President's Address. 31 



It is a serious matter to determine what to include and what to 

 leave out in any four-year course of study, and in the present day 

 this amount of time seems to be the maximum that one can expect 

 to hold the great majority of students. Some things must be left 

 out, and some left to be touched incidentally only through the per- 

 sonal influence of the teacher and his contact with the pupil. In 

 the main, the engineering schools are quite close together as to 

 their requirements, though courses of study are under constant dis- 

 cussion and are open to revision. In this matter there is no more 

 potent agency at earnest work than the Society for the Promotion 

 of Engineering Education, whose influence has been strongly felt 

 in the thirteen years of its life. 



There is yet another movement among the engineering colleges 

 of very great import, not only indirectly to students, but directly 

 to the public at large. This is a growing spirit of investigation, 

 the attempt to take up and solve many scientific questions relating 

 to the materials of construction, their use, or to methods of design. 

 Twenty years ago there was very little of this kind of work done, 

 outside of one or two institutions, and teaching was almost wholly 

 led by practice; but to-day, the results of the thinking and inves- 

 tigation of the college men are leading the practitioners. The 

 modern use of the alternating current grew out of the work of col- 

 lege men. The standardizing of the requirements for paving brick 

 came from work done in a college laboratory. The Cornell hy- 

 draulic laboratory, with its unequaled opportunities, is open for the 

 study of unsolved problems. The University of Illinois has pub- 

 lished results of investigations concerning reenforced concrete, 

 high-speed tool steels, the collapsing of tubes, the holding power 

 of railway spikes, and the drainage of earth roads. The Univer- 

 sity of Wisconsin has made a valuable contribution to our knowl- 

 edge of reenforced concrete. The Massachusetts Institute of Tech- 

 nology conducts postgraduate research work in sanitary engineer- 

 ing of great value. The Iowa State College is applying energy to 

 investigations of economic value to the state. Indeed, there is 

 hardly an institution of any great importance that is not doing 

 some practical research work. 



While the University of Kansas has done something along this 

 line — investigations of building stone, paving brick, gas, oil, etc., 

 and has in progress some study of stone for the improvement of 

 roads, a systematic water survey of the state, in connection with 

 the State Board of Health and the United States government, and 

 other studies of public importance — the applied-science men of its 



