ii4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



boat so large and successful as to convince the world of a new mode of 

 transportation. In recent times the question of developing the power 

 of Niagara involved the construction of turbines larger than had ever 

 been built. These were built in Philadelphia, by means of the tech- 

 nical skill there existing, but the designs were made in Geneva by the 

 well known engineers Faesch and Piccard. As a matter of fact the 

 Swiss had long since developed the theory of the turbine, and were pre- 

 pared to design one of any size on the principles already found sound. 

 More recently the steam turbine has come into the field formerly the 

 exclusive possession of the reciprocating steam engine. Curiously, the 

 first successful turbines came from England, then a large number were 

 developed in Germany and France, while at the present time we have 

 one very successful American turbine. Now the physical principles 

 involved in the turbine are quite different from those of the recipro- 

 cating engine, and involve considerable theoretical knowledge of the 

 properties of fluids in rapid motion, some of which were familiar in 

 the case of water, but which were of a different sort for an expansive 

 vapor like steam. It is very noticeable that the best treatises on the 

 steam turbine to-day are German, and begin with a large amount of 

 theory on the properties of rotating discs, then of the thermodynamics 

 of vapors, and finally of the flow of steam through jets, before the 

 technical matters are touched. We are now hoping for the development 

 of the gas-turbine, which shall combine the two advantages of the gas- 

 engine and the turbine, and which will demand for its success all the 

 knowledge of thermodynamics which we possess. As a final example 

 take the case of wireless telegraphy. This country was a pioneer in 

 ordinary telegraphy, having not only Morse to contribute the technical 

 knowledge, but before him Henry with his scientific development of 

 the electromagnet, but the wireless telegraph was imported in an ad- 

 vanced state of development, from England, where the scientific 

 acumen of Maxwell had predicted the action of the electric waves. I 

 am sorry to say that I feel that there is a tendency among our engi- 

 neers or at least among our engineering students to try to do their 

 work with a very small amount of scientific thinking, and it seems to 

 me that this tendency must be overcome if we wish to maintain a suc- 

 cessful competition in either science or technology with such a thor- 

 ough-going scientific nation as Germany. 



There is a tendency to-day in some quarters to disparage the use of 

 hypotheses. With this tendency I do not sympathize. It is difficult to 

 see how scientific advances can be made without the use of hypotheses, 

 nor has that been the ordinary custom. The phrase of Newton has 

 been quoted, " Hypotheses non jingo," but certainly that must be inter- 

 preted as meaning that he did not form unnecessary explanations of 

 phenomena rather than that he did not proceed by means of working 



