882 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXIX. No. 753 



that the salary they should pay ought to 

 depend on the sort of man they secured. 

 If they engaged a man of exceptional abil- 

 ity he would probably save them so much 

 in the cost of the work that they could well 

 afford to pay him twice or thrice what they 

 would pay an ordinary engineer. 



I am not here to indict my own profes- 

 sion. Far from it. But every member of 

 it who has reached mature years, held large 

 responsibilities and come in contact with 

 engineers of all sorts in actual work, will 

 confess that a very large amount of work 

 is done poorly that ought to be done well. 

 That many, many millions of dollars are 

 wasted that might be saved by better de- 

 sign, better supervision, better execution. 

 Engineers, let us confess, are not exempt 

 from the frailties of humanity. Some of 

 us are lazy, and will take the easy course 

 and let things run on in the rut of routine 

 rather than make the effort to prepare new 

 designs to meet changed conditions. Some 

 of us are arrant cowards, and rather than 

 run any risks we will spend money like 

 water— so long as it is not our own money. 

 I have seen engineers of this type take 

 credit to themselves for their conservatism, 

 and prate in official reports about the high- 

 class construction they had secured, when 

 the fact was that they had spent thousands 

 where hundreds would have satisfied every 

 requirement. 



I am perfectly well aware that there are 

 men who defend that type of engineering. 

 They claim that an engineer's business is 

 only to look after accuracy, strength, per- 

 manence and safety in construction ; to use 

 only the best materials and accept nothing 

 but the highest class of work. It is engi- 

 neers of this type who are responsible for 

 the idea, still too commonly held, that to 

 put an engineer in charge of work means a 

 great increase in its cost. If we had less 

 such engineering, there would be a greater 

 demand for engineers. 



I am able to give you a personal illustra- 

 tion of the difference between the two types 

 of engineering. Within forty-eight hours 

 I have talked with men in Washington who 

 know of the work your director has done 

 there in a great government department of 

 engineering work. He had the good sense 

 to see that this work was only a means to 

 an end, and that accuracy and hair-split- 

 ting refinement were only valuable where 

 they were effective in the final result. He 

 solved the problem, ' ' What is worth while, ' ' 

 and his solution has saved to the govern- 

 ment tens of thousands and probably hun- 

 dreds of thousands of dollars. 



I want to see more engineers who are 

 able to wisely solve this problem, "What 

 is worth while, " in a hundred lines of engi- 

 neering work. 



How many hundreds of millions of dol- 

 lars do you suppose are expended annually 

 in the United States in the promotion of 

 foolish and absurd inventions or enter- 

 prises wrongly planned ? It has long been 

 a theory of mine that people ought to be 

 saved from losing their money in such 

 schemes by seeking the advice of engineers. 

 But I have found that before my theory 

 can be put into practise, we must have engi- 

 neers who are wise enough and broad 

 enough to give reliable advice on such 

 matters. And the public must learn to 

 discriminate between the engineers who 

 know and those who only think they know. 



I think it well to set forth these facts 

 here for the encouragement of those who 

 may be looking forward to the profession 

 and who may have the feeling that engi- 

 neering work has already reached such a 

 stage of perfection that there is no room in 

 it for further advancement or greater 

 achievements. There is room and need to- 

 day for better engineers and for a higher 

 grade of engineering work. 



And so your mill, although it is to grind 

 out a staple product, is not designed to 



