144 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



success. Perhaps it may be that not along ttiis path that modern physics 

 seems to suggest will the new knowledge come but, as many years ago 

 there came the new and wonderful discovery of voltaic electricity while 

 Galvani was making experiments with frogs, so in the future a biologist 

 or chemist or physicist, working on some subject entirely remote from 

 the production of energy, may make discoveries which the Watts and 

 Faradays of the future may use to change the life of the world. 



From the point of view, then, of developments in engineering, modern 

 communities cannot afford to neglect the encouragement of scientific 

 research even in those subjects which at present may seem most remote 

 from its activities. Upon almost every section of this association 

 engineering lays tribute and in return engineering has given something 

 at least to make possible much of the brilliant work associated with other 

 sections. The precision of modern engineering made possible the manu- 

 facture and control of the great telescopes and other instruments upon 

 the accuracy of which the possibility of testing the attraction, predicted 

 by Einstein, of the light rays of the stars by the sun depends. The 

 latest apparatus by which Michelson repeated the classical experiment 

 associated with his name and that of Morley is a triumph of engineering 

 skill ; geology owes much to the data supplied by borings and under- 

 ground workings, and the work of many other sections has been facilitated 

 by the work of the engineer. 



Having, however, recognised the debt of engineering to science for 

 the discovery of new principles and new facts which have been used as 

 the starting point for new developments, and the dependence of engineer- 

 ing upon pure science for any new and important future developments 

 only part of the story has been told. In his essay on James Watt, Francis 

 Arago wrote in 1834 : ' There are two things to be considered in every 

 machine ; on the one hand the moving power and on the other the 

 arrangement, more or less complicated, of the moving parts,' and he 

 might have added — the difficulty of materials suited to the new purpose. 

 He further says that ' those persons devoted to speculative exertions are 

 little aware of the distance there is between the project . . . and its 

 realisation . . . the enterprise increases in difficulty and in uncertainty 

 in proportion as it requires the efforts of more artists and the employment 

 of more material elements.' 



In the workshops, in design, in choosing materials, very considerable 

 difficulties have to be overcome before success is possible. The principles 

 of the independent condenser were clearly grasped by Watt, he tells us, 

 as he walked over Glasgow Green, but many years of labour experimenting 

 with materials, many ingenious mechanisms were necessary before the 

 steam engine was at all perfect, and in every step that has been taken in 

 the direction of higher pressures and higher temperatures, new materials, 

 new processes, and new ingenious devices have been necessary before 

 success could be achieved. Inventive ability aUied with experiments, 

 research in the development of new metals for tools and machine elements, 

 precise measurement, the perfection of machine shop methods, especially 

 the very extraordinary improvements in machine tools encouraged by the 

 new tool steels and electric driving and control, have all contributed, and 

 wherever success has been sure the methods of science have been followed. 



