I believe that the present Secretary of the Navy, Mr. Josephus Daniels, in his creation of a civilian board of advisers to the navy to pass upon new inventions of value to the navy, has taken an important step in the protection of this country; the creation of this board I consider one of the greatest achievements of the present administration.
The few inventions which have gained sufficient early recognition and have received governmental aid in their development have usually been forced on the Army or Navy by either political or financial interests. The intrigue and lobbying conducted in Washington to secure exclusive privileges would make volumes of interesting and spicy reading, and it is possible that the knowledge of these well-known intrigues makes officers very chary in recommending or taking up devices that may appear to have merit. The usual answer to inventors of untried devices who offer their plans to the government has been, "Well, if you try it out and it proves successful, we will then consider it"; and in such a case should the inventor have no means or financial backing the invention is lost to the United States and is adopted abroad.
This policy is "penny wise and pound foolish" when it so directly affects the safety of the nation. I was informed by Mr. Otto Exius, the managing director of the great Krupp Works in Germany, that the Imperial German Government has followed a far different method in fostering inventions that might be of benefit to the state. Mr. Exius informed me that when they undertook the development of a new invention for the purposes of national defence the government paid them for the cost of all material used and allowed them a sufficient percentage over labor costs to cover their overhead, plus a fair amount of profit. This probably accounts for the fact that Germany to-day is far ahead of us in her development of engines for the military submarine. There is no gainsaying the fact that the policy of our government has been to make up an ideally perfect weapon and then invite manufacturers to bid for the work. They have thus thrown the burden of development upon individual firms, many of whom have been forced into bankruptcy in their patriotic desire to furnish acceptable devices to the government.