42: 



NATURE 



[November 8, 1900 



profession well, insists upon a knowledge of science in its new 

 members. If this recognition of science did not exist anywhere 

 else in the whole world, I say that its recognition by such a 

 thoroughly good professional society as that of the Civil 

 Engineers ought to recommend it to all professional societies. 



In Germany an enormous stride has recently been made in 

 the raising of Engineering degrees to rank with the highest 

 University honours. There is hardly one engineer of eminence 

 in Switzerland, France or Germany who has not passed with 

 honour through the classes of one of their great science 

 Universities.^ In Great Britain, within the last fifteen years, 

 not only have great engineering schools been established in all 

 the manufacturing towns, but even in Cambridge University 

 there is one of the best schools of civil, mechanical and electrical 

 engineering of which I know anything. 



Before we think of imitating the Institution of Civil Engineers, 

 we ought to reflect on certain fundamental distinctions between 

 that Institution and our own, which at first sight seem to make 

 us less professional. 



There is a well-known unwritten rule of the Civil Engineers, 

 to which there are only a few exceptions, that no contracting 

 railway or harbour engineer can acquire the title of M. Inst.C.E. 

 I think myself that it is a pity to draw a hard and fast line 

 between consulting engineers and contractors. No doubt it 

 simplifies the labour of the Council in its selection of candidates, 

 but it gives rise to anomalies. 



A man, who was once a civil engineer because he served a 

 pupilage under his clever father, and who now is nominally at 

 the head of his father's large practice, the real engineering 

 work being done by many clever employees, this man may 

 be a member. A contracting engineer who shows marvellous 

 ability, not only in rectifying the mistakes of the designer of a 

 large bridge or tunnel or reservoir embankment, but shows the 

 power of Lord Kitchener in directing the work of thousands 

 of men, so that no man need be idle, and the whole contract 

 goes on like clockwork, and is finished well in the minimum of 

 time, this man is ineligible. Now, in our institution, it has 

 been recognised from the very first that manufacturers and con- 

 tractors and their employees may belong to the very highest 

 ranks of their profession. Of course, I do not mean men who 

 simply receive the profits of businesses, or even men who 

 merely work to obtain orders for themselves. I mean men who 

 are not merely formally, but in reality manufacturing or con- 

 tracting engineers. I mean men who, in dealing with standardised 

 things, design new methods for quick, good, cheap production 

 of such things. I mean men who improve old forms of things, 

 possibly through their paid subordinates. I mean by a manu- 

 facturer fit to be a M.I.E.E., a man who might act as his own 

 manager, and who, perhaps, has a wider outlook than on mere 

 managerial duties. So long as a contractor or manufacturer is 

 really an engineer, we know that we add to our strength with 

 the ad('ii Jon of every such member. 



But consider a contractor who only uses ordinary types of ma- 

 chines or electrical plant in well-known ways, surely he can hardly 

 be said to be in the profession at all. Surely the one thing that 

 differentiates us from mere tradesmen is that we do not follow 

 mere rule of thumb methods ; we think for ourselves, we weigh 

 advantages and disadvantages. If every new installation re- 

 quired the same treatment as existing ones, the engineer would 

 degenerate into a tradesman, and it seems to me that the 

 electrical engineer ought to have a special fear of such degenera- 

 tion. 



In railway and harbour and river and sanitary engineering, 

 in every new job, there are new difficulties to be dealt with. An 

 engineer who designs many undertakings and sees them carried 

 out must be a thoughtful man ; he cannot help keeping himself 

 acquainted with engineering principles, and so he is a profes- 

 sional man. So an architect finds that each new job requires 

 all his experience. Every case that comes before a real physician 

 or surgeon requires a somewhat different treatment from any old 

 case. Every case brought before a barrister requires the exer- 

 cise of all his past experience. In every case a pi'ofession im- 

 plies the necessity for the exercise of all one's past experience ; 

 because the work one has to do is never the same as any work 



1 I understand also that the great unions of nianufacturers in Germany 

 are about to make facilities for giving a year of real factory work to the 

 Polytechnic students, thus perfecting the German system. In Japan we 

 found great success in requiring students to spend their summer in real 

 shops, their winters at college. In England it may be that we shall prefer 

 to Jet apprentices have shorter factory hours than workmen, their masters 

 being responsible for instruction being given in theory. 



NO. 1 619, VOL. 63] 



one has ever done before. And when I say past experience, I 

 really mean certain general principles which one has always in , 

 one's mind, principles derived from all that one has done or seen ■, , 

 or read about. \ ' 



Electrical engineering is in a curious position. It ovyes its 

 being altogether to scientific men, to the laboratory and desk- 

 work of a long line of experimenters and philosophers. Even 

 now the work going on in a laboratory to-day becomes the 

 much larger work of the engineer to-morrow. When at length 

 the laboratory experiment is utilised in engineering, we see that 

 there is no other kind of engineering which so lends itself to 

 mathematical treatment and exact measurement. Most of the 

 phenomena dealt with by the electrical engineer lend them- 

 selves to exact mathematical calculation, and after calculations 

 are made exact measurements may be made to test the accuracy 

 of our theory. For a completed machine or any of its parts can 

 be submitted to the most searching electrical and magnetic tests, 

 since these tests, unlike those applied by the mechanical 

 engineer, do not destroy the body tested. 



Contrast this with the calculations it is possible to make in 

 other kinds of engineering. The pressure of earth against a 

 revetement wall is possibly 200 or 300 per cent, greater, or 50 to 

 70 per cent, less than what we imagine it to be in what some 

 limited men call theory. We use factors of safety 5 or 10 or 

 more on all kinds of iron structure calculations, because we are 

 aware of our ignorance of a correct method of dealing with the 

 problems. The civil engineer never has exactly the same 

 problem as has already been solved. In tunnelling, earthwork, 

 building, &c., in making railways and canals, he is supremely 

 dependent on the natural conditions provided for him ; the con- 

 figuration of the surface of the ground, the geological formation, 

 the structural materials available in the neighbourhood. The 

 story of how the engineer has to study the endlessly different 

 ways of interaction of water and sand and gravel is told by the 

 troublesome bars at the mouths of rivers all over the world, by 

 the difficulties of coast and river-bank protection, by the failure 

 of sea walls and piers. But why should I make a catalogue of 

 the different kinds of work done by civil engineers ? Every one 

 of them needs the exercise of general scientific principles due to 

 much experience. 



Now of all such natural difficulties the consulting or con- 

 tracting electrical engineer is greatly independent. Give him a 

 source of power, and tell him what is to be done ; whether he 

 is to light a town or a building, whether with arc or incan- 

 descent lights ; whether he drives a stamp mill near a mine or a 

 pump, or a machine tool, or a spinning frame, the electrical 

 part of the work is carried out in much the same way. Natural 

 conditions affect him mainly in the cost of transport of his 

 materials and the cost of labour. He can make in an easy way 

 the most careful calculations as to the best arrangement of his 

 conductors and machines to give maximum economy, and 

 except for this easy calculation his work is that of a mere 

 tradesman. He is practically independent even of the weather. 

 There are, indeed, some of us who grumble that this easy cal- 

 culation is not made easier still, who prefer to make arithmetical 

 guesses rather than exact calculation, because perhaps we like 

 to see a little uncertainty introduced into the problem to make 

 it more like a problem in civil engineering. I want members 

 to see clearly that as times go on, as our electrical engineering 

 work gets more and more cut and dried, the man who loses the 

 power to calculate, who loses his grip of the simple theory 

 underlying our work, must sink more and more into the position 

 of a mere tradesman who has no longer the right to call himself 

 an engineer. 



An electrical engineer must have such a good mental grasp 

 of the general scientific principles underlying his work that he 

 is able to improve existing things and ways of using these things. 

 It has become the custom to call this theory, and I suppose I 

 must follow the custom. I should prefer to call it Scienre ^ or 

 knowledge. Do you remember Huxley's definition of Science ? 

 "Science," he said, "is organised common sense"; and this 

 is really what I mean. Well, calling it theory, the man who is 



1 What Falstaff said of the word ' ' occupy " we have to say of the word 

 " Science." It is used by many people out of its proper meaning and then 

 condemned, so that one is getting afraid to use it. In Prof. Fitzgerald's 

 splendid inaugural address to the Dublin Section of this Institution he says : 

 " As has recently been pointed out to me by Dr. Trouton, it would be im- 

 possible to say the same contemptuous things of knowledge as are said of 

 Science. In Germany the word used, ' Wissenschaft," is the one corre.^^pond- 

 ing to our word ' knowledge,' and there nobody of any sense could say that 

 ' knowledge is all humbug," as is here often said, and still oftener thought, 

 of 'Science." 



