G.— ENGINEERING 135 



continual fight against dirt. It is a hopeless fight, for every time they 

 open a window black specks float in to settle and dirty everything. 

 Patients at a nursing home are told that they cannot have the windows 

 open because to do so dirties the curtains. The perfectly ineffective and 

 hopeless labour of these housewives is ten times as great as the total 

 labour required to treat the coal and extract the valuable by-products. 

 Even if the carbonisation process carried out on a limited scale did not 

 show a profitable return, the objections to it disappear when we contem- 

 plate the process carried out on such a scale as completely to rid our 

 towns of smoke, and when the by-products are utilised in a national 

 scheme. 



The waste heat and power stations might be used in agriculture. A 

 power station having an average load of 50,000 kw. will waste more than 

 8,000 million British thermal units per day. This is sufficient to warm 

 500 acres of greenhouses. Two very important items of cost in the 

 forcing of vegetables are — (i) the capital cost of the greenhouses, and 

 (2) the cost of heating. The capital cost to a nation possessing sand, lime, 

 soda, and a surplus of labour need not be very great. If we can utilise the 

 waste heat of power houses to do the warming, we ought to be able to 

 save hundreds of thousands per annum, at present sent to foreign countries 

 for vegetables and flowers. At the same time we could do away with the 

 objectionable discharges from power houses. 



It is not only in connection with engineering and scientific matters that 

 the engineer can help to improve the lot of mankind. It is in connection 

 with all economic and social matters. There is a certain quality found in 

 some men which has been called ' eudemonistic' It is a quality very 

 often found in engineers and scientists, so much so that in the original 

 draft of this address I said that men who were possessed of this quality 

 were ' engineeringly minded.' I am told that this latter phrase is mis- 

 leading, because it seems to claim that only engineers have the quality, 

 and of course there are many people who are not engineers or scientists 

 who are eudemonistic or, as Stuart Chase has phrased it, ' engineeringly 

 minded.' A man has this quality when he throws the whole of his energies 

 into the carrying out of sound, practical and beneficent projects for the 

 sake of those projects themselves, and not primarily from selfish motives 

 or in pursuance of some irrational prejudice. But besides the motives, 

 the definition involves a certain faith in the obtaining of good by logical 

 procedure to that end. This quality of logicality is partly inherited, but 

 only brought to full efficiency by being trained and spurred to overcome 

 difficulties successfully. The man who gets into the habit of shirking 

 problems, the answers to which are not obvious, will never acquire this 

 quality. 



The distinction between the activities of the eudemonistic and the rest 

 of mankind can be best seen by taking a few examples of the activities of 

 the latter by way of contrast. 



Consider the wasting of the energies of the inhabitants of a town (say 

 of 50,000 inhabitants) on the interchange of wealth between individuals 

 instead of their utilisation in the making of wealth — the payment of 

 doctors by people who are ill instead of by people who are well ; the em- 



