The article is devoted to the 50th anniversary of the Russian Technical Society and V.I. Kovalevskii’s speech at the General Meeting of the Society on May, 25 1916 on the occasion of the anniversary. It has been emphasized that in his speech Kovalevsky relied primarily on his report "Basic needs of Russian industry" submitted to the Commission for Industry of the Russian Technical Society on April 29, 1915, in which he gave deep analyses of the Russian industry development in the early XX century and set targets to be solved by the Russian industry during the First World War and after its end