It is a sad situation. Our leaders have allowed so much manufacturing to be moved to China and elsewhere that we are making very little here. Now the software makers want to move to China the production of military software we use for our defense. China is like hand in glove with Iran because China needs oil and gas. Our money is in China. How can we outbid China for oil with our reduced treasuries? How can we hope to keep Iran from blowing up the world if Iran has China as a bodyguard? I read a little about Corning Glass the other day. One of the reasons they stopped producing the Corning Ware and other glass things was because the company was primarily about research. That was how Pyroceram came to be invented. Only after it was proven for missle nose-cones was applied to domestic products. The heavy glass casings for early storage batteries became Pyrex ovenware when one of the scientists cut the lower two inches from a couple of otherwise unusable jars and took them home for his wife to use as bakeware. We only have to think "PYREX" to see what a roaring success he happened upon while looking at a defect in a glass battery jar. I have a picture in an article about how Bendix was researching washing and drying in the same cylinder even before WWII. There is a picture of a bunch of engineers around one of the bolt-down automatics and Judson Sayre is holding one of those old, metal, hand-held hair dryers up to the door opening. Bendix invented the automatic tumbler washer and asked, now that laundry was washed by tumbling in a revolving cylinder and could be dried by tumbling in a cylinder, why couldn't the laundry tumble wash and tumble dry in the same cylinder? If we lose the basic research that is needed to solve problems that crop up in our advances, we will lose out on the wealth that is produced when the next leap of technology brings inventions to the marketplace. I guess that the very wealthy feel that their families will have enough money to live where and how they choose so they don't worry about the mess they are leaving for the rest of us as we struggle with the aftermath of their short-sightedness and greed.
