Science Pays Off

Launched in 1872 by the world's leading maritime power, the voyage round the world by H.M.S. Challenger in the cause of pure science marked a major commitment of government support for basic research. In a cruise of three and a half years and 69,000 nautical miles, the civilian scientific staff under C. Wyville Thomson, Regius Professor of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh, collected specimens and data which took twenty more years to describe in the fifty royal quarto volumes which made up the Challenger Report. This vast addition to the literature established oceanography as an independent scientific discipline. Moreover, the resources of the British Government made possible not only the publication of the expedition's results in such ample form but their wide dissemination through the free distribution of whole sets to scientific institutions all over the world. From 1872, when the cruise began, until 1899, when the last of the free copies of the Report were distributed, the British Government paid approximately ?171,000 ($855,000) at current prices for this single