600 MECHANICAL ENGINEERING 



in more or less systematic and conventional ways, to stand off and 

 look at results and ask one's self whether they are reasonable. 

 One man will figure that certain material weighs two hundred 

 tons, and believe it. Another will say that there is something 

 wrong in that, for it all came in two cars." 



The engineer in practice has to check results in this way because 

 errors are costly in money and reputation; but in the school where 

 ideas are not materialized the result of errors is less serious. The 

 consequence is that it is customary to assume that a result is right 

 because it has been figured. To use another illustration : One man 

 may get a result by using seven-place logarithms and may say that 

 it must be right because of the seven places. But another may 

 check it through with a slide-rule and show a large error in the 

 second figure of the result. After working out in detail, the whole 

 problem should be looked at broadly for reasonableness. The schools 

 should lead the student in this direction to line up with practice. 



These are probable criticisms of a man fresh from practice. Every 

 practicing engineer will, I think, recognize their reasonableness. 



Who then are the men to work out the changes? The men with 

 teaching capacity fresh from practice; and so again we come to 

 see the desirability of alternating teaching and practical work. 



Another difficulty is the present time-limit of the technical course. 

 With engineering development has come the demand that the 

 engineer should have broader training. The course was made to 

 cover four years at first, and that served for the early days; but 

 now for years we have so to speak - - been blowing steam into 

 a closed vessel from a high-pressure source; the result is too high 

 pressure. Students are worked too hard and as a result cannot 

 do the best work of which they are capable. It takes time for ideas 

 to soak into the human brain. The solution is to increase the course 

 to five years. The objection usually made is that students cannot 

 afford the time and expense. But is this true? I know a man who 

 spent ten years after entering college before he began the practice 

 of medicine; four years in college, four years in the medical school, 

 and two years in hospital work. This may be an extreme case, but 

 this is the kind of a physician I would like to call in case of serious 

 illness. Suppose the student leaves the technical school at the age 

 of tw r enty-four. He may reasonably look forward to thirty-six 

 or more years in the practice of his profession. If an additional 

 year's study can increase the efficiency of each one of these years, is it 

 not worth while? The increase in efficiency is not due alone to the 

 additional year's work. The stress is reduced, and the development 

 is more normal. Moreover, the danger of mental overstrain is re- 

 duced. The five-year course also would give opportunity for the 

 introduction of outside A\ r ork that would increase the engineer's 



