Part 1 (1/2)
Opportunities in Engineering.
by Charles M.Horton.
I
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 a.s.suredly 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 const.i.tutes 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 cla.s.s of professional men--diplomats and lawyers and divinities not excepted.
That engineering is a force fraught with stupendous possibilities, therefore, n.o.body 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 n.o.ble 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 n.o.ble 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 and devised the throwing of mustard gas, the two-ton explosive, the aerial bomb, the mortar sh.e.l.l, 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 pract.i.tioners 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.
II
ENGINEERING OPPORTUNITIES
The writer can best ill.u.s.trate the opportunities for young men which exist in engineering by a little story. The story is true in every particular. Nor is the case itself exceptional. Men occupying high places everywhere in engineering, did they but tell their story, would repeat in substance what is set forth below. More than any other profession to-day, engineering holds out opportunities for young men possessing the requisite ”will to success” and the physical stamina necessary to carry them forward to the goal. Opportunities in any walk of life are not all dead--not all in the past. A young man to-day can go as far as he wills. He can go farther on less capital invested in engineering than in any other profession--that's all.
The young man's name was Smith. He was one of seven children--not the seventh son, either--in a poor family. At the age of sixteen he went to work in overalls on a section of railroad as a helper--outdoor, rough work. At seventeen he was transferred to the roundhouse; at nineteen he apprenticed himself to the machinist trade. Engineering? He did not know what it was, really. Merely he saw his way clear to earning a livelihood and went after it. He was miserably educated. His knowledge of mathematics embraced arithmetic up to fractions, at which point it faded off into blissful ”nothingness”--as our New-Thoughtists say. But he had an inquiring mind and a proper will to succeed. While serving his three years in the shop he bought a course in a correspondence school and studied nights, taking up, among other things, the subject of mechanical drafting. When twenty-two years of age he applied for, and got, a position as draftsman in a small company developing a motorcycle. He was well on his way upward.
He spent a year with this company. He learned much of value to him not only about mathematics, but about engineering as a whole as well. One day he decided that the field was restricted--at least, too much so for him--and he left and went with a Westinghouse organization in Pittsburgh. His salary was in the neighborhood of a hundred and ten dollars a month. He remained with the company two years as a designer, and then, having saved up sufficient funds to meet his needs, went to college, taking special work--physics and chemistry and mathematics. He remained in school two years. When he came out, instead of returning to the drafting-room and the theoretical end of the work, he donned overalls once more and went to work in the shop as an erecting man. Two years afterward he was chief operating engineer in a small cement-plant in the Southwest, his salary being three thousand dollars a year. A year of this and he returned East, at a salary of four thousand dollars a year, as operating engineer of a larger plant. Then came a better offer, with one of the largest, if not the very largest, steel-plants in the country, as superintendent of power, at a salary of five thousand dollars a year. When the war broke out, or rather when this country became involved in the war, my friend Smith, at a salary of ten thousand dollars a year, became a.s.sociated with a staff of engineers brought together into a corporation manufacturing sh.e.l.ls. And all before he was barely in his thirties!
A young man still, what lies ahead of him can readily be surmised. Smith will follow engineering on salary until he is probably forty, when he will enter upon a consulting practice, and at fifty retire with sufficient money to keep him in comfort the remainder of his days. Nor will he be an exception, as I have stated in the opening paragraph. The profession is crowded with men who have worked up from equally humble beginnings. Indeed, one of the foremost efficiency engineers in the country to-day began as an apprentice in a foundry, while another, fully as well known in efficiency work, began life in the United States navy as a machinist's mate. Automobile engineers, whose names, many of them, are household words, in particular have gone big in the profession and from very obscure beginnings. It is not stretching the obvious to say that the majority of these men, had they entered upon any other work, would never have been heard from nor have attained to their present wealth and affluence. Smith was just one of many in a profession offering liberal opportunities. The opportunities still exist and in just as large a proportion as they ever existed. It remains but for the young man to decide. The profession itself, almost, will take care of him afterward.