Any one who has had practical experience in manufacturing well knows that it is usually a long step from laboratory experimentation to factory production, a step which it often takes months and sometimes years to make and which is frequently beset with all manner of difficulties and problems. But there was no such time at the disposal of the Edgewood gas-makers. In all their experiments they were never permitted to slack up on production. The need was too vital. Our armies in France were clamoring for gas, gas, gas. There were no existing models for much of the machinery needed, but the corps of brilliant young men with whom Colonel Walker had surrounded himself invented as they went along. Yet, as a result of the experiments at Edgewood, numerous new and more economical processes were discovered. The slow and dangerous water-cooling method of producing phosgene, as followed in Europe, was supplanted by an entirely new system and a plant was perfected which could turn out forty tons of this gas every twenty-four hours. When the Edgewood plant was put into operation the government was paying one dollar and fifty cents a pound for phosgene, but when the Armistice was signed we were manufacturing it at the theretofore unheard-of price of ten cents per pound and would have brought it to an even lower figure had the production been continued. The systems devised for filling, painting, and marking the shell were marvels of mechanical ingenuity. These discoveries were not intended for commerce. They were the result of patriotic effort on the part of the workmen to see the nation excel in the particular thing in which it was then engaged—war. They were the outgrowth of impatience over slow and dangerous methods, or a desire to do the work in hand a little better or a little more quickly than it had been done before—a quality inherent in the American character.