The Indianapolis times. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1922-1965, 1932-12-24
BY PAUL HARRISON,
NEA Service Writer

~ nocracy, which boasts the
ability to reorganize America on
an ordered basis of prosperity,
employment and increased leisure,
is being hailed as new school of
scientific philosophy.
Yet, while its head is in the
clouds of the present depression,
its roots reach back as far as Eng
lands industrial revolution and
the development Of the first labor
saving machines.
And the actual problems and
aims of Technocracy we're begin
ming to be defined in 1920, when
Howard Scott, leader of the pres
9 ent movement, organized what he
called the Technical Alliance.
He already had a half-formed
vision of a nation eventually to be
controlled by engineers, and to
that end had gathered some data
and compiled charts to show how
industry was being carried on. AS
Scott saw it-and still sees it:
The whole problem is one Of
elimination Of waste. But waste
to an engineer has a different
meaning than it has to the pub
lie.
Waste ordinarily is thought of
in terms of potato Feelings, or the
spending of money for luxuries.
If the elimination of that kind of
waste would solve the problem,
China would be the richest coun-
try in the world today.
But the engineer recognizes
that idleness is waste, that COM
petition is waste, and that dupli-
cation of effort and the unneces-
sary exhaustion of any natural
resource is waste.
If we can eliminate idleness and
duplication of effort, we can have
Immediately such prosperity as
the world never has known.
Nobody can bring this about
but engineers. So far, they have
been very successful in doing away
with material waste and duplica-
ton of energy in the various in
dustries in which they are employ
ed.
But they have not thought of
American industry as an industry
in itself. The time has come
when that must be done. We are
nearing crisis"
TITO get some Of the scientific
Il antecedents of the movement,
listen to M. King Hubert, profess
sor of geo-physics at Columbia
university and one of Techno-
cracy's leaders:
For many years the physical
sciences developed independently
in their separate fields. They be-
came SO highly specialized and
complex that scientists couldn't
even understand each other, and
along about 1900 progress began
to lag.
"One day Willard Gibbs, a Yale
physicist, sat down and solved the
problems that had baked the
chemists. About the same time a
Norwegian physici~t named
Bjerknes got interested in meteor
ology, threw all it's old theories
out the window, built up a new
one on the basis of physics, and
laid the whole foundation for the
true science of meteorology today.
Science suddenly realized that
it must cooperate to progress.
And now we have physicists,
phySio- chemists and all the rest of
the combinations.
so what?" asked the reporter,
who still wanted to talk about
Technocracy.
80 physical science in general
now is interested in the whole
field of our physical mechanism,
and even in the social sciences to
the extent that people are users
and converters of energy.
Science can't help watching
the inconsistencies of operation,
and wanting to combine and ana
lyze all aspects of the operating
mechanism"
THE inspiration for collective
Il chronological action came out
of the World war days, when en-
gineerS we're called upon to Or
ganize production, centralize it,
and speed it up to a new high.
Here is what one of the lead
ing technocratS has to say about
it; he is frederick Lee Alderman,
prominent New York architect:
During the early part of the
war, we were able to observe
what happened to production when
it was released momentarily from
price control. OF course, prices
still prevailed nominally, but they
were disregarded, so far as get
ting things done was concerned.
I'VE could watch the movement
of some products through a con-
tinuouS process from manufacture
to consumption. We noticed that
many problems we're not being
solved because of an improper
method of approach.
I'VE also saw that what we
considered the proper method
scientific control without the han
dicap of economic factors-worked
every time it was used.