256 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION G, 



Section G.— ENGINEERING. 

 President of the Section. — Professor J. E. Petavel, D.Sc, F.R.S. 



TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9. 



'i'he President delivered the following Address : — 



During the last five years every resource of the Empire, moral, intellectual, 

 and material, has been concentrated on une great task, now successfully achieved ; 

 and the present pexiod marks the end of a gigantic military struggle and the 

 beginning of a new social era. 



I. — Engineering and Science during the War. 



To summarise adequately the part played by engineering in the war would 

 constitutes a task far beyond the power of the w^riter or the scope of the present 

 address. Now, as in the past, the fate of nations in war or peace is primarily 

 determined by moral, intellectual, and physical attributes ; but, under modern 

 conditions, these forces can find efficient application, only through the agency 

 of science and engineering. 



A large army depends for its subsistence and equipment on the combined 

 effort of every branch of human activity ; and every productive industry, when 

 organised on a large scale, is in turn dependent upon the engineer. 



Before the end of the war this country had become transfomied into one 

 vast factory, every department of which required the services of trained engi- 

 neers. Every member of this section has contributed his own share to the task, 

 and our programme includes papers giving detailed accounts of several branches 

 of the work. 



It is fitting, therefore, that I should restrict myself to a mere outline of 

 some of the more outstanding facts : — 



The urgent necessity for an. output of munitions vastly in excess of any 

 previous production made centralisation and standardisation ess^ential, and 

 involved a complete revolution in workshop practice. The Ministry of Munition? 

 was responsible for the formation of the required organisations, and guided 

 the transformation of industrial conditions, and, when the dilution of .skilled 

 labour became inevitable, the technical engineer designed the machinery and 

 devised the methods which made efficient work possible. 



Credit is due to the Unionfi for the concessions made ; greater credit to the 

 women for their enthusiastic response to the call and the steady output they 

 maintained. 



Munitions. — The Ministry of Munitions was created in Tilay 1915, its early 

 efforts being concentrated on the production of guns and shells. A year later 

 the Ministry was in a position to meet the ever-increasing demands of the Army, 

 and by 1918 a large reserve of munitions had been established, the expenditui-e 

 being limited only by difficulties of transport at the Front. The maximum 

 expenditure of ammunition was reached one day in October of that year, when 

 900,000 shells, weighing 40.000 tons, were fired. The total number of guns 



