April 10, 1914] 



SCIENCE 



517 



the kinetic theory of matter, long before 

 they have enough facts at their disposal to 

 make these theories comprehensible. This 

 was natural enough — did not the great 

 artists who created the science of physics 

 do these things ? But, somehow, it did not 

 work. It was all too unusual and too ab- 

 stract and too remote from the interests of 

 real boys and girls. It was too coldly in- 

 tellectual to satisfy the demands of a world 

 of action and emotion. It was too much 

 like learning and trying to apply the fixed 

 rules of grammar to be really exciting. We 

 therefore had to give it up and try again. 



In the second attempt we shifted our 

 enthusiasm from the works of men like 

 Galileo, Faraday and Helmholtz, to the 

 achievements of men like Watt, Stevenson 

 and Wilbur Wright. In other words, we 

 seemed to be giving up trying to make 

 scientific artists out of all of our pupils, 

 and shifted the emphasis over to an ambi- 

 tion for engineers. Not that we forsook 

 entirely the traditions of the past — far from 

 it. We merely tried to use the inventions 

 and achievements of engineers as a bait 

 with which to catch the unwary on the laws 

 and principles aforesaid. We tried to use 

 a boy's natural enthusiasm for steam en- 

 gines as a means of painlessly inoculating 

 him with the errors of thermometers, the 

 laws of boiling, the laws of fusion, the laws 

 of saturated vapors, and the mechanical 

 equivalent of heat. 



This second attempt was a great advance 

 over the first, in that it showed some recog- 

 nition of the rights of the victims — it took 

 some account of the desires and emotions of 

 the pupils. But even this plan has not 

 succeeded. It is at best a sorry practise to 

 try to make any subject-matter interesting 

 after it has been selected on grounds other 

 than the interests of those who are to learn 

 it. This practise has not and will not 

 satisfy the demands of industry or teach 



boys and girls to cope successfully with a 

 world of machines. If it had and would, 

 we would not now be still seeking the 

 meaning of industrial physics. 



From the first of these experiences we 

 have learned that an age of machines is not 

 satisfied with a physics teaching that makes 

 a few men competent to reproduce state- 

 ments of the laws of physics as coldly intel- 

 lectual propositions at college entrance 

 examinations. From the second we are 

 discovering that the public does not con- 

 sider that it is getting its money's worth 

 out of a physics teaching that turns out a 

 moderate number of boys and girls with a 

 moderate amount of information about en- 

 gines, trolleys, telephones and wireless, and 

 some painful memories of a few laws and 

 principles as an added ornament. 



Both of these attempts at teaching ele- 

 mentarj^ physics in an age of machines 

 have failed for the same reason; namely, 

 because it is not possible to gain an under- 

 standing of this age merely by counting 

 cogs and levers, or by measuring moments 

 and coefficients, or by speculating about 

 atoms and ether. We have in it all over- 

 looked the fact that the works of the great 

 artist creators of the science of physics and 

 those of the great engineers of physics are 

 not intellectual or material products plain 

 and simple, but are the expressions of a 

 mighty spirit worked out through keen 

 intellects into tangible form. The great 

 physicists are great not because they merely 

 have more brilliant intellects than most 

 people. There are relatively many bril- 

 liant intellects and relatively few great 

 scientists. The great engineers too have 

 not been great merely because they pos- 

 sessed great intellects. Both the great phy- 

 sicists and the great engineers have been 

 great because they were inspired with the 

 spirit of science. Keen intellects are, of 

 course, necessary too, but they are not the 



