THE ENGINEERING TYPE

It is becoming more and more an accepted fact that engineers, or physicians, or lawyers—like our poets—are born and not made. I believe this to be true. Educators generally are thinking seriously along these lines, with the result that vocational advisers are springing up, especially in industrial circles, to establish eventually yet another profession. Instinct leads young men to enter upon certain callings, unless turned off by misguided parents or guardians, and as a general thing the hunch works out successfully. Philosophers from time immemorial, including Plato and Emerson, have written of this still, small voice within, and have urged that it be heeded. The thing is instinct—cumulative yearnings within man of thousands of his ancestors—and to disobey it is to fling defiance at Nature herself. Personally, I believe that when this law becomes more generally understood there will be fewer failures decorating park benches in our cities and cracker-boxes in our country stores.

The profession of engineering, therefore, has its type. You may be of this type or you may not. The type is quite pronounced, however, and you need not go wrong in your decision. All professions and all trades have their types. Steel-workers—those fearless young men who balance skilfully on a girder, frequently hundreds of feet in the air—are not to be mistaken. Rough, rugged, gray-eyed; with frames close-knit and usually squat; generous with money, and unconcerned as to the future; living each day regardless of the next, and living it—steel-workers are as distinct from the clerical type—slender, tall, a bit self-conscious, fearful of themselves and of the future—I say, the steel-worker is as different from the clerical worker as the circus-driver is from the cleric. Their work marks them for its own, if a man lack it upon entering the work, just as the school-room marks the teacher in time for its own. The thing is not to be mistaken.

The successful engineer must be possessed of a certain fondness for figures. The subject of mathematics must interest him. He must like to figure, to use a colloquialism, and his fondness for it must be genuine, almost an absorption. It must reveal itself to him at an early age, too, as early as his grammar-school days, for then it will be known as genuinely a part of him, and the outcropping of seeds correctly sown by his ancestors. Having this fondness for mathematics, which may be termed otherwise as a curiosity to make concrete ends meet—the working out of puzzles is one evidence of the gift—the young man is well armed for a successful career in the profession. He will like mathematics for its own sake, and when, later, in college, and later still, in the active pursuit of his chosen work, he is confronted with a difficult problem covering strains or stress in a beam or lever or connecting-rod, he will attack it eagerly, instead of—as I have seen such problems attacked more than once—irritably and with marked mental effort.

The successful engineer must be a man who likes to shape things with his hands. He need not always do it, and probably will not after he has attained to recognition, save only as he supervises or makes the mechanical drawings—the picture—of the thing. But the itch must be present in the man. And, like the desire within him to figure, it must make itself manifest within him early in life. If a young man be of those who early like to crawl in under the family buzz-wagon; tinker there for half a day at a time; emerge in a thick coating of grease and dust and with joy in his eye—such a young man has the necessary qualifications for a successful engineer. He may never do this—as I say—in all his engineering career. But the yearning must be as much a part of him as his love for mathematics—so much so that all his engineering days he will feel something akin to envy for the machinist who works over a machine of the engineer's own devising—and it must be vitally a part of him. To illustrate:

When only twelve years old the author, in company with several playmates, decided one November day to build an ice-boat. From the numerous building operations going on in the neighborhood, in the light of the moon, he secured the necessary timbers, and from a neighbor's back yard—also in the light of the moon—he got a young sapling which served delightfully as a mainmast. With the needed materials all gathered, it suddenly struck him that a plan of some kind ought to be made of the proposed ice-boat, in order to guard against grave errors in construction. To think was to act with this bright youngster. He got him his mother's bread-board and a pencil and an ordinary school ruler, and with these made a drawing of the ice-boat as he thought the boat should be. Knowing nothing of mechanical drawing, and but very little of construction of any kind, he nevertheless devised a pretty fair-looking boat and not a bad working drawing. One of his playmates, whose father was something or other in a manufacturing-plant, showed the drawing to the family circle; with the result that the kid's father, laying a rule upon the drawing, pronounced it an accurate mechanical drawing, drawn to scale—which was one inch to the foot—and sent for the youthful designer, meaning me.

"What do you know about mechanical drawings?" he asked the bashful youngster, pointing to the drawing under discussion.

"I don't know nothing about it," replied the kid—meaning me again. "I just made it with a ruler."

"But how come you made it to scale? That drawing is a complete plan and elevation of an ice-boat, drawn accurately to scale." He looked thoughtful. "I don't understand it. You ought to take up with drafting, my boy, when you get a little older. I never knew of a case like it. What does your father do?" he suddenly asked.

"He's an ice-dealer,"[1] replied the discomfited boy. "I just made it—that's all. We need it, too, to go ahead." Turning to his playmate, "Come on out, Jack; the gang is waiting."

Which terminated the interview.

Yet the thing was the beginning of a career for the boy. The boat in time somehow got itself built and out upon the little river; but owing to the fact that its materials were stolen, the river failed to freeze over that winter, and for three winters following—not till the boat itself had fallen apart from disuse and lack of care—which points its own moral, as hinted at above. If you must build ice-boats, and you are a kid with mechanical yearnings, pay for the material that goes into the making of your product. But the thing—as I say—was the beginning of a career for the lad. In time, through the kindly office of his playmate's father, he became apprenticed in a drafting-room of a large manufacturing-plant—and the rest was easy. In his first year, on paper, he devised a steam-engine with novel arrangement of slide-valves, and thereafter for years designed engines and machinery about the country, always quite successfully.

The successful engineer, while possessed of certain spiritual characteristics, must also—if I may be so bold as to say so—be possessed of certain physical characteristics. One of these is large, and what is known as capable, hands. Short, spatulate fingers, with a broad palm, appear to be a feature of the successful engineer. Of course, there are exceptions, as there are exceptions to every rule, but in the majority of cases which have come under the writer's observation the successful engineer has had hands of this shaping. He likewise has had wrists and arms to match with such hands, and—in the practical engineer—that is, the engineer whose particular gift is coping with ordinary problems of construction, as against the genius who blazes new trails, like Watt and Westinghouse and Edison and Marconi and the Wright brothers—a head whose contour was along the "well-shaped" lines. The so-called genius usually has an odd-shaped head, I've noticed, but for purposes of this book we shall confine ourselves to the average successful man in engineering.

Thus you have, roughly, the engineering type. I have sketched only the major characteristics. The minor characteristics embrace many features. There is patience, for one—patience to labor long with difficulties; concentration, for another; application, for a third; certain student qualities, for yet a fourth. Many graduate engineers have gone off into other work immediately after leaving college because of a clearly defined dislike for detail in construction. The average successful engineer will be a man interested in the shaping of the details of his machine or bridge or plant. To many, details are irksome. If the young man who is reading this book knows that he dislikes a detail of any character whatsoever, unless he be possessed of the creative genius of a Westinghouse or an Edison, he would better take up with some other profession. For engineering, in the last analysis, is the manipulating of detailed parts into a perfect whole—whether it be a bridge or a machine or a plant.