporation are several to the Smith- sonian Institution for work on solar radi- ation and its influence on plants and ani- mals; to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research, at Heidelberg, to carry on cancer research, to the Inter- national Auxiliary Language Association for linguistic research, to Harvard Uni- versity, Columbia University, Leland Stanford Junior University, Pennsyl- vania State College and the Stevens In- stitute of Techniology, in support of va- rious projects. A grant was made to the National Research Council to assist in the publication of one of the volumes of the "International Critical Tables." The last grant has been made to the Uni- versity of California to make possible the installation of an eighty-five ton magnet, through which it is hoped to produce twenty-five million volt protons.
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