The 100th birthday of Frederick Gardner Cottrell, the founder of Research Corporation, was observed at the Cottrell Centennial Symposium at California State College at Stanislaus in 1977. The two-day symposium focused on air pollution and its impact on agriculture. Speakers included politicians, biochemists, environmental scientists, plant pathologists, botanists, meteorologists and then-Research Corporation president James Stacy Coles.
At the symposium, Cottrell was hailed as an “air pollution control pioneer” whose invention of the electrostatic precipitator, first installed at the Selby Smelter near Stanislaus, greatly reduced smoke containing sulfuric acid, arsenic and lead in the atmosphere
In his address, Coles said, “The basic research supported by the foundation frequently has implications with regard to energy production with minimal pollution, or for modifying other processes which place great stress on air or water quality. We must look to basic research to provide the groundwork for the engineering and technology of the future; to ignore it in favor of mission-oriented research and development would be to deplete the reservoir of scientific knowledge on which the solutions of our environmental problems may depend.”
Coles continued his talk with a quote made by Cottrell in 1912, “Conservation of late has become a word to conjure with. All manner of economic wastes are very properly receiving too-long delayed attention. The men in our universities and colleges have been among the first and most effective in promoting the general conservation movement, yet there is what we may term an intellectual by-product of immense importance, a product of their own activities still largely going to waste. This is the mass of scientific facts and principles developed in the course of investigation and instruction, which…never, or only after unnecessary delay reaches the public-at-large in the form of useful inventions.”