August 9, 1912] 



SCIENCE 



163 



and — we have a McAndrews hynm. The 

 man in the street knows something about 

 spark plugs, and many women understand 

 the general principles of the telephone. 

 The social status of the engineer has 

 emerged from that of a mechanic to one 

 nearly as high as that of the clergyman, 

 the physician or the lawyer. 



Relatively recently there has been going 

 on simultaneously with all this, however, 

 hardly noticed, something else — a vast in- 

 crease in so-called engineering work by 

 men who are not engineers, and at the 

 same time a large drawing off into execu- 

 tive, administrative, industrial, commer-l 

 cial, civic, educational, financial and even 

 legal callings, of men of engineering train- 

 ing. A history of segregation and disinte- 

 gration seems to have begun to accompany 

 a history of integration and building up. 



For one to say to-day he is an engineer 

 gives very little idea of what he actually 

 does. It does not locate him in one of the 

 twenty-seven recognized classes. It leaves 

 it possible for the hearer to think of him as 

 a "social engineer" or an "efficiency engi- 

 neer" should he not look like a "civil engi- 

 neer"; but even if he did define himself 

 and say he was an electrical engineer, the 

 hearer would still not know whether he 

 represented the last word on the loading of 

 telephone circuits or his responsibility was 

 to determine whether the great railroad 

 terminals of Chicago should use a third rail 

 or an overhead catenary. If he .should say 

 "I am a teacher," "a physician," "a 

 clergyman, " " a lawyer, ' ' there would be a 

 much more definite conception attaching to 

 his answer. There must be, therefore, in 

 the title "engineer" something broader, 

 something not included, or included to a 

 lesser degree, in the titles of the other pro- 

 fessions or occupations. 



A light is shed if we examine the popular 

 definition that engineering is "educated 



common sense." Can it be that unlike 

 "physician," "lawyer," "teacher," the 

 term "engineer" does not describe what a 

 man does, but rather hotu he does it! A 

 method rather than an occupation! It is 

 even so; that is, essentially and with limi- 

 tations I shall refer to later. 



What then is this "method" that has 

 given the engineer his ever broadening do- 

 main and brought all kinds of men and 

 callings to his school? He can tell you at 

 once. Here is where he is defined and 

 where his fellows recognize him and each 

 other though they come from the ends of 

 the industrial earth as to diversity of ac- 

 tual occupation. The method had its birth 

 in Greece, though it was stifled almost to 

 death by the tremendous philosophic, hu- 

 manistic and artistic energies of the Hel- 

 lenes. Later it was buried in Europe under 

 the irruption of the barbarians. The names 

 of Thales, dear to our profession, with his 

 "elektron," and of Aristotle and Archi- 

 medes, stand out as having done much for 

 it — especially Archimedes — in spite of the 

 humanistically polarized intellectual atmos- 

 phere in which they lived and which they 

 contributed so gloriously to create. 



But the Greeks made only a start. To 

 quote an authority, their material think- 

 ing was largely based on what has proved 

 to be a wrong method of procedure, the 

 introspective and conjectural rather than 

 the inductive and experimental. They in- 

 vestigated nature by studying their own 

 minds, by considering the meanings of 

 words, rather than by studying things and 

 recording phenomena. But they saw much 

 of the light with all this. Though abso- 

 lutely dead for a thousand years in Europe, 

 "the method" was kept alive during the 

 middle ages in Arabia, although confused 

 with magic, alchemy and algebra. Then 

 came Roger Bacon, Leonardo da Vinci and 



