January 21, 1910] 



SCIENCE 



83 



ministered; and, once more, from the most 

 primitive times, man has realized the pres- 

 ence of some supernatural power, which 

 the priest, if only under the title of "med- 

 icine man," has endeavored to propitiate. 

 But clearly, man has always required 

 water and food, and has dug wells and 

 employed crude means for raising water 

 and of growing crops. He has also needed 

 habitations, and has required the services 

 of men to build them, so that the hydraulic 

 and the structural engineer or architect 

 may at least claim that their profession is 

 as old as any. 



As civilization developed, the work of 

 the engineer or builder developed equally. 

 The Assyrians and Babylonians built 

 arches and bridges, the inhabitants of 

 India built great reservoirs, the Egyptians 

 built pyramids, the Romans built roads, 

 bridges, aqueducts, baths' and other im- 

 portant works, many of them of great ex- 

 tent and requiring great skill. But when 

 we read that the construction of one of the 

 pyramids of Egypt required the labor of 

 360,000 men for twenty years, we see that 

 the work of the engineer was not precisely 

 directed to the uses of others, and we real- 

 ize the erudeness, in some respects, of the 

 civilization which would permit such 

 waste of useful effort. During the middle 

 ages, with the neglect of learning, engi- 

 neering declined, but with the revival of 

 learning in the sixteenth century it took on 

 new life, and since that time, with the ad- 

 vance of science, it has progressed prob- 

 ably more rapidly than any other field of 

 activity. 



During the early development of the pro- 

 fession, engineering came to be divided 

 into two kinds, civil and military, the lat- 

 ter being concerned with fortifications and 

 with means of offense and defense, while 

 the former included all other applications 

 of the building art. Up to nearly the end 



of the eighteenth century, Tredgold's defi- 

 nition was somewhat inapplicable, inas- 

 much as the sources of power in nature 

 were not understood, and could be utilized 

 only to a very small degree. Up to that 

 time, engineering comprised mainly the 

 construction of roads, canals and bridges, 

 the improvement of harbors, river works, 

 the construction of docks, and the supply- 

 ing of towns and cities with water. The 

 state of the art only allowed of the con- 

 struction of bridges of very short span, 

 of either stone or wood, since iron had not 

 j^et been brought into use, and ferries were 

 generally employed in crossing streams too 

 deep for fording. The steam engine was 

 known only in a very crude and uneconom- 

 ical form, the weaving of cloth was almost 

 all done by hand, there was little transpor- 

 tation except by sea, cities were not drained 

 or lighted by gas, the applications' of elec- 

 tricity were, of course, unknown, naviga- 

 tion by water was entirely by means of 

 sailing vessels or with oars, and the only 

 form in which iron was used to any extent 

 was in the form of cast iron. 



But before the end of the eighteenth 

 century there came a remarkable series of 

 mechanical inventions— the spinning jenny 

 by Hargreaves, the spinning frame by 

 Arkwright, the mule by Crompton, the 

 power loom by Cartwright, the modern 

 steam engine by Watt, the puddling proc- 

 ess for making wrought iron by Cort, and 

 others. These were followed, in the first 

 third of the eighteenth century, by the de- 

 velopment of the steam locomotive by 

 Stephenson, of the steamboat by Fulton, 

 by the inauguration of the era of railroads, 

 beginning for all practical purposes with 

 the victory of the "Rocket" in the com- 

 petition at Rainhill in 1829, and by the 

 further great improvements in manufac- 

 turing, and in the production of iron and 

 steel. 



