MECHANICAL ENGINEERING. 35 



that stock of substantial learning in the effort to develop the resources 

 of nature for use; and such advances could only go on, unimpeded, after 

 the nature of the great sources of power in the world should have been 

 discovered and their availability for the purposes of the engineer recog- 

 nized. Mechanical engineering, as we understand it, could only fairly 

 start in its wonderful progress after the mechanic had found ways of 

 utilizing natural forces and energies, and of making the tools with 

 which to produce these prime motors, through the operation of which 

 all the arts could be given application in the production of wealth, mul- 

 tiplying the power of the unaided hand by making it in the perform- 

 ance of work the guide of greater powers, rather than the tool itself. 

 It was only when mighty powers could be thus developed and guided 

 and directed that mighty tasks could be performed by so weak and in- 

 significant an organism as man. Man as a prime mover is feeble and 

 helpless before the great powers of nature; man as the master and guide 

 of nature's powers is only less than omnipotent. 



Mechanical engineering, to achieve its highest tasks, must have con- 

 trol of the grandest powers of nature and of all her energies; it must 

 avail itself of prime movers transforming all actual and potential en- 

 ergies into available, transformable, useful work; it must be capable of 

 making for itself tools and machines and apparatus, scientific and other, 

 competent to direct those energies in definite and helpful ways to the 

 performance of every useful task. Progress must wait for the power 

 and power must be guided, divided, applied, through invention and the 

 mechanic arts, to defined and precisely related productive operations. 

 The natural order is: first, sources of available energies; second, prime 

 movers applying while developing those energies; third, tools and ma- 

 chines devised and constructed to perform detailed tasks, exactly and 

 perfectly. Invention is the first necessity, and necessity has been found 

 to be the mother of invention; but invention is helpless without tools, 

 and invention began with the first crude tools; the motors followed, and 

 better tools followed motors, and better motors followed the invention 

 of better tools. It was only a century ago, or a little more, when the 

 inventor had reached a certain stage in the production of tools, that 

 Watt could produce the steam engine of the nineteenth century, that a 

 system of manufactures could come into being as the fruit of invention 

 and that the Golden Age of the centuries could begin. 



The Golden Age of the World, in all good senses, had its origin with 

 the birth of the nineteenth century, and when mechanical engineering 

 began uniting all the sciences and all the arts into one great system 

 of adaptation of nature's powers to the work of the promotion of civil- 

 ization. This fairly begun, the steam-engine, the gas-engine, the elec- 

 tric motors and generators, telegraphs and telephones, the steamboat, 

 the locomotive, the automobile, textile manufactures, iron and steel 



