August 9, 1912] 



SCIENCE 



16S 



cializations, will become general knowledge, 

 and will be absorbed by the community, 

 partly as a result of the shifting of the 

 center of education and partly through 

 every-day familiarity, and the men possess- 

 ing this knowledge will no longer be called 

 engineers. They will be called farmers, let 

 us say, in the case of the "agricultural 

 engineer" — of course, a farmer of a very 

 advanced kind compared to the earlier one. 



But the center of education will not al- 

 ways continue to shift. It is shifting now 

 only because it has so long been eccentric. 

 It would be a calamity for it to shift too 

 far, resulting in a world whose sole train- 

 ing was applied science and the utilities. 

 Under such a condition, engineering and 

 the utilities themselves would languish in- 

 stead of flourishing, for there would be 

 lacking in engineers the dynamic compo- 

 nent. 



Ample knowledge, insight, information 

 does not make an engineer. He must first 

 be a man. Engineering is not thought like 

 philosophy ; it is thought times action, and 

 only when the qualities of action are de- 

 veloped approximately to the same extent 

 as the qualities of thought is an engineer 

 at his best. Only then is his area of effect 

 a maximum. The qualities of action in- 

 volve tastes and personality, the feelings, 

 the will. And it is these that constitute the 

 component or factor that makes an engi- 

 neer's intellectual or rationalizing equip- 

 ment dynamic — that puts it to use. 



It was partly the intense appreciation of 

 the value of the dynamic component that 

 led the Greeks and successive centuries 

 astray in the direction of their education 

 and contributed to an underestimate of the 

 importance of science and the study of the 

 laws of nature. We must not go to the 

 equally wrong other extreme. 



So far I have said but little of electrical 

 engineering. It must be brought in if for 



no other purpose than to justify our titl&. 

 Although the article on "Engineering" in 

 the "Britannica" occupies only six inches 

 of one column, it concludes with the fol- 

 lowing: "The last great new branch is 

 electrical engineering, which touches the 

 older branches at so many pointe that it 

 has been said that all engineers must be 

 electricians." If engineering is a method 

 of doing things, and electrical engineering 

 tends to embrace all other branches, there 

 is an implication that electrical engineering 

 is the latest or most highly developed form 

 of the method — the method that is the 

 utilitarian application of the principles of 

 science to the material facts of life. 



Such is unquestionably the ease. Born 

 scarcely more than twenty-five years ago, 

 the ' ' youngest branch, ' ' electrical engineer- 

 ing, had the opportunity of striking its 

 roots into the richest of scientific soils, free 

 from prejudices, customs or traditions. It 

 had no entangling alliances, no political 

 laws to retard or encumber it. The field it 

 preempted was the terra nova of engineer- 

 ing, the new world of applied science. 



Under the influence of those geniuses of 

 science, Volta, Faraday, Ampere, Ohm, 

 Kelvin, Helmholtz, Maxwell, Oersted, 

 Henry, and with the metric system for its 

 cornerstone, there developed a comprehen- 

 sive structure of thought and a related 

 scheme of units. The latter are the ad- 

 miration of the world for their simplicity, 

 their convenience, their precision and their 

 reproducibility. The scientific method as 

 applying to all phenomena acquired its 

 most perfect embodiment in the electric 

 system and its relations. 



But there is a philosophical debt that we 

 electrical engineers owe our units. They 

 school our minds. The ability to measure 

 with precision difficult and complicated 

 quantities enables clear thinking on them 

 and renders reasoning about them possible 



