TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION G. 721 



The Professors were given a free hand at Finsbury, and there were no outside 

 examiners. I need not dwell upon the cour?es in Chemistry and Physics ; some 

 critics might call the subjects Rational Chemistry and Applied Physics ; they were 

 as d liferent from all other courses of study in these subjects as the courses on 

 Rational Mathematics and Mechanics differed from all courses elsewhere. The course 

 on ^Mechanics was really one on Mechanical Engineering, There were workshops in 

 wood and iron, not to teach trades, but rather to teach boys the properties of 

 materials. There were a steam-engine and a gas-engine, and shafting and gearing 

 of many kinds, and dynamos which advanced students in turn were allowed to 

 look after under competent men. There was no machine which might not be 

 experimented with occasionally. Elementary and advanced courses of lectures 

 ■were given; there was an elaborate system of tutorial classes, wliere numerical 

 and squared paper exercise work was done ; there were classes in experimental 

 plane and solid geometry, including much graphical calculation ; boys were taught 

 to make drawing-office drawings in pencil onh', and tracings and blue prints, such 

 as would be respected in the workshop, and not the ordinarj^ drawing-class 

 drawings, which cannot be respected anywhere ; but the most important part of 

 the training was in the Laboratory, in which every student worked, making 

 quantitative experiments. An offer of a 100-ton testing-machine for that laboratory 

 was made but refused ; the advanced students usually had one opportunity 

 given them of testing with a large machine, but not in their own laboratory. I 

 consider that there is very little educational value in such a machine ; the student 

 thinks of the great machine,' and not of 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 on a battered, rusty old screw-jack, or some other lifting- 

 machine, its efficiency under many kinds of load being determined, and students 

 studied their observations using squared paper, as intently as if nobody had ever 

 made such experiments before. There was one piece of apparatus, 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 experimenter — 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'laboi-a- 

 tory work. True, it was elementary 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 



' These great testing-machines, so common in Ihe larger colleges, seem to have 

 destroyed all idea of scientific experiment. There is so much that the engineer 

 wants to know, and yet laboratory people are persistently and lazily repeating old 

 work suggested and begun by engineers of sixty years ago. For example, men like 

 Fairbairn and Robert Napier would long ago have found out the behaviour of 

 materials under combined stresses. We do not even know the condition of strength 

 of iron or steel in a twisted shaft which is also a beam. The theory of strength of 

 a gun or thick tube under 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 bet 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 knowledge 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 Professor 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. 



1902. 3 ^ 



