TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION G. 723 



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 un- 

 educated who has not had a training in that kind of mechanical engineering 

 which is called electrical engineering. Professor Ayrton's laboratory at Finsbury 

 is the model copied by every other electrical engineering laboratory in the world. 

 lie and 1 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 laboratory 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 complete, 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, earthwork, 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 pleasure in undertaking than the arrangement of a laboratory in which 

 students might study for themselves such problems as come before railway, canal, 

 river, harbour and coast-protection engineers ; there is no such laboratory in 

 existence at the present time, and in any case it could only be of use in the 

 way of mere suggestion to an engineer who bad already a good knowledge of his 

 profession. 



It was a curious illustration of mental inertia that the usual engineering 

 visitor, even if he was a professor of engineering, always seemed to suppose 

 that the work done at Finsbury was the same as that done in all the ereat 

 engineering colleges. As a matter of fact no subject was taught there in the same 

 manner as it was taught elsewhere.^ 



Most of the students were preparing for electrical or mechanical engineering, 

 and therefore we thought it important that nearly every professor or demonstrator 

 or teacher should be an engineer. I know of nothing worse than that an engineer- 

 ing student should be taught mathematics or physics or chemistry by men who 

 are ignorant of engineering, and yet nothing is more common in colleges of 



' It is really ludicrous to see how all preachers on technical education are 

 supposed by non-thinking people to hold the same doctrine. The people askirg for 

 reform in education differ from one another more than Erasmus and Luther, and 

 John of Leyden and Knipperdoling. 



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