400 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. I. No. 15. 



together so that the great oceans scarcely 

 separate them ; they have bound continents 

 together by wonderful cables embedded in 

 slimy ooze at the bottom of the sea. Eiffel 

 reared his tower a thousand feet to pierce 

 the sky ; Baker projected three of his out 

 1700 feet horizontally without staging to 

 bridge the Firth of Forth ; and over them 

 fly four hundred trains daily without slack- 

 ening speed ; each span is longer than the 

 Brooklyn bridge, and there are three spans. 

 The seven wonders of the world have be- 

 come seventy, and still the modern en- 

 gineer pauses not. He now soberly con- 

 templates a deep waterway from the great 

 Northwest to the Atlantic coast. He has 

 not even abandoned the problem of aerial 

 navigation, but attacks it on a new princi- 

 ple. Archimedes is said to have declared 

 that if he had a place for a fulcrum he could 

 move the world. Professor Vernon Boys 

 has just weighed the earth and determined 

 its density to the third decimal place by 

 means of two gilded balls suspended by a 

 fiber of quartz, finer and stronger than a 

 spider's web. Not content that the earth 

 yields her yearly increase, and that the sea 

 furnishes abundant food, the engineer bur- 

 rows into the eternal hills and seeks for hid 

 treasures in the depths of the earth. The 

 gold and the silver he wishes to be his also. 

 He even establishes an electric plant some 

 1600 feet underground, converts the power 

 of the descending stream of water into elec- 

 tric energy, and sends it back to the surface 

 for further service. 



He has contemplated the colossal cataract 

 at Niagara not only as a display of natural 

 gi-andeur, but as an example of unhmited 

 power running to waste. At last he is 

 nearly ready to recover a small part of 

 this power and to transmit it to distant 

 cities, where it may turn the wheels of in- 

 dustry or be transmuted into light. No 

 grander problems remain for solution than 

 those even now confronting the electrical 



engineer. The swiftness with which he 

 has already passed from one almost insur- 

 mountable task to another has amazed no 

 one more than those most iamiliar with the 

 means employed. If electrical engbieeriag' 

 is still in its infancy it is certainly a giant 

 infant. It has long since outgrown its toys. 

 With the nerve and audacity of vigorous 

 young manhood it quails before no obstacles 

 and acknowledges no impossibilities. Hav- 

 ing practically banished the plodding horse 

 from the street railway, it is getting ready 

 to enter the lists against the locomotive. 

 If your city is not seated near a source of 

 power it will undertake to bring the power 

 to you. The mountain can not go to the 

 city, but the city can go to the mountain for 

 its power. Electrical engineering stands 

 at the door of the twentieth century, ready 

 to accept the tasks that it imposes, and 

 eager to enter upon a new period of dis- 

 covery and application. 



A marked feature of educational history 

 in the United States for the past twenty-five 

 years is the rapid increase in engineering 

 schools, partly on independent foundations, 

 and partly as a professional department of 

 universities. Of this latter class the only 

 ones existing a quarter of a century ago, so 

 far as I know, were the La\vrence Scientific 

 School at Harvard, the Shefl&eld Scientific 

 School at Yale, and the courses in Civil 

 Engineering in the Universities of Penn- 

 sylvania and Micliigan. The first two, as 

 their name implies, were devoted quite as 

 much to the teaching of pure science as to 

 engineering. They attracted but little at- 

 tention, and in fact the Lawrence School 

 had but a moribund existence for many 

 years after the establishment of the Insti- 

 tute of Technology in Boston. Recently 

 it has had new vigor infused into it and 

 has profited by the growing interest in 

 engineering education. Cornell and the 

 State Universities have led the way in the 

 establishment of engineering schools, and 



