Professor David Edgerton reflects on a WW1 clarion-call from the British scientific establishment. In a letter to The Times in 1916, many of the great names of British science declared their belief that both academic and applied science were being treated as Cinderella subjects. The Germans, they surmised, had got their act together and were outflanking the British military effort in chemical warfare, armaments and generally taking science more seriously. Edgerton finds out what was going on at the time and looks at how the First World War advanced British science.