The Value of Research to Navigation

Extract

The Council's report, our increasing membership, the eminence and wide range of activity of the new Fellows and the growing status and rising circulation of the Journal show that the Institute is making very good progress. I felt, nevertheless, as former Presidents have, that I should attempt some kind of reckoning and try to make some useful suggestions. I soon found that I could not improve on what Sir Robert Watson Watt said when he addressed us in 1950 and 1951, what he said seems all the more appropriate now. When he spoke, this country had the world's largest shipping and shipbuilding industries and a lead in the design and manufacture of the most advanced types of civil aircraft. He was concerned that we should do all we could to maintain and increase such dearly bought greatness. We could no longer afford, he said, to concentrate almost exclusive attention on the big 10 to 20 per cent factors which govern overall efficiency in such industries, and must give a greater share than before to the small 1 to 5 per cent factors. These, he pointed out, were mainly advances in the arts and sciences on which navigation depends for its full usefulness, and on which navigators depend more or less consciously in making their decisions. They generally advance with the help of new methods and practices which, though at first too novel or too elaborate for ordinary use, become commonplace before long.