620 TKANSACXIONS OF SECTION G, 



Section G.— ENGINEEEING. 

 President of the Section : — H. S. Hele-Siiaw, D.Sc, LL.D., F.E.S. 



WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8. 



The President delivered the following Address : — 



The preparation and delivery of a Presidential Address is usually a pleasant and 

 not difficult task, although it seems to be the custom mildly to intimate to the 

 contrary. In ordinary times the President chooses a subject on which he has 

 done some work, and with which he is therefore familiar, and with which, 

 moreover, his name is more or less associated. If this had been an ordinary 

 time, I should have liked to deal with the fascinating subject of mechanical 

 locomotion, and to review what has taken place, let us say, since the meeting of 

 the British Association held in Manchester rather more than half-a-century ago. 

 The subject would have afforded ample scope, as we can realise by considering 

 what would have been the effect produced if the distinguished Engineer, Sir 

 William Fairbairn, who was President of the British Association in that year, 

 had told his audience that within a comparatively short space of time our roads 

 would be to a large extent occupied with self-propelled traffic ; that electricity, 

 then nothing but a toy, would play a most important part in our means of 

 locomotion, not merely for driving but for lighting. That it would be used for 

 searching out and communicating with vessels far away from the land and from 

 each other ; that ships many times the size of the largest ones then in ordinary 

 use would employ steam as Hero employed it two thousand years ago, and obtain 

 by this means a speed more than twice that of any existing ships ; and that many 

 ocean ships would be propelled against wind and tide by engines without using 

 any steam at j,\\. If the President had further proceeded to predict that ships 

 would travel under water for long distances as easily as on the surface, and that, 

 above all, a safe pathway would lae found in the air by means of machines flying 

 at speeds far exceeding that of the swiftest birds, I suspect he would have lost 

 a good deal of his reputation as a man of judgment and common sense. 



Such addresses, which deal with scientific progress, are most instructive, and 

 the historical treatment of engineering questions is of the utmost value in 

 assisting the judgment as to future possibilities. It is therefore most dis- 

 appointing that I do not feel justified in taking up your time with an addrese 

 of this kind. 



The fact is, the time is not an ordinary one, for the war which a year ago 

 cast its shadow over the Meeting of the British Association in Australia has, as 

 the months have passed by, gradually unfolded the most terrible page in the 

 history of the world. 



It is terrible not merely because of the frightful slaughter which has taken 

 place and which will yet take place, owing on one hand to the gigantic armies 

 employed, and on the other to the nature of modern warfare. A predecessor in 

 the Chair, one who has left many marks of his genius on the peaceful engineer- 

 ing works of the country, Mr. Hawksley, commented about fifty years ago on 

 ' the unhappy necessity of devoting so much of the science and skill of members 

 of the Association to the defence of the homes of the people of this great 



