¶ Industrial Lag (1)
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Index Entry
Industrial Lag:
"I have made many studies of what we call the relative lag, the amount of time occurring between when a scientific discovery is made, or a technical invention is made, and the time when that discovery or invention is inhibited / sic / into society and put into use in the industrial equation. There are really some very great lags like that lag of chrome-nickel-steel from 1854 to 1914 in its being used.
"In studying these lags I find that they have a certain order-liness. Since the more remote the function, the more intellectual the the perspective we have on it, the greater the speed with which we accelerate its adaptability into our economic life.
“Men can see a cart going by and therefore can be critical of the wheel as we see it changing its positions. They are standing still and the cart is going by so they can see what broke up the wheel as it landed on a rock. So they began to invent ways of not letting that happen. That is what we call perspective. At any rate I find that the greatest perspective is really the intellectual one, and in the communications arts, radio, and so forth, there is only a lag of about two years”
¶ Citations
- Oregon University Lecture #1, p.18, 1 Jul’62
