SEPTEMBER 25, 1902] 
the tiny specimen. Junior students loaded wires and beams, or 
twisted things with very visible weights, and saw exactly what 
was happening, or they studied vibrating bodies. Many hours 
were devoted to experiments ona battered, rusty old screw-jack, 
or some other lifting-machine, its efficiency under many kinds 
of load being determined, and students studied their observ- 
ations using squared paper, as intently as if nobody had ever 
made such experiments before. There was one piece of appar- 
atus, an old fly-wheel bought at a rag and-bone shop, to which 
kinetic energy was given by a falling weight, which, I remember, 
occupied the attention of four white-headed directors of Electric 
Companies in 1882 (evening students) for many weeks. A 
casual first measurement led on to corrections for friction and 
stiffness of a cord, and much else of a most interesting kind. 
At the end of six weeks these gentlemen had gained a most 
thorough computational acquaintance with every important 
principle of mechanics, a knowledge never to be forgotten. 
They had also had a revelation such as comes to the true experi- 
menter—but that is too deep a subject. 
Perhaps teachers in the greater colleges will smile in a superior 
way when they hear of this kind of experimental mechanics 
being called engineering laboratory work. Trueit was elemen- 
tary mechanics ; but is not every principle which every engineer 
constantly needs called a mere elementary principle of mechanics 
by superior persons? I find that these elementary principles 
are very much unknown to men who have passed through 
elaborate mathematical studies of mechanics. Students found 
out in that laboratory the worth of formule; they gained 
courage in making calculations from formule, for they had 
found out the extent of their own ignorance and knowledge. 
I have never approved of elaborate steam-engines got up for 
students’ laboratory exercise-work. A professor who had 
devoted much thought for a year to the construction of such a 
four-cylinder engine showed a friend how any one or any two 
or any three or all four cylinders, with or without jacketing, 
could be used in all sorts of ways. The friend ventured to say : 
‘“This engine will be used just once and never after.” The 
professor was angry, but his friend proved to be right. The 
professor made experiments with it once himself with a few 
good students. Unfortunately, it was not a sufficiently elaborate 
investigation for publication. Afterwards he never had time 
personally to superintend such work ; his assistants were busy 
at other things; his students could not be trusted with the 
engine by themselves, and to this day it stands in the laboratory 
a Leautiful but useless piece of apparatus. At Finsbury there 
was an excellent one-cylinder engine with vaporising condenser. 
It drove the workshops and electric generators. Ona field-day 
it drove an electric generator only, and perhaps thirty students 
made measurements. Each of them had already acted as stoker 
and engine-driver, as oiler and tester of the machinery, lighting 
fires, taking indicator diagrams, weighing coals, opening and 
closing cocks from seven in the morning to ten at night, so that 
everything was well known to him. They maintained three 
different steady loads for trials of three hours each. They 
divided into groups, one from each group ceasing to take a 
particular kind of observation every ten minutes and removing 
to another job. All watches were made to agree, and each 
student noted the time of each observation. These observations 
were :—Taking indicator diagrams, checking the speed indi- 
cator, taking temperature of feed-water, quantity of feed by 
meter (the meter had been carefully checked by gauge-notch, 
and every other instrument used by us had been tested weeks 
before), taking the actual horse-power passing through a dyna- 
mometer coupling on the shalt, taking boiler and valve-chest 
pressures and vacuum pressures on the roof and in the engine- 
room, weighing coals (the calorific value had already been 
tested), taking the horse-power given out by the dynamo, 
counting the electric lamps in use, and so on. Each student 
was well prepared beforehand. During the next week he 
reduced his own observations, and some of the results were 
hydraulic pressure is no clearer now than it was fifty years ago. The 
engineer asks for actual information derived from actual trial, and we offer 
him the “cauld kail het again” stuff falsely called ** theoretical,” which is 
found in all the text-books (my own among others). These great colleges 
of university rank ought to recognise that it is their duty to increase know- 
ledge through the work of their advanced students. The duty is not 
neglected in the electrical departments of some of the colleges. Perhaps 
the most instructive reference is to the work done at the Central Technical 
College of the City and Guilds Institute at South Kensington, as described 
by Prof. Ayrton in some of the papers already referred to. I cannot imagine 
a_better development of the Finsbury idea in the work of the highest kind of 
Engineering College. 
NO. 1717, VOL. 66] 
NATURE 
335 
gathered on one great table. One lesson that this taught could 
never be forgotten—how the energy of one pound of coal was 
disposed of. So much up the chimney or by radiation from 
boiler or steam-jacket’ and pipes; in condensation in the 
cylinder ; to the condenser ; in engine friction ; in shaft friction, 
&c. I cannot imagine a more important lesson to a young 
engineer than this one taught through a common working 
engine. The students had the same sort of experience with a 
gas-engine. I need hardly say how important it was that the 
Professor himself should take charge of the whole work leading 
up to, during, and after such a field-day. 
The difficulty about all laboratory exercise work worth the 
name is that of finding demonstrators and assistants who are 
wise and energetic. Through foolishness and laziness the most 
beautiful system becomes an unmeaning routine, and the more 
smoothly it works the less educational it is. In England just 
now the curse of all education is the small amount of money 
available for the wages of teachers—just enough to attract 
mediocre men. I have been told, and I can easily imagine, 
that such men have one talent over-developed, the talent for 
making their job softer and softer, until at length they just sit 
at a table, maintaining discipline merely by their presence, 
answering the questions of such students as are earnest enough 
to come and worry them. In such cases it is absolutely neces- 
sary to periodically upset their clockwork arrangements. After 
such an artificial earthquake one might be reminded of what 
occurred at the pool of Bethesda, whose waters had their 
healing property restored when the angel came down and 
troubled them. But for a permanently good arrangement there 
ought to be very much higher wages all round in the teaching 
profession, 
No kind of engineering has developed so rapidly as the 
electrical. Why, it was at the meeting here in Belfast twenty- 
eight years ago (I remember, for I was a Secretary of Section 
A that year, and took the machine to pieces afterwards in Lord 
Kelvin’s laboratory) that there was exhibited for the first time 
in these islands a small Gramme machine. This handmaid of 
all kinds of engineering is now so important that every young 
engineer may be called uneducated who has not had a training 
in that kind of mechanical engineering which is called electrical 
engineering. Prof. Ayrton’s laboratory at Finsbury is the model 
copied by every other electrical engineering laboratory in ‘he 
world. Heand I had the same notions; we had both been 
students of Lord Kelvin; we had worked together in Japan 
since 1875; but whereas I was trying to make my system of 
teaching mechanical engineering replace an existing system, or 
want of system, there was no existing system for his to replace. 
Thus it will be found that in every electrical engineering labora- 
tory the elementary principles are made part of a pupil’s mental 
machinery by many quantitative experiments, and nobody 
suggests that it is mere elementary physics which is being 
taught—a suggestion often enough made about the work in my 
mechanical laboratory. When students know these elementary 
principles well, they can apply their mathematics to the subject. 
As they advance in knowledge they are allowed to find out by 
their own experiments how their simple theories must be made 
more complex in real machines. Their study may be very com- 
plete, but, however much mathematics and graphical calculation 
may come in, their designs of electrical machinery are really 
based upon the knowledge acquired by them in the electrical 
and mechanical laboratories. 
The electrical engineer has an enormous advantage over other 
engineers ; everything lends itself to exact calculation, and a 
completed machine or any of its parts may be submitted to the 
most searching electrical and magnetic tests, since these tests, 
unlike those applied by other engineers, do not destroy the body 
tested. But for this very reason, as a finished product, the 
electrical engineer cannot have that training in the exercise of 
his judgment in actual practical work after he leaves a college 
that some other engineers must have. In tunnelling, earth- 
work and building, in making railways and canals, the engineer 
is supremely dependent on the natural conditions provided for 
him, and these conditions are never twice the same. There are 
no simple laws known to us about the way in which sea and 
river currents will act upon sand and gravel, and engineers who 
have had to do with such problems are continually appealing to 
Nature, continually making observations and bringing to bear 
upon their work all the knowledge and habits of thought that 
all their past experience has given them. I do not know that 
there is any job which a good teacher would have greater 
