¶ Research (1)
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Index Entry
We must break a barrier in the kind of thinking we’ve been doing about the word ‘research.’ You have to have search before you can have research. The word research came into use in industry and business during the '20’s. They started going over the things they were throwing away. They began to apply new technologies. So you searched once and exploited your findings; then you researched what you’d done and exploited it again. It was very spottily done between 1900 and World War I; research really begins in 1929. Today it covers all kinds of things. When we talk about research in a university, that’s new too. The research professor is something very new. You had large corporations paying for a chair in the chemistry department and it was really a racket because what it meant was that you had a large number of people, graduate students working for you for nothing. You had a research professor giving your company very special benefits. The ulterior motives are frequently visible.
A researcher is always someone who goes over things again. He is a technician staying in one area to see what he can find. Research is very different from pure science exploration and invention. Research can just be processing and refining without
