Even though the majority of the world was on the cusp of creating breakthroughs in Science in 1936, we were a long way from perfecting those things we take for granted today. Television was in the experimental stage – records were still spinning at 78 rpm and would stay that way until after the war – computers were an abstract concept best left to the Science Fiction writing community. We were three years away from The New York World’s Fair and a glimpse at what was possible in the “world of tomorrow”.
Of course, things were happening – discoveries were being made. By the end of the 30s chemistry was a major discipline in American science. In 1930, American universities awarded 332 Ph.D.s in chemistry. In 1939, that number was 532. American chemists won several important awards in the 1930s, and the number of industrial laboratories grew. Between 1928 and 1938, Dow Chemical increased the number of its research workers from 100 to 500.
An increase in researchers led to an increase in new discoveries. For example, discoveries were made during the 1930s about the chemical elements that make up the basic building blocks of the universe. The “periodic table,” devised in 1869, lists these elements according to their “atomic number.” By 2001, there were 103 known elements, but in the 1930s only 92 were known, and numbers 61, 85, and 87 were missing. Marguerite Perey (1909–1975) discovered number 87 in 1939, naming it Francium after her native France. In 1935, Jeffrey Dempster (1886–1950) discovered that the element uranium occasionally appeared in a different form or “isotope” called uranium-235. This is the substance used in the atomic bomb.
This program featured High School Science students around the country under the name Student Science Clubs. This one, originally broadcast on February 12, 1936 featured students from the New York area.
May seem a bit strange now, being scripted and all – but this was the state of the art, so to speak – Science was poised to take center stage and education was crucial to America succeeding in the 1930s.
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