To accomplish this object a competent personnel within the Army had to be organized and developed; the Army requirements had to be carefully scrutinized and coordinated with reference to relative urgency; manufacturers had to be encouraged to undertake new tasks and to be impressed with the necessity for whole-hearted cooperation and with the importance of their part in the war; raw materials had to be secured and their transportation assured. These and other factors were faced and overcome. Although American fire-control instruments did not reach the front in as large numbers as were wanted, great quantities were under way, and we had attained in the manufacturing program a basic stage of progress which would have cared for all of our needs in the spring and summer of 1919. Incidentally there has been developed in this country a manufacturing capacity for precision optical and instrument work, which, if desired, will render us independent of foreign markets. At the present time there exists in this country a trained personnel and adequate organization for the production of precision optical instruments greatly in excess of the needs of the country. One of the problems which we now have to consider is the conversion of this development brought about by war-time conditions into channels of peace-time activity. At the present time American manufacturers are in a position to make instruments of precision equal to the best European product, and the industry will continue, provided there is an adequate market for its product. Such a market will exist if the universities and commercial laboratories of the country will obtain scientific apparatus from American manufacturers rather than import it from abroad as has heretofore been the custom. In April, 1917, the most serious problem in the situation was the manufacture of optical glass. Prior to 1914 practically all of the optical glass used in the United States had been imported from abroad; manufacturers followed the line of least resistance and preferred to procure certain commodities, such as optical glass, chemical dyes, and other materials difficult to produce, direct from Europe rather than to undertake their manufacture here. The war stopped this source of supply abruptly, and in 1915 experiments on the making of optical glass were under way at five different plants--the Bausch & Lomb Optical Co. at Rochester N. Y.; the Bureau of Standards at Pittsburgh, Pa.; the Keuffel & Esser Co. at Hoboken, N. J.; the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co. at Charleroi, Pa.; the Spencer Lens Co. at Hamburg, Buffalo, N. Y.