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OPPORTUNITIES IN ENGINEERING
* * * * * *
OPPORTUNITY BOOKS
OPPORTUNITIES IN ENGINEERING
BY CHARLES M. HORTON
OPPORTUNITIES IN AVIATION
BY LIEUT. GORDON LAMONT
And
CAPTAIN ARTHUR SWEETSER
OPPORTUNITIES IN CHEMISTRY
BY ELLWOOD HENDRICK
OPPORTUNITIES IN FARMING
BY EDWARD OWEN DEAN
OPPORTUNITIES IN MERCHANT SHIPS
BY NELSON COLLINS
OPPORTUNITIES IN NEWSPAPER BUSINESS
BY JAMES MELVIN LEE
HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK
ESTABLISHED 1817
* * * * * *
OPPORTUNITIES IN ENGINEERING
by
CHARLES M. HORTON
Harper & Brothers
Publishers New York and London
OPPORTUNITIES IN ENGINEERING
Copyright 1920, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
Published April, 1920
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. ENGINEERING AND THE ENGINEER 1
II. ENGINEERING OPPORTUNITIES 9
III. THE ENGINEERING TYPE 16
IV. THE FOUR MAJOR BRANCHES 24
V. MAKING A CHOICE 31
VI. QUALIFYING FOR PROMOTION 38
VII. THE CONSULTING ENGINEER 48
VIII. THE ENGINEER IN CIVIC AFFAIRS 54
IX. CODE OF ETHICS 62
X. FUTURE OF THE ENGINEER 68
XI. WHAT CONSTITUTES ENGINEERING SUCCESS 76
XII. THE PERSONAL SIDE 85
OPPORTUNITIES IN ENGINEERING
I
ENGINEERING AND THE ENGINEER
Several years ago, at the regular annual meeting of one of the major
engineering societies, the president of the society, in the formal
address with which he opened the meeting, gave expression to a thought
so startling that the few laymen who were seated in the auditorium
fairly gasped. What the president said in effect was that, since
engineers had got the world into war, it was the duty of engineers to
get the world out of war. As a thought, it probably reflected the secret
opinion of every engineer present, for, however innocent of intended
wrong-doing engineers assuredly are as a group in their work of
scientific investigation and development, the statement that engineers
were responsible for the conflict then raging in Europe was absolute
truth.
I mention this merely to bring to the reader's attention the tremendous
power which engineers wield in world affairs.
The profession of engineering--which, by the way, is merely the adapting
of discoveries in science and art to the uses of mankind--is a
peculiarly isolated one. But very little is known about it among those
outside of the profession. Laymen know something about law, a little
about medicine, quite a lot--nowadays--about metaphysics. But laymen
know nothing about engineering. Indeed, a source of common amusement
among engineers is the peculiar fact that the average layman cannot
differentiate between the man who runs a locomotive and the man who
designs a locomotive. In ordinary parlance both are called engineers.
Yet there is a difference between them--a difference as between day and
night. For one merely operates the results of the creative genius of the
other. This almost universal ignorance as to what constitutes an
engineer serves to show to what broad extent the profession of
engineering is isolated.
Yet it is a wonderful profession. I say this with due regard for all
other professions. For one cannot but ponder the fact that, if
engineers started the greatest war the world has ever known--and
engineers as a body freely admit that if they did not start it they at
least made it possible--they also stopped it, thereby proving themselves
possessed of a power greater than that of any other class of
professional men--diplomats and lawyers and divinities not excepted.
That engineering is a force fraught with stupendous possibilities,
therefore, nobody can very well deny. That it is a force generally
exercised for good--despite the World War--I myself, as an engineer, can
truly testify. With some fifteen years spent on the creative end of the
work--the drafting and designing end--I have yet to see, with but two or
three rare exceptions, the genius of engineers turned into any but noble
channels.
Thus, engineering is not only a wonderful profession, with the
activities of its followers of utmost importance, but also it is a
profession the individual work of whose pioneers, from Watt to
Westinghouse and from Eiffel to Edison, has been epoch-making.
For when James Watt, clock-repairer, tinker, being called into a certain
small laboratory in England more than a century ago to make a few minor
repairs on a new design of steam-engine, discovered, while at work on
this crude unit deriving its motion from expanded steam and the
alternate workings of a lever actuated by a weight, the value of
superheated steam for power purposes, and later embodied the idea in a
steam-engine of his own, Watt set the civilized world forward into an
era so full of promise and discovery that even we who are living to-day,
despite the wonderful progress already made in mechanics as represented
among other things in the high-speed engine, the dynamo, the airplane,
are witnessing but the barest of beginnings.
Likewise, when George Westinghouse, inventor of the airbrake, having
finally persuaded the directors of the Pennsylvania Railroad, after many
futile attempts in other directions, to grant him an opportunity to try
out his invention, and, trying it out--on a string of cars near
Harrisburg--ably demonstrated its practicability as a device for
stopping trains and preventing accidents, he also--as had Watt before
him--set the civilized world forward into an era full of promise and
discovery as yet but barely entered upon, even with the remarkable
progress already made in industry alone in the matter of regard for the
safety of human life--Westinghouse's own particular blazed trail through
the forest of human ignorance this same airbrake.
So with other pioneers--with Eiffel, in the field of tower construction;
with Edison, in the field of electricity; with the Wright brothers, in
the field of aerial navigation; With Simon Lake, inventor of the
submarine boat. All were pioneers; all set the civilized world forward;
all--though this perhaps is irrelevant, yet it will serve to reveal the
type of men these pioneers were and are--all overcame great
obstacles--Lake not the least among them.
Told that he was visionary, when Lake explained, as he did in his effort
to enlist capital with which to build his first submarine boat, that he
could safely submerge his invention and steer it about on the bed of the
ocean as readily as a man can steer an automobile about the streets of a
city, that while submerged he could step out of the boat through a
trap-door without flooding the boat, by the simple process of
maintaining a greater air pressure inside than the pressure of the water
outside--Simon Lake, discouraged on every hand, finally decided to build
a boat himself, and did build one, with his own hands--a boat fourteen
feet long and constructed of rough pine timbers painted with
coal-tar--in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey. With this boat Lake
demonstrated to a skeptical world for all time that he was neither a
visionary nor a dreamer, but a practical doer among men--an engineer.
Of such stuff, then, were, and are, engineers made. Whether they
realized it or not, whether the world at large realized it or not, each
represented a noble calling, each was a professional man, each was
chiseling his name for all time into the granite foundations of a
wonderful profession even yet only in the building--engineering. Their
name is legion, too, and their names will last because of the fact that
their work, remaining as it does after them equally with the work of
followers of the finest of the fine arts, is known to mankind as a
benefit to mankind. Known by their works, the list extends back to the
very dawn of history.
For it was men of this calling, the calling of engineers, who in the
early days wrought for purposes of warfare--warfare then being the major
industry--the javelin, the spear, the helmet, the coat of mail, the
plate of armor, the slingshot; just as their later brothers, for a like
purpose, conceived and devised the throwing of mustard gas, the two-ton
explosive, the aerial bomb, the mortar shell, the hand-grenade--for the
protection, false and true, of the home. For the upbuilding of the home,
for the continuance of the home, men of this calling also it was who
conceived and shaped, among other things, the cook-stove, the chimney,
the wheel, the steam-engine, the spinning-jenny, the suspension-bridge,
the bedspring-oh, boy!--the bicycle, the sandblast, the automobile, the
airplane, the wireless.
Thus it will be seen that engineering is a distinctive and important
profession. To some even it is the topmost of all professions. However
true that may or may not be to-day, certain it is that some day it will
be true, for the reason that engineers serve humanity at every practical
turn. Engineers make life easier to live--easier in the living; their
work is strictly constructive, sharply exact; the results positive. Not
a profession outside of the engineering profession but that has its
moments of wabbling and indecision--of faltering on the part of
practitioners between the true and the untrue. Engineering knows no such
weakness. Two and two make four. Engineers know that. Knowing it, and
knowing also the unnumbered possible manifoldings of this fundamental
truism, engineers can, and do, approach a problem with a certainty of
conviction and a confidence in the powers of their working-tools nowhere
permitted men outside the profession.
II
ENGINEERING OPPORTUNITIES
The writer can best illustrate the opportunities for young men which
exist in engineering by a little story. The story is true in every
particular. Nor is the case itself exceptional. Men occupying high
places everywhere in engineering, did they but tell their story, would
repeat in substance what is set forth below. More than any other
profession to-day, engineering holds out opportunities for young men
possessing the requisite "will to success" and the physical stamina
necessary to carry them forward to the goal. Opportunities in any walk
of life are not all dead--not all in the past. A young man to-day can go
as far as he wills. He can go farther on less capital invested in
engineering than in any other profession--that's all.
The young man's name was Smith. He was one of seven children--not the
seventh son, either--in a poor family. At the age of sixteen he went to
work in overalls on a section of railroad as a helper--outdoor, rough
work. At seventeen he was transferred to the roundhouse; at nineteen he
apprenticed himself to the machinist trade. Engineering? He did not know
what it was, really. Merely he saw his way clear to earning a livelihood
and went after it. He was miserably educated. His knowledge of
mathematics embraced arithmetic up to fractions, at which point it faded
off into blissful "nothingness"--as our New-Thoughtists say. But he had
an inquiring mind and a proper will to succeed. While serving his three
years in the shop he bought a course in a correspondence school and
studied nights, taking up, among other things, the subject of mechanical
drafting. When twenty-two years of age he applied for, and got, a
position as draftsman in a small company developing a motorcycle. He was
well on his way upward.
He spent a year with this company. He learned much of value to him not
only about mathematics, but about engineering as a whole as well. One
day he decided that the field was restricted--at least, too much so for
him--and he left and went with a Westinghouse organization in
Pittsburgh. His salary was in the neighborhood of a hundred and ten
dollars a month. He remained with the company two years as a designer,
and then, having saved up sufficient funds to meet his needs, went to
college, taking special work--physics and chemistry and mathematics. He
remained in school two years. When he came out, instead of returning to
the drafting-room and the theoretical end of the work, he donned
overalls once more and went to work in the shop as an erecting man. Two
years afterward he was chief operating engineer in a small cement-plant
in the Southwest, his salary being three thousand dollars a year. A year
of this and he returned East, at a salary of four thousand dollars a
year, as operating engineer of a larger plant. Then came a better offer,
with one of the largest, if not the very largest, steel-plants in the
country, as superintendent of power, at a salary of five thousand
dollars a year. When the war broke out, or rather when this country
became involved in the war, my friend Smith, at a salary of ten thousand
dollars a year, became associated with a staff of engineers brought
together into a corporation manufacturing shells. And all before he was
barely in his thirties!
A young man still, what lies ahead of him can readily be surmised. Smith
will follow engineering on salary until he is probably forty, when he
will enter upon a consulting practice, and at fifty retire with
sufficient money to keep him in comfort the remainder of his days. Nor
will he be an exception, as I have stated in the opening paragraph. The
profession is crowded with men who have worked up from equally humble
beginnings. Indeed, one of the foremost efficiency engineers in the
country to-day began as an apprentice in a foundry, while another, fully
as well known in efficiency work, began life in the United States navy
as a machinist's mate. Automobile engineers, whose names, many of them,
are household words, in particular have gone big in the profession and
from very obscure beginnings. It is not stretching the obvious to say
that the majority of these men, had they entered upon any other work,
would never have been heard from nor have attained to their present
wealth and affluence. Smith was just one of many in a profession
offering liberal opportunities. The opportunities still exist and in
just as large a proportion as they ever existed. It remains but for the
young man to decide. The profession itself, almost, will take care of
him afterward.
However, not all of our engineers have gone upward by the overalls
route. Nor is it at all necessary to do this in order to attain to
success. The high-school graduate, entering a college of engineering,
has an equal chance. Some maintain that he has a better chance. Certain
it is that he is better qualified to cope with the heavier theoretical
problems which come up every day in the average engineer's work. There
is a place for him, side by side with the practical man, and his
knowledge will be everywhere respected and sought. But a combination of
the theoretical and the practical, as has frequently been declared,
makes for the complete engineer. Some get the practical side first and
the theoretical side later; some get the theoretical side first and the
practical side later. It matters little--save only that he who gets the
practical side first is earning his way while getting it, while the man
who goes to college is in the majority of cases being supported from
outside sources while getting what he wants. But in the end it balances.
Merely, the "full" engineer must have both. Having both, he has,
literally, the world within his grasp. For engineering is--to
repeat--the adapting of discoveries in science and art to the uses of
mankind. And both art and science reflect and are drawn from Mother
Nature.
There is still a great scarcity of engineers. All branches feel the
need--civil, mechanical, mining, chemical, automotive, electrical--the
call goes out. It is a call just now, owing to the vast reconstruction
period confronting the world, lifted in strident voice. Engineers
everywhere are needed, which in part accounts for the liberal salaries
offered for experienced men. The demand greatly exceeds the supply, and
gives promise of exceeding it for a number of years to come. All
manufacturing-plants, all mining enterprises, of which of both there are
thousands upon thousands, utilize each from one to many hundreds of
engineers. Some plants make use of three or four different
kinds--mechanical, civil, electrical, industrial--some only one. But not
a plant of any size but that has need for at least one engineer, and
engineers are scarce. Therefore opportunities are ample.
To the young man seeking a profession, provided he be of a certain
type--possessed of certain inherent qualities, the nature of which I
shall set forth in the following chapter--engineering offers
satisfactory money returns and--more satisfactory still--a satisfactory
life. The work is creative from beginning to end; it has to do
frequently with movement--always a source of delight to mankind; a
source having its beginnings in earliest infancy, and it is essentially
a work of service. To build a bridge, to design an automatic machine, to
locate and bring to the surface earth's wealth in minerals--surely this
is service of a most gratifying kind.
And it pays. The arts rarely pay; science always pays. And engineering
being a science, a science in the pursuit of which also man is offered
opportunities for the exercise of his creative instincts, like art, is
therefore doubly gratifying as a life's work. I know--and it will bear
repeating--no other profession that holds so much of bigness and of
fullness of life generally. Engineers themselves reflect it. Usually
robust, always active, generally optimistic, engineers as a group swing
through life--and have swung through life from the beginnings of the
profession--without thought of publicity, for instance, or need or
desire for it. Their work alone engrossed their minds. It was enough--it
is enough--and more. And that which is sufficient unto a man is Nirvana
unto him--if he but knew it. Engineers seem to know it.
III
THE ENGINEERING TYPE
It is becoming more and more an accepted fact that engineers, or
physicians, or lawyers--like our poets--are born and not made. I believe
this to be true. Educators generally are thinking seriously along these
lines, with the result that vocational advisers are springing up,
especially in industrial circles, to establish eventually yet another
profession. Instinct leads young men to enter upon certain callings,
unless turned off by misguided parents or guardians, and as a general
thing the hunch works out successfully. Philosophers from time
immemorial, including Plato and Emerson, have written of this still,
small voice within, and have urged that it be heeded. The thing is
instinct--cumulative yearnings within man of thousands of his
ancestors--and to disobey it is to fling defiance at Nature herself.
Personally, I believe that when this law becomes more generally
understood there will be fewer failures decorating park benches in our
cities and cracker-boxes in our country stores.
The profession of engineering, therefore, has its type. You may be of
this type or you may not. The type is quite pronounced, however, and you
need not go wrong in your decision. All professions and all trades have
their types. Steel-workers--those fearless young men who balance
skilfully on a girder, frequently hundreds of feet in the air--are not
to be mistaken. Rough, rugged, gray-eyed; with frames close-knit and
usually squat; generous with money, and unconcerned as to the future;
living each day regardless of the next, and _living_ it--steel-workers
are as distinct from the clerical type--slender, tall, a bit
self-conscious, fearful of themselves and of the future--I say, the
steel-worker is as different from the clerical worker as the
circus-driver is from the cleric. Their work marks them for its own, if
a man lack it upon entering the work, just as the school-room marks the
teacher in time for its own. The thing is not to be mistaken.
The successful engineer must be possessed of a certain fondness for
figures. The subject of mathematics must interest him. He must like to
figure, to use a colloquialism, and his fondness for it must be
genuine, almost an absorption. It must reveal itself to him at an early
age, too, as early as his grammar-school days, for then it will be known
as genuinely a part of him, and the outcropping of seeds correctly sown
by his ancestors. Having this fondness for mathematics, which may be
termed otherwise as a curiosity to make concrete ends meet--the working
out of puzzles is one evidence of the gift--the young man is well armed
for a successful career in the profession. He will like mathematics for
its own sake, and when, later, in college, and later still, in the
active pursuit of his chosen work, he is confronted with a difficult
problem covering strains or stress in a beam or lever or connecting-rod,
he will attack it eagerly, instead of--as I have seen such problems
attacked more than once--irritably and with marked mental effort.
The successful engineer must be a man who likes to shape things with his
hands. He need not always do it, and probably will not after he has
attained to recognition, save only as he supervises or makes the
mechanical drawings--the picture--of the thing. But the itch must be
present in the man. And, like the desire within him to figure, it must
make itself manifest within him early in life. If a young man be of
those who early like to crawl in under the family buzz-wagon; tinker
there for half a day at a time; emerge in a thick coating of grease and
dust and with joy in his eye--such a young man has the necessary
qualifications for a successful engineer. He may never do this--as I
say--in all his engineering career. But the yearning must be as much a
part of him as his love for mathematics--so much so that all his
engineering days he will feel something akin to envy for the machinist
who works over a machine of the engineer's own devising--and it must be
vitally a part of him. To illustrate:
When only twelve years old the author, in company with several
playmates, decided one November day to build an ice-boat. From the
numerous building operations going on in the neighborhood, in the light
of the moon, he secured the necessary timbers, and from a neighbor's
back yard--also in the light of the moon--he got a young sapling which
served delightfully as a mainmast. With the needed materials all
gathered, it suddenly struck him that a plan of some kind ought to be
made of the proposed ice-boat, in order to guard against grave errors
in construction. To think was to act with this bright youngster. He got
him his mother's bread-board and a pencil and an ordinary school ruler,
and with these made a drawing of the ice-boat as he thought the boat
should be. Knowing nothing of mechanical drawing, and but very little of
construction of any kind, he nevertheless devised a pretty fair-looking
boat and not a bad working drawing. One of his playmates, whose father
was something or other in a manufacturing-plant, showed the drawing to
the family circle; with the result that the kid's father, laying a rule
upon the drawing, pronounced it an accurate mechanical drawing, drawn to
scale--which was one inch to the foot--and sent for the youthful
designer, meaning me.
"What do you know about mechanical drawings?" he asked the bashful
youngster, pointing to the drawing under discussion.
"I don't know nothing about it," replied the kid--meaning me again. "I
just made it with a ruler."
"But how come you made it to scale? That drawing is a complete plan and
elevation of an ice-boat, drawn accurately to scale." He looked
thoughtful. "I don't understand it. You ought to take up with drafting,
my boy, when you get a little older. I never knew of a case like it.
What does your father do?" he suddenly asked.
"He's an ice-dealer,"[1] replied the discomfited boy. "I just made
it--that's all. We need it, too, to go ahead." Turning to his playmate,
"Come on out, Jack; the gang is waiting."
Which terminated the interview.
Yet the thing was the beginning of a career for the boy. The boat in
time somehow got itself built and out upon the little river; but owing
to the fact that its materials were stolen, the river failed to freeze
over that winter, and for three winters following--not till the boat
itself had fallen apart from disuse and lack of care--which points its
own moral, as hinted at above. If you must build ice-boats, and you are
a kid with mechanical yearnings, pay for the material that goes into the
making of your product. But the thing--as I say--was the beginning of a
career for the lad. In time, through the kindly office of his playmate's
father, he became apprenticed in a drafting-room of a large
manufacturing-plant--and the rest was easy. In his first year, on paper,
he devised a steam-engine with novel arrangement of slide-valves, and
thereafter for years designed engines and machinery about the country,
always quite successfully.
The successful engineer, while possessed of certain spiritual
characteristics, must also--if I may be so bold as to say so--be
possessed of certain physical characteristics. One of these is large,
and what is known as capable, hands. Short, spatulate fingers, with a
broad palm, appear to be a feature of the successful engineer. Of
course, there are exceptions, as there are exceptions to every rule, but
in the majority of cases which have come under the writer's observation
the successful engineer has had hands of this shaping. He likewise has
had wrists and arms to match with such hands, and--in the practical
engineer--that is, the engineer whose particular gift is coping with
ordinary problems of construction, as against the genius who blazes new
trails, like Watt and Westinghouse and Edison and Marconi and the Wright
brothers--a head whose contour was along the "well-shaped" lines. The
so-called genius usually has an odd-shaped head, I've noticed, but for
purposes of this book we shall confine ourselves to the average
successful man in engineering.
Thus you have, roughly, the engineering type. I have sketched only the
major characteristics. The minor characteristics embrace many features.
There is patience, for one--patience to labor long with difficulties;
concentration, for another; application, for a third; certain student
qualities, for yet a fourth. Many graduate engineers have gone off into
other work immediately after leaving college because of a clearly
defined dislike for detail in construction. The average successful
engineer will be a man interested in the shaping of the details of his
machine or bridge or plant. To many, details are irksome. If the young
man who is reading this book knows that he dislikes a detail of any
character whatsoever, unless he be possessed of the creative genius of a
Westinghouse or an Edison, he would better take up with some other
profession. For engineering, in the last analysis, is the manipulating
of detailed parts into a perfect whole--whether it be a bridge or a
machine or a plant.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The boy's father always wanted to be a carpenter.
IV
THE FOUR MAJOR BRANCHES
The four major branches of engineering are civil, mechanical,
electrical, and mining. I give them in the order of their acceptance
among engineers. Each is separate from each of the others, and each is a
profession in itself, and as distinctive from each of the others as is
the allopathic from the homeopathic among men of medicine, though not
with quite the same distinction. Whereas the several groups of
physicians seek to relieve pain and correct disorder by way of
diversified channels, the several groups of engineers each work in a
field of endeavor actively apart from each of the other groups.
Sometimes one group will lap over upon another group, in certain kinds
of construction work, but even then the branches will hold sharply each
to its own.
Civil engineering embraces, roughly, all work in the soil. The surveyor
is a civil engineer. He constructs dams, builds viaducts, lays out
railroads, and in the war, where he was known as a pioneer, he was
responsible for all tunneling and trench projects, besides keeping the
highways clear and the wire entanglements intact. Civil engineering is a
profession which keeps its followers pretty well out in the open. A
civil engineer will go long distances, and frequently must, in order to
get to his work, and, having reached the scene of his labors, enters
upon a rugged outdoor life in camp where he remains until the job is
completed. The Panama Canal was a civil-engineering job--probably the
largest of its kind ever undertaken--and its success, after failure on
the part of another government, is a high tribute to the genius of our
own civil engineers.
Mechanical engineering is a profession whose medium of endeavor lies in
the metals. Mechanical engineers shape things out of iron or steel or
brass or other metal compositions, and put these things into engines or
machines for service. All machinery, whether it be printing-presses or
automobiles or steam-engines, is the work of mechanical engineers,
though in the matter of automobiles this has become a profession by
itself, one of the minor branches known as automotive engineering. The
mechanical engineer as a rule works within doors, just as the civil
engineer works out of doors, and his work, consequently, is more
confining. In the pursuit of his profession he spends much of his time
supervising the design of mechanical units, and is the one man
responsible for correct construction and security against fracture of
the machine itself when in operation. Actually the mechanical engineer
has more opportunities in his daily routine for the exercise of his
creative faculties than has any one of the other kinds of engineers, for
the simple reason that no two machines even for the same
purpose--speaking of types, always--are exactly similar in construction.
Two lathes of like size and scope, if manufactured by two separate
organizations, will be different in their minor features, and each in
some particular will be the work of a mechanical engineer whose ideas
are at variance with those of the mechanical engineer who designed the
other type. Engineers, like doctors, often disagree, which accounts for
the many different types of machinery serving the same purpose which are
found on the market.
Electrical engineering is, as its name implies, a profession embracing
all construction whose basis is the electrical current. Any unit
whatsoever, so long as it utilizes or eats up or carries forward a
current of electricity, is the work of electrical engineers. The
profession is a comparatively recent one perforce, owing to the fact
that but very little of a practical nature was known about electricity
until a very few years ago. The wonderful progress in this field made
within the past twenty years is one of the marvels of the engineering
profession. Dynamos, motors, arc-lights, alternating current, the
X-ray--these are a few of the things which followers of the profession
have created for the uses of mankind. The field is yet practically
unexplored, and offers to engineering students an outlet for their
energies--provided they enter this branch of engineering--second to none
of the other branches. A fascinating study, doubly so because of the
fact that nothing is known about electricity itself--its effects only
being understood--electrical engineering should appeal to the
curious-minded as no other vocation can. It is a profession shrouded in
mystery, and not the least mysterious of its recent developments is the
wireless telegraph. What this one development alone holds for the future
nobody can say. All sorts of inventions can be imagined, however, and
among them I myself seem to see automobiles operated from central
stations--indeed, all mechanical movements so operated--to the end that
individual engines in time will cease to be.
The profession of mining engineering, last of the major branches,
embraces all work having to do with the locating and construction of
mines--coal-mines, iron-mines, copper-mines, diamond-mines, gold-mines,
and the like. Also it establishes the nature of the apparatus used,
though more often than otherwise the mechanical engineer in this regard
is consulted, since much of the machinery utilized in mining operations
is the direct work of mechanical engineers. Screens and hoppers are
mechanical devices the result of mechanical engineering genius; but the
work of shoring up, done with timbers, and the work generally of
supervision of all mine operations, rests solely with the mining man.
The shaping of these timbers, though--the cutting of tenons, for
instance--is the work, again, of the mechanical engineer; though the
placing of these timbers, to revert back once more, is the work of the
mining engineer.
There are many minor branches, and more are rapidly coming into
prominence. Chemical engineering is one of the older minor branches;
while industrial engineering--following closely upon automotive
engineering--belongs properly with the more recent of the newcomers.
Efficiency engineering is a branch which to-day is making a strong bid
for recognition as a profession, although the work as yet, lacking, as
it does, proper foundation in scientific truth, even though strongly
humanitarian in its motives, has still to prove itself acceptable among
the engineering groups. Structural engineering, on the contrary,
"belongs." Its work consists of the design and layout of modern steel
structures--this roughly--while the minor branch known as heating and
ventilating engineering, as its name would indicate, deals with the
proper heating and ventilating of buildings, and as a profession is
closely allied with that of structural engineering. Out of these minor
branches come yet other branches, more particularly groups, with each in
the nature of a specialty, such as gas engineering, aircraft
engineering, steam engineering, telephone engineering, and so on.
Students about to enter engineering colleges usually select one or
another of the major branches and then after graduating begin to
specialize. But infrequently Fate has much to do with this
specialization, since after leaving college the average young engineer
will turn to the nearest or most promising vacancy offered him in his
chosen field--a major branch--and in the work eventually become expert
and a specialist. If it be a concern manufacturing steam-turbines, say,
the young engineer in time becomes expert and a specialist in
steam-turbines. So, too, with graduates in mining engineering, in
electrical engineering, in civil engineering, although the opportunities
for specialization in any of these latter branches are not so good as in
the mechanical field. However, entering upon a certain kind of work, the
student usually follows this work to the end of his days, which is
probably what engineering schools expect. All strive to educate only in
the principles of each of the major branches. The rest is up to the
graduate, who is permitted, and generally does, the shaping of his own
career afterward.
It is a feature of our democratic form of government--thanks be! Germany
does--or did--the other thing. Germany made careers for her young men,
instead of young men for careers, with the result that she also made
machines out of them. America is a nation of individualists, which is
what makes America what it is, and our schools and school systems are
responsible.
V
MAKING A CHOICE
About to make a choice among the branches of engineering, the
prospective student, unless he have a decided preference to start with,
finds himself confronted with many difficulties. Engineering is
engineering, whether it be mining or electrical or civil or mechanical,
and this fact alone is not without its confusions. Yet if the young man
decides for a mining career, say, the choice may take him, after
graduating, off to South Africa, whereas if his choice lay in the
electrical field he may never get any farther from home than the nearest
electrical manufacturing plant in his town or state--and remain there
for the duration of his life. This making of a choice is a momentous
thing in a prospective engineer's life. It should be approached with all
caution, and with due regard for the nature of the life he would lead
after graduating from school. If he have a penchant for outdoor life,
then the choice, in a way, is easy. He should select mining or civil
engineering as his particular vocation. If he be of those who prefer to
remain more or less indoors in the practice of his profession,
mechanical or electrical engineering should be his choice.
These are the major advantages or disadvantages, depending upon the
point of view. The minor ones are not so easily stated. Speaking always
for the young man without a decided preference, it is the writer's
opinion that the prospective student should analyze his particular
feelings in the matter and decide accordingly. Large projects may
interest him more than smaller ones. In this regard, he will
find greater satisfaction in following the profession dealing
with large projects, which is, of course, the civil engineering
profession--although mining, too, has its large ventures, which,
however, do not "break" as frequently as they do in civil engineering.
On the other hand, the young man may find himself attracted to the
development of small propositions, such as adding-machines and
typewriters and sewing-machines, and the like. Finding himself attracted
to these no less important phases of engineering than the development of
mines or the opening up of new country, the young man can, of course,
make no better choice than to enter the mechanical or the electrical
field.
It all depends upon the point of view. Nor is there any hard-and-fast
rule tying a man down to a single branch once he finds that he does not
like it, or finds that he likes one of the other branches better, after
he has given his chosen branch a trial in the years immediately
following graduation. Not a few mining graduates drift over into
straight civil work after leaving school, and, likewise, not a few in
the electrical branches find themselves in time pursuing mechanical
work. Fate here, as in the matter of specialization, works her hand. A
prominent publisher of technical magazines in New York took the degree
of Arts in Cornell in his younger days; and more writers of fiction than
you can shake a stick at once labored over civil-engineering plans as
their chosen career. Herbert Hoover is a mining man who best revealed
his capabilities in the field of traffic management--if the work which
he supervised in Belgium may be so termed. Certainly it had to do with
getting materials from where they were plentiful to where they were
scarce, which is roughly the work of the traffic manager.
And so it goes. The young man in this particular must decide for
himself. Actually, there is more of mystery and fascination in the
electrical field than in any of the other three branches, and to
prospective students this may be not without its especial appeal. To
others, the work of mining may possess its strong attraction, since this
work takes its followers into strange places and among strange people
frequently, where oftentimes the mining engineer must live cheek by
elbow with the roughest of adventurers. To yet a third group, civil
engineering, with its work of blazing new trails through an unknown
country, and wild outdoor existence through forests and over mountains
and across valleys--may have its strong attraction. While to a fourth
group of prospective students the quiet career, as represented in that
of mechanical engineering, always a more or less thoughtful, studious
life, may hold out its inviting side. The mechanical engineer, like the
electrical engineer, is a man who generally commutes, a man who comes
and goes daily between office and home, doing his work at regular hours
within the four walls of his office--a quiet, professional man. Such a
life would appeal to the man of family rather more strongly than either
of the outdoor professional branches. Yet the prospective student must
make his own choice.
To the young man who has no particular preference, and who would put it
up to the writer as to just which branch to follow--the young man more
or less in need--the writer unhesitatingly would advise mechanical
engineering. It is the one branch offering the largest and quickest
returns, and as a branch it fairly dominates all the other branches, for
the reason that whereas the mechanical engineer can get along without
the mining engineer or the civil engineer or the electrical engineer,
neither the mining engineer nor the civil engineer nor the electrical
engineer can always do without the services of the mechanical engineer.
No other branch so overlaps the other branches as does mechanical
engineering. The work of the mechanical engineer is seen in almost every
piece of construction reared by the civil man, just as it is seen in
every bit of construction work of the mining and the electrical
engineers. At first glance this may not appear to be true, but a close
analysis of different jobs will bring out the truth of this statement.
Thus mechanical engineering offers largest and quickest returns. It does
this for another reason. Because of this very overlapping upon the
other three branches, for every position open in the electrical field,
or the mining or the civil field, there are a dozen vacancies in the
mechanical field. It cannot but be otherwise. Not one of the other
branches but what has need at times for--as I have stated--a mechanical
engineer. The casings and base-plates and supports of motors, for
instance, while the motor itself--its windings and the like--is the work
of the electrical engineer, are due to the designing genius of some
mechanical man. Likewise, in the mining field, where shaking screens, to
name only one of the many mechanical units necessary in mining
operations, are an essential factor--units operated with pulleys and
belts and cams and levers--all the province of the mechanical
engineer--the mechanical man finds his uses. So in civil work,
especially in dam construction where gates are necessary; and in
chemical engineering--to drop into a minor branch--where tanks and vats
and ovens and stirring paddles and the like are used. No matter in which
branch a man may go, always he will find evidence of the presence some
time of the mechanical engineer. The mechanical engineer dominates all
the other branches, as has been said before. He is given second place
in the order of the branches merely because the civil engineer happened
to be the first and oldest kind of engineer to be given recognition as a
profession. This man made himself a professional man, just as did the
early practitioners of medicine--concocters of herbs in the beginning.
The proper selection will depend upon the young man's predilections and
tastes. If he selects wisely, following out his predilections and tastes
with a degree of accuracy, he cannot go wrong. He cannot go far wrong
even if he doesn't follow out his hunches, for the reason that he can
always swing over into any one of the other branches whenever he sees
fit to do so. The thing is done every day, and will continue to be done
throughout all time. Merely, it would be well for the young man, of
course, to select in the beginning that branch which most appeals to
him, and to stick to it like glue. Success is certain to be his. For in
no other walk of life are the rewards so sure and so ample and so
immediately responsive as in the engineering professions. These--like
the matter of his selection from among the four major branches--are
solely a matter up to the individual.
VI
QUALIFYING FOR PROMOTION
Immediately upon graduating--indeed, often several months before
graduating--the engineering student finds his first job awaiting him.
Frequently he finds a number of first jobs awaiting him and must make a
selection. For it is the custom with large manufacturing concerns to
send out scouts in the early spring of each year to address the
engineering student bodies, with the idea in mind of securing the
services of as many graduates as the scouts can win over for their
respective organizations through direct appeal. What is usually offered
the coming graduate is a brief apprenticeship in the shop, at a living
wage, with promise of as early and rapid promotion in the organization
as the work of the apprentice himself will permit, or improves.
These offers are generally splendid opportunities. The graduate may
learn much of a practical commercial nature which perforce has been
denied him in his student days, and also, having entered upon this
apprenticeship, he not only gets acquainted with production on a large
scale, but he is brought into touch with what constitutes most recent
acceptable practice as well. This, provided he be a mechanical or an
electrical engineer. Graduates in civil and mining engineering, while
offered positions from executives in these particular branches also,
have no such large opportunities offered them. The work itself does not
permit it. Yet in any of the branches there is never a scarcity of jobs
open to graduates upon their leaving college.
To qualify for promotion in any work, but more especially in the
professions, one must know one's business. That is a trite statement,
but it will bear repeating. The young graduate at first will not know
his business. His mind will be a chaos of theories based upon myriads of
formulæ which cannot but confuse him in the early days, when he is most
earnestly trying to apply one or more of them to the more or less petty
tasks which will be assigned to him. All he can do under the
circumstances--all anybody could do under the circumstances--is to wait
patiently, the while doing the best he can. Problems have a way of
working themselves out--the correct formula will present itself; its
true application will become manifest--and thus the young engineer has
learned something of a practical nature which need not forsake him
throughout the remainder of his engineering career.
Engineers are especially tolerant of one another's mistakes and errors.
They are much more so than medical men, for instance. In the field of
medicine one must show by many practical cases wherein a certain
treatment has proved effective before the fraternity at large will even
give the practitioner a hearing. This is not so among engineers.
Engineers turn to one another in difficulties with earnest desire to
help if they can help; and when one of their number is in trouble in his
efforts to solve a difficult problem the whole body will turn to him
with friendly encouragement and advice, if the latter is wanted. The
young graduate who is struggling with a problem come up in his daily
work, if he will but make the fact known to the engineers on the job in
association with him, will find himself surrounded by engineers every
one of whom will be seriously concerned for him and anxious to render
assistance.
So the young graduate need entertain no fears on the ground of possible
errors when starting out. Merely he must go slow; take his own good
time on a job; ask all the questions possible of his engineer neighbors.
Frankness in engineering, as in any other walk of life, pays. The
bluffer is not wanted. No man knows it all, and certainly no engineer
knows all there is to know about his profession. Time was when this
might have been true; but it isn't true to-day. The work of engineering
research and development has become so complex that engineers are forced
to specialize. The engineering graduate, entering upon his first job,
will discover early that he, too, must specialize. This will not be
difficult, owing to the fact that his engineering education has been
general and designed to embrace in a liberal way all practice. Drawing,
as he will, from this liberal source that which he finds necessary in
the solving of his initial problems, he will find himself within a short
time becoming, willy-nilly, a specialist.