ENGINEERING AND THE ENGINEER

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ENGINEERING AND THE ENGINEER

Several years ago, at the regular annual meeting of one of the major engineering societies, the president of the society, in the formal address with which he opened the meeting, gave expression to a thought so startling that the few laymen who were seated in the auditorium fairly gasped. What the president said in effect was that, since engineers had got the world into war, it was the duty of engineers to get the world out of war. As a thought, it probably reflected the secret opinion of every engineer present, for, however innocent of intended wrong-doing engineers assuredly are as a group in their work of scientific investigation and development, the statement that engineers were responsible for the conflict then raging in Europe was absolute truth.

I mention this merely to bring to the reader's attention the tremendous power which engineers wield in world affairs.

The profession of engineering—which, by the way, is merely the adapting of discoveries in science and art to the uses of mankind—is a peculiarly isolated one. But very little is known about it among those outside of the profession. Laymen know something about law, a little about medicine, quite a lot—nowadays—about metaphysics. But laymen know nothing about engineering. Indeed, a source of common amusement among engineers is the peculiar fact that the average layman cannot differentiate between the man who runs a locomotive and the man who designs a locomotive. In ordinary parlance both are called engineers. Yet there is a difference between them—a difference as between day and night. For one merely operates the results of the creative genius of the other. This almost universal ignorance as to what constitutes an engineer serves to show to what broad extent the profession of engineering is isolated.

Yet it is a wonderful profession. I say this with due regard for all other professions. For one cannot but ponder the fact that, if engineers started the greatest war the world has ever known—and engineers as a body freely admit that if they did not start it they at least made it possible—they also stopped it, thereby proving themselves possessed of a power greater than that of any other class of professional men—diplomats and lawyers and divinities not excepted.

That engineering is a force fraught with stupendous possibilities, therefore, nobody can very well deny. That it is a force generally exercised for good—despite the World War—I myself, as an engineer, can truly testify. With some fifteen years spent on the creative end of the work—the drafting and designing end—I have yet to see, with but two or three rare exceptions, the genius of engineers turned into any but noble channels.

Thus, engineering is not only a wonderful profession, with the activities of its followers of utmost importance, but also it is a profession the individual work of whose pioneers, from Watt to Westinghouse and from Eiffel to Edison, has been epoch-making.

For when James Watt, clock-repairer, tinker, being called into a certain small laboratory in England more than a century ago to make a few minor repairs on a new design of steam-engine, discovered, while at work on this crude unit deriving its motion from expanded steam and the alternate workings of a lever actuated by a weight, the value of superheated steam for power purposes, and later embodied the idea in a steam-engine of his own, Watt set the civilized world forward into an era so full of promise and discovery that even we who are living to-day, despite the wonderful progress already made in mechanics as represented among other things in the high-speed engine, the dynamo, the airplane, are witnessing but the barest of beginnings.

Likewise, when George Westinghouse, inventor of the airbrake, having finally persuaded the directors of the Pennsylvania Railroad, after many futile attempts in other directions, to grant him an opportunity to try out his invention, and, trying it out—on a string of cars near Harrisburg—ably demonstrated its practicability as a device for stopping trains and preventing accidents, he also—as had Watt before him—set the civilized world forward into an era full of promise and discovery as yet but barely entered upon, even with the remarkable progress already made in industry alone in the matter of regard for the safety of human life—Westinghouse's own particular blazed trail through the forest of human ignorance this same airbrake.

So with other pioneers—with Eiffel, in the field of tower construction; with Edison, in the field of electricity; with the Wright brothers, in the field of aerial navigation; With Simon Lake, inventor of the submarine boat. All were pioneers; all set the civilized world forward; all—though this perhaps is irrelevant, yet it will serve to reveal the type of men these pioneers were and are—all overcame great obstacles—Lake not the least among them.

Told that he was visionary, when Lake explained, as he did in his effort to enlist capital with which to build his first submarine boat, that he could safely submerge his invention and steer it about on the bed of the ocean as readily as a man can steer an automobile about the streets of a city, that while submerged he could step out of the boat through a trap-door without flooding the boat, by the simple process of maintaining a greater air pressure inside than the pressure of the water outside—Simon Lake, discouraged on every hand, finally decided to build a boat himself, and did build one, with his own hands—a boat fourteen feet long and constructed of rough pine timbers painted with coal-tar—in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey. With this boat Lake demonstrated to a skeptical world for all time that he was neither a visionary nor a dreamer, but a practical doer among men—an engineer.

Of such stuff, then, were, and are, engineers made. Whether they realized it or not, whether the world at large realized it or not, each represented a noble calling, each was a professional man, each was chiseling his name for all time into the granite foundations of a wonderful profession even yet only in the building—engineering. Their name is legion, too, and their names will last because of the fact that their work, remaining as it does after them equally with the work of followers of the finest of the fine arts, is known to mankind as a benefit to mankind. Known by their works, the list extends back to the very dawn of history.

For it was men of this calling, the calling of engineers, who in the early days wrought for purposes of warfare—warfare then being the major industry—the javelin, the spear, the helmet, the coat of mail, the plate of armor, the slingshot; just as their later brothers, for a like purpose, conceived an devised the throwing of mustard gas, the two-ton explosive, the aerial bomb, the mortar shell, the hand-grenade—for the protection, false and true, of the home. For the upbuilding of the home, for the continuance of the home, men of this calling also it was who conceived and shaped, among other things, the cook-stove, the chimney, the wheel, the steam-engine, the spinning-jenny, the suspension-bridge, the bedspring-oh, boy!—the bicycle, the sandblast, the automobile, the airplane, the wireless.

Thus it will be seen that engineering is a distinctive and important profession. To some even it is the topmost of all professions. However true that may or may not be to-day, certain it is that some day it will be true, for the reason that engineers serve humanity at every practical turn. Engineers make life easier to live—easier in the living; their work is strictly constructive, sharply exact; the results positive. Not a profession outside of the engineering profession but that has its moments of wabbling and indecision—of faltering on the part of practitioners between the true and the untrue. Engineering knows no such weakness. Two and two make four. Engineers know that. Knowing it, and knowing also the unnumbered possible manifoldings of this fundamental truism, engineers can, and do, approach a problem with a certainty of conviction and a confidence in the powers of their working-tools nowhere permitted men outside the profession.

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This book is part of the public domain. Charles M. Horton (2008). Opportunities in Engineering. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/24681/pg24681-images.html

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