ENGINEERING AS A
VOCATION -
BY
ERNEST McCULLOUGH, C.E.
Consulting Civil Engineer; Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers;
Western Society of Engineers; American Water Works Association; American
Society of Municipal Improvements; National Association of Cement
Users; American Society of Engineering Contractors; Illinois
Society of Engineers and Surveyors; Fellow of the
American Association for the Advancement
of Science; etc., etc.
NEW YORK
DAVID WILLIAMS COMPANY
239 WEST 39TH STREET
1911
Copyrighted, 1911
BY
DAVID WILLIAMS COMPANY
THE SCICNTinC PRESS
DRUMMOND AND COMPANY
BROOKLYN, N. Y.
To
'B Wtfc
THIS BOOK
is MOST RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED
BY
HER FRIEND AND SINCERE ADMIRER
AND SYMPATHIZER,
^t .Autljmr
And Ruth said " Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after
thee; for whither thou goest I will go; and where thou lodgest I will lodge; . . .
260043
SPECIFICATIONS FOE A GOOD ENGINEER
"A good engineer must be of inflexible integrity, sober,
truthful, accurate, resolute, discreet, of cool and sound judg-
ment, must have command of his temper, must have courage
to resist and repel attempts at intimidation, a firmness that
is proof against solicitation, flattery or improper bias of any
kind, must take an interest in his work, must be energetic,
quick to decide, prompt to act, must be fair and impartial as
a judge on the bench, must have experience in his work and
dealing with men, which implies some maturity of years, must
have business habits and knowledge of accounts. Men who
combine these qualities are not to be picked up every day.
Still, they can be found. But they are greatly in demand and
when found they are worth their price; rather, they are
beyond price and their value cannot be estimated by dollars."
Chief Engineer Sterling's Report to the Mississippi Levee
Commissioners.
PREFACE
THE subject matter of this work has been
rearranged (with additions) from a number of
addresses given before technical schools and asso-
ciations of engineer assistants. It is published
for the information of parents in order that they
may act wisely in selecting a career for their sons.
Semi-technical periodicals and daily newspapers
are bureaus of information consulted frequently
by ill-informed parents ; and, perhaps, more than
half the students now in technical schools are there
because of opinions obtained as valuable advice
from such sources.
The reason for the opinions expressed by writers
in such publications is hard to ascertain. A care-
ful reading of the back numbers of technical
periodicals and transactions of technical societies
will prove the statements in this book to be
accurate, and the advocates of wholesale technical
education have always had these sources from
which to obtain information. The reader is to bear
in mind that when the average engineer is men-
tioned it is the average in numbers and not in
ability that is meant.
THE AUTHOR.
Chicago, 111., June, 1911.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE ENGINEER .
CHAPTEE II
THE WORK OF THE ENGINEER 18
CHAPTER III
THE EDUCATION OF THE ENGINEER 36
CHAPTER IV
HOME STUDY COURSES 95
CHAPTER V
How TO HUNT AND HOLD A JOB 112
CHAPTER VI
DOES IT PAY TO STUDY ENGINEERING? 131
APPENDIX
THE OPINIONS OF ENGINEERING EDITORS. . , 181
"THE fact that a competent engineer can make
a little money go much further than it would go
without his advice and aid is one which the general
public is slow to comprehend. The average man
congratulates himself upon the dollars he saves by
dispensing with an engineer's services, and knows
nothing of the dollars lost in exorbitant prices, or
work poorly executed." From an editorial in
Engineering News, July 11, 1895.
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
CHAPTER I
THE ENGINEEK
THE average person is puzzled over the exact
meaning of the word "Engineer" after some
acquaintance with the many sorts of men who so
style themselves. To engineers the confusion is
often humorous, but none the less occasionally
mortifying. A fond mother whose son was a
student in engineering at one of the leading tech-
nical schools was asked by a friend how she could
contemplate having her son work in greasy clothes
around an engine, "like a common laborer." The
same mother was asked by another friend if she did
not think it a great waste of money to educate her
boy at such an expensive school "to be only a com-
mon surveyor after all."
Engineers enjoy the story of the payroll. The
name was not Smith, but it does for the story. On
a certain payroll appeared :
Smith, Aaron, Engineer. .$15 per week.
Smith, James, Asst. Eng. .$75 per week.
2 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
Aaron Smith was a colored man unable to read
and write. His duty was to run the steam launch
that carried James Smith, C. E., the principal
assistant of the Chief Engineer up and down the
river where he had charge of important improve-
ments costing several millions of dollars. What's
in a name ?
For years professional engineers have tried to
designate men like Aaron Smith as " launch
tenders," men who operate stationary engines as
" engine runners," and men who operate locomo-
tives as " engine drivers." Such terms are used in
some countries, but are being gradually supplanted
by the word " engineer" with a qualifying word
before it.
In the United States the locomotive engineer
is styling himself a "traveling engineer," although
that term should be applied exclusively to men
employed by railways to travel and instruct loco-
motive engineers. By this time the public knows
that a " stationary engineer" operates engines
in power houses and on contractors' plants. A
"hoisting engineer" runs a hoisting engine. A
man in charge of an entire power plant is known
as an "operating engineer." This does not always
fully explain, for the operating engineer who takes
a contract to look after a number of large plants in
important factories or large office buildings, may
be a graduate mechanical or electrical engineer,
while the "operating engineer" in a sawmill may
ENGINEEKING AS A VOCATION 3
be illiterate and his entire power plant consist of
a second-hand fifty horse-power engine.
At present an " electrical engineer" may be a
man who designs, or sells, or installs electrical
machinery, or he may be a man in temporary
charge of a five horse-power motor. Some bell
hangers are called electrical engineers and so
advertise themselves. In Great Britain an
" engineer" may be one of the greatest men in the
empire or he may be merely an employetin an
engineering works, or, as we term them in the
United States, machine shops or factories.
With all the confusion the public, through the
medium of the press is coming to a better realiza-
tion of the engineer and his work so that the pro-
fessional engineer is taking rank among educated
people, with the lawyer, the surgeon, the physician
and the clergyman. With this better conception of
the professional side of the calling there has also
crept in the idea that it is a remarkably well-paid
business, embracing the romance and adventure of
the soldier's life with that of Aladdin, who merely
rubbed an old lamp when he needed money.
The engineer only incidentally is tied to an
engine, either as designer, builder or operator. A
search of the dictionary for roots yields the follow-
ing definitions :
ENGINE, French, engin; from Latin,
Ingenium, a genius, an invention.
4 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
ENGINEER, English, engin-er; Old .
French, enginier; French, ing&nieur. A
person of genius or ingenuity.
In the Latin-English dictionary we find :
IngSnlosus-a-um. (ingenium) Naturally
clever, talented, acute, able, ingenious.
Students of engineering history accept the fore-
going definitions as satisfactory root forms of the
word " Engineer." Thus we find the engineer is
"the ingenious man." This broad definition
brings all characteristically energetic, able men
into the category of engineers. When a man is
said to have engineered a deal it is understood he
obtained his own way after the exercise of con-
siderable ingenuity. There are to-day many fool-
ish persons who display a silly affectation in
assuming the title of engineer, such as social
engineers, who are persons engaged in studying
social conditions; advertising engineers, who are
persons engaged in handling advertising on a large
scale, etc., ad nauseum. Other words, equally, if
not more, effective in conveying the intended mean-
ing might be used, for the English language is very
rich. To the writer and other men in the pro-
fession there are two definitions which exactly
describe the engineer, and these definitions, if
properly acknowledged, would break down the
artificial lines of separation between the numerous
" specialties" of engineering work which are
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 5
damaging and tend to make of the school-bred
engineer an automaton and an illy-paid, hardly-
treated person.
In 1828, Thomas Tredgold, in England, defined
civil engineering as "the art of directing the great
sources of power in nature for the use and cop-
venience of man." This definition is incorporated
in the constitution of the Institution of Civil
Engineers of Great Britain.
In 1885, A. M. Wellington, a prominent Amer-
ican engineer, for many years editor of Engineer-
ing News, said in the preface of his classic
" Economic Theory of the Location of Railways,"
that ' ' engineering ... is the art of doing that
well with one dollar, which any bungler can do with
two after a fashion."
The second definition is really the more broad.
Any man who directs the great sources of power in
nature for the use and convenience of man is prac-
tising engineering. A partly educated man may do
this. The fresh often too fresh young graduate
of an engineering school may do this. The
engineer, however, has been so well trained in
engineering that he can do a thing well with one
dollar which a bungler can do in a bungling manner
with the expenditure of two dollars.
Ability+Education+Training+Experience=Engmeer.
There was some spice, perhaps unintentional,
in the definition of civil engineering. To one, how-
6 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
ever, who appreciates th6 grim humor of strong,
self-tutored men, the spice was, no doubt, intended.
From the beginning of civilization men had houses
built by builders who came to form a distinct order
and were known after a while as architects. These
men wrought for the comfort and convenience of
mankind. Engineers, however, were military men
whose structures were for warlike purposes. Their
bridges were not erected for peaceful use and as
an embellishment of the landscape were never
looked on with favor. Only architects built beauti-
ful bridges, following the plans of the engineers,
whose bridges were erected so that armies might
attack a province or defend a city. For many cen-
turies engineers were employed to plan campaigns
and lay out works to defend or to attack forts and
cities. Many great soldiers in the past preferred
the title of " Engineer" to that of "General."
Military engineers showed their ingenuity in
the invention of engines and implements of war
and the use of every means at hand to kill men and
destroy the works of their hands. In times of
peace, or when the engineer corps of an army was
quartered in cities, the engineers were employed to
construct water works and drainage works for
large districts. This was not done primarily for
the purpose of making conditions tolerable for the
inhabitants, but to provide water and guard health
during a possible siege, for sieges in those old days
sometimes lasted for years. The engineer, the mili-
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 7
tary engineer, might have been defined as one "who
practised the art of directing the great sources of
power in nature for the harm and destruction of
man.'
Somewhat more than one hundred years ago
some Englishmen engaged on construction work
intended for the advancement of civilization, such
as the building of roads, bridges and canals, and
the erection of great buildings, learned that many
Italian, French and Spanish architects and bridge
builders, the latter work by this time having
become a distinct specialty, were in the habit of
terming themselves engineers without any qualify-
ing designation and military engineers were mak-
ing strong objection. These Englishmen concluded
that since much ingenuity was required in civil as
well as military construction, the term "Civil
Engineer" was eminently proper and it was
adopted. There being strong opposition to the use
of the word engineer by civilians it was necessary
to exactly define the civil engineer, the definition of
Thomas Tredgold being the result; somewhat
insulting to the army as well as to the naval
engineer, who, at that time, had no engines to care
for, but who built docks, designed ordnance, etc.,
and assisted the naval architect in the design and
construction of war vessels.
To-day the distinction is disappearing. Mili-
tary engineers have so little employment of the old
sort that most of their time is spent in work of a
8 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
civil engineering nature, the internal improve-
ments of the country. The army engineers of all
armies are selected from the honor graduates of
the national military academies. They constitute
a body of well-trained men on whom the govern-
ment may call for any duty. Their pay is the
highest of all soldiers and the engineers are the
ranking branch of the military service. Naval
engineers are highly trained mechanical and elec-
trical engineers. For the construction and main-
tenance of ship yards, docks, etc., there is a special
corps of Civil Engineers of the Navy, Robert B.
Peary having been a member of that honorable
corps of men who have a relative rank, with uni-
forms and all the honors pertaining to the rank,
but who have no right to the use of the title. For
example when Robert E. Peary was a Commander
he was borne on the Navy lists as a Commander ;
wore the uniform of a Commander ; took rank in
a procession or at a reception in accordance with
his relative rank ; got the pay of that rank, and yet
among naval officers he was Mr. Peary, Civil Engi-
neer, U. S. N. To-day, while retired as an Admiral
he has no right to have the word Admiral engraved
on his calling card, unless the act retiring him with
that rank was so worded as to confer that right.
But we digress while discussing the strange cus-
toms of the least democratic of all the institutions
of the American government.
Shortly after the Civil Engineer appeared the
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 9
steam engine was improved to such an extent tliat
its rapid development led to the most wonderful
changes the world has ever witnessed. The power
of men to achieve was multiplied a millionf old and
manual labor gave way to mechanical effort,
whereby comforts hitherto unknown were brought
within the means of everyone. Need was had for
men trained in mathematics and the physical
sciences and such men were found in the ranks of
the engineers, civil, naval and military. The first
men to make a specialty of engine design and
operation were known as Mechanical Civil
Engineers, but for only a short time was the awk-
ward title used, the word civil being dropped so
that the Mechanical Engineer became an indi-
vidual. The first mining men who called them-
selves engineers were Mining Civil Engineers, but
it was a cumbersome title soon abandoned for that
of Mining Engineer, or Engineer of Mines. The
Electrical Engineer was an electrician when that
science first came into prominence and the Elec-
trical Engineer as such did not appear upon the
scene until about seventy-five years after the
Mechanical Engineer dropped the word civil from
his title.
" Farther than runneth the memory of man,"
every nation had schools for the training of mili-
tary engineers and the professors were men who
wrote many books so that some of the rules of con-
struction followed to-day date back several cen-
10 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
turies. The first school, however, to teach the new
profession of civil engineering, as such, with the
degree of Civil Engineer, was the Eensselaer Poly-
technic Institute of Troy, K Y., founded in 1826.
It has had a most successful career and is to-day a
leading school, courses in mechanical engineering
and electrical engineering having been added
within the last five years. Engineers have not
been particularly impressed with the value of the
history of their profession and all the facts are
not exactly known, or are not easily accessible. It
is believed that the second civil engineering school
was established in France a year or two after the
establishment of the Eensselaer Polytechnic Insti-
tute in Troy, although the famous Ecole des Ponts
et Chausses for the training of engineers to care
for the French highways, was essentially a civil
engineering school, the military school of St. Cyr
educating military engineers and artillerymen.
Between 1830 and 1840 the University of Glasgow,
Scotland, established a course in mathematics and
the natural sciences for the theoretical training of
young gentlemen apprenticed to civil engineers,
and from this school was graduated William John
Macquorne Rankine. Rankine practised as a civil
engineer for several years and, in 1856, upon the
retirement of the great Professor Gordon, suc-
ceeded him as professor of civil engineering.
Rankine was a phenomenal man who wrote many
books covering the entire field of engineering,
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 11
establishing it upon a sound basis as a mathemat-
ical science. There were many great investigators
and writers on engineering subjects in Europe,
especially in France and Germany, whose work he
made free use of, but by all of these men he was
looked up to as a leader and might be said to have
been the father of the civil engineer. Before his
time the engineer " picked up" his education and
received his theoretical and scientific knowledge
as best he could while burning the midnight lamp.
Kankine made it possible to study engineering with
the least loss of time and wasted effort. The fourth
school of civil engineering was Union College, now
Union University, Schenectady, N". Y.
In Great Britain it was the custom for many
years, which custom has not entirely died out, to
apprentice boys to some engineer for a definite
term of years, paying a fee for the privilege, the
amount of the fee being governed by the degree of
eminence of the engineer. The boys were sup-
posed to receive practical instruction through
helping around the office and out in the field or
in the works, becoming engineers through the
operation of a gradual " soaking in" process. The
schools were so conducted as to give one, two, or
three years' instruction for a few months each
year in mathematics and science, to enable the
"articled" pupil to acquire the theoretical knowl-
edge he actually needed. Since the instruction
given at the schools was wholly along theoretical
12 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
lines it was not looked upon with much favor, the
British being a great people to laud practical ( ?)
methods. Some of the old feeling against schools
crops out once in a while, but the majority of the
British engineering schools to-day are not very
different in aims and methods from the schools of
other countries.
In continental Europe young engineers received
all their theoretical instruction in schools having
five- and six-year courses before going into prac-
tical work. To-day a certain amount of practical
work, or shop training, is insisted upon as a pre-
requisite to graduation, this work being sand-
wiched between school years. In the United States
the apprentice system was never in favor and the
schools in this country from the first endeavored
to complete the scholastic training of the students
before they went into practice. Engineers were in
demand and for a great many years the schools
could not turn them out fast enough, so there was
lacking the intense thoroughness of the German
and Frenchman and the practical training of the
Briton. The differences in methods of instruc-
tion f ormerly common in the schools of different
countries were well illustrated in a remark made
by a prominent educator a few years ago to the
effect that the British engineer was a technically
trained mechanic, the continental European
engineer a technically trained scientist and the
American engineer a technically trained busi-
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 13
ness man. It was said that these differences were
plainly shown in South Africa and other frontiers
of civilization where the British engineer was an
outside superintendent at good pay bossing labor-
ers ; the continental engineers were in the drafting
office and computing desk getting much less pay
and the American engineer was drawing a large
salary as general manager. Actually such a view
of the matter was a most unjust slur on the
engineers trained in British, German and French
schools. In those countries no railway was built or
any great public work undertaken until it was
deemed a necessity. When decided upon it could
not be started until many tedious legal formalities
and governmental requirements had been complied
with. It was not a gamble, and, therefore, no
expense was spared to make it permanent. The
young men trained in the schools of such countries
naturally were drilled in methods that were hardly
adapted to pioneer countries where every railway
and other enterprise was a gamble and the item
of first cost most important. Americans have never
been particularly noted for willing acquiescence in
regulations of any sort that interfere with a man
doing as he pleases, so, of course, American
engineers were the best for newly exploited coun-
tries. In old countries the idea of having to rebuild
anything is viewed with horror. In the United
States, especially the United States of a couple of
generations ago, the very cheapest work was
14 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
wanted as it was believed the profits would enable
the work to be done over in a few years if neces-
sary. The differences, therefore, between the
engineers of the different countries were not due
wholly to the training received in schools, but were
due primarily to environment, heredity, custom
and habit.
To-day engineers in all countries read and
study papers and books written by men in other
countries. Translators are busy everywhere so
that each week the up-to-date engineer receives by
mail a paper containing an account of everything
of value to him in his own and other countries.
The schools are gradually getting together and
there is very little difference between first-class
schools, whether they are in England, Germany,
France, Belgium, Sweden, Italy, Austria, Eussia,
ffctpa^i, Argentine or in the United States. In all
will be found the leading works of the leading
instructors in all countries and Rankine's works
have been translated into many languages and have
formed the basis of hundreds of standard text
books.
Considerable criticism of engineering schools
is heard. " What is the trouble with our engineer-
ing schools ?" is a cry frequently heard, but if there
in any trouble it is farther back and the cry should
be "What is the trouble of our engineering
schools?" The answer being "The false ideals
and the lack of consistency and coordination in the
ENGINEEKING AS A VOCATION 15
public schools.' 9 It is not fair to expect the
engineering schools of the United States to take
that illy-digested product, the average grammar
or high school graduate, with his smattering of
many things, including plain sewing, and expect
to get as perfect a product in the way of an edu-
cated man as the German schools turn out. Much
of the criticism, however, of our engineering
schools is a survival of the days when few
engineers were school bred and a college education
was not common. No employer cared to have in his
employ a man better educated than himself, for
they were autocratic, were the successful men of
the days of our fathers and grandfathers. The
old practical (so-called) engineer was preferred
whenever an engineer was employed. A strong
stream of engineering graduates has been poured
out over the world within the past thirty years
and numbers of them have deserted technical (pro-
fessional technical) engineering to go into con-
tracting and manufacturing. Their success has
been so marked that the heads of the largest manu-
facturing establishments and the heads of the most
progressive contracting companies are men who
received engineering educations. If their training
had not been as practical as it is possible to make
school training, they would not have succeeded.
Some men ask that the school courses be made more
practical and yet are unable to explain just what
they mean. Some are merely echoing an old com-
16 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
plaint and some graduates are crying from disap-
pointment, when, perhaps, the school was not
responsible. Accidents of birth have much to do
with lack of success in life. No school can supply
a man with common sense and intelligence if these
very desirable qualities were omitted in his make-
up, but education can do much to enable one to
make good use of all the intelligence he may have.
The modern engineer must have a college train-
ing or something that is equivalent. The equiva-
lent is very, very hard to obtain. Teaching is a
distinct profession and the practising engineer
cannot always obtain the viewpoint of the teach-
ing engineer. The curricula of the numerous
engineering schools bear a very close resemblance
to each other, yet many men have taken positions
as professors with the idea of revolutionizing mat-
ters. Many of these men have had the privilege
of organizing new schools in old colleges and uni-
versities and have had, some of them, the oppor-
tunity to start out on new lines in entirely new
institutions unhampered by traditions. With the
free hand given them and the splendid opportunity
offered for reform it is significant that the courses
in such schools gradually bear a very strong resem-
blance to those in older schools. All heads of
engineering schools pay great attention to old
graduates and the average engineering school of
to-day, with all its reputed shortcomings is really
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 17
the product of the alumnae, much as some of them
will dispute it.
There is really nothing serious the matter with
our engineering schools that will not be corrected
in time. The Society for the Promotion of
Engineering Education is doing good work and
many eminent practising engineers belong to this
society, which invites helpful criticism. If any-
thing is a fault with the training given in the
schools it is that many schools have paid entirely
too much attention to outside criticism and the
students are narrowly trained specialists, who
have been cheated in their unfortunate attempt to
get a proper education. However, this does not
belong in the chapter which is supposed merely to
define the engineer. In a later chapter the subject
of the scholastic training of the engineer will be
discussed. This present chapter has defined the
engineer in the words of two eminent engineers.
A third definition is by some unknown and reads :
"An engineer is a compound of common sense and
mathematics. If he has not enough mathematics
his lot in life will be hard. If he has not enough
common sense God pity him."
CHAPTER II
THE WORK OF THE ENGINEER
THE old-time civil engineer, before lie was
known by that title, built roads and bridges and
helped architects erect great buildings. During
the middle ages when the wonderful cathedrals and
monumental bridges of Europe were built, the
greatest architects were engineers and often pre-
ferred to be called engineers. Some were able mili-
tary engineers and conducted many campaigns and
great sieges of history. Leonardi da Vinci was an
architect, an engineer, a painter and sculptor; of
commanding rank in each calling. The knowledge
of the world was not so great in those days, but
that one man could know practically all that was
necessary in many callings.
For a long period architecture was a sleeping
art for nothing new was developed and the archi-
tects grew proud and drew away from the
engineers and courted the society of artists. Archi-
tects were delighted when their art was called
" frozen music," little recking that things are gen-
erally dead when frozen. For centuries architects
did nothing but measure and copy and try to
develop schools without placing proper emphasis
on the fact that architecture is "The art of build-
is
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 19
ing pleasingly." To build pleasingly the material
must be recognized. The long spans of Grecian
architraves were possible with the strong stone
used by the Greeks and imitations in the weaker
limestones and sandstones of other countries were
but imitations after all, beautiful as some were.
The greatest buildings were erected and archi-
tecture made advances only when the engineer and
architect worked together or were one and the
same person. With the invention of the steel-
framed building, the introduction of reinforced
concrete and structural tile, all due to the engineer,
architecture has been reborn and the moderns, in
America, at least, are developing styles which will
some day eventuate in something as good as the
Greek pillar and lintel, the arch of the Etruscans
and Romans and the pillared vaults of the Goths.
Since the " engineer has joined hands with the
unwilling architect there is no limit to the possi-
bilities of realizing dreams and embodying them
in lasting materials.
The old-time civil engineer also improved
rivers and harbors and constructed canals. This
ends the list of his achievements. He, of course,
had to know how to make surveys so he could lay
out his work and make estimates of cost and pre-
pare plans. It is well known that the science of
geometry arose from the necessity for recovering
land lines and boundaries buried in the mud at
the times of the annual rises of the Mle. The
20 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
geometers (earth measurers), land surveyors or
engineers, call them what you please, were always
employed to set out work and no doubt from very
early times surveying was a large part of the work
of practical builders, architects and contractors,
later of engineers. The old-time civil engineer had
to be a draftsman also, for drafting is a universal
language understood alike by the trained engineer,
the architect and the building mechanic. The sur-
veyor had also to be a draftsman in order to
make maps of his surveys. To be a good surveyor
and draftsman implied a good knowledge of
mathematics. The student in a modern American
high school receives more instruction in mathe-
matics than the best engineer of two hundred years
ago. The old-time engineer then was a man of
ingenuity and common sense with little mathe-
matics. The engineer of to-day must have fully as
much ingenuity and common sense as the engineer
of olden time, together with much more mathe-
matics.
Hero of Alexandria is styled the first engineer
of recorded history. He invented a fountain and a
steam engine, besides many other things of service
to mankind, although his steam engine remained
a toy and the principle has only lately been applied
in the turbine engine, which is regarded by many
as the coming engine. His writings consisted of
fourteen books treating on the whole of practical
surveying and construction work as they were
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 21
understood in those early days, but all the books
did not survive the numerous wars and raids of
the intervening years. A book in the days of the
ancients was generally about as full as a thin
pamphlet or a chapter in a modern book. The
author of fourteen books hardly wrote as much as
the author of a ten-chapter treatise on the design
of a plate girder to-day. Be this as it may, Hero
is reputed to be the author of fourteen books which
for some centuries were a veritable cyclopedia of
engineering and of these books we have only his
surveying in full, with parts of three or four other
books. His treatise on surveying contains many
of the problems taught to-day and his methods of
solution are unchanged, except as changes have
been made by the introduction of algebra and
trigonometry, two subjects of which the ancients
knew nothing. Hero was not regarded highly by
his brother mathematicians in Alexandria because
he believed in " practical, applied" mathematics
and wrote books for the purpose of educating the
common herd. He profaned a most noble science
when he disclosed the grave secrets of the mathe-
maticians and made a science of what was a
philosophy. It is said that to-day the first toast
at the annual banquet of a certain mathematical
society is " Here's to pure mathematics. Cursed
be he who attempts to find use for it."
Let us see how modern this wonderful pro-
fession of engineering is. All knowledge of stress
22 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
and strain was empiric up to a very late date. In
1678, Robert Hooke published his famous law of
stress and deformation in materials, namely, "As
the extension, so is the resistance," which he
claimed to have discovered eighteen years pre-
viously and kept secret for the purpose of obtain-
ing some patents. It is still termed Hooke 's Law,
but is now known to be true only within the elastic
limit of any material. Prom that date until 1857,
when Saint- Venant gave a complete analysis of
the strength and elasticity of beams, engineers fol-
lowed many strange hypotheses, which they digni-
fied by styling them theories, and tried to preserve
many individual secrets. Self-tutored mechanics
to-day bring forth startling ideas, startling at
least to modern engineers, because so many of them
read reprints of books written fifty and sixty years
ago. The self-tutored man should never buy a
book without examining the copyright page for
the date. [If the copyright was obtained prior to
1895 he should not purchase the bookj
When the first man wanted to cross a river
without swimming and found a fallen tree span-
ning from bank to bank, the first bridge existed.
It may have been many centuries before the human
race developed to a point where it was possible to
fell trees and build bridges. The bridges as late
as Roman times were built of horizontal beams
and girders resting on piles, with no attempt at
intelligent trussing. That is, of course, wooden
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 23
bridges were so built, for stone and brick arch
bridges are very ancient. In the course of time
it was discovered that the triangle was the ideal
form of framework and the truss was developed.
Bridge building became the work of a craft, like
the building of cathedrals, and men went all over
Europe erecting bridges, yet no real principles
underlay their work, which consisted in a/cut-and-
tryj method of design. The art of building truss
bridges developed through correction of errors of
judgment, but methods for computing the strength
of suspension bridges were known fairly well about
1780. When railways commenced to supplant
navigable canals and bridges were required to
carry something more than light wagons many
strange patents were obtained for trusses com-
bining the principles of the truss, the arch and
the chain.
In the summer of 1846 a Yankee school teacher,
Squire Whipple, sat on the bank of a stream fish-
ing and idly watching some carpenters repairing a
wooden highway bridge close by. The school
teacher learned that the foreman was a noted
bridge builder, so he stopped fishing to converse
with him. It was with considerable surprise that
he learned there was no certain method then
known for calculating stresses in bridge trusses.
Upon his return home Whipple made a model of
the bridge with small pieces of wood, joined at the
angles with pins, having strings for counterbraces.
24 ENGINEEKING AS A VOCATION
By rolling balls in grooves along the top chord he
discovered how the frame work deflected and thus
learned how to design a bridge to carry a prede-
termined load. He wrote a " Practical Treatise
on Bridge Building," which was printed in Utica,
1ST. Y., in 1847. In 1851, Haupt, in America, and
Bow, in England, produced books on bridge design,
the forerunners of a literature which justifies one
in saying with the old Hebrew "Of the making
of books there is no end."
Tramways were first built in England about
two hundred and fifty years ago for the purpose of
transporting coal from collieries to the sea. They
were first made of two lines of flat stones to afford
a track for the wagons. Civil engineers, or rather
surveyors, were employed to secure proper curves
and grades. Longitudinal timbers enabled heavier
loads to be drawn and when iron rails were placed
on the timbers, thus further reducing resistance
and wear and permitting still heavier loads to be
drawn, the tramways became railways. The first
rails were channeled, or grooved, and it was~a
stroke of real genius when some man used a plain
rail and put the flange on the wheel. It effected
great economy and was very simple, but then the
really great things in this world are very simple in
their inception. In 1821 the Stockton and Dar-
lington Railway was incorporated in England, this
road being operated by steam locomotives in 1825.
The success of the steam locomotive caused a
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 25
boom in railway building and the demand for civil
engineers was so great that for many years it was
almost impossible to find enough to go around. At
the same time the need for skilled designers of
engines and machinery led the mechanical
engineers to form a distinct body as distinguished
from civil engineers. The old distinction between
civil and military engineers was lost forever and
to-day we have engineers. The old qualifying
terms remain but the lines, for a time so distinct,
are each day becoming fainter. The real dis-
tinction now exists as between engineers who
design and build stable structures and those who
design, build and sell engines and machines.
By common consent the man who is to-day
known as a civil engineer is one who deals with
statics, and the man who is known as a mechanical
engineer is one who deals with kinetics, the elec-
trical engineer being a cross between a physicist
and a mechanical engineer, having a marked strain
of conceit common to youth ; the electrical engineer
being comparatively an infant, but very husky.
Mechanics is that part of the science of dynamics
which treats of the laws governing the interaction
between forces and solid matter. Statics is a
branch of mechanics treating of the action of
forces upon bodies at rest, or in a state of static
equilibrium ; that is, of balanced forces. Kinetics
is a branch of mechanics treating of the action of
unbalanced forces and the movement of solid
26 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
bodies. Statics, therefore, applies to bridges and
all stationary frames, as well as embankments,
retaining walls, river and canal improvements, etc.
Kinetics deals with engines and machines.
In hydraulics the engineer has been employed
from time immemorial. At first his employment
on harbor work was in the government service,
connected with the navy, but later he was employed
as a civil engineer to design and build harbors for
vessels of commerce. Centuries of dock and wharf
building developed rules and styles which have not
been much changed by the advance in scientific
instruction of engineers in the past century. Navi-
gable canals were for a time the great training
schools for engineers, but they are everywhere giv-
ing way to railways, except where interested agita-
tion keeps alive public interest in old-fashioned
things. A few canals are kept up at enormous
expense to satisfy artificially created public
demands, supposedly to act as a deterrant upon
railway rates. Sentiment, however, rather than
common sense business principles, keeps the small
navigable canal in existence. The present day
hydraulic engineer finds his chief employment in
the design, construction and operation of water
works for towns and cities ; canals, reservoirs and
dams for irrigation; canals and ditches for land
drainage; the improvement and regulation of
rivers.
The first writer of note on public water supplies
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 27
was Sextus Julius Frontinus, water commissioner
in Rome during the reigns of Nerva and Trajan.
He possessed a shrewd knowledge of the flow of
fluids, but hardly more than that which any observ-
ing man may pick up by working around a water
works system to-day. In 1628 Castelli published a
small pamphlet on the flow of fluids, followed in
1643 by a pamphlet giving more important dis-
coveries. In 1828 Fourneyron invented the turbine
and from that time to this important discoveries
on the flow of water have been announced at
intervals. The past twenty-five years have seen
the knowledge respecting the flow of water placed
on nearly as satisfactory a basis as a knowledge of
the stresses in structures, although for fifty years
prior enough was known to enable engineers to
carry out great hydraulic works with reasonable
certainty and economy.
Hydraulic engineers were formerly employed
in large numbers on the design and construction
of power plants operated by water wheels. After
the introduction of the steam engine the water
wheel declined in importance and many mills
replaced their hydraulic plant with steam plants.
To-day the hydraulic engineer is again in demand
to design and erect water power installations in
which the wheel picks up the power from falling
water and carries it to huge electric generators,
to be converted into electricity which is easily
transmitted for long distances. The term
28 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
" Hydraulic Engineer" is now borne by three
classes of engineers :
Hydraulic civil engineers are skilled in the sur-
vey, planning, designing and construction of
canals, dams and power houses ; also in the design,
construction and operation of water works for
municipalities, irrigation and drainage projects.
Hydraulic mechanical engineers are skilled in
the design and construction of all kinds of
hydraulic machinery, including hydraulic presses,
water wheels, turbines, etc.
Hydraulic electrical engineers are skilled in the
design, installation and operation of hydro-electric
plants.
The sanitary engineer is an important man
to-day and his value to the community is increas-
ing. He may be employed to design and construct
systems for the sewering of municipalities and the
purification of sewage, and he may be employed to
design and construct water works systems and
plants to purify water. The tendency, however,
is marked to limit the sanitary engineer to the
design and construction of plants to purify sewage
and domestic water supplies.
The municipal engineer is charged with the
planning and construction of water works, sewer-
age systems and street improvements within the
corporate limits of municipalities. For the puri-
fication of sewage or water he calls in the consult-
ing sanitary engineer and for the bringing of the
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 29,
water to the city limits he calls in the hydraulic
civil engineer. If large pumping stations are
required he employs the hydraulic mechanical
engineer. For the ordinary work required in the
average town and city the local municipal engineer
is usually competent, if his training has been broad
and of the approved kind. One defect in many
cities is the employment of imperfectly trained
men of limited experience because they work for
low pay. The position of the average town and
city engineer is not enviable, for his office is the
prey of politics.
On a railway the civil engineer surveys the
routes, makes estimates of cost and constructs the
lines. He designs all buildings and terminal yards
and on many roads designs all the bridges, while
on other roads he merely prepares specifications
for the design of bridges and supervises their
erection. Maintenance-of-way engineers have
charge of the upkeep of the railway, look after
repairs and in general have charge of all renewals
and reconstruction. The engineering department
is almost wholly connected with the surveying and
construction of new lines, the maintenance-of-way
department being separate. Some old railways
have no chief engineer, the maintenance-of-way
department doing all the civil engineering work,
for these roads make no important extensions.
The mechanical engineer on a railway has charge
of the purchase and repair of rolling stock and all
30 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
machinery; and machines required in the repair
of machinery. The mechanical engineer also pre-
pares specifications for such equipment as the rail-
way may have made to order or purchases under
contract.
Bridge engineering is practically a distinct
profession, for many companies are engaged
exclusively in the design and erection of bridges
for railways and highways.
Structural engineering is also a distinct pro-
fession for few important buildings are erected
to-day without steel or reinforced concrete frame-
work and floor systems.
Numbers of men trained as engineers go into
surveying work, but not so many that it is right to
say "A civil engineer is nothing but a surveyor,"
as so many illy-informed or mendacious mechanical
and electrical engineers remark to parents who
make inquiries with reference to selecting careers
for their sons. Some surveyors work for the gov-
ernment and are employed in making accurate
surveys for the purpose of marking national boun-
daries, determining the size and shape of the earth,
topographical surveys as a basis for the develop-
ment of sections of a country, etc. Some engineers
go into private practice and specialize on surveys
for determining land lines, settling property dis-
putes, setting grades for ditches, for drainage or
irrigation, etc. Others work all their lives for
railways and other corporations, running instru-
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 31
ments, making maps and doing work of a similar
nature in the development work upon which all
such corporations are engaged. This latter class
does not receive steady employment, the unfor-
tunate wanderers never knowing how long a job
will last and not receiving very high pay.
The United States Government is doing a great
deal of work in connection with irrigation develop-
ment and within a very few years the drainage ques-
tion has assumed wonderful importance. A num-
ber of young graduates enter government employ
each year in the irrigation and drainage depart-
ments. Numbers of companies are engaged in pri-
vate irrigation and land drainage enterprises, but
the employment is uncertain and the pay poor.
The demand for improved highways has led
to the formation of an important department. The
Bureau of Road Inquiry conducts investigations
and gives free information on the subject, besides,
giving young engineering graduates special train-
ing in highway work, in order to prepare them to
enter the employ of states in which highway
improvement is a live issue. The pay for the rank
and file is low, but state highway commissioners
generally receive high salaries, which means a
mingling of politics and efficiency, generally to the
impairment of the latter.
Members of the Engineer Corps of the United
States Army are educated at West Point, the man
standing at the head of the graduating class being
32 ENGINEEEING AS A VOCATION
sent for a post-graduate course to an advanced
engineering school. Civil engineers in the United
States Navy, in charge of navy yards, etc., are
selected after severe competitive examinations
from graduates of good civil engineering schools.
Naval engineers and naval architects are graduates
of Annapolis who stand at, or near, the head of the
graduating class and are then sent to special
schools for more instruction.
The greatest opportunities for engineering
graduates to-day lie in the field of contracting and
general construction work and the best training for
this employment is to be had in the civil engineer-
ing and mining engineering courses.
The four great divisions of engineering, mili-
tary and naval engineers being ranked merely as
engineers, are:
Civil Engineering,
Mining Engineering,
Mechanical Engineering,
Electrical Engineering.
mm
Each is divided into numerous specialties, but
the young man who takes a specialty in one of
the above branches makes a mistake, unless he is
preparing himself to fit into a certain position
already provided.
Every engineer ends by specializing to a greater
or less extent. This is unavoidable in the conduct
of the work of the world, but the fundamentals are
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 33
the same in all branches and for every specialty in
each branch. For the average graduate several
years must elapse before a permanent line of work
is entered upon. Frequently this is not along the
line of the specialty selected while at school. It is
an axiom with experienced engineers that the
specialty selects the man by a process of chance,
rather than the man the specialty.
^Knowing this it seems the height of absurdity
for schools, as many do, to require a student upon
the completion of his freshman year to make a
selection for the following three years' work from
a bewildering list of specialties, when he has not
really made up his mind as to why he chose the
hard engineering course instead of the easy courses
in which memory, rather than reasoning ability,
enables one to secure high marks and make the
honorary fraternities.
The writer does not decry any desire on the
part of ambitious young men to pursue some
special subject after adequate preparation, pro-
vided this is done in the same way that a man
collects stamps, becomes a high-grade amateur
photographer, or pursues any other hobby. A
specialty, after adequate preparation, selected in
such manner is a splendid thing and if the student
finally makes it pay well he is to be congratulated.
A specialty selected after a supposedly due con-
sideration of the question, " Which specialty do
you think pays best?" is frequently, in fact, gen-
34 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
erally disappointing. Proper consideration must
be paid to other inclinations than the desire to
earn money.
The following clipping from The Chicago
Tribune shows the point of view of practically
all newspaper writers on the subject of the pro-
fession of the engineer. This was taken from a
page containing advertisements of schools, some
technical schools being represented, but, of course,
this fact cannot be supposed to have influenced
the writer of the article clipped :
FUTURE DEMANDS TRAINED ENGINEERS
The field for the labors of the engineer constructive or
electrical are practically unlimited. The student graduating
from the accredited technical school is assured of good posi-
tions months before he graduates. Indeed, it is a true
embarrassment of riches when, as is repeated yearly with the
graduating classes of every technical school, the youthful
engineer has to choose between several enticing and profitable
offers of employment before he has ceased to breathe school-
room air.
Only one among the multiplied advantages of engineering
as a profession compared with the older professions of medi-
cine and the law, is that the young engineer is entirely and
comfortably self-supporting from the beginning earning a
good salary from the start. The technical school trained engi-
neer holds the world in his hand. Employers are waiting for
him. Opportunities for ultimately becoming independent or
his own employer, are legion.
There does exist just the demand mentioned
in the article, but there also exists a demand in
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 35
the business world for stenographers, clerks, book-
keepers, and all classes of employes at entering
pay. When the supply is large many employers
have no hesitancy in dismissing older employes
to make room for the younger men. This active
demand will continue just as long as the supply
is continuous of fresh young men, who work at
low pay "to gain experience," hence the demand
is largely artificial and fostered by the readiness
with which it is supplied. A large employer of
engineering graduates told the writer that 90 per
cent, of his work was of such a nature that it could
be acceptably done by young men, with little or no
experience, provided with a good technical educa-
tion. Consequently he did not pay very high
salaries, wages he termed it, for there was a con-
stant supply of just the sort of men he wanted,
and at the first signs of dissatisfaction with pay
he let men go. This fact is known by many engi-
neers to satisfactorily explain the standing adver-
tisements of large companies for draftsmen and
designers.
The following advertisement was clipped from
another page of The Chicago Tribune:
SITUATION WANTED Massachusetts Institute of
Technology civil engineering graduate, 1911, age
26, having had several years' business experience
as a bookkeeper and timekeeper for a contracting
firm, desires a position where he can make use of
his training and experience; salary no object.
Address N 206, Tribune.
CHAPTEE III
THE EDUCATION OF THE ENGINEER
engineering course comprises:
Bight years grammar school,
Four years high school,
Four, five or six years technical school.
The standard course in technical schools has
been four years in length, but within the past ten
years many American colleges and universities
have established five- and six-year courses. Some
have done this in order to give the students more
purely cultural studies and some have added to
the courses many things that seem to be essential
nowadays to the education of the engineer along
professional lines.
In all colleges and universities offering a
selection of courses for different degrees the engi-
neering courses are avoided by lazy students and
"the engineers" are looked upon as being the
hardest worked students; their courses the most
difficult. If a man cannot undertake such a train-
ing as is above outlined he had better go into a
business where the training is not so severe and
expensive, for an engineering education costs from
two thousand dollars up to any amount the student
,36
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 37
may be able to secure from his parents or
guardians. By giving up the idea of studying
engineering the man not perfectly adapted to the
work will help the profession by enabling thou-
sands of illy-paid, highly educated men to get bet-
ter pay and steadier employment, besides giving
them more zest in the doing of their work.
While the regular method above outlined is the
very best, there exist splendid opportunities for
the men who missed their chance earlier in life.
For such men good courses of instruction are
given by some reputable correspondence schools,
evening classes in the Y. M. C. A., evening classes,
in high-grade technical schools, and in a few pri-
vate schools giving individual instruction. Young
fellows who can afford the time to go to college
and study engineering in the proper manner have
no place in these schools intended solely for men
who missed early chances and now want instruction
in special subjects. The man who works by day
and studies in odd moments cannot possibly cover
properly the broad and comprehensive schedule
of studies provided by specialists in engineering-
teaching for young fellows whose sole object, when
under their instruction, is to prepare for their life
work.
The man studying under the severe handicaps
incident to earning a living is apt to be hyper-
critical and has neither the patience, nor the time,
to take up any study from which he sees no hope
38 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
of immediate financial return. Night schools,
therefore, arrange courses of study to meet the
needs of these strictly utilitarian pupils. The
young man going to a regular resident engineering
school makes a mistake in taking up a specialty.
The man who later in life endeavors to study the
things he feels he sorely needs, is of necessity the
most narrow of specialists. Occasionally men take
up one subject after another in special schools,
gradually getting the equivalent of a fairly com-
plete engineering education. The percentage,
however, is small and the result of the widely
advertised special courses in engineering subjects
has been to crowd the ranks with partly trained
men who keep down pay and lower the dignity of
the calling. It is sometimes a serious question
whether it is wise to give the few who are worthy
a chance, when in the giving of it so many are
injured.
There is a third way by which a man may
obtain a fair engineering education, and that is by
self -tutoring. The self -tutored man is one who
endeavors to educate himself from books, without
the assistance of teachers or correspondence
schools. All honor to the man who succeeds in this
stupendous undertaking which many start upon
and few accomplish. It was the way in which
90 per cent, of the engineers were educated more
than fifty years ago and a large percentage of
engineers now living, who are past middle age,
-ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 39
were self -tutored. That many achieved great suc-
cess was due rather to the fact that the country
needed them and they were instinctive engineers,
than that they were ' ' practically educated. ' ' With
the advent of the well-trained college graduate the
self -tutored men are not so highly thought of as
was once the case. Prior to the civil war there was
considerable activity in railway building, and the
engineering schools of the country were so few that
it was hard to hold the graduates of West Point
and Annapolis in the service of the army and navy,
their education being so good along the lines of
applied science. General McClellan, a graduate
of West Point was chief engineer and manager of
a railway when the war broke out. After the war
ended the whole country, especially the west,
experienced such a boom and there was so much
railway building that the schools were again unable
to supply enough engineers, so boys with the most
elementary training were placed at drafting
boards and bright young fellows were given a few
lessons in handling surveying instruments, the
result being that the country in dull times was
crowded with "engineers," many of whom were
hardly more than automatons, doing all the routine
work connected with railway surveying and build-
ing in a mechanical manner. One panic period
lasting three or four years sufficed to enable the
engineering schools, enormously increased in num-
bers from the half dozen existing in the late 60 's,
40 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
to catch up and more than supply the legitimate
existing demand, a condition of affairs that still
exists.
Much of the work done in engineering offices is
of a nature which does not demand the full train-
ing required by an engineer. Much of this work
is drafting of a kind that merely requires a fair
knowledge of standard methods of construction
and the man who has worked around an office long
enough "to soak it in," manages to eke out a fair
living and is employed pretty constantly at pay
which is about that of an average clerk. There
are others who do nothing but make tracings, and
obviously they do not require any more education
than is given in grammar schools. Their pay is not
high. Others are employed as blue printers, filing
clerks, statisticians, timekeepers, rodmen, chain-
men, etc. Nearly all enter upon the work with
the idea of "learning it practically," the result
being an imitation of the old-time British engi-
neer, a technically trained mechanic. It is only
an imitation, for in the case of the British boy
a high premium was paid for the privilege of get-
ting him into an office and some pains were taken
to see that he managed to get the rudiments of an
engineering education for the credit of the office,
if for no other reason. The present-day boys and
young men in American offices are not taken in as
pupils. They are employed to do certain definite
work that calls for no particular education and is
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 41
never more highly paid than is the work of a com-
mon laborer, frequently not so highly paid as the
work of a union laborer.
It is this class of assistants that supports the
correspondence schools, the evening classes, the
private " practical" schools. A pitifully small
number do amount to something after a while and
from the very nature of engineering work a large
percentage of engineers to the end of time will be
men who have not received an education in resident
technical schools. Some men prove by statistics
based on records of men applying for membership
in the national engineering societies, that very few
men engaged in engineering work to-day are self-
tutored. Their deductions are false, for, in the
first place, the successful self -tutored men have
to be urged to apply for membership in such
societies, having a feeling that a prejudice exists
against engineers who are non-graduates. In the
second place a man has only to canvass the offices
of engineers and make inquiries to discover that
a large percentage of the engineers and their
assistants to be found to-day are non-graduates.
Many are high school graduates and many have
had only one or two years in resident schools,
while a great many have simply grown up in the
business, starting in as office boys. The writer
made a canvass of one hundred engineering offices
and sixty architects' offices and the drafting offices
42 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
of forty manufacturing establishments to deter-
mine these facts. The percentages were as follows :
Graduates. Non-graduates.
% %
Engineers' offices 80 20
Architects' offices 22 78
Manufacturing plants 18 82
In engineers' offices the permanent positions
are few and when an engineer has to increase his
force he must have men already trained. This
accounts for the high percentage of graduates in
the offices of engineers in private practice. With
architects the conditions of employment for drafts-
men are better than with engineers in private
practice. In manufacturing establishments there
are many permanent positions for low-grade drafts-
men. If this canvass had been made in the works
and offices of the great electrical companies the
percentages would probably have been ninety-five
graduates to five non-graduates, but conditions of
pay not improved. In manufacturing lines much
of the work has been standardized and the drafting
consists in tracing and making slight alterations
in existing drawings to adapt them to other uses.
There is very little high-class designing, empirical
methods developed by many years of practice in a
particular specialty being used. In electricity
there is greater need of well-trained men than in
mechanical work, for electrical practice has not
vet been fully standardized.
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 43
The majority of men, however, who are trying
to secure an engineering education by night study
will never succeed, for their trouble is tempera-
mental. They went into practical work instead of
going to a technical school, because they imagined
four years was too long a time to spend in study
and thought there was some royal road to learn-
ing. Some, in fact many, believed there was no
necessity for all the studies the technical student
must take. The desire to begin earning money led
them to neglect the preliminary school training.
Later in life they take up night study, but the
impatient spirit still stirs within them and pre-
vents rapid or great progress. Such men are gen-
erally pretentious to a degree and are a positive
detriment to the profession.
A man succeeds in the present day because of one
or all of three things, as compared with his com-
petitors. They are :
Superior intelligence,
Greater energy,
Superior preparation.
The superior intelligence must be proven and
it takes many years generally for a young chap to
prove he has ordinary intelligence. The possession
of greater energy must be proven and this takes
years of hustle in competition with seasoned
veterans in the battle for existence. Adequate
preparation along lines which a century of experi-
44 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
ence in training engineers has shown to be good, is
the finest backing that intelligence and energy can
have. It is a mistake to permit a young fellow to
go into a profession like engineering without the
best technical training it is possible to secure.
Sometimes the man who has a good training can
make a small amount of energy and a mediocre
brain carry him through life splendidly.
What sort of an education does an engineer
require ?
In the first place he should be an excellent
draftsman. Drafting is a universal language by
means of which the designer conveys instructions
to the workman. The graduate is employed for
the first few years after graduation in minor posi-
tions in which drafting is his principal occupation.
If he is not a good draftsman he seldom has an
opportunity to get a foothold in his chosen work.
The engineer is lost without a sound knowledge
of mathematics. The amount used in routine work
is not great and there is a class of "rule of thumb"
and "pocket-book" engineers, which decries the
great stress laid upon a sound knowledge of mathe-
matics by the men who head the engineering
schools. It is a puzzling thing that the actual
amount of mathematics required in daily work is
so small, yet the men who have received the broad-
est training in mathematics are the most reliable,
and, in late life, are the most successful engineers.
The first few years out of school are spent in
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 45
detail work and it is the young fellow, generally,
who is intrusted with most of the research work
requiring a knowledge of mathematics; work of
a nature to seriously tax the patience of an older
man. With the passing of years the work of the
engineer becomes more executive and his knowl-
edge of mathematics less sure. The fact that few
eminent engineers can pass a satisfactory examina-
tion in elementary mathematics and would flunk
badly in the higher branches is no argument
against the value of a thorough training in mathe-
matics. It may be that the reason the men achieve
marked success who acquire an understanding
knowledge of mathematics is that they are
instinctive engineers and so took the mathematical
instruction intelligently as a necessary part of the
preparation for their life work.
Mathematics enable a man to investigate
scientifically many things which might otherwise
wait years for experimental proof. The rapid
growth in the use of reinforced concrete as a
structural material is an evidence of this. The
invention of reinforced concrete was not due
to an engineer. A gardener used wire netting-
embedded in concrete in the construction of some
large jars and an engineer saw the possibilities in
such material. He possessed a sound knowledge of
mathematics and mechanics and developed some
theoretical formulas to explain the action of the
internal stresses and to arrive at the correct
46 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
amount of steel required to reinforce concrete.
Other engineers and mathematicians also worked
at the problem and a number of hypotheses were
worked out, differing slightly in detail, but prac-
tically all giving nearly like results. In Europe
the material Had a wider use than in the United
States, which is naturally a backward country
in taking up new ideas, and in which besides,
certain patents gave a monopoly to a few con-
cerns. When the patents expired the material
came into common use and so many uneducated
and half -educated men went into the business with
empirical and rule of thumb methods of design
that many accidents happened. A number of
experiments were made from which simple for-
mulas were derived, and it was discovered that
the formulas and methods of the mathematicians of
Europe were to all intents and purposes safe and
their reasoning in the main correct. The presence
of thousands of half-educated, self-styled engi-
neers in this country was responsible for many
disasters, the public having great confidence in
the " practical" man and being fearful of the
"theoretical" man. The writer has observed this
strange sentiment for many years and has dis-
covered that to be a practical man it is merely
necessary for a man to style himself "practical"
and rail at men who have spent good money to
acquire an education. The public makes no inves-
tigation into the qualifications of the self-styled
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
"practical" man, taking his word that he is prac-
tical and that the trained man is a fool, and
" theoretical." Because the word theoretical is
used in an awesome manner it is thought to mean
something dreadful. Barnum once made a state-
ment that the people like to be humbugged.
Theory is a plain statement of a law that has
been proven. Hypothesis is an idea advanced as
a theory. The man who takes a thorough engineer-
ing course studies the theories underlying his work
and thereby obtains a practical understanding of
it. In engineering schools a large part of the
instruction consists in a study of the work done
by engineers and contractors in many parts of the
world and during all the centuries. When a young
fellow who has conscientiously pursued his engi-
neering studies graduates, it does not take him long
to acquire a first-hand practical knowledge of his
work and to this he adds a knowledge of what
other men have done. It is plain to see, therefore,
that the theoretically trained man is the practical
man.
The man who has no school training in the
underlying theory of his work and merely learns
by seeing, without doing much, if any, reading, or
without doing any reading under proper guidance,
has only his own experience to guide him. He is
practical to the extent that he has " picked up
knowledge" by doing. Not being a student he
knows little of what other men have done, except
48 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
men situated like himself whom he occasionally
meets. Sometimes an idea strikes him and he pro-
duces an hypothesis, dignifies it by the term of
" theory" and starts on a wild goose chase, fre-
quently finding men of means to advance money to
push his wild ideas. The man who follows true
theory is the practical man, for he follows what
others before him proved to be true. The man
who works by hypothesis will distort facts to
attempt to prove himself right and is really the
theoretical man in the sense that the average
individual understands the meaning of theory. The
" theoretical" man is not the educated man and
the " practical" man is not the uneducated man.
Anything which will enable a man to think
soundly and act with intelligence has a place in the
curriculum of an engineering school. Mathematics
is, therefore, entitled to first place when it is
taught as a tool and not as an end.
In school a grade of 70 will carry a boy through
and 90 gives him extremely creditable standing. In
business a grade of 100, or perfect, is necessary to
hold a position. Intelligence, plus a grade of 100,
is absolutely necessary for advancement. The well-
known " Gentleman's grade of C," of the old-time
classical course is an inferior grade in the engi-
neering course. A careful study of the biographies
of successful engineers, appearing frequently in
technical papers, will show that a surprisingly
large number won prizes and had excellent stand-
r
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 49
ing in many, if not all, of their studies while in
school. Their careful, conscientious work at school
enabled them to secure satisfactory positions upon
graduation. When men were laid off in dull sea-
sons these well-trained workers were retained.^
They were not all " greasy grinds," in spite of their~7
high standing, for many won enviable records on
the athletic field. The engineering student must
not forget that his training is for service and if
he does not acquire industrious habits in school
he will hardly change in character and acquire
them later in life. The standards of schools exist-
ure must not be permitted to
dominate the schools intended for utilitarian
training.
Many young chaps fail in offices not only be-
cause they are poor draftsmen, but because their
training in mechanics has not been thorough. The
training in mathematics is for the purpose of
enabling mechanics to be properly studied and the
two are essential. A common complaint against
engineering graduates is that they are often able
to chase "the elusive x through the mazes of a
cubic equation" and yet cannot perform an ordi-
nary problem in arithmetic. The time in school
has been spent on the study of principles and laws
with insufficient time for an application of the
principles. The writer does not wonder at this
very much, however, as he is well acquainted with
a number of instructors in mathematics. Their
50 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
interest does not lie in teaching, but in the study
of this, their favorite science. Each student is
put through a course of instruction without any
idea on the part of the instructor that he is to
regard it as a tool, but merely because it is a part
of the prescribed course of instruction. There are
a few professors and instructors who rail bitterly
at life because they must teach to earn a living.
They think college is a fine place were it not for
the students and their idea of happiness is to sit
and study all day and night. The head of the insti-
tution may require certain text books to be used,
but an examination of the books will reveal the
word "omit" written on every page where prac-
tical examples are given, and at the beginning of
every chapter filled with applications of the theory
taught. It is not an uncommon thing to find a 300-
page text book used and only a part of it given to
the students when there are plenty of abridged
works on the market which the teacher could use,
supplementing the book with personal instruction
were he not too lazy. Instead of using large books
and giving a "skim" course, it would be better to
give a short course from a small book and give it
thoroughly. The writer believes that tutorial
methods should be used to some extent in engineer-
ing schools, so that the instructors in mathematics,
graphics and mechanics could be changed every
semester and thus the teachers of mathematics
would learn to know what their students require.
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 51
If an instructor in mathematics were required to
teach his poorly instructed class the following
semester in mechanics he would improve as a
teacher of mathematics. This lack of coordination
is marked in small colleges where there is an engi-
neering course newly established and the professor
of engineering must rely upon the other older
established departments to train his students in
the fundamentals. It is also a fault in some large
schools.
Physics, of which mechanics is a branch, is a
most important subject and chemistry is becoming
daily of more importance as a part of the knowl-
edge an engineer must possess. The engineer deals
with materials and a proper study cannot be made
of materials without thorough grounding in
physics and chemistry.
Every engineer must know how to lay out work
and make surveys through strange countries. This
requires a knowledge of surveying and exploratory
surveying presupposes a knowledge of astronomy,
which is, therefore, a part of the curriculum of all
engineering schools. Sometimes it is taught as
astronomy and sometimes it is a part of the course
in surveying, enough of astronomy being given to
determine latitude, longitude and time.
A knowledge of geology is necessary to enable
the engineer to extract metals and ores from the
earth, form his excavations and embankments
52 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
properly, construct dams and reservoirs and put in
stable foundations.
All engineering studies such as the design of
structures, the flow of water, sanitation, etc., are
based upon mathematics, physics and chemistry,
and the mathematical, physical and chemical
sciences. Thoroughly grounded in these the student
can study by himself, if need be, the higher sub-
jects comprised in practical work.
The men who have the most to do with the
framing of courses of study for engineering schools
are safe guides for the young men who seek infor-
mation as to electives. The individual professors
are wretched advisers, for each professor is a
slave to his own course and magnifies its impor-
tance. For instance, nothing more useless to an
intending engineer can be imagined as an elective
than the offered graduate courses in higher mathe-
matics ; the prescribed courses are amply sufficient.
If the head of the mathematical department, how-
ever, is consulted he will generally advise mathe-
matics. The professor of chemistry will sing the
praises of advanced chemistry when the principal
reason for the study of chemistry by an engineer
is the acquisition of information. The professor
of mechanics will advise technical mechanics and
then more technical mechanics. These men all
mean well, but they have deliberately chosen to
withdraw themselves from the outside world and
immure themselves in walls to deal forever with
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 53
immature minds and teach narrow special subjects.
They are not qualified to advise the young man
who is going out into the world to guard a home
against the attack of the wolf. Neither can the
professor of bridge design, of structural design,
of sanitary engineering, of hydraulic engineering
be counted a safe adviser, for each will unduly
magnify his specialty. The entire course is
arranged to give each of the subjects a proper
representation and if there is any time left for
electives the young man should take them in
the humanities, literature, political economy,
sociology, etc.
The engineer changes the very face of nature.
He makes millions of blades of grass grow where
none grew before. He builds railroads which peo-
ple the deserts. He erects factories and equips
them. Thousands of people are employed through
him and his employment. History, sociology,
economics and philanthropy are studies with which
he should be familiar. He deals with materials
and for four years his studies are arranged to give
him a proper knowledge of materials. His largest
dealings are with men and until a very late period
nothing was taught him about mankind.
The study of English is most important. Engi-
neers must make reports on the feasibility of pro-
jects involving the expenditure of vast sums. The
men who have the money to invest are usually of
a class that cannot tolerate poor English and who
54 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
also like to have men in their employ who can act,
speak and write like gentlemen. The ability to
write a readable report is a valuable asset. It is
becoming necessary nowadays for engineers to
study the laws of business and the law of contract
so that litigation may be avoided. The average
lawyer is sadly lacking in the ability to write
intelligible English and in earlier days when every
engineer assumed it to be part of the work of a
lawyer to prepare all legal papers, there was much
litigation over contracts. To-day few contracts
and specifications are seen by lawyers and the
ability to properly express his meaning, together
with the marked lessening of litigation over con-
struction work, has strengthened the engineer with
his employers. The work of the engineer often
takes him to foreign lands. There are also numer-
ous international conventions. In every country
there are many technical societies holding frequent
meetings to describe and discuss work in progress
and publishing bulletins containing reports of
these meetings and discussions. Science has no
national boundaries and all men of science, pure
and applied, are brothers. The modern engineer,
therefore, should possess a reading knowledge, at
least, of French and German, while a knowledge
of Italian and Spanish will wonderfully increase
his power for research.
The training of engineers is so broad at the best
schools and the overlapping of the various
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 55
branches is so marked, that it is not uncommon to
see graduated civil engineers employed on work
considered the proper employment for mechanical
or electrical engineers, while the latter are often
put on work of a strictly civil engineering char-
acter. The mining engineer receives such a diver-
sified training that he is to be found everywhere
doing all kinds of work.
In every school where various branches of engi-
neering are taught it is usual to have the courses
identical for the freshman and the first half of the
sophomore year. In the second half of the sopho-
more year there is a slight difference and a final
separation in the junior year. However, a num-
ber of studies are the same even in the third and
fourth years, but the hours are different, some
branches taking a three-hour course while others
take only one or two hours.
Each school varies the standard curriculum
slightly according to local influences. The majority
of graduates find employment near the school and
the curriculum naturally reflects to some extent the
industry of most importance in that section of the
country. Some of the older schools have a large
number of the alumnae employed in a certain line
of work, and as the alumnae are always loyal to
their alma mater and give her graduates the pref-
erence when assistants are required, it is natural
that the school will lay stress on the line of work in
which the greatest number of graduates find
56 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
employment. Here is a slight hint as to the
selection of a school. A very old school with an
honorable name is a splendid place-finder for grad-
uates likely to do it credit. The newer schools find
it somewhat more difficult to place graduates. A
disadvantage often found in old schools is intense
conservatism and an overabundant supply of
" inbred" instructors. Frequently a new school is
good because all the teaching staff has been selected
for proved ability and a desire to start a new
school thoroughly abreast of the times,
unhampered by traditions. This is excellent if the
departments of mathematics, physics and chem-
istry in the older part of the institution will
arrange courses of value to engineers and not con-
sider the " culture" requirements of budding
theologues, lawyers and physicians as sufficient for
technical men.
The man who tries to start a school to satisfy
critics in the ranks of practical engineers is fore-
doomed to failure. The wisest men recognize that
no school can turn out engineers, but that all
schools should turn out young fellows trained to
be good engineering assistants and having enough
education to be ready for advancement when it
comes. The chief criticism against the schools is
that the boys are not well enough drilled in prac-
tice, lack of time preventing more than the instill-
ing of principles. It is a serious criticism, but
unjust, for all men are not endowed with the brains
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 57
to be good engineers. All the young chaps who
study engineering are not entitled to be termed
"ingenious," for many are one degree removed
from extreme simplicity. Because of the very
large number of engineering school graduates
there is quite a respectable sprinkling of those who
lack ordinary intelligence in practical affairs;
enough of them to bring undeserved reproach upon
the schools.
The best reply possible to some severe critics
is to remind them that they are themselves grad-
uates of the schools they criticise. Many of them
who met with trials after graduation may have
been mistaken in taking up engineering and stuck
to the work simply because they did not like to feel
their time had been wasted, and, as the years rolled
by, they gradually developed into engineers. The
training, after all, was their salvation. This, of
course, is merely a personal opinion formed after
studying some men who would like to try their hands
at revising engineering curricula. They are the sort
of men who come always unprepared to class and
want the notes of the lesson in advance to study
instead of the longer text. Men who only learn to
study after many bitter experiences, their early
experiences having led them to rely always upon
a teacher. Faults in schools do exist and the
writer will touch upon a few on other pages,
but these faults are being remedied each year
as teachers come together and as more of the
58 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
high-class professors combine teaching and the
practice of engineering. The courses of study have
been so well tried out in the years gone by, and the
number of men successfully educated at the schools
is such a large per cent, of the whole that inferior
instructors and assistant professors cannot do
much harm when there is a real man at the head of
the department. It is only when the head of the
department is weak that the school suffers this
being true of any business.
Typical courses of engineering may be repre-
sented by the following, taken from the annual
catalogue of the University of Illinois, Urbana, 111.
The figures following the subject indicate the num-
ber of recitation hours per week, each hour of
recitation being assumed to require two hours of
preparation. The university receives aid from the
United States Government so a certain amount of
military instruction is given. All engineering
schools do not have military instruction.
FRESHMAN YEAR
Common to all courses.
First Semester
General Engineering Drawing 4
Trigonometry 2
Advanced Algebra 3
French, German, Spanish or English 4
Shop Practice 3
Military Drill 1
Gymnasium 1
Total semester hours. . . 18
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 59
Second Semester
Descriptive Geometry 4
Analytical Geometry 5
French, German, English, Rhetoric or Spanish . . 4
Shop Practice 3
Military Drill 1
Military Regulations 1
Gymnasium 1
Total semester hours 19
SOPHOMORE CIVIL ENGINEERING
First Semester
Differential Calculus 5
Physics, Lectures 3
Physics, Laboratory 2
Rhetoric 3
Surveying 5
Military Drill 1
t Total semester hours 19
Second Semester
Integral Calculus 3
Physics, Lectures 2
Physics, Laboratory 2
Rhetoric 3
Analytical Mechanics 3
Topographical Surveying 4
Railroad Curves 1
Military Drill 1
Total semester hours. . , 19
60 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
JUNIOR CIVIL ENGINEERING
First Semester
Engineering Materials 1
Analytical Mechanics 2.5
Eesistance of Materials 3.5
Railroad Surveying 5
Chemistry 4
Total semester hours 16
Second Semester
Hydraulics 3
Eoad Engineering 2
Graphic Statics 2
Astronomy or Geology 5
Steam Engines and Boilers 3
Principles of Economics 2
Total semester hours 17
SENIOR CIVIL ENGINEERING
First Semester
Masonry Construction 5
Bridge Analysis 2
Bridge Details 3
Tunnelling 1
Metal Structures 1
Water Supply Engineering 4
Thesis 1
Total semester hours. . . 17
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 61
Second Semester
Masonry and Reinforced Concrete Design 2
Bridge Design 5
Advanced Bridge Analysis 2
Engineering Contracts and Specifications 2
Seminary 1
Sewerage 3
Thesis 2
Total semester hours 17
Every senior student must prepare a thesis to
defend Ms right to receive a degree in engineering.
Modern thesis work generally is of a research
nature. The time given above to thesis work rep-
resents the time given by the instructional staff in
assisting the students in this work. The seminary
item refers to the time devoted by the dean of the
school in leading topical discussions on articles
appearing in technical papers, thus making the
boys ready against the time when they will leave
school and must thereafter depend upon them-
selves in hunting up authorities, etc. If a tech-
nical school does nothing more than guide a
student in the selection of and inspire a dis-
criminating taste for good technical literature it
accomplishes much, as was recently said by the
editor of Engineering News.
62 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
SOPHOMORE MECHANICAL ENGINEERING
First Semester
Similar to Civil Engineering, with the omission of sur-
veying, substituting :
Machine Shop 3 hours
Machine Design 2 hours
Second Semester
Similar to Civil Engineering, with the omission of
topographical surveying and railroad curves, substituting :
Machine Shop 2 hours
Steam Engineering 3 hours
JUNIOR MECHANICAL ENGINEERING.
First Semester
Engineering Materials 1
Analytical Mechanics 2.5
Eesistance of Materials 3.5
Power Measurements 2
Mechanism 3
Integral Calculus 2
Chemistry 4
Total semester hours. . , 18
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
Second Semester
Thermodynamics 3
Machine Design 3
Seminary 1
Analytical Mechanics 3
Dynamo Machinery 4
Engineering Chemistry 3
Total semester hours 17
SENIOR MECHANICAL ENGINEERING
First Semester
Heat Engines 2
Mechanics of Machinery 3
Machine Design 3
Mechanical Laboratory 3
Seminary 1
Alternating Currents 2
Principles of Economics 2
Total semester hours 16
Second Semester
Design of Power Plants 3
Seminary 1
Thesis 3
Kailway Engineering or Surveying 2
Economic Problems 2
Elective 2
Total semester hours 16
SOPHOMORE ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING
Same as Mechanical Engineering.
64 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
JUNIOR ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING.
First Semester
j
Engineering Materials 1
Analytical Mechanics 2.5
Eesistance of Materials 3.5
Dynamo-electric Machinery 3
Electrical Engineering Laboratory 2
Electrical and Magnetic Measurements 2
Chemistry 4
Total semester hours 18
Second Semester
Hydraulics 3
Alternating Currents 4
Electrical Engineering Laboratory 2
Electrical and Magnetic Measurements 2
Steam Engineering 3
Total semester hours 16
SENIOR ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING
First Semester
Seminary 1
Advanced Alternating Currents 3
Electrical Distribution 3
Electrical Engineering Laboratory 2
Electrical Design 2
Thermodynamics 3
Principles of Economics 2
Total semester hours 16
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 65
Second Semester
Power Plants 3
Seminary 1
Electrical Engineering Laboratory 2
Power Plant Design 1
Thesis 3
Mechanical Engineering Laboratory 3
Economic Problems 2
Electives 2
Total semester hours 17
A course in mining engineering has been
established at the University of Illinois within
the past two years and reflects the principal mining
industry, coal, of the state. The following fairly
typical mining course is that of the Montana State
School of Mines, Butte, Mont. :
FRESHMAN YEAR
First Semester
First Term Second Term
Hours per week Hours per week
Higher Algebra 3 3
Trigonometry 5 5
Chemistry, Lectures 3 3
Chemistry, Laboratory 9 9
English 2 2
Descriptive Geometry 2 2
Mechanical Drawing 6 6
Total . . 30 30
66 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
Second Semester
First Term Second Term
Hours per week Hours per week
Analytical Geometry 5 5
Plane Surveying, Theory 3 3
Descriptive Geometry 2 2
Chemistry, Lectures 3 3
English 2 2
Chemistry, Laboratory .6 6
Mechanical Drawing 9 9
Total 30 30
SOPHOMORE YEAR
First Semester
Calculus 5 5
Physics 6 6
Chemistry, Lectures 2 2
Mineralogy, Lectures 2 2
Mineralogy, Laboratory 6
Surveying, Field Work 15
Topographical Drawing 9
Total 30 30
Second Semester
Calculus, Analytical Mechanics ... 5 5
Physics 4 4
Chemistry, Lectures 1 1
Chemistry, Laboratory 9 9
Mine Surveying, Theory 2 2
Mineralogy, Lectures 3
Geology, Lectures 3
Mineralogy, Laboratory 6 16
Total . . 30 40
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 67
JUNIOR YEAR
First Semester
First Term Second Term
Hours per week Hours per week
Mechanics 5 5
Mining 2 2
Geology 5 5
Metallurgy, Lectures 3 3
Mine Surveying, Practice 15
Chemistry 6
Graphics 9
Total 30 30
Second Semester
Mechanics and Hydraulics 5 5
Mining 2 2
Geology, Lectures 5 5
Metallurgy, Lectures 3 3
Engineering Design 6 6
Geology, Field Work 3 3
Metallurgy, Laboratory 3 3
Chemistry, Laboratory 3 3
Total 30 30
SENIOR YEAR
First Semester
Geology 5 5
Mining 2 2
Ore Dressing, Lectures 3
Metallurgy 3 2
Power Transmission 3 3
Assaying 15
Geology, Field Work 3
Ore Dressing, Laboratory 3
Engineering Design 6
Total . . 28 27
68 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
Second Semester
f First Term Second Term
Hours per week Hours per week
Mining 3 3
Ore Dressing, Lectures 2 2
Ore Dressing, Laboratory 3 3
Metallurgy, Lectures 3 3
Metallurgy, Laboratory 3 3
Mechanical Engineering 5 5
Engineering Design 6 6
Petrography 5 5
Total 30 30
The attention of the reader is directed to the
number of hours per week at the school of mining
engineering as compared with the hours per week
at the University of Illinois. Thirty hours is a
pretty heavy course to carry, yet it is done in
many schools and the students seem to be none the
worse for it. Their work is no more arduous than
that of youths of the same age employed in offices
and shops and around mines. Assuming seventeen
hours per week, each hour supposed to involve
two hours of preparation and we have a total of
fifty-one hours per week spent on studies.
Assuming that four of the seventeen hours were
laboratory work, which counts one-half, the stu-
dent has then actually put in about fifty-nine hours
per week on his work. This is an average of prac-
tically ten hours per day for six days. In the
mining course above described the laboratory;
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 69
periods may be deducted, that is, only the time
placed in the schedule may be counted. It will be
seen then that there is not a great difference.
The work, however, at all mining schools is much
heavier than the work at other schools. There is
one item, however, to be fully considered in all
statements regarding work at all colleges and
universities. Very few students actually spend
two hours in preparation for one hour of lecture
or recitation. The children in the grammar
schools put in five hours per day for five days and
many of them spend two hours per day in home
work, thus getting in thirty-five hours per week.
Very few men who have gone through the average
schools have considered themselves hard worked,
except while in school, saying in later years that
they could easily have carried more work if com-
pelled to do so. Eighteen hours class and six hours
laboratory, a total of twenty-one catalogue hours,
is not too much to ask of engineering students, and
if this were done and a longer course given, a more
general education would make them better men
and increase their opportunity to earn a living
after leaving school.
The fact that students are required at many
institutions to select a specialty at the end of their
Freshman year, before they have a realizing sense
of what the profession is, has been referred to.
This happens for several reasons. In the first
place there is a certain amount of advertising done
70 ENGINEEKING AS A .VOCATION,
by all schools to attract students and when one
school advertises a certain special course all the
other schools near by feel compelled to follow suit
or fall in the estimation of the public.
The newspapers are greatly to blame for get-
ting parents of growing boys excited. A large
city constructs a vast water works system and the
project attracts the attention of special newspaper
and magazine writers who play the thing for all it
is worth. Little wonder when some of these men
receive $50 per page. In the descriptions a great
deal of attention is paid to the picturesque side
of the engineer's work and the few engineers who
receive large salaries are paraded before the pub-
lic until the fathers and mothers begin to believe
that their sons must study hydraulic engineering.
The schools hunting for students scent the popular
demand and immediately thereafter it is
announced that courses in the highly paid specialty
of hydraulic engineering are to be started. The
work of the United States Bureau of Eoad Inquiry
compelled the starting of many special courses in
highway engineering. A great piece of sanitary
work like the Chicago drainage canal or the Wash-
ington filtration plant calls for special courses in
sanitary engineering. The wonderful interest in
concrete work during the past ten years, due to the
advertising of the cement manufacturers, has
stimulated interest in concrete engineering and
thousands of boys are specializing in reinforced
ENGINEERING AS A .VOCATION 71
concrete design. Always the same idea to get into
line on some kind of work that is exciting public
interest with the idea that bigger pay may be had.
Few of the young fellows who take up a specialty
are really imbued with a love for engineering work,
but are going into it with the mistaken idea that
it pays well, provided a fellow can select the most
popular line.
In the larger schools, owing to the sizes of the
classes it is impossible for any teacher to teach
more than one subject, so the schools are full of
specialists, each clamoring to be the head of a
department and this, added to the will-o'-the-wisp
search of parents for remunerative vocations for
their offspring hurts the profession. The writer,
in common with the majority of engineers who have
had a fairly broad experience, believes the desig-
nations of Civil, Mechanical, Electrical and Min-
ing Engineer should disappear in the curriculum
of the schools and there should be given one gen-
eral engineering course, with special courses which
the graduates may take later. This general course
could be so arranged as to afford considerable
choice of subjects in the last year, thus enabling
a student to specialize along certain lines only
after he has completed the fundamentals of all
engineering work, and has had sufficient vacation
experience to enable him to choose intelligently
among a lot of offered courses those which he feels
sure will be of the greatest value to him immedi-
72 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
ately upon graduation. The schools might also
drop the three months' vacation and adopt the plan
of the Michigan College of Mines, Houghton,
Mich., and the University of Chicago, in which
the year is divided into four twelve-week terms.
The student may take three terms each year and
complete the course in four years, or, by taking
four terms each year complete the course in three
calendar years. A proper engineering course,
however, cannot be completed in four school years,
or three calendar years if the greatest good is to
result to the student.
As will be referred to further on the managers
of large corporations and special interests are also
largely responsible for the numerous specialties in
engineering schools. The profession is now so well
stocked with embryo engineers that the schools
can well afford to cease adopting methods for
attracting students and devote more time to turn-
ing out the very best possible product. The slogan
of the advanced woman is "Not more children, but
better children," and the schools having more than
caught up with the legitimate demand for engi-
neers can afford to say "Not more engineering
graduates, but the best possible quality of grad-
uates." How the state universities will be able to
do this the writer will not attempt to answer, but
the privately endowed institutions can well afford
to do it. By a reduction in the size of the classes
they will require smaller quarters and less equip-
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 73
ment and can afford to employ a smaller number of
instructors, who should receive larger pay. Owing
to the very large number of students and the result-
ing large number of underpaid instructors the
best trained engineers are not always to be found
among the graduates of the larger institutions with
their well-equipped laboratories and shops. Many
kings among engineers have been turned out of
schools not sufficiently equipped according to
modern standards, but with the log on which Mark
Hopkins sat and the faithful old teacher whose
heart is in his work sitting at one end, ready to
prove that after all a sound training in the funda-
mentals of engineering science goes a long way
when the material to work upon is of proper cali-
ber. A good workman can do fine work with a
very lean equipment of tools when his material is
good. The best workman with the finest tools,
however, does only a botch job with poor material.
More care should be exercised in the admission of
students and the publicity managers should be
cautioned to be careful in advertising the engi-
neering courses.
In European schools there seems to be no rule
about the granting of degrees. The custom seems
to be to give a diploma to a graduate, who then
styles himself "Dipl. Eng.," and after he has
acquired some standing and presents a thesis to
show he possesses capacity to do original work, he
is granted the degree of Doctor of Engineering,
74 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
the word " Doctor" signifying "A person of great
learning; a superior teacher."
In America the degree awarded depends to
some extent, in fact, largely, upon the attitude of
the advertising department of the school. A false
estimate is placed upon the salary attracting value
of a degree by the boys who attend engineer-
ing schools and by their parents. Students are
attracted to a school by the advertisement that
upon graduation they will receive the degree of
C.E. (Civil Engineer) ; M.E. (Mechanical Engi-
neer) ; E.E. (Electrical Engineer), or E.M. (Engi-
neer of Mines). The school, therefore, that is
anxious to attract students is apt to give the pro-
fessional degree upon graduation. The absurdity
of this, however, is gradually filtering into the
heads of the advertising managers of the best
schools and the professional degree is being shelved
by some and has been abandoned by others.
No school can graduate an engineer. The engi-
neer must have experience added to the school
training. The school can only give an education
in the fundamentals of engineering science. Engi-
neering is not wholly an exact science, but is mainly
an art depending upon scientific methods for its
existence and growth. The school gives only the
scientific groundwork and hence should confer
degrees only in science. The engineer supplements
this scientific training with practical experience so
that, by and by, the scientist sent out by the school
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 75
becomes a man who practises an art in a scientific
way.
A few good schools still give the professional
degree instead of a bachelor degree upon com-
pletion of the four-year course. The majority,
however, of the better schools now grant the degree
of Bachelor of Science. A student taking one or
two years additional work in residence receives
upon completion of this work the professional
degree, but few except those who intend to become
teachers take any graduate work. An attempt was
made a year or two ago to have the schools abandon
the professional degree altogether, for the letters
C.E., M.B., etc., are merely abbreviations of the
words Civil Engineer, Mechanical Engineer, etc.,
and, as such, are assumed by a great many men
without college training, who are practising engi-
neering. There are no laws to prevent them from
doing so if they wish, so the professional degree is
now not only an absurdity, but it is also meaning-
less. The men who have received it by doing extra
work prize it, but wish there was some protection
afforded the rightful owners.
Instead of the professional degree it is pro-
posed to substitute the degree of Master of Science
as a second degree, for graduate work. For a third
degree the degree of Doctor of Science in Engi-
neering is proposed for additional work of a
research nature to engineering teachers and the
degree of Doctor of Engineering for research work
76 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
for men who are practising engineering and have
taken this additional work in residence. This
degree of Doctor of Engineering to be also an
honorary degree to be conferred on engineers
eminent in their profession who have been in
active practice not less than twenty-five years.
Degrees are academic affairs and the younger
engineers are just as well off with a diploma or
almost any kind of a certificate setting forth the
extent of the engineering education received.
Older men prize degrees as an attest of standing.
With teachers the degree is purely a matter of
business and engineering should have degrees like
any other university subject.
A great many men seek degrees and prize them
so the way the matter often works out was called
to the attention of the writer some time ago. A
young chap who was a " shark" at mathematics
and all the purely theoretical subjects and purely
scientific subjects in his course, graduated from
a high-class engineering school and tried to work
as an engineer. To explain things that happened it
is well to say that among many of his classmates he
was known as " Kitty," the name being intended to
designate something real nice and dainty. He was
a positive failure as a practising engineer. He
lacked tact. He lacked real horse-sense. He made
people feel as if he might be soiled if touched or
might cry if spoken to rudely. He lacked accuracy
in most of the common-place work he was given
ENGINEEKING AS A VOCATION" 77
and was a hair splitter of the most exasperating
kind. He was also greatly given to argument and
had a poor sense of proportion, as applied to com-
parisons of school-bred and practically trained
men. As an instance of how abjectly he failed to
satisfy his employers he worked in five offices in
a period of seven months in a busy year when men
were in demand. He got a job finally as time-
keeper on a construction job and held it one week
after making a number of mistakes and showing
plainly that he did not fit in with the rough work.
The rush and hurry bothered him also, for he was,
by nature and cultivation, made for the schoolroom
and the library. In fact, he should really have
studied for the ministry. He was a good-looking
chap and had a kind heart, so that the men imposed
on him with hard-luck stories everywhere he
worked. Finally he landed a job as a tracer and
general helper in a railway office, which job he held
until the following fall, when he went back to
school to take advanced work and obtain the degree
of C.E. His experience of fifteen months in "prac-
tical" work enabled him to get a billet as instructor
upon graduation. His short experience proved
that he had not the makings of an engineer in him,
or perhaps that what he might have had originally
had been educated out of him. Although his col-
lege dubbed him "Civil Engineer" and the diploma
hanging in his bedroom attests the fact, he is not
one and never will be one in the sense that an
78 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
engineer is generally meant. To do the man justice
it is fair to say that he is a shining success as a
teacher. Rankine, however, the greatest professor
of engineering, was a practising engineer for years
and resigned as chief engineer of a railway to
become a professor.
Prom the school which graduated " Kitty"
another man of the same age graduated a year or
two earlier. He made friends on every piece of
work on which he was employed. In the office and
in the field he seemed to be equally at home. When
he was laid off it was because the job had ended
and all his past employers praise him highly,
except one, who was a pretentious man of small
parts on whose pet hobbies the better educated
young man, pardonably bumptious because of his
youth, stepped rather hard a few times. After
several years of successful work he applied to his
Alma Mater for the professional degree. It had so
happened that opportunity had, as yet, thrown no
important work his way, his positions having all
been minor ones as assistant. He made good, how-
ever, and is a graduate of whom a school should
feel well satisfied. He will do big things some day
when the opportunity comes, for it is in him. His
request for the professional degree was not granted
" because his ability to do original work is not
proven and the work he has so far been engaged
upon has been in minor positions carrying little
responsibility." The reasons for declining to give
ENGINEERING AS A .VOCATION 79
him the coveted degree may be good, but he was
further informed that if he put in one year of resi-
dence work he could obtain it. It is plain to any-
one that the man who is now sporting the degree
of " Civil Engineer" is really a Master of Science
and such should have been the degree given to him.
If he did not feel the incongruity of the matter the
second young man, the real engineer, would not fee!
so bitterly over it. He does not object in the least
to the school placing a high value on the pro-
fessional degree, but he feels queer when he meets
" Kitty" and knows that the school calls him an
engineer while practical men under whom he tried
to work call him things not so complimentary.
The graduate of a technical school should be
able to think and reason mathematically. He
should not think in mathematics, which is some-
thing different ; the man who does the latter being
better fitted to become a physicist, or a teacher of
mathematics. No student should become absorbed
in the tools, for, if he does, he will forget their
proper use. Too many graduates come out with
very vague ideas of their life work and this is due
to the fact that even the best school cannot make
an engineer of the unfit. It is a reminder of the old
proverb about the silk purse and the sow's ear.
Many practical men, unaware of the difficulties
under which a teacher must labor, condemn whole-
sale the American schools and praise the schools of
Europe, especially of Germany. No one doubts the
80 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
very high standing of the German schools, but the
difference is in the lower grades rather than in the
higher schools, the technical high school in Ger-
many corresponding to our technical schools here.
Many eminent Germans have said the American
engineering schools are as good as any in the world,
as engineering schools, but that as schools devoted
to research and research methods they are inferior
to the schools of Europe. The American public
school system is based on the idea that each male
pupil has an equal chance to occupy the Presi-
dential chair and that each girl has an equal
chance to become the wife of the President. This
idea is carried out to some extent in the engineer-
ing schools, where the endeavor seems to be to
train boys to fill positions as chief engineers. Rest-
lessness, envy and discontent are marked American
traits and these, in part, account for the success of
so many foreign engineers who come to the United
States and succeed, even with the handicap of
having to learn a new language. Few teachers in
American engineering schools tell the truth to
their pupils about conditions as they actually exist.
Nothing is said about the ninety-nine privates in
the company, to use a military simile, but the cap-
tain is a hero. The captain himself, however, is
only a minor officer and it is the colonel over twelve
captains and the generals over three or nine
colonels, who are held up as examples for the
emulation of the boy. The majority of the schools
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 81
do not aim to fit the boys to fill the positions in
the ranks and fill them acceptably, so that finally
the private may become a corporal, the corporal a
sergeant, the sergeant by hard effort becomes a
lieutenant and then having placed his feet on the
lower round of the ladder of promotion, his future
is secure. The majority of the graduates look
upon themselves as cadets in training for a com-
mission which is theirs by right of scholastic train-
ing, upon graduation.
The boys may be taught to do the work that
belongs to the minor positions, but they are taught
no respect for the work, it being regarded as some-
thing disagreeable which all young fellows must
do for awhile, but which should not be done for a
long time, nor be considered as anything more than
a bit of perfunctory training. The German studies
for the power that education gives him. The
American boy studies to enable him to earn big
money and escape drudgery. This is shown by the
rush toward specialties reflecting big work being
done in the vicinity of the homes of the students.
The German does not grumble at the prospect of
six years of severe training, during which time he
imbibes a love for the work, while the constant
cry of Americans is that vocational courses in
portions of engineering work be cut down to two
years.
A prominent educator, in addressing a class of
engineering students said, "Our aims are high. If
82 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
I thought that this school will turn out any men
who will be nothing better than draftsmen and
detail men all their lives, I would feel ashamed and
deem the school a failure." It is unfortunate
remarks such as this that cause many men to fail,
"For who hath despised the day of small things."
The German idea of education is different from
the American, so that boys going to the technical
high schools are better trained in the minor
things than the average American boy is trained.
At the higher schools there is also a difference due
to the fact that the "private docent" in Germany,
the "tutor" in Great Britain, have no prototype
in American schools. The student here is wholly at
the mercy of the lazy or incompetent instructor for
his drill in mathematics and the studies lying at
the foundation of the training for his future life
work, seldom coming in contact with the high-
grade professor until in the two final years he has
good stiff courses to take with him, predicated
upon perfect preparation. If he flunks he must
go to a private tutor and pay him $1 per hour for
cram work. In the foreign schools he can desert
the regular instructor when he has taken his
measure and go to the outsider, the "privat
docent," who is, however, a recognized institution
and not wholly an outsider. The higher teachers
are often recruited from the ranks of the "privat
docents," or "tutors," who have demonstrated
their fitness. It is no uncommon thing in a
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 83
European university to find a "privat docent" in
fairly active competition with a well-known pro-
fessor.
The writer has no wish to be ranked with the
men who are wholesale in their condemnation of
American schools of engineering. He has no wish
to be ranked with the men who condemn at all, but
he is not blind to some grave defects which are
easily remedied and which exist because few
teachers are . able to realize that their former
students have grown to be men, and actually have
a better knowledge of conditions than the teachers
themselves. Few men whose opinions are worth
anything care to see much of a change from stand-
ard curricula.
Engineering teachers have organizations, as
before mentioned, in which many prominent
practitioners hold membership. In many schools
the alumnae are represented on the governing-
boards and these men endeavor to correct defects
they observed while students. There are many
teachers who are not graybearded book worms, but
who are live, energetic men who made a success of
practical work and later took up teaching from
choice. Many of them are of high rank as con-
sulting engineers, and in conventions of engineers
are listened to with respect and are placed at the
heads of good committees. " Common sense and
mathematics" are a good combination.
Considering the fact that the financial reward
84 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
of the teacher is limited and fixed in amount, a
deadening influence on most men, it is gratifying
to meet so many high-minded, energetic teachers
whose fondness for their work leads them to stay
with it when everyone who meets them knows
they are able to compete with the best men
on the outside. The writer never visits an engi-
neering school without experiencing the charm
that holds men in the walls and believes that in
many ways the rewards of the profession are
greater for the high-minded, high-grade teacher
than for the leading practising engineer. All suc-
cess cannot be measured in financial terms. One
amusing thought, however, is that all engineering
teachers class themselves with the best of the active
practitioners and thus count themselves very much
underpaid, this having considerable to do with
their lack of results.
The principal defect in engineering schools is
the " inbreeding" caused by a too rapid growth of
the engineering department and lack of sufficient
funds to procure proper instructors. Many
instructors are of the " God-to-be-pitied" class, so
that a home is necessary for them. The pay in
the grade of instructor is so low that a man who
is well adapted to go out into the world and win
a living in competition with other men in the same
line of work will not consider it. The result is
that numbers of young men graduate from a school
in the spring and in the fall enter the same school
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 85
as instructors, their knowledge limited to what is
taught within the walls of that institution, and,
like all small men, become vainglorious and
prideful within a few years so that progress for
them is impossible. The boys who pass under their
hands are in a pitiful plight. In mathematics and
physics especially, these men are bad, for after
conducting one class through the text book the
teacher can rest his brain and become just as lazy
as he likes, and that is often very lazy indeed
when a man's brain begins to atrophy, so that
many professors actually get the idea strongly
fixed in their heads that "once a teacher, always
a teacher," regardless of whether their work is
productive of real results. On this point the
reader is referred to an editorial entitled "About
Dismissing Professors," in the Popular Science
Monthly for March, 1911.
Many instructors did try practical work for a
short time after graduation, as will be remembered
was the case with "Kitty," but returned to the
school, like a cat to a comfortable home, when
opportunity offered. Teaching is a distinct call-
ing and many do make excellent teachers finally,
but the present hap-hazard way of holding on to
teachers without requiring definite results from
their work is not seemly when taken in connection
with such a practical profession as that of engi-
neering. Teachers should be better paid and
should be retained, as other workers are, only
86 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
when they prove their ability. Many teachers
resent very strongly the idea that their work
should be measured by results. The college to a
teacher is a home, and sometimes a graduate,
smarting under insult, injustice and incompetency,
has to wait twenty years before he can get on the
governing board of his Alma Mater and attend
personaly to the discharge of a teacher he knows
to be unfit.
Practical men frequently state that in no line
of work can a man make a living with less real
effort and smaller results than as a member of a
teaching force in a college, engineering schools
not excepted. The same trouble is found in pub-
lic offices and in the offices of all large corporations
where there are enough good, earnest, hard
workers to enable a lot of lazy incompetents to
hold down jobs without detection. The pay of
a professor lags about ten years behind the
average of the pay of engineers in active prac-
tice. At the start there is scarcely any difference,
but the teaching engineer has an advantage in
that he holds practically a life position, where he
may, if he wishes, work with all the enthusiasm
and energy of the clock-watching clerk. The pay
of a good professor never rises above the average
the first-class, successful engineer may figure con-
fidently on securing after fifteen years' work.
A good professor however, often makes a great
deal of money as a consulting engineer, his work
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 87
for the school being the finest sort of advertise-
ment.
A vast improvement might be made in many
schools by making it a rule to require all instruc-
tors to be graduates of other schools, with not
less than two years' practical experience after
graduation. The instructors should not be
employed upon one study, but should be required
to be prepared to teach at least four subjects, one
subject each semester, thus compelling them to
grow. It is deadening for a man to teach graphics
all his life, or to carry advanced algebra year after
year, or to teach any subject in which the advance
to-day is small, if there is any advance. Too much
specialization is the trouble with the schools, not
alone in the courses taught, but in the teachers.
In American schools there is a class of teachers
known as "flunkers," who seem to think that
about 25 per cent, is the minimum number to
" flunk" at examination. What would be thought
of a workman in a factory if 25 per cent, of his
product day after day were condemned? How
many days would he last ? A teacher who regularly
flunks a high number of his students is a misfit,
for a real teacher will soon remedy the trouble, if
there be any other trouble than laziness on his
part. Sometimes it appears to an outsider that
instead of the teachers who handle the students
during the first two years being the most poorly
paid, the case should be reversed and the pro-
88 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
fessors in the foundation studies should receive
the highest pay and take charge of the students
from the day they enter college. The graduate
requires his mathematics during the last two years
of school and during the three years immediately
following graduation. The higher engineering
problems, for which he is most carefully trained
by the highest paid men in school, are things he
cannot hope to approach for many years after
graduation, for the outside world deems con-
siderable experience is first necessary. When
ready finally to take up such problems there should
be no difficulty in reading up and studying the
matter, for on such projects one is seldom unduly
hurried. It is really in the fundamentals, th.e
tools of his work, he should be best trained.
Require not less than two years' practical
experience before appointing a man an instructor
and also require recommendations from his
employers, to insure getting an intelligent man.
Do not select as an instructor a graduate of the
institution. No man should be appointed an assist-
ant professor until he has been an instructor at
least five years, and in the case of an assistant pro-
fessor there is no objection to taking a graduate of
the institution, providing he has had not less than
two years' practical work, and has taught in
another engineering school not less than five years.
This will do away with " inbreeding" and should
keep men alive.
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 89
To ascertain just how well the teachers are
doing their work permit the graduates to help
improve conditions. The fifth year after grad-
uation, thus allowing time for the clearing away
of youthful bitterness and animosity, each grad-
uate should be sent a blank to be carefully filled
in, in which he is to reply categorically to a list of
inquiries respecting the members of the teaching
force at the school while he was there. This report
to be confidential between the man who makes it
and the President of the institution. The grad-
uates can thus have full opportunity to help their
Alma Mater and show-up the weak points of the
teaching staff, and if the head of the institution is
fit for his position he will know what to do, and
how to do it. In studying such reports he is not
dealing with immature graduates, but with men
who are experiencing the hard knocks of life,
after having supposedly been prepared for their
life work at the school whose instructors they are
invited to criticise.
The essential difference between engineering
instruction in Germany and America is that the
attempt is made in Germany to give a complete
scientific course and train men in the application
of science to industry. They graduate technicians
there. Even with the amount of practical work
now required, the graduate is a technically-trained
scientist, who understands that his education is
for power, and that it alone does not entitle him
90 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
to high pay, but that it does open wide for him
the door of opportunity. The American ideal has
been lower and too much the result of listening too
closely to criticism. In fact, the principal faults
in the American schools are due to the endeavor
of the teachers to give the students what
a century of training has shown to be about
right, and, at the same time, try to satisfy the
selfishness of men who want well-trained, narrow
specialists without bearing any of the expense
of training them.
When specialties are discussed it is well to
remember that it is difficult to train a man thor-
oughly in a minor subject without causing him
to lose the sense of proportion he must maintain,
if he is ever to be more than a part of a machine.
Whether all the boys are fit to be engineers or
not, they represent a select lot of humanity when
they finally finish the grind and get their diplomas.
A large percentage of them should amount to
something later in life. That more do not meet
with considerable success is due to the wilful blind-
ness of the deans, who act as employment agents
for large corporations, in their anxiety to advertise
to the world that "this school, owing to its excellent
methods of instruction, cannot supply the demand
for graduates." It requires the use of the short,
ugly word to properly characterize these state-
ments in many cases.
Many large corporations like to fill their offices
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 91
and works with well-educated men, because the
average young educated man has been advised by
his instructors to work for low pay during the
first years after college "to gain experience."
Thus these chaps give rather more for the money
than men not so well trained. When a man has
been selected for a place because he has exhibited
superior qualifications he naturally expects a
regular increase in salary, year after year, even
if small. When, as so often happens, he finds
he has been put into a position where there is no
hope of advancement and little hope for better pay
he becomes discontented. The discontented ones'
are marked for discharge and when the next
annual crop of graduates is harvested, a spell-
binder from the corporation goes to the school and
leads the entire class to the slaughter house, the
dean rubbing his hands gleefully and taking never
a thought in after years for the poor, misguided
victims, who might have been spared if he had
carefully investigated in advance the positions
offered and had acted like a father to his boys.
The process is just one little remove more cruel
than the merciless processes of nature, as set forth
in the works of Dr. Darwin. Out of it a few men
do succeed, but the waste of effort is needless and
the waste of money represented by the sacrifices
of the parents of the slaughtered boys is criminal.
Some students enter American schools with so
poor an idea of what engineering involves, and
92 ENGINEEKING AS A VOCATION
are so plainly adapted to the calling, that the
problem of the often insufficient preparation is
most important. Dr. W. G. Kaymond, Dean of the
Engineering Schools, Iowa State University, Iowa
City, Iowa, has adopted a method which is similar
to what is known as " Seminary" in European
schools. The student, unable to keep up with the
class, is taken from the class and taught topically,
practically individually, until his sense of per-
ception is dilated, when he goes back into the class,
and it has been the experience that such men are
leaders in class work for the remainder of the
course. This is "unit" instruction, and, as the
engineer works on the "unit" system in after life,
it is good that some of his instruction, especially
if he be backward or deficient, should be on this
system. Professor Schneider of the University of
Cincinnati has been very successful in establish-
ing combined courses, wherein the students and
instructors alternate between the school and
manufacturing establishments, the length of the
courses being six years instead of four, in order
to enable the student to sandwich in the practical
work without losing what he requires of theory.
These combined courses are now becoming stand-
ard in other schools, the "Seminary" method of
Dr. Raymond requiring more work on the part of
the teacher and also requiring, on an average, a
better grade of teacher in the minor subjects. The
engineering course of the future will be not less
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 93
than six years in length, and will combine the
schools, the shop and the topical study and dis-
cussion.
The engineering course of the future will not
all be given in the engineering schools. Since fully
90 per cent, of the men employed in engineering
work do not require the complete education the
engineer should have, much of the work of pre-
paring the large majority can be done in the high
schools. Two years can readily be added to the
courses in the high schools, so that boys wanting
to go into technical work may be specially trained.
In the additional two years can be given all the
algebra, trigonometry and analytical geometry
now given in the technical school. The high school,
in the additional two years should also give
descriptive geometry and drawing, the drawing
course being so arranged that finished draftsmen,
not designers, may be turned out fit to do the
ordinary work in the offices of engineers, archi-
tects and manufacturers, such work as the younger
men are given. The high school can also give
as much chemistry and physics as the average
engineering school now gives. The use of survey-
ing instruments and the elements of land survey-
ing can also be taught in the high school. The
shop work of the average engineering school,
which is generally an advertising feature of
ridiculously little practical use, can be given in
the high school. This additional work on the part
94 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
of the high school will answer the wide-spread
demand for short-term vocational courses and
relieve engineering schools of much elementary
work. The engineering schools can then maintain
their courses at four years, demanding as entrance
requirements all the above work in the high school.
The first three years of the engineering school will
then be a general technical training, with plenty
of culture studies, the students specializing in the
final year only, and not specializing narrowly.
CHAPTER IV
HOME STUDY COURSES
IN an earlier chapter the writer has said some-
thing about men who take up engineering studies
in order to improve their standing and provide
for advancement. He has no sympathy with the
man who can afford the time and expense to attend
a resident school and yet deliberately neglects such
an opportunity in order to learn the business
" practically," whatever that may mean. For the
man who is really fit to be an engineer and who is
unable to do anything more than study alone he
has the utmost sympathy. For many years the
writer has conducted classes in evening schools,
where the service, rather than the small salary,
is considered to be compensation, and he is
now a member of the educational committee in
the Y.M.C.A. Institute, so that he thinks he has
a pretty fair understanding of the men who
imagine they would like to " learn more to earn
more." There are enough mature earnest men to
justify him in giving up a chapter to guidance in
home study, but he is frank to say that an enor-
mous number of men are filled with desire and
not with ambition, the difference not being plain
to many.
95
96 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
The advantage of being able to attend a night
school is that one has the help of a teacher, a great
boon to men taking up the different studies con-
nected with engineering. In some " practical"
schools the instruction is individual and the
schools are open all the year. They exist to supply
a demand for education from men who wish to
quickly increase their earning ability and many
of them labor under the disadvantage that the
teachers do not guide the students in a course of
study. The students dictate to the teachers as
to what they want and if the teacher thinks dif-
ferently some other school gets them. A few of
these schools are excellent, but the majority are
run solely to make money and for the good of
the profession should be suppressed.
Many high-class institutions now have eve-
ning courses, but as the income of the school is
not dependent upon the money received from the
students, the cost generally being far higher than
the amount charged for tuition, each student is
expected to enter a class and receive class instruc-
tion. The courses extend over practically as many
months as the courses in the day school, but this
in years means more than double, for the evening
classes continue for only about six months in each
year and for two or three evenings in each week.
Mght-class students generally want something in
a hurry and the course that only occupies their
time for half the year, and is arranged to cover
ENGINEEKING AS A VOCATION 97
from three to six years looks apalling. Another
drawback is the class method, due to the necessity
for keeping down instructional cost, so that when
the student misses an evening once in a while, he
becomes discouraged.
The Association Institute in Chicago has
adopted an excellent method in which courses in
the night school are arranged so that each may be
fully completed in a season. Instead of compelling
a student to start in at the rudiments of all engi-
neering science, he is taken as far as his previous
training will permit in the subject he has chosen,
endeavors being made to have him later take more
of the fundamentals and finally pursue inter-
mediate and advanced courses covering the same
ground. This may be radical and a copy of the
methods of the schools run for profit, but the aim
of the school is to help the student and the small
fees charged indicate sufficiently that there is no
financial profit in the enterprise.
Correspondence schools are a great improve-
ment over night schools, on account of the all-year
study, but they do not furnish a flesh and blood
teacher in the room with the student. The man
who takes a correspondence course in a reputable
school has well-prepared lessons regularly mailed
to him and his progress depends wholly upon him-
self. If he requires help he has only to write to
receive it. The courses, however, are stiff and a
98 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
marvellously small per cent/of those who start
remain to finish.
Before the days of evening and correspondence
schools many men studied alone, poring over
books, in the course of many years acquiring
enough knowledge of the essentials of engineering
science to get along well. It is a solitary way and
not to be preferred to the well-organized methods
by class or through correspondence. Many, how-
ever, prefer to study alone, and to the end of time
there will be those who would rather buy a book
and be self -tutored in spite of the easier and better
ways. For the men who insist upon being self-
tutored the following courses are offered, the
writer vouching that he knows a number who have
achieved considerable success by home study.
The main difficulty in studying alone lies in
knowing just what books to buy, many expensive
trials being made. Few men know how to advise
a young fellow in the purchase of books for self
study, and, as a rule, most men will advise books
away above the comprehension of the inquirer,
because of his insufficient grounding in the rudi-
ments. The self -tutored man finds plenty of books
dealing with the particular specialty in which he
is interested, but runs afoul of the mathematics
plentifully besprinkled over the pages.
The first thing required is that the student be
expert in common fractions, decimal fractions,
ratio and proportion. The best way to study these
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 99
subjects is to resurrect the old school arithmetic
and go through the sections dealing with the fore-
going subjects. The higher branches of mathe-
matics will be of no practical benefit and cannot
be properly studied by a student not fairly expert
in ordinary arithmetical operations. At the
present writing there is no good book on the market
written for the instruction of self -tutored men in
arithmetic. There are some excellent British
books for the purpose, but the American student
finds them exceedingly hard to use because of the
absurd monetary system and system of weights
and measures used in all the examples for prac-
tice. The examples themselves would be most
excellent practice were it not for the fact that the
American student feels he is wasting his time deal-
ing with subjects for which he will never have
practical use.
During the present year (1911) a new book
has appeared entitled " Mathematics for the Prac-
tical Man," by George Howe, M.E. ($1.25), which
explains in simple language the fundamentals
of Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, Logarithms,
Coordinate Geometry and the Calculus. This, it
is seen, must be preceded by Arithmetic. The
author gives numerous examples to be worked and
his manner is extremely lucid. No better book
can be taken up by the self -tutored man who wishes
to study mathematics.
One book, however, is not enough, for the
100 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
views of another man are helpful, the teacher
being able often to make clear things not plain
from a study of the text book. The self -tutored
man has no teacher, so for additional explanation
he should buy " Algebra Self Taught," by Paget
Higgs (60 cents). This is rather an old book, con-
taining no examples to be worked out, the writer
confining himself solely to the philosophy of
mathematics. Study Howe thoroughly, working
out all the examples, and use Higgs for reference
and collateral reading. When Howe is completed,
study those subjects in Higgs which Howe does
not treat so fully.
At this point the courses separate. Students
studying civil engineering or architecture should
follow with " Elementary Practical Mathematics,"
by M. T. Ormsby ($2.25).
Students in mechanical engineering should
study " Practical Calculations for Engineers," by
Larard and Grolding ($2.00), following with "A
Primer of the Calculus," by E. Sherman Gould (50
cents).
Students in electrical engineering should study
"An Introduction to Practical Mathematics," by
R M. Saxelby (60 cents), and then take, by the
same author, "A Course in Practical Mathe-
matics" ($2.25).
The student should now be able to read intelli-
gently and enjoy any mathematical book published.
An interesting book for reference and home study
ENGINEEKING AS A VOCATION 101
after one has completed the first two books men-
tioned, is " Practical Mathematics," by Knott &
Mackay ($2.00). The section on Strength of
Materials should be studied first and then that on
Trigonometry. The other subjects may be studied
as the student's interest in the matter dictates.
After completing the books above mentioned it
often happens that a man wishes to learn more
about mathematics, and an excellent book to buy
in such case is " Higher Mathematics for Students
of Chemistry and Physics," by J. W. Mellor
($5.00), a book intended for self instruction. In
studying mathematics no real power is gained by
reading until the principles are understood. To
thoroughly understand the subject means many
hours of monotonous drill on problems.
It is always assumed that the self -tutored man
is employed in some capacity in the office of an
engineer or architect, or in the office or shops of
some manufacturing concern. If he is engaged
in mercantile pursuits he should not try to get into
engineering work by home study or even by means
of the correspondence school. He will meet in his
books a great many statements which will be fully
intelligible only to men in the business. The
writer makes a special plea to every man to stick"
to his trade or calling.
After completing the course in mathematics
take UD:
102 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
Elements of Mechanics, Merriman ($1.00).
Strength of Materials, Merriman ($1.00).
There is a larger book by the same author having
the same title, but the small one is best adapted for
self -tutored men.
Materials of Machines, Smith ($1.00).
Mechanics' Problems, Sanborn ($2.00).
Chemistry and Physics of Building Materials,
Munby ($2.00).
The student having completed the above list
and having presumably studied each book
thoroughly, is in a position where he is free to
select for himself. No technical book should
bother him because of the mathematical expres-
sions or references to certain statements in
mechanics.
Drawing is a most important subject, and the
most complete book for the self-tutored man is
"Mahan's Industrial Drawing," new edition by
French ($3.50).
All engineers, and also architects, will require
the information given in:
Elements of Graphic Statics, by Cathcart &
Chaffee ($3.50).
Steam Power Plants, by Meyer ($2.00).
Power and Power Transmission, by Kerr
($2.00).
Elements of Electrical Engineering, by Kinz-
brunner ($2.00).
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 103
For general information on subjects of great
value buy :
A Text Book on Physics, by W. Watson
($5.00).
Descriptive General Chemistry, by Tillman
($3.00).
The man wishing to study surveying should be
in the employ of a surveyor, or of a civil engineer
doing considerable surveying, and study:
The Surveyor's Hand Book, by Taylor ($3.00).
A Manual of Land Surveying, by Hodgman
($2.50).
Hodgman deals with the laws governing the
recovering of lost corners and boundaries, a very
important part of a surveyor's work. The sur-
veyor, however, should not limit himself to one or
two books, but should have in his library the books
of Johnson and of Gillespie. Major Eees of the
Corps of Engineers of the United States Army
has written a remarkably good book on Topo-
graphical Surveying and Gribbles' " Preliminary
Survey" ($3.00) is full of methods of considerable
value and interest.
The civil engineering student should read
thoroughly :
Civil Engineering as Applied in Construction,
by Vernon-Harcourt ($5.00).
Engineering Work in Towns and Cities, by
McCullough ($3.00).
Water Supply, by Folwell ($4.00).
104 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
Sewerage, by Folwell ($3.00).
The student interested specially in structural
work should study :
Bridge and Structural Design, by Thomson
($2.00).
Typical Steel Railway Bridges, by Thomson
($2.00), following with:
Steel Mill Buildings, by Ketchum ($4.00).
Walls, Bins and Grain Elevators, by Ketchum
($4.00).
Highway Bridges, by Ketchum ($4.00).
The student of mining engineering will require
all the preceding mathematics, physics, chemistry,
drawing and surveying before taking up :
A Manual of Mining, by Ihlsing & Wilson
($5.00).
Prospecting for Gold and Silver, by Lakes
($1.00).
Prospecting, Locating and Valuing Mines, by
Stretch ($2.50).
Mining, Mineralogical and Geological Law, by
Shamel ($5.00), following with any of the books
already mentioned, which he believes might be
helpful to him.
It is, of course, understood that no attempt has
been made here to give a list even approximately
complete of the best books on any particular sub-
ject. The only thing the writer has endeavored
to do has been to assist the reader in selecting
good first books.
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
105
For the encouragement of men who missed
earlier opportunities and are determined to sup-
plement the deficiencies in their earlier education,
the two diagrams here presented are interesting
studies.
The first is a copy of a diagram frequently used
by modern contractors for the purpose of rating
their foremen, and is taken from a job of which
the writer had charge. The horizontal lines rep-
8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
Working Days
FIG. 1 Labor Cost Per Unit of Product.
resent percentages and the vertical lines represent
days. On the first day the cost of the product,
assumed here to be a yard of concrete, is taken as
a maximum, for the men are green and the fore-
man not acquainted with his crew, it being the
first day of the work. Therefore at 100 per cent,
the start is made for cost of product. The crew
was small and the cost of the foreman was 20 per
106 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
cent, of the total expense for labor. It will be
noticed that actual costs are not given, everything
being represented in percentages. The second day
the crew was increased in size and the percentage
cost of foreman was consequently reduced and
there was a considerable reduction in cost of
product. With each succeeding day there is a
reduction in percentage cost of foreman, with a
corresponding increase in percentage cost of
laborers, the cost of the product falling. Finally,
as the men become well trained and accustomed to
the work and the foreman also gains in experience,
the cost reaches a minimum and becomes fairly
constant. An ideal diagram would show all the
lines smooth.
This diagram is made each day from the
reports of the timekeeper and cost clerk and
plotted for the information of the supertintendent ;
and the foremen themselves. The percentage cost
of the foreman is expected to be fairly smooth
after getting started, but the cost of the product
varies, owing to accidents, or to a neglect by the
foreman of his work. When the superintendent
reads the diagram each day and finds the cost of
the product rising, he can find the cause and
quickly stop the waste. By means of such dia-
grams all modern manufacturing business is kept
track of, contracting being merely migratory
manufacturing.
If all workmen are well trained and so intelli-
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 107
gent that little guidance is required, the cost of
foremen becomes very low. All workmen are
not intelligent and the most intelligent are not
always the most industrious. Intelligent directors
of work are, therefore, required, and they are, of
course, the specially trained men. Such diagrams
show that education and training pay. In order
to direct the vast numbers of poorly-trained men
there must be numbers of better-trained men, and,
as technical education becomes more common and
the general intelligence of ordinary laborers rises,
the educated men must be far better educated than
the average if they are to receive better than the
average pay.
The second diagram is taken from the Trans-
actions of the American Society of Mechanical
Engineers, Vol. XXV, 1904. This diagram was
prepared under the direction of Mr. James M.
Dodge, to illustrate his Presidential Address
before that society in December, 1903. Mr.
Dodge assumed that all boys have a potential
value of $3000 at the age of 16 years. He con-
siders four groups of men working in the mechanic
arts the unskilled labor group, the shop-trained
or apprentice group, the trade-school group and
the technical school group.
Data is lacking as to the progress of the unskilled
labor group from the age of 16 to the age of 22,
when the average weekly wage is $10.20. This con-
tinues to be fairly level for a few years and then,
108
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
of course, will drop as the laborer becomes weak-
ened through disease, excessive labor or age.
The apprentice or shop-trained worker has a
40000
35000
30000
25000
20000
15000
10000
5000
1
43.00
r
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3
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SL
x*
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y
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rt
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^-d fl
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ie
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eek
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> A
sy2
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81
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Labor
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Trans, j
L.S.M.
J. Vol.
xxv
J
6 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30. 81 &
Each vertical line represents one year.in age
FIG. 2 The Money Value of Technical Training.
potential value of $3000 at the age of 16 when,
he enters the works in good health and with good
habits. Assuming the working year to consist of
fifty weeks, he receives $3 per week, which amounts
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 109
to 5 per cent, interest on his potential value. His
accumulated experience increases Ms potential
value, until at the age of 24 it reaches $15,800 and
he draws interest, in the form of wages, to the
amount of $15.80 per week. This is practically his
maximum, and is practically 50 per cent, more
than that of the unskilled laborer. The writer
objects to the word " unskilled" when applied to
ordinary laborers, for the word does not fit. His
experience has shown Mm that many of these men
are wonderfully skilled in the work with which
they are intrusted and, therefore, wishes to make
a plea to substitute the word " untrained," for the
other more objectionable word.
Mr. Dodge stated experience showed that 5
per cent, of the apprentice group, acquiring the
machinist trade, rise above the line made by Ms
average man ; 35 per cent, follow the line closely ;
during the period of training about 20 per cent,
leave of their own accord, and, as near as can be
ascertained, go to other shops and continue in the
line originally selected ; 40 per cent., however, are
found unworthy or incompetent, and are dis-
missed, probably never rising to the $15.80 line.
On this point he remarks :
"AppenticesMp of to-day in many establish-
ments does not make the man, broadly speaking,
a mechanic in a majority of cases he is a specialist
or tool hand, and not comparable with the old
mechanic, who was a worker in metals, had some
110 ENGINEEEING AS A VOCATION
practical knowledge of steam and prime movers,
could chip, file, work on lathe, planer, drill press
or as an assembler, and was competent to meet the
varied and unusual conditions found in general
construction and repair work."
The young man fortunate enough to secure
three years' training at a good trade-school enters
a machine shop at the age of 19 and can command
$12 per week, equal to the apprentice at 21 years
of age. His three years in school, during which
time he was earning nothing, have proven equal
to five years practical shop training, but in reality
the difference is greater, due to his broader train-
ing in theory and general processes. A study of
the line of this group shows the advantage to be
permanent, the line of average earning being about
50 per cent, above that of the apprentice. The
dotted extension of this line shows a possible
increase in value, while, of course, a few excep-
tional men may go far higher. It is for these three
groups that the numerous correspondence, night
and vocational schools exist, and for them that the
home study courses have been planned.
The young man who prepares himself for
entrance into a high-grade technical school at the
age of 18 is presumed to have a potential value of
$4000 at that age, although he is in the non-earn-
ing class until he graduates at the age of 22, when
his four years' course in the technical school
ends. His entering pay in the works puts
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 111
him six months behind the apprentice and
two and one-half years behind the trade-school
graduate. In six months the technical school grad-
uate overtakes the apprentice, at which time both
are earning $14.00 per week. The technical school
graduate reaches the $15.80 line nearly one year
before the regular apprentice. In three years'
time the technical graduate overtakes the trade-
school graduate. The line then becomes more
curved until, at the age of 32, just ten years after
graduation, the technical school graduate has a
potential value of $43,000 and receives the 5 per
cent, interest on this valuation in the form of a
weekly salary of $43.00, at which age the pay of
the trade-school graduate may be assumed to be
about $25 per week. The curve on the diagram
ends here, but the writer has plotted it to a prob-
able maximum of $45.00 per week fifteen years
after graduation, with a prospective drop after
the age of 45. The compensation of the average
graduate in mechanical engineering is thus seen
to be at a practical maximum fifteen years after
graduation of about $2250 per year. This does
not seem large, but it is well known that some
exceptional men, or men who had exceptional
opportunities, earn far more. This, likewise,
applies only to salaried men.
CHAPTER V
HOW TO HUNT AND HOLD A JOB
THE average engineer is known as a "job
chaser." Not only in vacation time must the engi-
neering student hunt jobs, but periodically after
graduation the same experience must be gone
through. The majority of engineers work on
salary, the terms of employment are uncertain and
in slack times thousands of men are turned adrift.
Mr. Onward Bates, President of the American
Society of Civil Engineers in 1907, took occasion in
his presidential address to classify the active mem-
bers of the society with a view to studying the sub-
ject of engineering employment. He assumed that
as the percentage ran in the society so it would run
throughout the ranks of the profession, although
the American Society of Civil Engineers repre-
sents probably less than one-fourth the total num-
ber in the country, and these the more successful.
In percentages the employments were as fol-
lows:
United States Government Service . . 7.7 per cent.
State and Municipal Service 12.7 "
Eailway Service (all kinds) 15.2 "
Manufacturing, Contracting, etc. ... 17.6 "
Consulting Engineers 20 . 2 "
Architects, Teachers, Editors, Misc.. . 5.1
Unclassified 21.5 "
112
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 118
The men marked " Unclassified" were those
who gave merely an address for the annual reg-
ister, but failed to give the nature of their employ-
ment. A few may have been retired and the
majority, no doubt, belong to the numerous class
that is seldom blessed with a job lasting a whole
year, although their pay may be good.
By " Consulting Engineers" is meant men in
private practice, and Mr. Bates assumed that more
than three-fourths of all engineers are dependent
upon salaries and less than one-fourth receive fees
as compensation for work. Mr. Bates assumed
that what was true of members would be equally
true of associate members and juniors, but the
writer believes, as careful study of these two grades
would show, the percentage of men dependent upon
salaries to be nearer 90 per cent, for the entire
membership, for we do not know how many of
those engaged in manufacturing, contracting, etc.,
were on salary or in business for themselves.
A member in this society must be not less than
30. years of age, qualified to design as well as
superintend construction, in active practice not less
than ten years, of which at least five years must
have been in responsible charge of work. Mem-
bers, therefore, may be assumed as being fairly well
settled.
An associate member must be not less than 25
years of age and engaged in active engineering
work for not less than six years, of which one year
114 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
has been in responsible charge of work. An asso-
ciate member is, therefore, one who is being made
into an engineer, and, generally, is not yet settled.
A junior must be not less than 18 years of age
and have had two years' practical experience, or be
a graduate of an engineering school. His con-
nection with the society ceases when he becomes
32 years of age, unless sooner transferred to a
higher grade.
There are other grades of membership in the
society, but the three above noted constitute the
bulk of the membership, and counting them as
constituting the entire membership, the per-
centages are as follows :
Members 49 per cent.
Associate Members 37
Juniors 14 ' l
Practically none of the juniors and but few of
the associate members are in private practice, or
in business for themselves, so, from the standpoint
of the man who is seeking employment upon engi-
neering work, it may be assumed that nine out of
ten of his competitors are in like case with him,
transient employes.
The young engineer is exceedingly hurt by the
fact that his education seems to be so lightly
regarded as a qualification entitling him to high
pay and that his degree is laughed at. He resents
being set as a foreman, timekeeper or setter of line
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 115
and grade stakes over illiterate men who get bet-
ter pay. Many young men complain, and too large
a number become chronic kickers. A few write
letters to the technical papers, which letters are
discussed until the editors close the discussion for
the time being as leading nowhere. The discus-
sion ranges from grave to gay, and many sea-
soned veterans take a heartless pleasure in poking
fun at the "fresh graduate." These discussions
recur at fairly regular intervals of about five years
and elicit nothing new. They come around about
as regularly as the discussion of standard moot
subjects in engineering circles, and, indeed, this
problem of the earnest young man, with his first
glimpse at actual conditions, may be said to now
constitute one of the "moot" subjects, which the
regular reader of engineering periodicals must
expect to have called to his attention half a dozen
times in his professional life.
The fact is that the education does not entitle
the young chap to high pay. It simply gives him
an opportunity to secure employment, and places
him in a better position than the man who is not
so well educated. It gives him broader opportuni-
ties to secure employment than the self -tutored
man, who is, of necessity, a specialist and, there-
xure, limited in his powers to move about. Many
young fellows learn a great deal in offices about
certain kinds of work in which their employers are
specialists, but when times get dull and they are
116 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
laid off, their chances for employment are very slim
as compared with the college graduate. The
diploma, therefore, is merely a card of intro-
duction, the education a permit to remain in an
office and give proof of ability.
Some young men secure permanent positions
early, and advance slowly and steadily until they
become the highest officers in a corporation, for
corporation employment is most common as an
engineering probability. The majority, however,
roam for many years from one piece of work to
another before settling in one place, and it is
strange how few become expert at selling their
services. Most of them seek a new place with a
decided feeling of resentment, and often become
sarcastic when discussing prospective employment.
To hunt a job is an art and some seasoned
men have it pat. Much, of course, depends upon
the employers, but long practice makes a man per-
fect in reading character and approaching pros-
pective employers, some of whom ask for let-
ters of recommendation, while others profess
ability to "size a man up." It is well to secure as
many letters of recommendation as possible so they
will be ready when asked for.
An engineer makes many changes and should
ask for a letter every time he is laid off. 7^
employer may profess a willingness to answer all
inquiries from prospective employers, but this pro-
fession of willingness on his part should not pre-
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 117
vent the applicant from getting the letter. When
a past employe changes positions frequently, the
old employer sometimes experiences annoyance
when called upon frequently and finally ceases to
respond, especially when some years may have
elapsed. Men also die, and after that event the
experience had under them is of no value as an
asset, there being nothing to support the claims of
the applicant. Some engineers, when politely put
off when requesting a letter, have had a friend
write to inquire about them, this friend turning
over the letter of recommendation when received,
to be traced so that blue prints may be made of it
for future use.
One engineer, with whom the writer is very
well acquainted, had a humiliating experience,
which shows how valuable it is to have docu-
mentary evidence when required. He was seeking
a position on a certain kind of work, and, in con-
versation with the prospective employer it was
found that they had many mutual acquaint-
ances, among them an engineer in a distant
part of the country, under whom this engi-
neer had once worked, and whom he regarded
as a very good friend. Without his knowl-
edge this engineer was written to and asked
about the applicant, the reply being that he
did not know anyone of that name. The pros-
pective employer sent for the applicant, and, with-
out a word of comment, laid the letter before him.
118 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
The engineer read the letter over slowly, and then
from his pocket drew a letter seventeen years old,
in the same handwriting, on the same letterhead
and signed by the same man, in which he testified
to having known him for the past five years and
praised him very highly. The business man com-
pared the two letters carefully and had a good
laugh. He had them photographed side by side
and sent the photograph to the engineer in the
distant city, the return mail bringing a letter of
most abject apology. Seventeen years was a long
time for the memory of the successful man, but the
man who had never had a chance to rest his feet,
but was a perpetual " job chaser," suffered keenly
at the thought of an old friend so completely for-
getting him. To make the story complete, he got
the job he was seeking and it lasted a full year.
Many employers advertise as follows for men :
SUPEBINTENDENT A construction company taking general
contracts for reinforced concrete building work, desires the
services of a first-class superintendent. Must be familiar
with all branches of work entering into the construction of
factory, warehouse, office and public buildings. State age,
married or single, salary expected and when open for engage-
ment. Work to be in the Metropolitan district. Address
"G. 26,"' Engineering News, New York. 26-2t
WANTED At once, by cement company doing its own design-
ing and construction, a competent all-round draftsman, fully
able to check and handle wide variety of work unaided.
Experience in reinforced concrete, mill buildings and
machinery a necessity. Permanent and good place for man
who knows his business. In answering, state salary expected
and experience. Address "B.A. 26," Engineering News,
New York. 26-2t
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 119
WANTED Concrete engineer, technical graduate, of five years '
experience, to design and estimate reinforced concrete struc-
tures; state age, training, experience and salary acceptable
for immediate employment. Address "H. 1," Engineering
News, New York. l-3t
It will be noticed that each applicant is to
state the salary for which he will work, and he
must give his experience, which, of course, means
sending on copies of letters of reference. Firms
advertising in this way never reply to the letters of
unsuccessful applicants, seemingly taking a cruel
delight in keeping them in suspense, for even the
most seasoned "job chaser" is somewhat of an
optimist and hangs on for a long time in the hope
that his letter will bring him success. A postal
card notification that he was unsuccessful is a
decently courteous act which would cost little. The
applicant never knows to whom he sends his
application, and, as the appointment is made solely
from the written record, the man who will work
for the least money is generally chosen. Letters
are never returned, and many inexperienced young
men have lost valuable letters which they foolishly
sent to prospective employers. The writer, many
years ago, commenced making tracings on cloth
of his letters of reference and sending blue prints
of them when applying for a position. The
prospective employer thus saw a facsimile of the
letter, and if he did not return it, only the cost of
the blue print was involved.
A letter of application should be brief and to
120 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
the point. A badly written, misspelled letter is
no recommendation, and all letters should read
as if written by a man who knows what he wants
and how to ask for it. The writer always knew
how to spell, for he was a pupil in grammar
schools before plain sewing and such fads were
introduced, the recreation for good students being
a spelling bee, and the punishment for bad ones
being the memorizing of many pages of hard words
with their definitions. Thanks to his fondness for
reading, he was never at a loss to express his
meaning when he wrote a letter, so two of the
gravest faults of young graduates namely, poor
spelling and ungrammatical letters, he was spared.
He was, however, a most abominable penman,
about as bad as the majority of young chaps who
do not intend to become bookkeepers, and so take
no pains with their writing. On his first job after
leaving school he received a letter from the presi-
dent of the company expressing pleasure with the
letters he had written the company, but ending up
with the request that he use a typewriter there-
after or cease from writing to firms with which
the company did business, as his handwriting was
so poor that it looked as if the company employed
a cheap man. It was true they were having their
work done cheaply, but the writer flattered himself
that it was not a cheap man who was doing it. The
rebuke was kindly meant and was received in the
proper spirit, a copy book purchased and a severe
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 121
course of training begun, until a fairly legible
hand was the result, for which he has never ceased
to feel grateful to his old boss.
A personal application for a position should
not end with a visit. Leave a card containing
name and address and a statement as to kind of
work wanted, together with references. This card
should be the regulation 3- by 5-inch card
index size, and all information should be let-
tered *on it by the applicant, as a means
of showing a sample of his work. This in-
volves considerable labor, of course, but it
pays, for such a card is filed for reference,
while smaller cards will be thrown away almost as
soon as the applicant closes the door on leaving
the office. A hektograph, the size to print such
cards, does not cost much, and is a good invest-
ment. A few days after calling make a written
application and follow it a month or so later with
another. Few applications are kept more than
thirty days, for a man is supposed to have obtained
a position within that time.
The subject matter of this chapter is inspired
by the desire of the writer to assist young men to
sell their services in the best way. He had many
years' experiences as a "job chaser," and also as
an employer of assistants, so can give instruction
on this most important subject as a result of
experience on both sides of the desk.
Instead of resenting the fact that work must
122 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
be hunted for, remember the traveling salesman
who must make his rounds regularly to keep cus-
tomers of his house in line. The engineering grad-
uate " hunting a job" is a salesman engaged in sell-
ing his services. If too conceited in appearance,
or, if too meek and modest and shrinking he
will not be employed. His proper attitude should
be one of perfect confidence, unmarred by self
consciousness; he should also be neat and have
an appearance of frankness and businesslike alert-
ness. Some day the weary round may cease and
the "job chaser" settle down to steady employ-
ment, all the better for the hard training. The
period of "job chasing" depends considerably
upon the date of graduation, for the graduates in
dull years may be wanderers for twenty years or
more, perhaps for life. The lucky ones, who grad-
uate in flush times, may not go through a period
of "job chasing" of more than two or three years'
duration, many securing positions immediately
upon graduation, which are in the line of pro-
motion, and may finally end in great importance
and high standing.
To hold a position a man must be competent to
do the work and do it quietly and intelligently.
Industry is a great blessing, and the industrious
man has much to be thankful for in the possession
of such a great blessing as the habit of industry.
The diligent, earnest man will be certain to suc-
ceed if he loves his work, can keep out of debt and
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 123
does not acquire bad habits. The world greatly
needs men who can do detail work and do it well,
year after year, not bothering about the place
above, but ready to take it when vacant, concern-
ing themselves only with the work in hand. A
great fault with many men is that they are not
steady, nor of a contented disposition, this being
responsible for the promotion of the steady men,
who step into the places left vacant by the restless
ones. Restlessness and the kicking habit have made
tramps of many promising men. Nothing except
laziness, combined with drunkenness, will so cer-
tainly kill a man's chances for success as the
acquirement of the insidious kicking habit.
Some students like surveying and do not like
drafting. Surveying and field work can be done
only at certain times of the year, and this work
is not particularly well paid. Drafting now offers
fairly steady employment, and while it does not
pay well in the lower grades, it pays better than
field work after a time, and the chances for pro-
motion are better in the office than in the field.
The man who is good, both inside and outside, is
the best, and the inside man has the best oppor-
tunities for meeting the responsible heads of the
company for which he is working.
No better advice can be given to the ambitious
young man than to tell him to be as good a drafts-
man as it is possible to be. Forget the job higher
up and aim to fill properly the job in hand. Bead
124 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
and Study all the time, and try to associate with
men who can teach something. Avoid the kickers,
to be found in every organization, as the plague.
By acquiring a knowledge of the business one is
always ready for promotion. Do not study with
a view to getting the job next higher, but study
because of a love for the work. The writer has had
to turn away many fine young fellows because they
were not well drilled in the details of the small work
a young fellow is generally put at after graduation.
Perhaps, if given an opportunity, these boys might
have been found competent to be chief engineers,
although that is extremely doubtful, but they will
get no opportunity to show their worth in such
high positions until they demonstrate successfully
their ability to fill minor positions carrying little
responsibility. "He who would be served must
first learn to serve."
The following from the commencement address,
June 1, 1910, at the School of Mines and Metal-
lurgy, Eolla, Mo., by Dr. Charles Sumner Howe,
President of Case School of Applied Science,
Cleveland, O., should be taken to heart by every
engineering student:
The successful engineering graduate will subscribe for the
leading technical magazines in his line of work, and he will
not only subscribe for them he will read them, in order that
he may keep posted in regard to what men in his profession
are doing, not only from the engineering standpoint, but from
the manufacturing standpoint as well. Too many technical
graduates never take a technical journal.
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 125
They say they do not need it for the work they are doing,
which is probably true, and if they continue in that frame of
mind, the probability is they will never need to take the jour-
nals, because they will not rise to positions of high enough
responsibility to make it necessary. The successful man the
man who is willing to do all that is in him to do must know
what other men are doing, and he must put his knowledge to
use in the work which he does from day to day.
In hunting and holding jobs the graduate must
remember that in the United States more than 200
schools of college grade give engineering courses,
and the annual crop of graduates five years ago
was estimated at practically 4000. There are many
night schools and private institutions giving short
courses and partial courses. There are several
good correspondence schools and a number of
inferior ones. The surplus graduates of schools in
every country in the world come to the United
States, for it is imagined that in a comparatively
new country there should be good chances for
engineers to succeed. That so many do succeed
while so many American graduates fail, is a sad
commentary on the American.
Much suffering and trouble would be avoided
if more of the graduates would look upon their
course as one in applied science and not a voca-
tional subject, as the modern idea of education in
opposition to the ancient as expressed in
the now useless classical course. This being
true, it is not necessary for them to try and
126 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
practise engineering. Those who find the condi-
tions of employment in engineering work unsatis-
factory can go into any other business for which
they feel adapted, knowing that their college
course has been a very practical and useful
one. Such men will really be technically educated
business men, and in later years should be valuable
members of boards of directors and officers in
large corporations. If their engineering education
does nothing more than lead them not to interfere
with the work done by engineers in the employ of
their companies, it will serve them and the stock-
holders well.
The graduate should lose no time in becoming a
member in one or several of the leading technical
societies. This gives him standing immediately,
and while the societies do very little in the way
of assisting members to find employment, fix rates
of pay, or establish codes of ethics, they are great
forces for the advancement of the profession. In
fact, the present solidarity of the profession is due
entirely to the numerous societies in existence
which provide reference libraries and places for
meeting and for the discussion of technical sub-
jects, foster acquaintanceship between men in one
line of work and issue periodicals devoted to the
improvement of the work of engineers.
The oldest national society of engineers in
America is the American Society of Civil Engi-
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 127
neers. Membership in this society is based upon
the idea that all engineers are civil engineers.
The American Society of Mechanical Engineers
seemingly classifies all engineers as mechanical.
The American Institute of Electrical Engineers
has a very large membership and is rapidly grow-
ing. The grade of member calls for very high
attainments and the associate member grade is
a large per cent, of the total.
The American Institute of Mining Engineers
is the leading society for the promotion of mining
engineering work.
All the foregoing societies have headquarters
in New York City. Many members are members
in several or all of the national societies, as well as
holding membership in local city and state
societies.
The Western Society of Engineers has the
same requirements for membership as the Amer-
ican Society of Civil Engineers, and has, also, a
student grade, so that boys in technical schools may
join, receive the proceedings, and, finally, when
they graduate, go into the society as juniors, feel-
ing, from the day they enter school, that the older
men in the profession are interested in them. This
society has headquarters in Chicago, with a mem-
bership pretty evenly divided among all the
branches and specialties of the profession. The
large reference library in the Monadnock Block,
in the heart of the business district, is a center
128 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
for members from all over the country, who make
it their headquarters while in Chicago.
In nearly every state there is an engineering
society holding an annual meeting for the presen-
tation and discussion of papers, which are later
printed. In the larger cities there are local
societies and clubs, some of the national societies
having local chapters as well.
In the opinion of the writer, before another
generation, there will be but one national society
in the United States, namely, the American
Society of Engineers, divided into sections about as
follows :
Structural and Bridge Engineering,
Municipal and Sanitary Engineering,
Mechanical Engineering,
Electrical Engineering,
and such other sections as may have enough
specialists to warrant the organization. This is the
plan on which the Western Society of Engineers
is conducted and it works very well. By combining
all the societies in this manner the engineering pro-
fession will be compact and can work well as a unit.
The largest society of engineers in the world is
the German Society of Engineers, having
numerous special sections. The present arrange-
ment in the United States and Great Britain,
resembles unpleasantly the division of medical men
into schools.
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 129
There is a strong influence abroad in the ranks
of the profession, markedly so among the younger
and foreign-born engineers, tending toward
organization and the fixing of wage scales,
although the majority of engineers feel that any-
thing savoring of trades unionism tends to lower
the standing of the profession. An increasingly
large element is seeking some protection through
legal regulations to determine the status of sur-
veyors and engineers, a few states now having
license laws. Legal regulation of land surveying is
a necessity for mathematical requirements are
very simple; a knowledge of law and practice
being most essential.
It is hard to admit, but it is true, that the men
who pay the poorest wages, or salaries, to young
men are the engineers with big reputations, whose
charges for their own services are exceedingly
high. The reason is that young men flock to their
offices, seeking to shine in the reflected glory, many
even offering to work for nothing for a year or
two in order to say they had this experience ; like
Paul sitting at the feet of Gamaliel. The writer
feels that license laws will not help the general
public to distinguish between good and poor engi-
neers, however beneficial they may be in the case of
land surveyors. They will help the 20 per
cent, in private practice, but will be of no
assistance to the 80 per cent, in the ranks of engi-
neers who work on salary, nor the more than 95
130 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
per cent, on salary of those who are employed on
engineering work, but have not yet attained the
engineer grade.
The present tendency is to give better pay to
men of experience who have proven their ability,
and maintain the pay of men in the lower grades at
a low level, this being caused by the enormous num-
ber of graduates and their disposition to work for
low pay "to gain experience." Protected by law
against competition with incompetent men, it will
be comparatively easy after a while to use this
same law to hold men down and keep them longer
in subordinate positions. Membership in a
national society is a better recommendation than a
certificate from a politically appointed state
license board.
CHAPTER VI
DOES IT PAY TO STUDY ENGINEERING?
THE drawbacks to any vocation are best under-
stood by the men engaged in it. The half -serious
joke of the lawyer is that no man is fitted to take
up the study of law until he has acquired a taste
for sawdust without butter as a steady diet. The
physician has adopted that joke as one peculiarly
fitting to his calling, and in the funny columns of
a college paper the writer saw the joke recently
credited to the president of a well-known engineer-
ing school. Thus the story which was credited
first to Lord Eldon, in 1780, may really have been
original with a barrister in the time of Nero, just
as the story of Stonewall Jackson's brigadier,
who built a bridge before the engineers "got their
picter of it did," is told by Julius Caesar about his
quartermaster and engineer.
Competition is keen in every line of endeavor.
It has always been keen and will always be keen.
To those who long for the good old times it does
no harm to say that the best authorities on
economics and sociology say it requires fifty thou-
sand acres of land to support one hunting savage.
People in a state of savagery are continually on
the verge of starvation and grumble at every new
birth in the tribe because of the increase in com-
131
132 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
petition. The males being hunters, therefore pro-
ducers, the birth of females is deplored. Perhaps
this is too far to go back for the good old times.
Before the era of the manufacture of power,
barely one hundred and fifty years ago, the lot
of the educated man without private means was
pitiable. All manufacturing was done by hand,
and nearly every man was a handy man. Wheat
at five shillings a bushel and wages one shilling a
day, less than one hundred years ago makes pres-
ent-day grumblers at high prices seem like queer
people. The high cost of living has been a never
failing topic of conversation since the beginning
of speech. In those good old days, one hundred
and fifty years ago, the college-educated man, who
had worked his way through college, and failed to
secure an appointment to teach or preach, was lost.
He was trained with gentlemen and with culti-
vated tastes for the fine things of life without
means to gratify them, it is small wonder that he
started the discussion "Does a college education
pay?" Business was not done then on the scale
it is done to-day and openings as clerks and
accountants were few. The improvement and
and development of the steam engine, which meant
the actual manufacture of power on a scale
hitherto undreamed of by the owners of water
wheels, put the educated man to the front. Educa-
tion became a fetich, and to-day is so essential as
to be commonplace.
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 133
Fifty thousand acres required to support one
savage and to-day some countries support a popu-
lation of five hundred people to the square mile,
almost one to every acre. ^ It is the engineer who
has made this possible. He designs and makes
machines which manufacture power. He builds
railways, which annihilate distance and make all
men neighbors, so that the gospel is being carried
to all the lands and war will soon be a rarity. { He
puts wires everywhere so that "We are as close to
you as your telephone" has become an advertising
slogan. He tunnels hills, bridges rivers, paves
streets, brings pure water into houses and takes
away the waste matters so that health is preserved,
drains swamps and irrigates the dry hills and
plains, carries workmen to their work and back to
their homes in rapid transit cars, so that the
actual working time has been cut down fully 25
per cent., and the average earnings have been
increased, yet the cry is heard that the good old
times were best when there was less competition.
The good old times when the most wealthy lived
in draughty houses, and comfortable chairs looked
like sentry boxes, when people died on the average
ten years younger than the average to-day; men
and women were old at 50, and decrepit at 60,
whereas to-day men of 60 look as if in their prime.
The kings in the good old days had no better food
than the average man of to-day, and baths were
134 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
such a rarity that strong perfumes were used by
all who could afford them.
This long preamble is to soften the statement
that the average engineer is a kicker and is sorry
he took up the business. Competition is keen. The
writer, after an experience of twenty-five years in
the work, sympathises keenly with the average en-
gineer and wishes conditions were better. Yet his
eldest son will shortly graduate as a civil engineer.
Not because engineering is necessarily a lucrative
profession, but because the education is the modern
education, one for service. The young man may
practise as an engineer and he may not, but what-
ever happens to him he will have received the best
education it is possible to give a boy at the present
time, in the sciences that broaden a man. There
is something also in the old belief that a boy has
much better chances for success if he follows the
business of his father than if he starts off in a
new field for himself, where the experience
gathered by those who preceded him is not avail-
able for his guidance.
A large number of young men enter engineer-
ing schools every year firmly convinced that engi-
neering is a highly paid profession. If such were
not their honest and firm belief they would go at
something else, for they do not enter the profession
with the spirit that prostrates a sculptor at the
feet of a statue, or which leads the lover to cast a
rose at the feet of the mistress of his heart. Going
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 135
into the work with the expectation of great gain
and without the true spirit which makes a work-
man fondle and polish and ornament the creation
of his hands, it is small wonder that so many
engineering graduates speak bitterly of their call-
ing. They like to recall the words of Satan in the
Book of Job, "And the Lord said unto Satan,
Whence comest thou?" And Satan answered the
Lord and said, "From going to and fro in the earth
and from walking up and down in it," the modern
engineer being called "A poor devil," because his
career upon earth so closely resembles the occupa-
tion of Satan.
Thousands of young fellows whose fathers are
doing well at a trade go to college to study engi-
neering and be the gentlemen in their father's
trade, for a mechanical engineer is only a scien-
tifically educated mechanician,, the civil engineer a
scientifically educated master builder, the electrical
engineer only a scientifically educated electrical
artisan. If these boys, with their superior
education, would buckle down to work with their
hands beside their fathers, or in their fathers'
employ, there would be a big increase in the num-
ber of multi-millionaires in this and other
countries. As a rule, the education gives the young
men an idea that honest toil soils hands, whereas a
few years of dirty hands directed by trained brains
means, generally, a great many years later in life,
136 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
when one can afford the daily ministrations of a
manicure.
This feeling against soiled hands is causing a
great many disturbances in different parts -of the
country, if it is true that men can turn in their
graves. Numbers of men have left fortunes to
endow trade schools, and, the money getting into
the hands of the wrong men, the result has been
either the establishment of a manual training
school, which, up to date, has not proven its value,
or the establishment of preparatory schools for
engineering colleges. The ideas of the founders
were not followed, for the men who administered
the estates knew little about the class the patron
wished to benefit, and the ambitious "man, whom
they selected as head of the school, felt it
beneath his dignity to be the head of a mere trade
school. A proposed new institution has been
described to the writer as "A superior grade of
trade school," and the writer, thereupon, ventured
to bet that an engineering course will be established
when the funds are available, only to be met with
a surprised "Why not?" Half the engineering
schools in the country could be eliminated, or
turned into low-grade trade schools with immense
benefit to the country.
Too many graduates are turned out of engi-
neering schools who are absolutely unfit tem-
peramentally for the work. Their awakening is
rude. The chances for success in engineering are
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 137
about as good as in any other learned profession,
perhaps slightly better. None of the learned pro-
fessions offer much chance to secure more than a
comfortable competence at best. It is the mistaken
idea that engineering is a combination of learned
profession and remunerative business that crowds
the ranks with the unfit, makes conditions of
employment irksome and keeps down pay.
The chances for continuous employment are
very slim. Many engineers never acquire a com-
petency ; the periods of non-employment often last
long enough to get a man in debt. Once in debt
his case is almost hopeless. He works for a
salary when he works at all, and there is small
opportunity to recoup losses, for the salaries are
just large enough to live on. This recurrence of
idle periods when the treasury is empty is the
cause of most of the poverty and distress in the
world. In this the educated man has no advantage
over the laboring man. He is, in fact, worse off
than the laborer, for he cannot descend to the doing
of manual work without losing caste and being
looked upon by his relatives as a failure. Men
hold on, year after year, at first because to try to
secure other work would be deemed a tacit con-
fession of failure, and this would be damning, as
in the popular mind engineering is the best paid
business in the world ; finally, the disheartened man
is compelled to hang to the one thing he under-
stands best, because he reaches an age when a man
138 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
finds it practically impossible to make a start with-
out capital in some other line of work. If he were
a merchant, whose sole business is to buy and sell,
it would make little difference what he should
finally buy and sell, but to leave a profession
means to go into some line of work entirely
foreign to all previous experience, and the throw-
ing away of all the experience thus far gained.
After a number of years prospective employers
begin to turn a man down because he has worked
in too many places. It is a source of keen humilia-
tion to many high-minded men that they have
changed often and have not suceeded in getting a
permanent footing, but they are in this predica-
ment through no fault of their own. The engineer-
ing graduate, who is turned loose in the world dur-
ing a period of business depression, such as is
experienced in the United States at intervals of
about ten years, seldom, if ever, gets solidly on
his feet. He is a wanderer from job to job to
the end of the chapter, be he the most capable man
in the world and a worshipper of his calling. He
further experiences poignant suffering in seeing
class after class of young men graduate years
later than he and step into good positions just
because they happened to graduate in years when
men were in demand and young fellows start at
almost any pay they can get. This cruel condition
is understood by some employers, but the majority
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 139
give it no thought and are disposed to blame a man
who changes positions often.
Reference has been made to the artificial
demand, which leads to many newspaper stories
being written about the great demand for engineers
and the short supply. There is another hateful
thing which also causes a great deal of suffering,
and is most unjust, namely, the fact that many
head draftsmen and superintendents own stock in
employment agencies which charge a fee for secur-
ing men positions. The writer has known of
instances where forty draftsmen have been laid
off for lack of work to keep them busy and of a
hurry call being sent to an employment agency for
men in less than a week. This happens so fre-
quently that it is a strange thing that the directors
do not look into the matter and investigate such
wholesale changes. When a draftsman enters the
office of an engineer and asks for work, saying
that he had been just laid off by a certain com-
pany, and the engineer knows that company is at
that very moment looking for draftsmen, it takes
him but a few moments to decide that the appli-
cant before him must have been below the
standard or he would have been retained. These
agencies charge 10 per cent, of the first month's
salary for a position lasting less than six months ;
25 per cent, of the first month's salary for a posi-
tion paying less than $75 per month and lasting
140 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
more than six months; 40 per cent, of the first
month's salary for a position paying more than
$75 and less than $175, and lasting more than
six months; 60 per cent, of the first month's
salary for a position paying more than $175 and
lasting more than six months.
The charge is not made that much of the seem-
ingly unbusinesslike reduction in forces is made
because some one is interested in a nearby employ-
ment agency. The statement is merely made that
this might be a reasonable explanation since one
man told the writer that he lost a position when
the manager of his company found out he got a
10 per cent, commission on all business he sent to
a certain agency, besides owning $500 worth of
stock in the agency, on which his dividends were
about 8 per cent, per annum. The writer had fre-
quent dealings with a certain agency some years
ago, and this agency he always believed, and
still believes, did everything in a square way.
Nevertheless, he declined to purchase any of the
stock when it was offered him, because he did not
like the idea of making money out of his unfor-
tunate brothers in the profession.
There are reputable agencies, and it is for-
tunate there are, for otherwise many men would
have an exceedingly hard time getting in touch
with vacancies they are capable of filling. This
question of finding employment for men is one that
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 141
should be taken up by all the engineering societies.
An employment bureau could be established in
every large city, supported by members of the
different societies, for the sole purpose of
securing transient employment for members. A
small fee, say of 5 per cent, of the first month's
salary could be charged until the actual cost of
operating the agency is discovered, when the
charges can be made to cover the actual cost only.
In this way all the societies can secure new mem-
bers and will be doing a needed work. If this work
is properly done there will be heard less of the
present agitation for license laws and the forma-
tion of organizations with trades union ideas and
sentiments.
Some assistants in the office of Messrs. D. H.
Burnham & Co., in Chicago, organized a few years
ago the American Technical Association, which
has nicely furnished offices in that city. This is
a voluntary association of engineer assistants and
draftsmen, organized as a mutual benefit associa-
tion to keep the members employed. The dues are
small and no fee is charged for securing a posi-
tion. All that is asked of a man after he goes
to work is that he keep up his dues so other
men will be helped. The membership is grow-
ing rapidly and such an organization deserves
to be encouraged. The way to help it is to
send to the secretary when assistants are wanted,
and finally the society will be able to keep a secre-
142 ENGINEEKING AS A VOCATION
tary constantly employed on salary to do this
altruistic work. Every large city should have a
branch of this association, unless the large societies
will unbend from their dignified position and take
cognizance of the member who is never able to get
a footing on the shifting sands.
Occasionally a man who has been on the rack
for years does get a position where he apparently
has a chance to make good. The first thing that
happens is very often the starting up of what is
commonly termed "the anvil chorus," by men
longer in the employ of the company, who feel
aggrieved at a newcomer being put over them and
at a larger salary. With the objectors the ques-
tion of competency is second to that of long
service. The newcomer, interloper, according to
the older employes, is generally a man of very
broad experience, and has an intimate knowledge
of systematic methods employed in many estab-
lishments. Generally he has worked out methods
of his own for doing work expeditiously and
economically. All attempts on his part to intro-
duce innovations are opposed, not always openly,
until he either resigns, or finally settles into the
grooves and travels with the rest of the crowd,
much to the disgust of the management, for
his selection was due to a desire to have new life
put into the work. His resignation is then either
asked for, or his position from that time becomes
a purely political one, held by finesse and not
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 143
gauged by material results. Few corporations
know how much the fetich of system and red tape
is costing them, but as young men go in at the
bottom and gradually grow into conservative ways,
it is seldom that an older man has an opportunity
to break in and become permanently attached to a
payroll, for he is a disturbing element. The pay
of the middle-aged engineer is good when he is
working, if he demands good pay and can show
results. He works on the unit system, the system
that implies good organization with a minimum
of machinery that wears and induces lost motion.
It happens often to old experienced engineers
that a firm will employ them on contract for a
year and put them in sole charge of the construc-
tion or designing department, with instructions to
systematize it and effect as much saving as pos-
sible. Their long and varied training having made
them good organizers they go to work joyfully and
finally get matters in such shape that they have
an opportunity to take it easy. The organization is
put in such good order that it runs like well-made
and well-lubricated machinery. The reward of the
engineer is to be "laid off" when the contract time
is up, the young chap, who acted as principal
assistant during the change, getting the position
thus left vacant at half, or sometimes less than
half the salary. The irony of the whole deal is
often revealed when it is discovered that the young
fellow knew months before that the change would
144 ENGINEEKING AS A VOCATION
be made, and was told to prepare himself to take
charge of the work, but say nothing to the older
man about it. This is not uncommon.
When dull times come in all engineering estab-
lishments, the highest salaried men are laid off
first, a recent graduate being advanced to the title
at half the pay. His turn comes with the next
panic period in business, for the schools are busy
turning out graduates "to supply, if possible, the
demand that exists for the graduates of this well-
know institution,' 7 to quote from certain printed
matter. Were such changes not made there would
be no promotion possible for young men. Even in
the army and navy, where the officers have life
jobs, it is necessary to have retiring boards work-
ing, in order that there will be a movement toward
the top strong enough to prevent discouraged men
from leaving the service. The retired officers,
however, go on half pay, while the thrown-off
engineer has to hustle for a job, with the stigma
of dismissal attached to him.
Many companies manufacturing engineering
specialties will secure an experienced man of wide
acquaintance to push their goods on commission.
Thinking that here, at last, is an opportunity to
quit salaried work and get into business for him-
self, the man pushes the goods hard, sometimes
almost verging on the unprofessional in using the
meetings of his society for places to introduce dis-
cussions that will bring out the name of his com-
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 145
pany, and finally opens the market. The sales
then mount up in volume and he handles most of
the business from an office by correspondence. It
is then that the company begins to grumble about
the amount of his commissions, and when the year
ends he is displaced by a young engineering grad-
uate working on a salary.
Engineers in private practice find that the
character of their work changes from year to year.
First there is a railway boom in their vicinity and
they are railway specialists; then new towns are
developed and they are highway specialists. When
the section settles up more they are in demand for
the purpose of building water works systems.
Then follows sewerage and finally water purifica-
tion and sewage purification. To-day most of the
engineers in private practice are busy on the
valuation of public utilities. No engineer in pri-
vate practice can tell in January just what his
principal work will be during the coming twelve
months. Since this is the case with men able
to support an establishment, and with the means,
one would suppose, to keep to one line of work,
how much more apt is the wanderer working
always on salary, to change the nature of his
employment with nearly every new job. When one
considers this seriously, the teaching of narrow
specialties in schools is seen to be absurd, except
in schools situated near centers where the specially
trained men can be absorbed as fast as produced.
146 ENGINEEBING AS A VOCATION
It is not always, in fact it is seldom, the specially
trained young man who gets the high pay, but the
man of broad experience, who has acquired the
ability to absorb quickly the essentials, which will
enable him to perform properly the duties per-
taining to the position in which he finds himself.
One engineer in seeking a position showed
excellent references from many employers, all men
of high standing. The gentleman to whom he was
applying for employment said:
"I think your letters are all right and the
parties to whom you referred me have answered
promptly and favorably, but all the same I think
there must be a screw loose somewhere. It seems
to me a man of the ability with which you are
credited should be settled. In fact, the letters are
too good. You have never held a job more than
eight or ten months, and I want a steady man. We
have decided to get a young man, who will work for
less pay and who is up in the very latest methods,
and who has not been out long enough to have
acquired the tramp habit that so many of you older
men seem to have acquired."
"I guess it is all up with me then," said the
engineer. "How long will this job of yours last,
anyhow?"
"O, about seven or eight months, I guess. If
we can get the right kind of a pusher it should
be done sooner."
"What will you put the engineer at then?"
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 147
"Why nothing. This is the only time we have
ever employed an engineer, and we will have noth-
ing more for him after the building is completed. ' '
"Well, then," said the engineer. "Has it not
struck you that every one of my past employers
was in your case ? I have made an enviable reputa-
tion in this particular line of work and can save
you money even at the salary you say is high. I
have been always employed as a specialist. A man
hires me and lets me go when the work is done.
He is my friend from that time on and always
willing to recommend me. You need have no fear
about lack of steadiness on my part, because my
jobs are short time jobs. I am ready at any time
to accept a good paying, permanent position. You
employ a lawyer because of his experience, but his
having worked for many people is a recommenda-
tion, not a drawback. The difference between
the engineer and the lawyer is that the engineer
works on a salary for one man at a time, and
the lawyer works for fees for many people at one
time. You can, if you wish, employ some engineer
who is in private practice to do your work on a fee
and keep a resident engineer on the job, but you
find it comes cheaper to employ a man on a salary.
You should consider that the more experience a
man has had the more money he should be able
to save you. The physician and the lawyer stay
in one place and work for small fees, but the engi-
neer, having to give his whole time on salary to
148 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
his employer, must work in many places and never
lias a home. He is continually making new
acquaintances and being forgotten by the old."
The manufacturer saw the point and the engi-
neer was employed, carrying the work through to
a successful end and adding another good name to
his list of references. He is not a perfectly happy
and contented man, however, for he long ago
passed the age limit for permanent positions and
must continue to the end of the chapter a "job
chaser."
Private practitioners have been referred to a
number of times. Men employing engineers
demand a showing of experience, so that a man
cannot go into private practice as a consulting
engineer until he has had considerable experience.
Some young fellows at school announce their
intention of opening offices as consulting engineers
after graduation. Some try it for awhile, but
they soon see the comedy side of it and the offices
are closed; generally closed automatically by the
exhaustion of the pocketbook. When a man goes
into private practice too early in life his work
is apt to be small in character, so that he gains
no really valuable experience in the doing of
it. By dint of hanging on he may finally secure
enough small work to eke out a living, but the
pay is small and the work of a petty character.
Most of it is surveying. When the man of middle
age and ripe experience goes into private practice
ENGINEEEING AS A VOCATION 149
as a consulting engineer he has a wide acquaint-
ance with many who can send friends to him, and
it is not very difficult to get a start. To start, how-
ever, requires an office in a good location, with an
assistant or two, and the expenditure of consider-
able money in promotion work. In a city like
Chicago it requires a capital of at least ten thou-
sand dollars, and an experience of not less than
fifteen or twenty years, while in New York the
cost will be double. The beginner may be very
lucky in the first year and secure some clients of
a good kind so that he will be fairly on his feet
with the expenditure of less than two thousand
dollars, but such happenings are like many strange
things that Fate deals out to men ; they go by the
generic term of "Chance." There are losses in
all lines of business, and the private practitioner
in engineering is no exception to the general run
of business men. That many fail in private prac-
tice is due to lack of capital, the item which causes
so many failures in all business lines. There
would be more successful men in private practice
if the expenses of conducting the business and
legitimate promotion work were not so heavy. The
young attorney can go into private practice
immediately upon graduation and do well, for he
needs only to consult books to give opinions, and
is seldom away from his office more than a few
hours at a time. The young physician may open
an office immediately after graduation and grad-
150 ENGINEEKING AS A VOCATION
ually work up a pretty fair practice, his clients
knowing always what his office hours are, and gen-
erally preferring a young man, for they consider
him to be well up in the latest methods in surgery
and medicine.
The engineer, on the contrary, cannot hope to
succeed in private practice until he has managed
to secure a broad experience and he must have his
affairs so arranged that evidences of his experience
can be produced upon demand to satisfy pro-
spective clients. This then postpones his entrance
into private work until near, or past middle age.
His work is also of such a nature that it takes him,
or his assistants, away from his office, and often
from the city in which his office is located, for
months at a time. He must, therefore, possess
enough capital to be in a position to employ men
on salary to go out and do the detail work and
small work which cheaper men than himself can
do, in order that he may be available for consulta-
tion and advice when needed by his clients. Until
the engineer has enough capital to run his business
in this manner he is no better than the wandering
" job chaser," plus the expense of office rent, adver-
tising and general promotion. A great many engi-
neers open offices in a small way, going out and
securing work and bringing it back to the office to
attend to personally. Such men seldom get impor-
tant work and life is always a struggle. The engi-
neer in private practice must be a business man
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 151
and learn to employ competent assistants on work
they can do as well as he, his part being to secure
the work, guide it when it has reached the point
where his judgement is worth many dollars to his
client and act in emergencies. The consulting
engineer satisfies the definition of Wellington he
can do well with one dollar what any bungler can
do after a fashion with the expenditure of two
dollars. The young man with insufficient experi-
ence is more or less of a bungler and the " prac-
tical" man is generally a bungler.
There is no rule to govern pay. The engineer
has his fixed charges and it is the client who
determines for himself just how much he can
afford to spend on engineering services in order to
save money. Occasionally, in fact, frequently, the
client makes a mistake in employing a cheaper
man than he should. Some consulting engineers
charge, earn and receive fees of five hundred dol-
lars per day. The number of men in the United
States in so enviable a position may probably be
counted on the fingers of a man possessing the
normal equipment of fingers. Needless to say they
do not receive such pay every day in the year, nor
for many days in any year. The bulk of their
income comes from work they undertake on per-
centage, the same as an architect. They serve a
class of clients that makes it necessary to employ a
large staff and rent offices in expensive buildings
152 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
so that some engineers are under an expense of
from one to five thousand dollars per week.
The general charge for consulting engineers is
one hundred dollars per day, with expenses added
when the employment takes them away from their
home city. A great many good men can be
obtained for fifty dollars per day. Men who have
worked up a fairly good practice on medium and
small work and who are seldom engaged by the
more wealthy employers, charge twenty-five dol-
lars per day. The average engineer in private
practice starts out with a charge of about fifteen
dollars per day for strictly consultation work and
ten dollars per day for ordinary work. In places
of less than 25,000 inhabitants the usual rate is
about eight dollars per day, while, surveyors
seldom charge more than five dollars per day for
their work. The day of an engineer away from
his office is not eight hours, but is generally
counted from an hour before the sun rises until as
far into the night as is necessary to get his notes
in shape. A number of years ago the writer was
located in a small western town and his charges
were as follows : Important work of a strictly con-
sultation nature, twenty-five dollars per day for
less than one week, plus expenses, and when work
lasted more than a week the charge was twenty-
five dollars for the first three days, twenty dollars
for the next three days and fifteen dollars for the
remainder of the time. Few jobs of this kind
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 153
lasted more than three days, the sliding scale being
an inducement to get longer employment, an
artifice that often succeeded. For general work,
such as surveying, drafting and taking charge of
construction, ten dollars per day and expenses for
less than twenty days' work ; for more than twenty
days' work, ten dollars per day for the first ten
days and nine dollars per day for the second ten
days, after which the charge was eight dollars
per day for the following thirty days, dropping
to six dollars per day and remaining at that level
until the completion of the work. There were two
reasons for this sliding scale, the first and most
important being that it acted to make jobs last
longer ; the second being that the high-class work
is generally the first part of every job. After the
plans are made the work is of such a routine nature
that the average employer is tempted to dismiss
a highly paid man and employ a cheaper one to
look after the execution of the contract. This is
where the average employer makes a mistake, and
few can be made to see it that way, but they are
willing to employ as a superintendent, the man
who planned the work rather than put on a
stranger, provided the difference in pay is not
great. The work in that section was of such a
nature that no engineer could employ assistants
to do his work, all employers insisting upon
the personal attention of the engineer, so there
was small opportunity to do much more work than
154 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
a man could do in the twenty-four hours, so
mercifully allotted to a day. Sunday was a fine
day in which to catch up. From the first of
November to the following April the engineer had
plenty of time to improve his mind, provided he
was able to purchase books and papers.
When men in large cities ask less than twenty-
five dollars per day and expenses for their services,
it is understood they have severe competition ; how
severe it is impossible to tell. When the average
engineer loses a salaried job and is looking for
another he often takes up consultation work and
hawks his services from office to office of men who
employ consulting engineers. Taking up such
work as a temporary expedient only and needing
it to keep alive, he works for fees ranging from
three to six dollars per day. When a negro
preacher, who received an annual salary of fifty
dollars, was told that it was mighty poor pay, he
replied that he gave in return mighty poor preach.
The laborer is worthy of his hire and the cheap
man is generally dear at any price. When a man
knows he is working for less than his services are
really worth, and feels that his employer realizes
it, he works always with a discontented feeling and
gives just as little as possible.
The enormous growth in number and size of
corporations conducting vast industrial enter-
prises has absorbed thousands of technically
educated men annually, but the age limit for
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 155
employment has been lowered. The semi-socialistic
policy of pensioning employes after they reach a
certain age, or have completed a definite number
of years of employment, compels employers to
adopt a rule fixing an age limit for new employes.
This rule also works to assist consulting engineers,
who are employed on transient work requiring
broader experience than any of the men in the
engineering department of the corporation possess,
but this is incidental. The fixing of a maximum
entering age limit insures getting the maximum
number of years of employment out of a man
before retiring him. Fifty years ago the average
age of college graduates was about twenty-one,
while to-day few boys graduate from high school
under the age of nineteen. The average age of
engineering school graduates is about twenty-
three, and the deadline in securing permanent
salaried employment is between thirty and thirty-
five. A corporation pensioning employes after
thirty years' continuous service does not like to
have men on the payroll long after they are sixty.
If the young technical graduate, therefore, does
not succeed in landing a permanent salaried job
before the age of thirty-five he is doomed to roam
the earth.
Men who specialize most closely at school are
the poorest paid, as a rule. They so thoroughly
prepare themselves in the specialty that they are
narrow and, perforce, compelled to look for posi-
156 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
tions in which this knowledge is necessary. Manu-
facturers and corporations take advantage of this.
When more assistants are required in certain
departments the information is conveyed in some
way to a nearby technical school, or an intimation
is given to the omnipresent newspaper reporter or
special writer that there is a lack of trained men
for such work and that a job will be given to every
young man who specializes in this particular
subject. When the news gets out there is great
interest manifested in it by the seniors, who have
electives, and in the spring, the Dean, in a flowery
speech, which is sent broadcast over the country
by the Associated Press, announces that the entire
graduating class was supplied with positions
before graduation, and was, with difficulty, held
in school until the last day.
Dissatisfaction with the prospects for advance-
ment is soon manifested, and one by one the boys
drop out, or are discharged for kicking and
grumbling, finally leaving only a few, who, being
relieved of close competition, do have some oppor-
tunity to advance. Frequently the men who are
left and go to the top, are not the best of the
lot, but they deserve what measure of success they
achieve because they stick. The restless ambition,
or desires, of the American boy and his quickness
to resent exploitation gives the well-trained
foreigner his opportunity. Coming from a
crowded country where pay is low, the pay the
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 157
American considers absurdly low is to him, handi-
capped by the necessity for learning a new
language very good and he stays year after year,
proving himself steady and reliable. He has bred
in him a feeling of content when his bread and
butter are secure. His many years of scholastic
training have given him a liking for the quiet
studiousness of the laboratory, the computing
room and drafting office, which the American boy,
with his fewer years of less intense schooling,
interspersed with practical outdoor life and
indulgence in field athletics finds irksome. The
foreigner is, therefore, preferred in many places
for the reason that he fits in very nicely as a well-
adjusted part of a machine. He is not obnoxious
in seeking advancement, but is always ready for
it when it comes. Many foreigners now head
important enterprises in America because they
stuck to a job when they had a chance. There
are no rules to set before young men except to tell
them that if they land in a place where the work
is congenial, they should stay with it and provide
for the future by living within their income. More
men become well to do by saving than by earning
high pay. The men who succeed best in the
world are generally those who are content to wait
for the pleasures of life after they have made
arrangements to provide a surplus out of which
the pleasures will be paid for. There are many
solid pleasures in life other than the wearing of
158 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
fine clothes, eating fine food, seeing the latest plays
and riding in automobiles.
Many professors advise their pupils to shift
considerably the first few years after graduation
in order to gain experience. Men who give such
advice to-day have not kept up with the world, and
do not know their advice is thirty years late in the
United States, and is about one hundred years late
as compared with the rest of the world. The law
of supply and demand is pretty effectually settling
this question of shifting around, and the world
never looked with favor on the " rolling stone."
Thirty years ago there was a dearth of engineers
in the United States, and as much of the work
requires a modicum of training, numbers of half-
educated men entered the profession and some
achieved considerable success. To-day there exists
considerable difficulty in properly absorbing the
surplus graduates of technical schools at home,
in addition to "die Auswanderer" from the foreign
school.
Getting down to salaries, there is no set rule.
The employer fixes rates of pay and the engineer
is free to take it or leave it, this being the reverse
of the rule for compensating consulting engineers
of standing. Much depends on the employer and
much depends on the employe. In one building, in
different offices, will be found men doing exactly
similar work for different employers at widely dif-
fering rates of pay. The writer knows one man
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 159
who receives $3000 per year from his employers
who fear every day that some one may make him a
better offer. Across the street another man of the
same age, and fully as good education and experi-
ence, is doing the same kind of work for a larger
company and with fewer assistants, for $1800 per
year. The men employing the higher paid engineer
are satisfied with him and propose to keep him.
They know they are paying what is generally con-
sidered to be much more than the market rate for
the work he does, but they are satisfied and so it is
nobody's business but theirs. The responsibilities
of an engineer are so great that it would be an easy
matter for an incompetent man, or a green man, to
cause a loss on one piece of work which would
amount to several times his annual salary. This
man, therefore, holds on because he has made
good, although envious acquaintances say he is a
"bluffer," The lower paid man says that he holds
one because he has observed that $150 per month
is close to the dead line and that when dull times
come engineers who receive more than that are
not certain of their positions. He prefers a life
job at $150 per month than the uncertainties that
accompany better pay. He is no sport, but he
has a nice little family and is buying a home on
the installment plan.
Railways give considerable employment of a
transient nature to engineers and the organization
160 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
of maintenance-of-way departments, together
with the establishment of repair departments, and
the fact that railways generally design all their
own bridges and buildings and do less work by con-
tract than was formerly common, has led to the
permanent employment of many men, although the
pay is not very high in the lower ranks and pro-
motion is not rapid. For transient employment
the pay is about as shown in the following table, it
being an average arranged from a study of the pay
tables of about ten roads :
District Engineer, super-
vising several parties on
preliminary or location
surveys $125 to $175 per month.
Chief of Party 85 " 150
Topographer 80 " 100
Transitman 75 " 100
Leveler 60 " 90
Rodman 35 " 50
Draftsman 65 " 100
Head Chainman 40 " 60 "
BearChaiman 30" 50
Tapeman 30 ." 35
Back Flag 25 " 30
Axeman 22 " 35
Stake Artist 25 " 30
Teamster 25 " 35
Cook 40 " 60
Flunky (Cookee).. 20 " 30
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 161
The company furnishes tents and feeds the
men in addition to the above pay; the men fur-
nishing their own blankets. On construction work
the pay is about ten dollars per month more, but
the men pay their own board out of this, taking
their meals in the contractors' camps or in nearby
farm houses, the construction parties, as a rule,
being small and moving around so much that the
keeping up of a cook outfit would be too expensive.
There being always a surplus of unemployed men,
it is possible to equip and send out a full party
within twenty-four hours from almost any fair
sized city. These rates of pay also obtain on sur-
vey parties for irrigation and drainage work,
although on such work the chief of party will
receive higher pay. The chief of a railway party
is not likely to be the chief engineer of the rail-
way, whereas the chief engineer of an irrigation
or drainage district generally goes into the field
in charge of the survey work.
For the work mentioned the pay goes with the
job, regardless of the experience of the man, pro-
vided his experience has been sufficient to insure
him getting the work. Personal acquaintance has
much to do with securing positions on such parties,
high officials generally having relatives or friends
to take care of. The writer has taken out parties
when every man, except the cook and his helper,
was competent to hold any position on the party,
and some had been in charge of parties at some
162 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
time. He has also gone out with parties composed
almost wholly of high school boys, " official sons,"
and college graduates, with little or no experience.
His part was done when he dutifully took them
out and the favor of the officials to their friends
was done when the boys were given positions.
That nearly all were sent back inside of a week as
incompetent, simply meant a little more expense
to the corporation and was expected ; for the chief
is held rigidly accountable for mistakes and is also
expected to cover a certain amount of territory
each day, so only a few green men can be retained
if work is to be pushed. Summer survey parties
are fine for college students seeking to gain experi-
ence and earn money while having a vacation in
the open air. Some railway companies in the older
settled states have a ridiculously low wage scale
for such work, depending upon the work being
done in vacation months by students seeking
experience. These poor dupes fail to understand
how injuriously they are affecting the wage scale,
and the professors, who encourage it and some-
times act as chiefs of party, are censurable for
being so short sighted.
Opportunity is half of life. A study of the two
accompanying diagrams illustrates this most
forcibly. Figure 3 presents a very nice curve
of average income received by graduates of
an institution situated near the most highly
developed portion of the United States, tech-
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
163
nieally and commercially; many of the grad-
uates, no doubt, having gone into a business owned
or controlled by relatives and many having, for
some years, been in private practice in financial
centers. The shaded areas give the highest and
lowest incomes reported, the heavy line being the
average of the averages for each year. The
average income does not represent the income of
men known as engineers, in the common accept-
$8000
| $7000
$6000
$5000
5 $4000
$3000
$2000
$1000
W/A
18
2 i 6 8 10 12 H 1
Years after Graduation
FIG. 3 Reported Incomes of Worcester (Mass.) Polytechnic Institute
Graduates.
ance of the term, but represents the incomes of
men who graduated in engineering courses. Simi-
lar curves can be drawn for classical schools of
equal standing in this section of the country, the
course of study having little to do with the curve.
Figure 4 is the result of a study of a western
school of practically as high standing. The farmer
boys of the middle west make splendid engineers,
but their start in life is in a developing country,
where the work is of a pioneering nature, and
164
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
pioneer work is always illy paid. The line repre-
senting the average income is almost straight, but
up to the eighth year after graduation the two
schools seem to be on an equality, thus showing
that the young man is employed in minor positions
carrying little responsibility. The greater fluctua-
tions in income show that the Iowa graduates
stuck more to technical engineering work than did
the Massachusetts graduates, and the low average
4 6 8 10 12 1 16 18 20
Years after Graduation
FIG. 4 Reported Incomes of Iowa State College (Ames, la.) Graduates.
would also indicate this. In the first diagram the
average annual income at the end of twenty years
is $9000, whereas in the second diagram it is about
$3800. These two diagrams cover the period since
the civil war, when, for about fifteen years, the
country was developing so rapidly that engineer-
ing schools had difficulty in furnishing enough
graduates. Similar diagrams thirty years from
now will probably show a slight rise in the average
income of graduates from western schools, with a
ENGINEEKING AS A VOCATION 165
considerable drop in the average income of grad-
uates from eastern schools.
These diagrams are presented just as the
average newspaper or magazine would present
them. The reports from which they are taken go
into considerable detail and would hardly be inter-
esting to the reader of this little book. To read
the full discussion confirms one in the opinion
that, as a rule, showings of averages are misleading
without an accompanying full discussion. The
report from the western school seems to the writer,
whose experience has been almost wholly between
Chicago and the Pacific coast, to represent con-
ditions more accurately, so far as the technical
engineer is concerned, than the report from the
eastern school. Both reports are on selected
bodies of men and do not, by any means, represent
the entire body of the profession, for a great many
men practising engineering and calling themselves
engineers, are non-graduates. Instead of the lines
of average income representing actual averages,
they represent to the majority of graduates, the
amounts they should be entitled to receive in the
years given. That is, the pay shown as an annual
average, represents what should be twelve times
the monthly pay an experienced engineer hopes to
receive when employed. It is really awkward to
have to explain that the average line on Figure 4
is here referred to, the average line on Figure 3
being a dream after the fifteenth year is passed.
166 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
The average engineer, chasing from job to job,
may work awhile for over $200 per month, and,
after a period of idleness, take a place at a little
over $100 per month. A good draftsman can
generally secure fairly steady employment,
although the pay, as a rule, is not high, for so
much of the work can be done by partially
educated boys and men. One designer can keep
many draftsmen busy and on some classes of work
one computer can keep two or three head drafts-
men with their assistants fully occupied.
Engineers are a product of civilization, and,
therefore, get along best in populous centers. They
are closely dependent upon capitalists for employ-
ment and when capital is not active the engineer
rests. Three generations ago Horace Greeley
gave his famous advice to young men to go west.
To-day a great many engineering students
announce that upon graduation they will go to the
growing western states where engineers are in
demand.
The writer spent two-thirds of his professional
life in states west of the Eocky Mountains, and
has found the East better, so far as chances for
continuous employment are concerned, and far
better when the question of pay is considered.
Every western state has a state university and
many have an agricultural school and school of
mechanic arts as well, largely supported by United
States funds under the provisions of the Morrill
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 167
Act. All these schools have engineering courses
arranged to meet local needs. They graduate more
men than are required to fill vacancies, so that
every eastern man who goes in adds to the con-
gestion and increases the severity of the compe-
tition. The writer has been in over fifty places east
of the Mississippi Valley, having populations of
more than 3000, in which there were no signs to be
found of engineers or surveyors or architects, and
it took diligent inquiry in some of them to discover
that men were living there, or close by, who could
be engaged to do some surveying. It is a per-
fectly safe statement to make that in every hamlet
containing more than 1000 inhabitants in the far
western states a good surveyor can be found, and
in the average place of more than 3000 inhabitants,
there will be an average of about one and one-half
engineers and architects to every 1000 of popula-
tion. In one place of 1700 population the writer
knew two graduated civil engineers, one of whom
paid office rent and the other had a room at home
fixed up as an office ; two non-graduate civil engi-
neers; two land "butchers"; one graduated
mining engineer; three non-graduate mining
"experts"; two architects, one of whom also took
building contracts. Such a condition of affairs is
not at all uncommon in the mountain states of the
West.
To thinly settled parts of the world the engi-
neer should never go with the expectation of
168 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
becoming wealthy, or even moderately successful
in the practice of his profession. He will find in
those countries nearly all of the inhabitants to be
fairly ingenious men in many ways, of small
means, and they do not call upon the engineer to do
much outside of surveying. They use " practical"
men to do work the engineer is employed to do in
the more densely populated sections, where all men
must of necessity be specialists. On the frontier
the book-taught, school-bred man is not classed
with " practical" men, who are supposed to be
horny-handed sons of toil. The work in sparsely
settled parts of the world is of a petty nature when
financed by the local inhabitants and can just as
well be done by less well prepared men than the
graduates of a good school. That is, it is done
well enough to satisfy the men who pay the bills,
for the amounts spent are small, and fine economics
are of the " stingy" sort, real economic saving
being unknown.
When large work is undertaken on the frontier
it is financed from the large cities and the engineer
in charge is sent out from the home city of the
corporation. He is generally fully supplied with
assistants, most of them being sons of men having
influence with the directors, many being relatives
of officers in the corporation. The local engineer
in the frontier town is looked upon with curiosity
by these men from the great city where wealth is
stored and has small chance for employment. It
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 169
happens occasionally that the man sent out is not
fully competent to handle the work and a local
man can be picked up who is perfectly competent.
The chief engineer makes this local man his prin-
cipal assistant to practically take entire charge,
the chief making a good reputation out of the
ability of his assistant. This is something that
happens in lines of work other than engineering.
It is a pretty good plan when an engineer
finishes an engagement out on the edge of civiliza-
tion to return to the financial center before his
money is gone, instead of going into private
practice in a new country, only to be finally
starved out. On a salary a man can live any-
where, and, under proper conditions, a man should
elect to live where he most enjoys life. If con-
ditions are not right then he should live where a
living is most readily obtained.
The true engineer is a man of action, resource-
ful, ingenious, executive; the sort of man who
would succeed whatever line of work he took up.
The work of computing quantities, calculating-
strains and stresses, drawing lines upon paper, is
only clerical work after all. It is of a higher order
than ordinary clerical work, such as requires
practice rather than education, but it is, neverthe-
less, clerical. If a young engineer is not settled in
some permanent position within ten years after
leaving school, he should cast around for some
other line of employment, brave his relatives, who
170 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
never can be brought to understand conditions, and
make a new start. Successful men always win
success by passing over the heads of those who
fail.
The question is often asked, " Which branch of
engineering pays best?" So far as financial
rewards go there is little choice. In all branches
there are successful as well as unsuccessful men.
If the intending student has no ideas upon
the subject himself, and his parents have no
connections whereby they can advance him in any
special branch, he should not go into engineering.
The choice may pretty safely be left to the boy if
he is bent upon being an engineer. Something
more than casual advice should influence one in
the selection of a career.
Steady employment of engineers is to be
expected the closer they keep to manufacturing
lines. For this reason mechanical engineering and
electrical engineering are considered good. The
starting pay, however, is small and promotion is
very slow. In this connection a study of the charts
of average income is good, for the fluctuating
income and low average is in a section of the
country with little manufacturing.
The steady job with a future pays, as a rule,
poorly at the start. The transient job is always
comparatively well paid. Within the past few
years, however, there have been indications that
the maximum for mechanical and electrical engi-
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 171
neers has been reached and the curves of average
income are flatter. The boom period has pretty
nearly ended, and the period of slow, steady
growth, proportionate to population, has set in.
Machines are being rapidly standardized, which
calls for less skill on the part of the office employes.
Salaries may be slightly larger in the high posi-
tions, but they will stay at the present level or
slightly decrease in the lower grades, which, with
the increasing cost of living, means an actual
reduction in incomes as now reported. Future
graduates in mechanical and electrical engineering
must expect to work for many years at low salaries,
competing with boys trained in the shops, who
study mechanical drafting in the evenings.
The exploitation of electrical engineering
students by large corporations has been shameless.
It has been a common practice to send men to
a school with offers of positions for the entire
graduating class. The entering salaries range
from $40 to $60 per month, and each man is given
the impression that the company looks upon him
as a possible second Edison. Promotion in the
main is slow, and the writer knows a number of
young fellows now getting only $90 and $100 per
month after five years' work. They would have
done as well with a $50 course in bookkeeping and
stenography at a business college. They may, of
course, be exceptions, but electrical engineering
graduates have told many "hard luck" stories to
172 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
the writer, which had much to do with his deciding
that, after all, the civil engineering course was the
best for his son, with some additional work in the
electrical engineering department at school.
The electrical business is controlled by a few
large corporations and to one of these a young
fellow must tie himself. The chances for a future
are not particularly good, so far as ultimate pay
is concerned, but a living wage is almost always
certain for those who care for a life-long job on a
salary about equal to that of the average clerk, who
did not spend $2000, nor one-tenth part of that
amount, on his education. It has been remarked
before that some iruen do succeed who can hang on,
and the successful men are not always those who
would have been picked as probable successful
ones, when at school. Often mediocrity wins where
intelligence of a high order fails, because of the
ambition that goes with intelligence.
When mining engineers get fairly started their
pay is good, but in the course of time every mine is
worked out and a new job is sought. In the mining
business changes in the directorate and manage-
ment occur more frequently than in any other busi-
ness, for the average investor does not look upon
mining as a business, but regards it as much of a
gamble. If profits do not come up to expectation
there are insurgent owners of stock who rise and
take control, discharging competent men, and very
often putting charlatans in their places. The dis-
ENGINEEEING AS A VOCATION 173
charged men always labor under the disadvantage
of having to explain why they were discharged
from a mine that was not closed down, but is still
operating. Few mining engineers can expect a
life-long job with one company under the best of
circumstances, and they get in the habit of calling
a three- or four-year job " permanent." This
overturning of management and discharge of men
is not peculiar to mining, but is common in all lines
of business, the average director being no more
competent to manage a business than is the average
politician to run a city. Many business enterprises
would fail were it not for faithful, hard-working,
often browbeaten employes ; men with the special
training their employers lack.
The general education of the civil engineer is
perhaps the best fitted to prepare a man for engi-
neering work, for it is the most broad of all the
branches, except mining, and even that is now
being divided into specialties. The present civil
engineer could be improved by adding another year
to be put in on mechanical and electrical subjects.
Upon leaving school the well-trained civil engi-
neering graduate is competent to enter the office
of any engineer in any line of work and be a com-
petent assistant. If he was well trained he should
be a fair mechanical and architectural draftsman,
and have a pretty good knowledge of prime movers.
This added to his knowledge of the mathematical,
physical and chemical sciences, the properties of
174 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
materials, ability to design structures, etc., gives
him far better fighting chances than his more nar-
rowly trained brother students, who specialized on
smaller subjects.
The business of contracting has been fairly
revolutionized by technical graduates, this being a
field of endeavor in which the engineer is fitted to
shine. Not many years ago the contractor was
not looked upon as a business man, but as pretty
much of a speculator. To-day contracting is a
legitimate business. When a manufacturer can
determine his costs properly he is in a position to
conduct his business at a profit. The system and
method introduced into the business of contract-
ing within late years by engineers, have converted
it into a manufacturing business, carrying no more
risk than that of any other manufacturing busi-
ness. There are a few old style contractors in
existence, but their number is growing less, and
many, even of the most conservative, employ engi-
neers, thus putting to shame the few men who still
claim that the school instruction is not " practical"
enough. The training in exact analysis which
every engineering student receives, is just what is
needed in every line of business, and has been
justified by the experience of contracting since
engineers took it up.
The civil engineer has good opportunities to
start in at the bottom of the ladder in mechanical
and electrical engineering work, and advances very
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 175
rapidly up the ladder in general contracting work.
He has also good preliminary training for work-
ing as an architect, provided he possesses artistic
talent. It is gratifying to see the numbers of
young civil engineers who enter the employ of
.architects to do the structural designing and act
as outside superintendents of construction. The
putting in of deep foundations is a specialty in
itself and, of course, no one is so well adapted to
this class of work as the young man trained as a
civil or mining engineer. The old-time civil engi-
neer, who was almost wholly a surveyor, has disap-
peared and the present day surveyor is that and
nothing else, for a man who has taken a full
engineering course seldom cares to settle down to
the practice of "land butchering" in a small
country town.
The education of a civil engineer is an excellent
preparation for general business, for nearly all
men are concerned more or less with construction
enterprises in these days. This training is
superior to the study of Latin and Greek, no mat-
ter what line of work a man goes into. A business
man having two sons whom he intends taking into
business with him, but prefers that they have a
college training first, can hardly do better than
have one study law and the other civil engineer-
ing, before going into his office to learn the busi-
ness, with a view to partnership later.
Salaries of young engineers, when they are
176 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
working, are generally pretty fair as salaries go
for young men. It is a shock to them, however,
when they learn that salaries do not necessarily
increase with age and experience, but are gov-
erned very largely by responsibility, hence ' ' salaries
go with the job." The curves of average income
in the two diagrams elsewhere presented, show an
increase as the years go by, which is due to the
fact that this is governed largely by the men who
have permanent high-paid positions, and by those
who are in business for themselves, as well, also, by
the fact that, all things being equal, the older men
are generally trusted with greater responsibility.
The bottom edges of the shaded areas must not
be overlooked, for averages are very deceitful.
The maximum and minimum salaries at the end of
the twenty-year periods may be given by a much
smaller per cent, of the total number of men ; that
is, the averages for the first few years may have
been obtained from a very large number and the
higher averages from a small number, which, in
reality, was a small per cent, of the number still
living.
That salaries and the pay of men who have to
seek employment may be low has no effect on men
in private practice, and those whose varied experi-
ence leads them to be selected to conduct important
work. These men get pay commensurate with
their experience and ability. The average pay of
lawyers, surgeons and physicians is less than $600
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 177
per year, yet it is well known that there are men
in each of these callings whose incomes are much
larger than the salary of the President of the
United States. The average man, after all, has
little to do with the income of the more fortunate
man. Each man receives what his services are
believed to be worth, and every properly equipped
man starts with an equal chance.
If he wishes to succeed, the young man must
bear in mind the old saying, ' ' Seest thou a man dili-
gent in his business ? He shall stand before kings.
He shall not stand before mean men." The
greatest measure of success comes to the man who
makes the fullest use of his opportunities. We
may float upon the stream of life, but to some
extent we have the ordering of our ways. Patience,
ability, industry, strict economy, rigid honesty r
good habits, avoidance of inferior and weak
associates, these all bring their own reward.
Given a number of men, each with enough ability
to do the routine work of his calling, success
becomes a matter of the man and his opportunity
rather than matters of exceptional ability or
genius. Opportunity is one half, and the man is
the other half. It is much a question of tempera-
ment, rather than ability, provided one has
ordinary ability and sound training as a basis.
There is more to life than meat, clothes and
money. For the man who is imbued with the right
spirit of the engineer and loves his profession
178 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
there is a serene satisfaction in doing his work well
and holding his head high. The world is out of
joint in many places, and the engineering pro-
fession is not alone in offering salt drink to its
devotees. No calling is free from drawbacks, and
engineering especially is no occupation for the
man whose sole motive in selecting it is the belief
that pay is always high, advancement certain, and
great wealth the sure end.
Life is like a swiftly flowing stream, carrying
upon its surface many floating objects. Some
keep near the center and move on serenely with
no disturbance of any sort, clear to the ocean in
which the river ends. Others float near the edge,
unable to get near the middle, and these
occasionally strand, lying on the sand bars until
a rise in the stream carries them to another shallow
where they again rest. Still others are caught in
some eddy and float round and round in restless
circles until they become waterlogged and sink,
unless, in the meantime, a rise in the stream, or
some other disturbance takes them again into the
main current. In the spring many millions of
blossoms appear upon the fruit trees, but we can-
not predict the fruit crop from the blossoms.
Many infants are born, but few reach maturity.
It is a law of life that not all men reach the fullest
success, to this extent proving that all men are not
born free and equal, although the politicians do so
declare. Real success lies wholly in a feeling of
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 179
work well done in the line of endeavor for which
a man is best qualified and which commands all
that is best in him to stand forth.
Surely the man who " directs the great sources
of power in nature for the use and convenience of
man/' should find a comfort in such work that
will compensate for many moments of bitterness
when on tours of apparently endless "job
chasing. ' ' To make the ways straight in the wilder-
ness, to carry food to the people of all nations, to
make fruits and grains and flowers flourish in
erstwhile desert spots, to be the means of spreading
intelligence broadcast, to build highways which
draw nations together and thus end wars and mis-
understandings, to increase the power of the world
to the end that one man is as five hundred of the
men of olden times surely this is a great work.
Of the truly successful engineer no better
memorial can be had than the following from the
poem by Edward Everett Hale, entitled "The
Unnamed Saints";
What was his name? I do not know his name.
I only know he heard God's voice and came;
Brought all he loved across the sea,
To live and work for God and me,
Felled the ungracious oak,
With horrid toil
Dragged from the soil
The thrice-gnarled roots and stubborn rock;
180 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
With plenty filled the haggard mountain-side,
And, when his work was done, without memorial died.
No blaring trumpet sounded out his fame;
He lived, he died. I do not know his name.
No form of bronze and no memorial stones
Show me the place where lie his moldering bones.
Only a cheerful city stands,
Builded by his hardened hands ;
Only ten thousand homes,
Where, every day,
The cheerful play
Of love and hope and courage comes ;
These are his monuments, and these alone
There is no form of bronze and no memorial stone.
APPENDIX
THE OPINIONS OF ENGINEERING EDITORS
SOME time elapses between the delivery of the
manuscript of a book to the printers and the time
of publication. Much as an author regrets this
fact, in the present instance it has been a boon, for
the insertion of two editorials from leading engi-
neering papers has been rendered possible. The
writer realizes that the ideas he has given of the
profession of engineering are so totally at variance
with the ideas of the newspaper-reading public,
that this corroborative testimony is required, for
the editorials closely reflect all that has been said
in the preceding pages.
It will, perhaps, do no harm to say that Chapter
VI was written four years ago, at the request of an
editor, who wanted an article on the subject : " Will
It Pay to Study Engineering?" He promptly
declined the article when received, writing as fol-
lows: "You certainly must be mistaken or your
experience has been unusual. This is the first
time I have ever read such statements regarding
the engineering profession, which is universally
181
182 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
considered, I might say is known, to be very
remunerative." No arguments could move him,
and one of his corps of special writers prepared
the sort of article he wanted, which appeared on
the front page of an educational edition, in the
latter part of the summer, filled with advertise-
ments of schools, a goodly number of technical
schools being listed. The writer later submitted
the article to a newspaper syndicate, four news-
papers and three magazines, finally being com-
pelled to write this book, in which it is the final
chapter, in order to have it printed. In the light
of this information the editorials are doubly inter-
esting.
CALLING IN THE STUDENT
(The Engineering Record, September 30, 1911)
THIS is the period at which the up-to-date pur-
veyor of education is beginning to realize the
results of the publicity campaign of the last sea-
son. The traditional college president has always
until now been a bald-headed and bespectacled
minister of the gospel, clad in shiny broadcloth and
dividing his time between homilies to his assem-
bled flock of students and instructing them in
Paley's Evidences. But we have changed all that
and to-day the personage chosen to head an edu-
cational institution is very likely to be a polished
and smooth-spoken man of affairs, smartly dressed
and ready to meet all sorts and conditions of men
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 183
with the persuasive affability that leads to legacies.
His chief function is administrative, and he is
become, in fact, the manager of a species of educa-
tional department store, keenly anxious to adver-
tise his wares and judging the success of his cam-
paign by the number of customers who attend his
bargain sales of learning. The change may be, on
the whole, for the worse or better, but the thing
w^hich here concerns us is the nature of the adver-
tising campaign which is carried on and the
veracity of the claims made for the goods adver-
tised. There is no educational pure food law
which compels nostrums to be labeled with their
percentage composition, so that when a skilfully
worded advertisement proclaims the virtues of
mechanical engineering syrup, or electrical engi-
neering cough mixture, the would-be customer
knows as little of its real virtue as the man who
reads the certificate of a centenarian to somebody's
stomach bitters knows how far those bitters vary
from ordinary whisky or whether the centenarian
ever lived.
To be quite serious, the situation in technical
education calls for comment, for the publicity
methods adopted by some institutions, from the
humble but profitable correspondence schools to
the university with 4000 or 5000 students, are often
open to somewhat severe criticism, chiefly because
the respective courses advertised are proclaimed
as nostrums, a few doses of which must inevitably
184 ENGINEEKING AS A VOCATION
lead to distinguished success, measured in dollars.
Unfortunately, of course, those who take the medi-
cine do not always or often reach the expected
result, and learn too late that the published cer-
tificates of excellence are slightly misleading. It
is the purpose of this comment to present some of
the hard facts regarding the courses of treatment
commonly prescribed.
As regards the engineering professions, noth-
ing is further from the fact than the common delu-
sion that they are especially promising and lucra-
tive. They are honorable callings, very alluring
to those whose tastes run in technical lines, and
guaranteeing a decent livelihood which may rise
to distinguished success if supplemented by
extraordinary ability, rare good fortune or an
exceptionally powerful pull, these three additional
factors being here rated in increasing order of
practical importance. Many statistics have been
published in the last few years regarding the earn-
ing capacity of technical school graduates at vari-
ous periods after graduation. They sound well,
but in point of fact they are no more encouraging
than what could be derived from similar statistics
gathered from the graduates of non-technical
institutions of similar grade, or from men of simi-
lar ability and opportunities trained only in mer-
cantile pursuits. The group last mentioned would
practically be impossible of comparative investi-
gation, for the simple reason that of late years it
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 185
has been the fashion for young men of good ability
and from well-to-do families to acquire a collegiate
education of one kind or another.
There are certainly no large prizes to be drawn
in the ordinary course of events from the engi-
neering lottery, and investigation of the affairs of
any large company would show that the big sal-
aries do not fall to the lot of the engineering force,
however competent. Now and then they may be
drawn by men who have received technical train-
ing, but in virtue of circumstances quite apart
from that training. If one were to judge educa-
tion by pecuniary results, as shown by statistics,
it is altogether probable that the supreme place
would be taken by Harvard or Yale, not in virtue
of any special excellence of the education there to
** - ^_ - -^
be obtained, but from the simple fact that both
these institutions have drawn in large numbers
students whose antecedents have foreordained
them to pecuniary success. A few men in any
given class who inherit the great business interests
which mean large apparent earnings raise the
average to a point that bears no relation to the
value of the course of educational training they
may have followed.
As an example of the fallacy of statistics one
may profitably examine the claims made in the last
few years for the so-called business courses of the
post-graduate variety. The nominal result indi-
cates great rewards for the diligent student, but a
186 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
little examination of the situation makes it per-
fectly evident that few or no young men have time
or money to devote to post-graduate courses in
finance, unless they have already within reach
openings for which this additional training is
merely a convenient preparation. Many men of
large affairs proclaim bitterly and justifiably of
the lack of trained men for positions of high
responsibility, but save in very rare instances these
positions do not go to young men whose sole recom-
mendation is education and ability. The college-
educated man who quickly lands in an important
position generally does so because he has been
trained with reference to putting him in that par-
ticular position.
The " business course" is not wholly a hollow
sham, for it imparts information of which, with
opportunity, great use may be made, but the oppor-
tunity is generally the cause rather than the result
of the training. Mental discipline in engineering
or otherwise is, in and of itself, a good thing, and
on the average the well-trained man stands a much
better chance of making good when opportunity
offers than the untrained man. In so far, institu-
tions of learning do not either fail of their pur-
pose or claim virtues that are not theirs, but the
young man who is drawn to them by the publicity
campaigns inaugurated of late years should enter
without roseate illusions, and with full realization
that the most he can hope for is the discipline and
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 187
training that will enable him to make the best use
of his abilities, if he ever gets the opportunity to
display them.
WHAT CAN THE ENGINEERING PROFESSION DO TO
IMPROVE ITS POSITION ?
(Engineering News, August 17, 1911)
THERE may be some among our readers who, on
reading the above title, will question whether
engineers need do anything to improve their posi-
tion. There are plenty of platitudes in print
describing the grandeur of the engineer's work,
the heavy responsibilities he carries, his advan-
tage over other men in being able to make his
work an imperishable monument to his ability.
We think, however, most engineers who are daily
confronted with the bread-and-butter problem will
agree that the present position of the engineering
profession leaves very much to be desired.
It is generally agreed, we take it, that at least
nine out of ten members of the profession are
receiving less for their work than what can be
considered a fair compensation, when the degree of
responsibility, the uncertain tenure of the employ-
ment, the long period of training and experience
required to attain a high position in the profession,
and the income earned by successful men in
other lines of work are all taken into account.
The exceptions to this rule the engineers who
188 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
are amassing a competence or wealth are very
largely the men who have given up the profes-
sional practice of engineering and taken up some
line of business. It is often said that engineering
is a poor business. There is, however, plenty of
good and profitable business in connection with
engineering work.
Certainly, this situation is not one to be approved.
It will be admitted, of course, that the professional
man in any line of work, if we except the modern
surgeon and the corporation lawyer, does not ex-
pect to gain a fortune, as fortunes are rated nowa-
days, in purely professional work ; but at least he
ought to gain a comfortable living and a chance to
save a competence for his family and his old age.
It need not be said that engineers are mercenary
in folding that the work of their profession ought
to be better paid. It is well understood that the
public to-day pays scant honor to success, unless
that success can be translated into terms of dollars
and cents. The engineer wants a larger income
not alone because of the income or because of what
it will yield for himself and his family, but because
he realizes that his position in the community in
which he lives and the respect that he and his
fellow-members of the profession can command
is greatly reduced if he is compelled through
meager salary or inadequate fees to live on a scale
far below that of his neighbors. And what applies
to the man in the higher ranks of the profession
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 189
applies also to the younger men to the rank and
file, clear down to the beginners. We find men
doing work requiring expensive education, a high
degree of skill and, more than all else, a high grade
of honor and trustworthiness. We find men meet-
ing all these requirements and yet receiving com-
pensation which is too often below that of the
skilled workman who is a member of a union.
We shall not attempt to discuss in detail the
causes which have led the engineering profession
into this situation further than to say that they are
traceable in general to the reaction in higher educa-
tion against the old time training which led
nowhere and to the widespread desire among well-
to-do parents to fit their sons for the work of a
profession rather than for a business career.
Whatever the causes, they are beyond the power
of the engineer to remove.
The fact must be faced that the profession is
overcrowded at the present time and will continue
to be overcrowded for a long time to come. This
means that the supply of engineers is in excess of
the demand and that by the process of competition,
wages, salaries and fees inevitably tend toward a
minimum below which the supply is reduced by
men taking up some other line of work.
It has been seriously proposed by some engineers
to follow the example of the trade union and
attempt to limit competition and fix a standard
scale of wages for draftsmen, instrument men, etc.
190 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
It is extremely doubtful whether such a plan
could possibly be made operative and whether, in
the event that it could, it would be, on the whole,
a benefit to the profession. Inevitably, by such a
procedure the profession would forfeit something
of the public esteem which it now enjoys. Fur-
ther than this, it must be admitted that to a cer-
tain extent competition is beneficial to the profes-
sion. If we can have competition that will enable
the best and ablest men to rise to the top, competi-
tion that will displace the third-rate and fourth-
rate men, because men of greater ability can be
found to fill their places, we might then see an
actual benefit to the engineering profession from
competition.
In order to view this question in an intelligent
and constructive way, we must view it from the
side of the public as well as from the side of the
engineer. The public complains that the work of
the engineer too often is poorly done. There are
too many mistakes; there is too much extrava-
gance. The men dealing with large affairs claim
that, while there are plenty of engineers who can
do this or that or the other special task, they do
not know how to find engineers whom they know
to be trustworthy to deal with the largest prob-
lems and not make mistakes. It is recognized that
such engineers when they can be found are liter-
ally worth their weight in gold. In high positions
of executive responsibility, the engineering man-
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 191
agement often makes all the difference between
profits and losses ; between success and failure.
It is not often realized, we believe, how difficult
is the task of the man who wishes to employ a
competent engineer, and how much more difficult
the task is than it was twenty-five years ago ! Not
because there are fewer competent engineers, by
any means ; but because engineering work covers
a far wider range, and the profession has grown
so large that engineers themselves are often at
a loss to find the right man for a special task.
It must be said, too, that the public does not fully
comprehend the great difference between different
grades of competency in engineering. The public
is too much inclined to put all engineers into two
classes the good and the bad. It does not realize
that there are all grades between the extremes.
An excellent illustration of the attitude of the
public toward this question is furnished by the
legislation which has been proposed requiring all
engineers to pass an examination before an official
board and receive a license in order to have the
privilege of practising their profession. Talk
with almost any layman on such proposed legis-
lation and he will express the opinion offhand
that it would be a good thing to have some such
law so that the public would be protected from
incompetent engineers. He has no appreciation
of the flimsiness of any such barrier as a protec-
tion to the public.
192 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
We have so fully discussed this particular ques-
tion in recent months that we do not need to con-
sider it further here, except to point out that, from
the standpoint of the public, there is real need that
it should be assisted in the selection of competent
engineers. It will be admitted, perhaps, that the
banker or the capitalist engaged in large enter-
prises knows fairly well how to gauge the ability
of the engineers he is accustomed to employ, but
that is only one limited aspect of the case. Take
the engineers engaged in municipal work: How
does the average city council know how to pick
out the right engineer when it wants to build a
bridge or system of water-works or engage in a
large scheme for road improvement 1 ? How shall
governors and mayors and public boards know
how to select the right engineers for the works
they have in charge ? Nor is this question limited
to public works. The great bulk of the members
of the profession engaged in mechanical engineer-
ing are in the employ of manufacturing concerns.
How shall the superintendent pick out the right
man for a chief draftsman ? How shall the presi-
dent find the man he needs for a superintendent 9
How shall the board of directors get the right man
for the executive head of their concern? Upon
such selections as these the financial success of
many a concern will directly depend. But in how
many cases is a certain man selected for an office
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 193
simply because fhey do not know where to find a
better one ?
When one stops to think of it, is there any com-
modity of commerce of such great value which is
bought and sold by such crude and imperfect
methods as is high-class professional and execu-
tive ability ? There are recognized exchanges for
buying and selling cotton and grain and metals
and stocks. There are even exchanges for buying
and selling the ordinary grades of labor ; but when
it comes to the highest class of professional service,
on which so much depends, the buying and selling
is done in a manner which leaves everything to
be desired.
Let us take an actual example: Here is a
mechanical engineer who has been for nearly half
his lifetime in one position, having responsible
charge of a certain class of work. He has attended
strictly to business, but his work has been techni-
cal rather than executive and he has made no wide
circle of acquaintances. Some business change
occurs. Perhaps the controlling interest in the
company changes hands. The works may be
closed, or operated under a different system. The
new owners have no use for his services. After
twenty years of steady work he is thrown out of a
position and he has little more idea how to find
another one than if he were newly landed on earth
after a journey from Mars. Further, and what is
one of the most unfortunate features of the whole
194 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
4 situation, a man cannot offer his own services for
sale without immediately depreciating their mar-
ket value by 50 per cent, at least. We may say
this ought not be so, but we must recognize the
existent fact. The mere statement that a man is
out of a job and is asking for another always counts
against him.
Take another illustration and a very common
one : A man is engaged in a steady position, but
at work which he knows to be much below his
capacity to perform and at a salary much less
than he feels he would be worth in a more respon-
sible position. How is such a man to find the open-
ing that will place him where he wants to be ? In
some cases, it is true, a man is fortunate enough
to have employers or superiors who place the obli-
gations of brotherly kindness above mere mercen-
ary considerations and who are willing that a man
should make an effort to better himself without
imperiling his present position; but this is far
from being always the case.
It may be said, in reply, that there are certain
engineering employment agencies carried on by
private enterprise which make a business of regis-
tering engineers who are open to offers of posi-
tions and who, with more or less industry, canvass
possible employers. It may be admitted that these
concerns do, after a fashion, serve as exchanges
whereby the buyer and seller of certain classes of
engineering work are brought together and en-
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 195
abled to do business. But many a man is loath to
place his honor and his professional reputation in
the custody of such organizations. Further, these
concerns deal only with positions in which salaried
men are involved. No solution to this problem
can be considered complete which does not deal
with the employment of engineers for public
work, etc.
We wonder if many engineers have not at some
time or other in their lives felt the need of some
organization of high standing which could offer
their services in the market without in any way
lowering their own self-respect or lessening their
market value. We do not believe any organization
carried on as a private enterprise can meet this
need, no matter how well managed or by whom
conducted.
At various times in the history of Engineering
News, the project has been canvassed of organiz-
ing in connection with this journal of some such
high-class exchange for professional services as
is here proposed; but it is our belief that this is
not a field in which private enterprises alone can
do the best work. It is our belief that this work
should be undertaken by the organized engineering
societies of the country, and that it is the most im-
portant responsibilty which now lies before them.
It is true that in a small way a number of
engineering societies have already undertaken
something in the way of an employment exchange.
196 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
The American Society of Mechanical Engineers,
for example, has for many years published at fre-
quent intervals a bulletin containing a list of its
members who are open to offers of new positions,
together with a list of employers desiring en-
gineers. In numerous other societies the secre-
tary's office has become more or less of a meeting
ground for the members out of work and those
looking for engineers.
The criticism we would make upon such work
is that, while it is good as far as it goes, it falls
far short of what ought to be done to put the buy-
ing and selling of high-grade engineering services
on a dignified and proper basis. Instead of being
a mere trifling side issue, it should be fully organ-
ized and important department of every engineer-
ing society, and it should be conducted on a
business basis.
Let us explain a little more fully what we have
in mind: Suppose in the American Society of
Mechanical Engineers, for example, there were a
complete register including every member of the
Society open to offers of a position, or to engineer-
ing work of any sort, in a consulting or other
capacity, and stating concerning each man all the
information that an employer or a client would
desire to know. Such a list should, of course, be
carefully classified. All the different grades of
work would be included so that the society could
satisfy applications either from the directors of
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 197
a manufacturing concern in search of the right
man for an executive head, or, at the other extreme,
from concerns having openings for student mem-
bers just graduating from college.
It is recognized, of course, that, before any con-
cern selects an important executive officer,
personal interviews will be had and thorough
investigation of the man's past record will be made.
The Society employment exchange would not
recommend one man or another, but it would place
in the hands of a concern in search of a vice-presi-
dent, a superintendent, or a chief draftsman the
names of three men or eight men or twenty men
who would be eligible candidates for the position.
It would show for each of these candidates what
their entire experience and professional record had
been. It would give the names of the men best
qualified from personal acquaintance to speak as
to the ability and character of each candidate
suggested.
We believe that this service, if conducted as it
might be conducted, would render greater benefits
to the engineering profession and to the public
which employs engineers than any other work in
which the engineering societies of the United
States have ever engaged. Of course, there would
be difficulties in the conduct of any such organiza-
tion. There are difficulties in accomplishing any
useful and important task. There would be room,
of course, for favoritism to creep in and for the
198 ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
Society to be made a tool to advance the interests
of a certain few who were on the inside, with re-
spect particularly to the recommendation of men
for the highest positions.
It does not seem to us, however, that this is a
strong argument against the undertaking of any
such work. When the essential principle of pro-
fessional work is honorable adherence to fair and
impartial standards, we cannot believe that it is
impossible for the organizations representing the
engineering societies of the United States to carry
out such an important trust in an honorable and
impartial manner. If any of the societies are not
now organized so that they are truly representa-
tive of the membership at large and so that the
governing body can be trusted with large responsi-
bilities by the membership, then reorganization is
needed in any event.
Of course the argument will be brought forward
that there would be dissatisfaction with a Society
on the part of certain of its members who would
fail to get positions and who might even have their
present positions jeopardized, because it would be
found possible to provide better men in their
places. But failure to benefit such men is no
reason why a Society should not do what it can
to benefit its abler members. The fact must be
faced that, with all the care taken in the selection
of men for membership in the national societies,
there is included in the membership of all of them
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 199
a certain proportion of men of low grade. Of
course, a Society cannot, in justice to its reputa-
tion, assist to place such men in positions where
they are likely to bring discredit upon the profes-
sion. Nor would it be likely to under the plan we
have suggested above, under which those desiring
to employ engineers would be simply given a list
of eligibles, with their qualifications, experience
and references and the employer would make his
own selection.
It is worth while to emphasize the fact even
farther that the public needs this service from the
engineering organizations as much as, if not more
than the profession itself needs it. Millions of
public funds to-day are being wastef ully expended
because of the failure of the public to place high-
grade experts in charge of the technical depart-
ments of public work. This is realized by very
many intelligent citizens, but the difficulty they
experience is in distinguishing the real expert from
the man who poses as one.
If the engineering societies would each create
an organization and make known their abilty to
furnish a list of high-class experts available for
any class of engineering work, we believe their
services would be in demand by city councils, by
mayors, by governors and heads of state depart-
ments and even by many departments of the fed-
eral government, besides the demand from private
business concerns.
200 ENGINEEKING AS A VOCATION
Such a work by the societies would supplement
and systematize the work which is now being done
by many engineers, by the deans of engineering
schools, by the heads of important engineering
firms. At present when a man wants an engineer
for an important piece of work and does not know
where to find him, he writes letters to half a dozen
people or firms who he conceives might know of
such a man. All these people, as a rule, take time
from their regular work to answer these queries
to the best of their ability, knowing that they them-
selves may need aid in a similar search at any time.
At the same time the engineer who is out of a posi-
tion, or who is in a position and wants a better one,
is writing twenty letters to people he knows who
might suggest where what he wants can be
obtained.
Such monumental inefficiency in connection with
the buying and selling of engineering work is a
disgrace to the engineering profession; but the
individual engineer is powerless to help himself
and can do very little to aid others.
Only through the organizations representative
of the engineering profession can a systematic
method be established for bringing the competent
engineer into touch with the employer who desires
first-class professional service and is willing to
pay for it.
The four great national engineering societies
have on their rolls over 21,000 members, who con-
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION 201
tribute annually some $300,000 for their support.
These societies have the standing and reputation
and public prestige to undertake such a work as
we have proposed and make it a success. We
repeat that it is the most important responsibility
which is now before them.
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