their membership bodies. In each case it is a code based upon other and
older codes, codes long in practice among professional men, such as
lawyers and doctors. It is a code built up on Christian principles, as
it should be, and rarely is it ignored among men of the profession. To
do unto others as you would have others do unto you is the basis of its
precepts, though more concretely it aims to guide the engineer in his
business intercourse with other men in such a way as to give all an
equal chance without transgressing the law. The so-called building codes
in effect in large cities are intended to hold engineers to restrictions
for the greatest good of the greatest number, and the code of ethics in
practice among each of the engineering professions likewise was devised
toward this end. There seems to be need for it.
Perhaps by pointing out where engineers sometimes transgress, the
writer more effectively can indicate the need of a code and the
principles of which the engineering code of ethics consists. Even to-day
there are engineers digressing from the path indicated by the
professional body, though in such a way as to benefit still by the
protection of the law, and to be not openly susceptible to admonition
from the engineering societies' committees. Engineers of this stamp at
best are but tricksters. Actually, they should be debarred from
practice, just as the legal fraternity takes effective action against
members of the bar who go outside the pale, though nothing is ever done
to engineers. Engineering organizations in this regard are weak. The
man's name should at least be posted, or, better still, published in the
society's bulletin, so that the fraternity at large could know, and,
knowing, could warn men with capital to invest--the trickster's especial
prey--for its own welfare.
There was an engineer brought to the attention of the writer whose
activities were devoted to securing for his clients men of no mechanical
knowledge who yet wanted something done by machinery. A manufacturer of
paper dolls, say, having entered upon this phase of manufacturing only
because he had money to invest and not because he was interested in
mechanics, would see the need in his plant for additional mechanical
devices to cut down manufacturing costs. The engineer to whom I have
reference would find this type of manufacturer his particular "meat,"
because of the man's ignorance of mechanics, and, after clinching him
with a contract drawn up by the engineer's lawyer, would undertake to
devise for this manufacturer a perpetual-motion machine, if that
happened to be what the manufacturer wanted. The engineer conducted a
machine-shop in connection with his "consulting" office, where, at a
dollar an hour for the use of his machine-tools, he would "develop" his
ideas, as passed upon by the manufacturer who knew no more of
construction or the reading of mechanical drawings than he did of the
chicanery of the engineer, and in this way roll up the costs against the
unfortunate. In the end the engineer might and might not produce a
satisfactory working machine. There was nothing in the contract about
this--save only as it protected the engineer. What was indeed produced
was a list of costs for the development often of several designs of a
given idea that to say the least were heartrending.
Then there is the engineer who for a consideration will bear false
testimony against his neighbor, or his neighbor's ox. This happens most
frequently in municipal traction or lighting wars, set before tribunals
under the caption of "The People _vs._ the S. S. Street Railway
Company," or in a battle of alleged infringement of patent rights. There
are engineering experts, just as there are legal experts, who deem it
within their code of ethics to address themselves and their energies
toward the refutation of such claims, however wrong or right these
claims may be. Engineering is an exact science. It is based on
principles hardly refutable. Yet there are engineers who will and can
confound these principles before a court of law in such manner as to win
for their clients a decision of non-suit where the facts point glaringly
to infringement--in the matter of mechanics--or to win for their clients
a favorable decision in the matter of costs of maintenance and operation
of a railway, in a case of this kind. As has been said, figures don't
lie, but figurers sometimes do.
Other instances of breach of engineering ethics, however otherwise
secure from the clutches of the law, occur to the writer, but the two
just cited ought to serve. At best, the topic is unpleasant and by no
means indicates the character of the profession as a whole. Where there
is one engineer who will perjure himself in the fashion as set forth
above there are many thousands of engineers who could not be bought for
this purpose at any amount of money. The profession of engineering is
notably clean; its code of ethics rigidly adhered to; the rights of
others, both in and out of the profession, regarded with something akin
to sacredness. Engineers, as a body, for instance, possess a peculiarly
rigid idea concerning themselves in relation to branches of the
profession outside their own and yet intimately close to their own.
Called in as an expert in the matter of heating and lighting a building,
say, the heating and lighting engineer will rigidly confine himself to
this phase of the engineering venture and to no other, however he may
find his work again and again overlapping the work of the structural
engineer or the industrial engineer--phases concerning which he may
possess important knowledge. He regards these things as strictly none of
his business, and in doing so conserves the esteem and friendship of his
confrères.
The code of ethics is a liberal one among the engineering groups. It has
been laid down with an eye to fairness both for the practitioner and
the client. Rigidly held to, it will admit of no engineer going far
wrong in the practice of his profession, and, broken, will not land him
in jail. It is presupposed that engineers are men of intelligence. A man
of intelligence will hold himself to the spirit of the Ten Commandments
if he would attain to success, and to the letter of them if he would be
happy during the declining days of his life. Most engineers realize this
and accept it as their every-day working creed. Life to them, like the
medium through which they give expression to their ideas, is a matter of
mathematics. Two steps taken in a wrong direction mean an equal number
of steps forcibly retraced--or the whole problem goes wrong. Engineers
rarely take the two steps in the wrong direction. When they do take
wrong steps they are quick to right them. For the code is always before
their eyes.
X
FUTURE OF THE ENGINEER
Just at present the future of the engineer is more richly promising than
it might otherwise have been but for the war. Due to the period of
reconstruction now confronting the world, a work almost wholly that of
the engineering professions, engineers for a period of a decade at least
are destined to be overburdened with projects. Nor will any one branch
be occupied to the exclusion of any other branch or branches. Civil and
structural engineers will, as a matter of course, have the first call;
but with the work of these men well under way--consisting of the
reconstruction of towns and cities--mechanical and electrical men will
necessarily be called upon, with, no doubt, liberal demand for mining
engineers. Each branch will have its place and serve its usefulness in
the order as the reconstruction work itself will fall, with the result
that all branches of the profession will be busily occupied.
Manufacturers have been ready or are getting ready for this
unprecedented promised activity for some little time. Representatives
are flocking abroad on every boat sailing from these shores with schemes
and plans for the rapid upbuilding of devastated Europe. These men, for
the most part, are engineers embracing all branches of the profession,
and each is a man especially well qualified to serve in his branch. In a
way he is a specialist. He may represent a giant structural
organization, or a machine-tool manufacturer, or an electric-lighting
and power concern--any one of the many fields of industrial enterprises
whose product is needed to place demoralized France and Belgium back
upon a productive basis. For when the construction period is over with
there will be need for machine-tools and equipment for operating these
tools, such as engines and boilers and motors, all of which come
properly under the head of engineering productive enterprises.
Engineers--especially American engineers--will be in great demand, as
they are already. Nor will the close of the reconstruction period
witness an abatement of this demand. Having once entered the foreign
field on a large scale, they will of necessity continue to be in demand
not only for the furtherance of industrial projects, but for purposes of
maintaining that which has been installed at their hands. Machinery has
a way of needing periodical overhauling--even the best of machinery--and
this will entail the services of many engineers for long after the
machinery itself has been set up. The services of erecting engines,
operating engineers, supervising engineers--known more properly as
industrial engineers--following, as the need will, close upon the heels
of the constructing and selling men--will keep the many branches alive
and in foreign trade for much more than a decade--or so it seems to the
writer. Other nations may, of course, whip into the field and in time
crowd out the more distant--meaning American--engineers and engineering
products. But I don't think so, because of the acknowledged supremacy of
American engineers in many directions. The war itself taught the world
that we possessed such a supremacy, and the world will be slow to
forget--especially the purchasing side of nations themselves so crippled
of man-power as to be for a generation well-nigh helpless.
So the immediate future of the engineer is richly promising. It is so
rich with promise that a young man could hardly do better than to enter
upon engineering as a life-work, provided he has no particular choice of
careers, and would enter upon an attractive and scopeful one. His work
is already laid out for him. Taking up a course of study leading to the
degree of M.E., or C.E., or E.E., in four years, upon graduating, he can
retrace his way, or the way of his brother, over the battle-fields of
Europe, a constructive rather than a destructive agent now, a
torch-bearer, a pilgrim, a son of democracy once again advancing the
standard in the interests of humanity. He may do this as a mechanical
engineer, as a civil engineer, as an electrical engineer, as a mining
engineer; it matters not. What does matter is that he will be carrying
Old Glory, in spirit if not in the letter, to the distant outposts--the
especial province of the Anglo-Saxon race, anyway, from the beginnings
of this race--and so serving to maintain the respect and affection
already established in these countries by our soldiery. To the writer
the thing looks mighty attractive.
Yet the young engineer's future need not lie in distant places
necessarily. He may stay at home and still have his work cut out for
him. The promised unparalleled activity in the field of engineering on
the other side cannot but enlarge and accentuate the activity on this
side of the water. Plants will be operating full blast to catch up with
the demand imposed by this abnormal activity, and thus the engineer will
perforce bear the burdens of production. He will bear them in all
directions, since industrial activity means engineering activity, and
the work of production cannot go on without him. In the mines, the
mills, the quarries, the foundry, the machine-shop, the pattern-shop,
the drafting-room, the engineering offices, the consulting
divisions--all these, necessitating as they do the employment of one or
more engineers in at least a supervising capacity, will have urgent need
for his services. Constructive work always, he will grow as his work
grows, and because the growth of his work under these abnormal
conditions will be of itself abnormal, his own growth under these
conditions will be abnormal. He will find himself a full engineer before
his rightful time.
Right here it would be well to point out to the young graduate the
importance of getting under a capable engineer. For, much as the writer
dislikes to admit it, there are engineers who are not capable and who
yet occupy positions of great responsibility. The young engineer, fresh
from college and a bit puzzled as to the game as a whole, if he accept a
connection under an engineer, for instance, whose inventive ideas are
impractical, will unwittingly absorb such a man's viewpoint on
construction, and so spoil himself as an engineer for all time to come.
Cases like this are not rare. The writer personally knows of more than
one young man who enlisted under an engineer whose ideas on
administration probably accounted, being as they were good ideas, for
his position of authority over matters not strictly of an administrative
nature. The man wanted to exercise his authority over all things within
his department--not the least of which was machine design--with the
result that the young graduate's normally practical viewpoint on matters
of construction became warped into that of the man over him, and
continued warped for so long as he remained under this man, and
frequently longer, indeed, to the end of his engineering career. The
young engineer must pick his boss as our young men are facetiously
advised to pick their parents. The wrong selection will prove disastrous
to him in after-life.
Which is but an aside--though a very important one. To emulate a
weakling in whatever walk of life, be it painting or writing or
engineering, means to begin wrong. Everybody knows the importance of a
right beginning. It is no less true of the young engineer than of
others.
And what with the example set by Herbert Hoover and other dollar-a-year
men, mostly engineers, in the nation's administrative affairs during the
war, the future of the engineer looks bright in these quarters as well
as in quarters embracing engineering constructive work wholly. The
engineer of the future undoubtedly will take active part in municipal
and national affairs, more likely than not in time entering upon a
political career as a side interest, as the lawyer enters upon it
to-day, within time--so it seems to the writer--members of the
engineering professions occupying positions of great trust, such as
state governorships and--who knows?--the Presidency itself. Certainly
the hand points this way. More and more engineers are coming into
prominence in the public eye, and with every member of the profession so
coming, the respect for men of his profession multiplies among laymen.
It is not too much to say, therefore, that engineers are destined to
fill places of great political power. It is to be hoped that they are.
Whether they do or not, the future at this writing amply promises it,
and so forcibly that it may well be included as existing for the
engineer, as being a part of the future of the engineer.
XI
WHAT CONSTITUTES ENGINEERING SUCCESS
A graduate of Cornell, in the class of '05, after placing away his
diploma where it could not trouble him through suggestiveness, accepted
a position with a large manufacturing concern in western Pennsylvania.
He was twenty-three years old. He went into the shop to get the
practical side of certain theories imposed upon his receptive nature
through four long years of study in a mechanical-engineering course. The
concern manufactured among other things steam-turbines, and this young
man, having demonstrated in school his particular aptitude for
thermodynamics--the study of heat and its units in its application to
engines, and the like--entered the erecting department. Donning
overalls, and with ordinary rule in his hip pocket--as against the
slide-rule with which he had worked out his theoretical calculations
during his college years--he went to work at whatever was assigned him
as a task by his superiors--shop foremen, assistant superintendent,
occasionally an engineer from the office.
This young man did many things. He helped to assemble turbine parts;
carried word of petty alterations to the proper officials: assisted in
the work of making tests; made detailed reports on the machine's
performance; screwed up and backed off nuts; in short, got very well
acquainted with the steam-turbine as manufactured by this company. He
knew the fundamentals of machine construction, and an understanding of
the details of this particular type of turbine therefore came easy to
him. He worked shop hours, carried his lunch in a box, changed his
overalls every Monday like a veteran. Usually his overalls more than
needed changing, because he was not afraid of the grease and grime with
which he came into contact throughout the day. He liked the work and
went to it like a dog to a bone. He was applying in a practical way what
he had learned in college of a theoretical nature, and finding the thing
of amazing interest.
He made progress. In time his work was brought to the attention of the
chief engineer, and one day, when the president of the company, who was
also an inventor of national repute and responsible for the design of
the turbine being manufactured by the organization, wanted to make
certain bold changes in the design, the chief engineer sent for the
young engineer whose work in college in thermodynamics had won for him
certain honors, with the result that our hero found himself presently
seated opposite the president at a table in the latter's office, engaged
in working out calculations on his slide-rule--calculations beyond the
powers of the president, because he was not a heavy theoretician. This
call was a big advance indeed, for it marked him as a man of promise--a
"comer"--in the concern. The president liked the ease with which the
young engineer "got" him in the matter of the proposed changes, and
quite before either realized it both were talking freely, exchanging
ideas, in the field of turbine construction generally. The young man
unconsciously was driving home the fact that he was a capable engineer,
one who, while still lacking in broad experience, was nevertheless
possessed of the proper attitude toward engineering as a whole to compel
the interest and attention of his superior.
The young man eventually was sent out upon the road as an erecting man.
In this work he discovered certain operating faults in the design, and,
reporting these faults to the home office, observed that not a few were
remedied in subsequent designs. He moved about the country from place to
place, setting up and operating steam-turbines, until there came the
blissful day when he was called back to join the engineering staff in
work covering design. Laying aside his overalls, he emerged as a crisp
young engineer in a linen collar and nifty cravat--although not till
later did he don a cream-colored waistcoat--and thereafter his hours
were seven instead of nine. With a desk and a stenographer he entered
upon work of a somewhat statistical character. He followed the designs
of rival companies as best he could through their advertising and
articles covering their respective designs appearing in the technical
journals, and about this time also applied for admission, and was
granted it, in the foremost engineering society embracing his particular
branch of the profession. He was still making progress.
Likewise, he was rapidly becoming an expert in the field of
steam-turbines. His work in the shop, together with his experience on
the road, both as an erecting man and operating engineer, had eminently
fitted him for valuable service in the home office as an engineer
overseeing design. His work in charge of design, where his knowledge of
what had given service both good and bad in details of construction
while he was in the field, was extremely valuable to the designer
himself, was rapidly rounding him out as a steam-turbine man. His salary
had gone up apace with his progress; he had met the right girl at a club
dance in the suburban town where he had taken modest quarters; he was
rapidly headed toward success both as an engineer and a citizen. He had
been out of school probably six years, and was still a very young man,
with all the world practically before him.
One day he was asked by the chief engineer of the concern to journey to
New York, and read a paper before his engineering society at one of the
regular annual meetings, on the subject of thermodynamics in its
relation to the company's own product--the turbine. He tipped over his
chair in his eagerness to get out of the office and on the train. He
realized the importance of this opportunity. He was to appear before his
fellow-engineers--the best and most capable and prominent in the
profession--and to appear as an authority on his subject! The thing was
another step forward. He prepared a paper, basing it on his six years'
experience in steam-turbines, and when he reached New York had something
of value to tell his brother engineers. The meeting was held in the
afternoon, and, dressing for the part, he stepped out upon the platform
before a gathering of some eight or nine hundred engineers and delivered
himself of his subject with credit to himself and to his organization.
Not only that. In the rebuttal, when engineers seated in the auditorium
rose to confound him with questions--engineers representing rival
turbine concerns--he proved himself quick at the bat and more than once
confounded those who would confound him.
He was making his mark on the industrial times. His paper was reviewed
in the technical journals and almost overnight our young hero found
himself recognized as an authority in his chosen branch. He was sought
out for other articles by technical editors, his associates in the home
plant generously commended him for his work; his salary received another
elevation; he called on the girl that night and had her set the date.
Then he plugged for salvation--further knowledge as a turbine
man--harder than ever. Having won the full confidence of the officials
of the company by this time, he was given free voice in all matters
having to do with the design of their product, and shortly after his
first little boy was born was promoted to the position of assistant
chief engineer. He served in this capacity for two years, and then,
realizing that he had gone as far up in the organization as it was
physically possible to go, owing to the fact that the chief engineer was
the president's sister's husband--or something like that--he accepted an
offer from one of the rival concerns manufacturing turbines and entered
the organization as chief engineer at a salary too big to mention. Our
young friend had at last arrived.
Yet his success was not quite complete, nor will it be complete, until
he sets up, as he assuredly will some day, as a consulting engineer.
When he at last does this, when he swings out his shingle to the breeze,
he will then have attained to the maximum of possible success as an
engineer. Already recognized as being possessed of a fine discrimination
in matters of engineering moment, especially in thermodynamics as
related to turbines, he has but gone up in channels early laid out for
him, and indicated to him, in his college days. His direction even then
was clearly marked. All he had to do, and all he did do, was to develop
himself in this single direction. He did nothing that would be
impossible to any other engineering graduate. Merely he hewed to the
line--persisted in remaining in the one branch of the game--met with his
reward in time just as any young man would meet with it. There was
nothing of phenomenal character, nothing of the genius, revealed in what
he did. His way is open to all. And it is a way both worthy and
admirable, for to-day this engineer stands high in his profession and is
meeting with financial reward in keeping with his position among
engineers.