Abstract
Aisr apologia on a research association's work and policy is an unenviable task for any of its officials to essay. Mr. Wilsdon, director of the Wool Industries Research Association, in his recently issued annual report, has frankly stated those especial difficulties which beset his and other research associations in endeavouring to establish and increase the confidence and support of its members, whose subscriptions are on a voluntary basis, whose individual interests are widely divergent and, with the many subdivisions of the industry, even competitive, and whose expectations, apart from some particular information yielding direct financial benefit, are largely nebulous in character. Such associations are for these reasons an easy mark for destructive criticism, always louder than the praise for specific individual benefits, which is too often uttered unobtrusively, if at all. Standardization, on which Mr. Wilsdon rightly puts insistence, has an undoubted place within this, as other, industries. There is also much to be said in favour of pooling information for the general raising of manufacturing excellence; but there are limiting factors which make the effective bounds much narrower than in most manufactures. As the architect puts his individual skill and experience, as well as his knowledge of fitness of material, design and colour, into the creation of the structure, so is cloth-making largely a ‘creation’ in this sense. The devising of woollen blends and of worsted tops is of similar complexity, and such circumstances tend to narrow the field within which the personal factor can be replaced or even checked by scientific classification.
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Wool Industries Research Association. Nature 139, 104 (1937). https://doi.org/10.1038/139104a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/139104a0