Opportunities in Engineering Part 1

Opportunities in Engineering.

by Charles M.Horton.

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 a.s.suredly 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 const.i.tutes 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 cla.s.s of professional men--diplomats and lawyers and divinities not excepted.

That engineering is a force fraught with stupendous possibilities, therefore, n.o.body 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 n.o.ble 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 n.o.ble 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 sh.e.l.l, 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 pract.i.tioners 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 a.s.sociated with a staff of engineers brought together into a corporation manufacturing sh.e.l.ls. 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--c.u.mulative 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 p.r.o.nounced, 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 ill.u.s.trate:

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, p.r.o.nounced 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 a.n.a.lysis, is the manipulating of detailed parts into a perfect whole--whether it be a bridge or a machine or a plant.