Opportunities in Engineering Part 2

The consulting engineer represents the pinnacle, as it were, of professional success. The inventor is something else--a wilding in the profession--and as such cannot be considered in a paper of this kind, save only as to say that he is the presiding genius among engineers, the Shakespeare or Milton among his kind, a man whose path to the heights is nowhere known of men. The consulting engineer, on the contrary, representing, as he does, the zenith of slowly attained power in some certain branch of engineering, a vantage--point open freely to all, is the embodiment of the goal toward which all graduates should strive. The consulting engineer has perfected himself in his chosen field; he has become an authority in his branch of engineering; his word is accepted as final in court and privy council. Having gained to this enviable position only after prolonged study and protracted and wide experience in his particular specialty, the consulting engineer has well earned whatever accrues to him in the way, among other things, of generous fees for his services.

Still, there are consulting engineers who have become so through accident. The writer personally knows a consulting engineer who was following a general engineering practice when called upon one day to advise a group of capitalists in the matter of a garbage-disposal plant of new design for a large mid-Western city. His services were sought not because he was a garbage expert, but rather because he was expert in intricate pipe layouts and the like. However, once he got his hand into garbage disposition on a large scale, he remained in this branch of engineering, eventually traveling about the country supervising the design of similar plants whose object was the economical disposal of munic.i.p.al refuse. Practically alone in the field, his writings soon became accepted as authoritative, and yet the whole thing began with that first call, quite by chance, in a matter foreign to the subject.

Like other professional men, engineers never know when the heavens will open for their particular benefit.

Yet these cases are rare. The average consulting engineer is a man who has won to pre-eminence only through protracted study and hard work in one line. He is a specialist with a high reputation for accuracy and skill in that line. The basis of this skill, of course, lies in a broad general engineering experience, upon which is built a peculiar knowledge of a certain, and not infrequently isolated, branch of engineering.

Heating and ventilating engineers are but specialists grown to such large numbers as to form a definite branch of engineering. Likewise, automotive engineers are men who have specialized through long years in this branch. The man who knows more about building dredges, say, than any other man among his engineering brothers is a man who will be most frequently sought by industrial powers feeling the need for a dredge, just as a man suffering eye-strain will seek out the best specialist known to the medical fraternity. He goes to the one acknowledged authority in this line, and in doing so but follows a sane inner dictation.

And that is consulting work. The individual of money who would launch into manufacturing, knowing nothing of manufacturing, will, after deciding as to which branch of manufacturing he wishes to follow, enlist the services of a consulting engineer big by reputation in this branch. The capitalist may wish to enter the paper-manufacturing field.

Straightway he will put himself in touch with a consulting engineer whose specialty is paper-manufacturing plants, and, having informed this man as to the amount of money he is willing to spend on the venture, together with the location where he wishes, within certain prescribed limitations, to have his plant stand, may withdraw from the thing, if he choose, until the plant is built and in operation. The consulting engineer has done the rest. He has gone out upon location, seeking sites with an eye to economy both of power and transportation; he has supervised the design of the plant and the location in the plant of the necessary machinery; has enlisted the service of a builder whose task it is to follow these plans from foundation to roof in the work of actual construction. For this work the consulting engineer receives a fee, usually based upon a percentage of the cost, and then turns to other clients--waiting in his outer office--who would enlist his services in a similar capacity.

The consulting engineer has other sources of revenue. Like the lawyer, he is frequently retained by traction and lighting interests to guard the rights of these interests, service for which he receives payment by the year. His testimony is valued in matters of litigation, sometimes patent infringements, sometimes munic.i.p.al warfare between corporations, but always of a highly specialized nature. He is an authority, and when I have said that I have said all. His retainer fees are large; his work is exact; he is a man looked up to by those in the profession following a general practice. He has his office, and retains a staff of engineers, usually young engineers just out of college, who, like himself at one time, are on their way upward in the game. He is rarely a young man; generally is a man of wide reading; is a man respected in his community not for what he knows as an engineer, but for the standard of living which he is able to set by virtue of his income. Besides the sources of revenue which are his, and as I have set forth above, he is sought by technical editors to contribute to magazines powerful in his field, and this is a pleasurable source of income to any man in any walk of life.

The consulting engineer is a man to be admired and emulated by all engineering students.

As to the time in life when an engineer feels qualified to enter upon consulting work, that is something which must come to him from within.

Usually the engineer knows that he has become a factor in his chosen branch or specialty when he finds himself becoming more and more sought in an advisory capacity among his fellows. He can judge that he has become an authority in his work by the simple process of comparing himself and his work with others and the work of these others in the field. If he finds that he is designing a better plant or automatic machine, or more economically operated mine or more serviceable lighting station than his neighbor, and, together with this knowledge, perceives also that capitalists are beating a deeper path to his door than to the doors of his compet.i.tors--to warp an Emersonian phrase--then the handwriting on the wall should be clear to him--to quote the Bible.

Having sufficient capital to carry him through a year or two of personal venturing in the consulting field, he will open an office and insert his professional card in the journals in his field--and fly to it. If he be a man of righteous parts, he will succeed as a consulting engineer--and can go no higher in the profession.

The game is certainly worth the candle.

VIII

THE ENGINEER IN CIVIC AFFAIRS

Much has been written of late of the engineer as a citizen--of his civic responsibilities, of his relation to legislation, to administration, to public opinion, and the like. It is timely writing. The engineer is about due for active partic.i.p.ation in civic affairs other than a yearly visit to the polls to register his vote. He has not done much more than this since his inception. His work alone has sufficed, for him, at least, though the time is past when he can bury himself in his professional work and, in the vernacular, get away with it. Men of the stamp of Herbert Hoover have demonstrated the very great need for men of scientific training in public affairs. Such places heretofore have been filled with business men and lawyers. These men served and served well.

But since administration of public affairs to-day is largely a matter of formulation and execution of engineering projects, it is a.s.suredly the duty of engineers to take an active part in these public affairs.

Exact knowledge, which in a manner of speaking is synonymous with the engineer, is needed in high places in our nation. Men of technical education and training have demonstrated their fitness as servants of the people in the few instances where such men have taken over the reins of administration in certain specified branches of our government.

Trained to think in terms of figures and the relation of these figures to life, engineers readily perceive the true and the untrue in matters of legislation and administration, though as a body they have never exerted themselves to an expression of their opinions on matters coming properly under the head of public opinion. Engineers have felt that they have not had the time. Or, having the time, that the public at large, chiefly owing to the engineer's self-imposed isolation, would not understand a voice from this direction, and so engineers have kept silent. The day has arrived, however, when this silence on the part of engineers must be broken.

The World War has been an awakening in this as in other directions.

Lawyers and politicians have successfully dominated our government from its beginning, with a single beautiful exception in George Washington at one end and another admirable exception in Woodrow Wilson at the other.

Washington was a civil engineer, and Wilson, while trained as a lawyer, was an educator. In between these two men there may have fallen a scattering of others who were not lawyers or politicians; the writer is not sure. Of one thing he is sure, however, and that is that engineers in the future will dominate politics to the betterment of the nation as a whole. For engineers are idealists--otherwise they would never have entered upon an engineering career--and idealism has come, as it were, into its own again. The man of vision of a wholesome aspect, the man who can so completely forget himself in his work of service as to engage in tasks whose merits n.o.body save himself and those pursuing like tasks can or will understand--which is pre-eminently the engineer--is the one man best fitted to administrate in public affairs. More important still than this statement is the fact that the world at large is beginning to realize the truth of it. Engineers as a body stand poised upon the rim of big things. Nor will they as a body stoop to the petty in politics, once they are fairly well launched in active partic.i.p.ation of civic affairs. Neither their training nor their outlook, based upon their training, will permit it. For engineers, more than any other group of professional men, are given to "see true." And seeing true, being, as it is, the essence of a full life, is what is needed in our public administrators.

Engineers in the past who have become more or less prominent in the public eye--and there are some who have--have demonstrated their ability to see things as they are. Westinghouse was the first man in this country to foresee the coming of the half-holiday Sat.u.r.day as an innovation that promised general adoption. He granted it to all his employees at a time when lesser industrial captains believed him to be at least "queer." Ford set the pace for a minimum rate of five dollars a day in his plant, and lesser captains still frown upon him for having perpetrated this "evil." Edison, among other things, has told of the importance of loose clothing--loose shoes and collars and hats--to a man who would enjoy good health. The list is not long, but the insight of those who form this short list cannot but be recognized. What these men have said and done concerning matters freely apart from the subject of engineering reveals them as members of a fraternity well qualified to lead public opinion rather than to follow it, as has been the province of engineers in the past. Each when he has spoken or entered upon action having the public welfare in mind has p.r.o.nounced or demonstrated a truth which fairly crackled with sanity.

Engineers belong in civic affairs. The world of humanity needs men of their stamp in high places. Humanity needs men in control of state and national affairs who would hold the interests of humanity sacred.

Engineers are such men. Not that engineers more than any other professional men are sprouting wings--not that. But engineers do see things in their true light--cannot see them in any other light than the one imposed by the law of mathematics, which is that two and two make four, never five or three--and this involuntarily would admit of decisions and grant graces from the point of view of absolute truth, which is, of course, the point of view of humanity--the greatest good for the greatest number. With such men occupying high places in the nation's affairs, the world of men and mankind would leap forward ethically and spiritually at a pace in keeping with the pace at which civilization has progressed under the impetus of engineering thought since the days of Watt. n.o.body can deny _that_ progress. n.o.body could well deny the fact that ethical progress under engineering guidance would be equally great.

I hold a brief for engineers, of course. Engineering has been my major work for twenty years and more. It has been my privilege to a.s.sociate intimately with two men--yea, three--possessed of great engineering ability. The third man failed of great repute, owing chiefly to his advanced--rather too much advanced--visionings. He wanted to talk across the ocean by telephone at a time when the cable interests successfully prevented him from commercializing his apparatus. And he died a disappointed inventor. But he had the stuff in him, the thing that makes for human greatness, just as had the other and more successful two men with whom I as a designer was privileged to work. All were men of kindly spirit, of broad outlook, of unselfish devotion to worldly interests.

Each was a humanitarian. Each saw things as they are, and each saw things as they should be, and each thought much on problems of human welfare and betterment. Of such men in civic affairs the nation, and indeed the entire world of nations, has had but a sad too few in the past. It is to be hoped, and it is the belief of the writer, that engineers will become more plentiful in civic life in the future.

I have always believed that the man who reached an advanced age without a sizable bank-account is a fact which would well serve as a definition as to what const.i.tutes an idealist. There are many such men--meaning, of course, men having a level set of brains, and not mental incompetents.

Such men are inclined to things other than the acc.u.mulation of bank-accounts. They strive toward goals which to them are more worth while--self-improvement, for instance, spiritual growth being a better term. Of such men were the world's acknowledged saviors. A man who can wilfully thrust oars against the current of a stream flowing currency-wise, in such a way as to force himself into a back eddy or pool more or less stagnant, is a man p.r.o.nouncedly great among men. The world is loath to recognize such a man for what he is; yet such men have lived and still live and will continue to live, always more for others than for themselves--seeing life in the true, in other and more gracious words.

Engineers, in the abstract, are such men. The acc.u.mulation of money is secondary with them. Their work holds first place in importance.

Possessed of that professional pride which will not permit a man to set aside his work and enter a more lucrative and materially satisfactory field of endeavor--if he starve in his obstinacy--engineers are men of the temperament, aside from the training, to minister to public needs and desires. Self-effacement is the engineer's chief characteristic. He views largely and without bias. He can see things from the other fellow's angle because he is not an engineer if he has not the gift of imagination. The successful engineer has this most precious of endowments, and, having it, cannot but be possessed also of kindliness and sympathy, which are imagination's own brothers. Kindliness and sympathy are needed in the high places of our government for the people by the people. And because men in time gravitate to their rightful sphere of usefulness through the workings of an all-wise Providence, engineers already have turned and are turning toward the administration of public affairs.

IX

CODE OF ETHICS

All engineering societies have a code of ethics for the guidance of their membership bodies. In each case it is a code based upon other and older codes, codes long in practice among professional men, such as lawyers and doctors. It is a code built up on Christian principles, as it should be, and rarely is it ignored among men of the profession. To do unto others as you would have others do unto you is the basis of its precepts, though more concretely it aims to guide the engineer in his business intercourse with other men in such a way as to give all an equal chance without transgressing the law. The so-called building codes in effect in large cities are intended to hold engineers to restrictions for the greatest good of the greatest number, and the code of ethics in practice among each of the engineering professions likewise was devised toward this end. There seems to be need for it.

Perhaps by pointing out where engineers sometimes transgress, the writer more effectively can indicate the need of a code and the principles of which the engineering code of ethics consists. Even to-day there are engineers digressing from the path indicated by the professional body, though in such a way as to benefit still by the protection of the law, and to be not openly susceptible to admonition from the engineering societies' committees. Engineers of this stamp at best are but tricksters. Actually, they should be debarred from practice, just as the legal fraternity takes effective action against members of the bar who go outside the pale, though nothing is ever done to engineers. Engineering organizations in this regard are weak. The man's name should at least be posted, or, better still, published in the society's bulletin, so that the fraternity at large could know, and, knowing, could warn men with capital to invest--the trickster's especial prey--for its own welfare.

There was an engineer brought to the attention of the writer whose activities were devoted to securing for his clients men of no mechanical knowledge who yet wanted something done by machinery. A manufacturer of paper dolls, say, having entered upon this phase of manufacturing only because he had money to invest and not because he was interested in mechanics, would see the need in his plant for additional mechanical devices to cut down manufacturing costs. The engineer to whom I have reference would find this type of manufacturer his particular "meat,"

because of the man's ignorance of mechanics, and, after clinching him with a contract drawn up by the engineer's lawyer, would undertake to devise for this manufacturer a perpetual-motion machine, if that happened to be what the manufacturer wanted. The engineer conducted a machine-shop in connection with his "consulting" office, where, at a dollar an hour for the use of his machine-tools, he would "develop" his ideas, as pa.s.sed upon by the manufacturer who knew no more of construction or the reading of mechanical drawings than he did of the chicanery of the engineer, and in this way roll up the costs against the unfortunate. In the end the engineer might and might not produce a satisfactory working machine. There was nothing in the contract about this--save only as it protected the engineer. What was indeed produced was a list of costs for the development often of several designs of a given idea that to say the least were heartrending.

Then there is the engineer who for a consideration will bear false testimony against his neighbor, or his neighbor's ox. This happens most frequently in munic.i.p.al traction or lighting wars, set before tribunals under the caption of "The People _vs._ the S. S. Street Railway Company," or in a battle of alleged infringement of patent rights. There are engineering experts, just as there are legal experts, who deem it within their code of ethics to address themselves and their energies toward the refutation of such claims, however wrong or right these claims may be. Engineering is an exact science. It is based on principles hardly refutable. Yet there are engineers who will and can confound these principles before a court of law in such manner as to win for their clients a decision of non-suit where the facts point glaringly to infringement--in the matter of mechanics--or to win for their clients a favorable decision in the matter of costs of maintenance and operation of a railway, in a case of this kind. As has been said, figures don't lie, but figurers sometimes do.

Other instances of breach of engineering ethics, however otherwise secure from the clutches of the law, occur to the writer, but the two just cited ought to serve. At best, the topic is unpleasant and by no means indicates the character of the profession as a whole. Where there is one engineer who will perjure himself in the fashion as set forth above there are many thousands of engineers who could not be bought for this purpose at any amount of money. The profession of engineering is notably clean; its code of ethics rigidly adhered to; the rights of others, both in and out of the profession, regarded with something akin to sacredness. Engineers, as a body, for instance, possess a peculiarly rigid idea concerning themselves in relation to branches of the profession outside their own and yet intimately close to their own.

Called in as an expert in the matter of heating and lighting a building, say, the heating and lighting engineer will rigidly confine himself to this phase of the engineering venture and to no other, however he may find his work again and again overlapping the work of the structural engineer or the industrial engineer--phases concerning which he may possess important knowledge. He regards these things as strictly none of his business, and in doing so conserves the esteem and friendship of his confreres.

The code of ethics is a liberal one among the engineering groups. It has been laid down with an eye to fairness both for the pract.i.tioner and the client. Rigidly held to, it will admit of no engineer going far wrong in the practice of his profession, and, broken, will not land him in jail. It is presupposed that engineers are men of intelligence. A man of intelligence will hold himself to the spirit of the Ten Commandments if he would attain to success, and to the letter of them if he would be happy during the declining days of his life. Most engineers realize this and accept it as their every-day working creed. Life to them, like the medium through which they give expression to their ideas, is a matter of mathematics. Two steps taken in a wrong direction mean an equal number of steps forcibly retraced--or the whole problem goes wrong. Engineers rarely take the two steps in the wrong direction. When they do take wrong steps they are quick to right them. For the code is always before their eyes.

X

FUTURE OF THE ENGINEER

Just at present the future of the engineer is more richly promising than it might otherwise have been but for the war. Due to the period of reconstruction now confronting the world, a work almost wholly that of the engineering professions, engineers for a period of a decade at least are destined to be overburdened with projects. Nor will any one branch be occupied to the exclusion of any other branch or branches. Civil and structural engineers will, as a matter of course, have the first call; but with the work of these men well under way--consisting of the reconstruction of towns and cities--mechanical and electrical men will necessarily be called upon, with, no doubt, liberal demand for mining engineers. Each branch will have its place and serve its usefulness in the order as the reconstruction work itself will fall, with the result that all branches of the profession will be busily occupied.

Manufacturers have been ready or are getting ready for this unprecedented promised activity for some little time. Representatives are flocking abroad on every boat sailing from these sh.o.r.es with schemes and plans for the rapid upbuilding of devastated Europe. These men, for the most part, are engineers embracing all branches of the profession, and each is a man especially well qualified to serve in his branch. In a way he is a specialist. He may represent a giant structural organization, or a machine-tool manufacturer, or an electric-lighting and power concern--any one of the many fields of industrial enterprises whose product is needed to place demoralized France and Belgium back upon a productive basis. For when the construction period is over with there will be need for machine-tools and equipment for operating these tools, such as engines and boilers and motors, all of which come properly under the head of engineering productive enterprises.

Engineers--especially American engineers--will be in great demand, as they are already. Nor will the close of the reconstruction period witness an abatement of this demand. Having once entered the foreign field on a large scale, they will of necessity continue to be in demand not only for the furtherance of industrial projects, but for purposes of maintaining that which has been installed at their hands. Machinery has a way of needing periodical overhauling--even the best of machinery--and this will entail the services of many engineers for long after the machinery itself has been set up. The services of erecting engines, operating engineers, supervising engineers--known more properly as industrial engineers--following, as the need will, close upon the heels of the constructing and selling men--will keep the many branches alive and in foreign trade for much more than a decade--or so it seems to the writer. Other nations may, of course, whip into the field and in time crowd out the more distant--meaning American--engineers and engineering products. But I don't think so, because of the acknowledged supremacy of American engineers in many directions. The war itself taught the world that we possessed such a supremacy, and the world will be slow to forget--especially the purchasing side of nations themselves so crippled of man-power as to be for a generation well-nigh helpless.

So the immediate future of the engineer is richly promising. It is so rich with promise that a young man could hardly do better than to enter upon engineering as a life-work, provided he has no particular choice of careers, and would enter upon an attractive and scopeful one. His work is already laid out for him. Taking up a course of study leading to the degree of M.E., or C.E., or E.E., in four years, upon graduating, he can retrace his way, or the way of his brother, over the battle-fields of Europe, a constructive rather than a destructive agent now, a torch-bearer, a pilgrim, a son of democracy once again advancing the standard in the interests of humanity. He may do this as a mechanical engineer, as a civil engineer, as an electrical engineer, as a mining engineer; it matters not. What does matter is that he will be carrying Old Glory, in spirit if not in the letter, to the distant outposts--the especial province of the Anglo-Saxon race, anyway, from the beginnings of this race--and so serving to maintain the respect and affection already established in these countries by our soldiery. To the writer the thing looks mighty attractive.

Yet the young engineer's future need not lie in distant places necessarily. He may stay at home and still have his work cut out for him. The promised unparalleled activity in the field of engineering on the other side cannot but enlarge and accentuate the activity on this side of the water. Plants will be operating full blast to catch up with the demand imposed by this abnormal activity, and thus the engineer will perforce bear the burdens of production. He will bear them in all directions, since industrial activity means engineering activity, and the work of production cannot go on without him. In the mines, the mills, the quarries, the foundry, the machine-shop, the pattern-shop, the drafting-room, the engineering offices, the consulting divisions--all these, necessitating as they do the employment of one or more engineers in at least a supervising capacity, will have urgent need for his services. Constructive work always, he will grow as his work grows, and because the growth of his work under these abnormal conditions will be of itself abnormal, his own growth under these conditions will be abnormal. He will find himself a full engineer before his rightful time.

Right here it would be well to point out to the young graduate the importance of getting under a capable engineer. For, much as the writer dislikes to admit it, there are engineers who are not capable and who yet occupy positions of great responsibility. The young engineer, fresh from college and a bit puzzled as to the game as a whole, if he accept a connection under an engineer, for instance, whose inventive ideas are impractical, will unwittingly absorb such a man's viewpoint on construction, and so spoil himself as an engineer for all time to come.

Cases like this are not rare. The writer personally knows of more than one young man who enlisted under an engineer whose ideas on administration probably accounted, being as they were good ideas, for his position of authority over matters not strictly of an administrative nature. The man wanted to exercise his authority over all things within his department--not the least of which was machine design--with the result that the young graduate's normally practical viewpoint on matters of construction became warped into that of the man over him, and continued warped for so long as he remained under this man, and frequently longer, indeed, to the end of his engineering career. The young engineer must pick his boss as our young men are facetiously advised to pick their parents. The wrong selection will prove disastrous to him in after-life.

Which is but an aside--though a very important one. To emulate a weakling in whatever walk of life, be it painting or writing or engineering, means to begin wrong. Everybody knows the importance of a right beginning. It is no less true of the young engineer than of others.

And what with the example set by Herbert Hoover and other dollar-a-year men, mostly engineers, in the nation's administrative affairs during the war, the future of the engineer looks bright in these quarters as well as in quarters embracing engineering constructive work wholly. The engineer of the future undoubtedly will take active part in munic.i.p.al and national affairs, more likely than not in time entering upon a political career as a side interest, as the lawyer enters upon it to-day, within time--so it seems to the writer--members of the engineering professions occupying positions of great trust, such as state governorships and--who knows?--the Presidency itself. Certainly the hand points this way. More and more engineers are coming into prominence in the public eye, and with every member of the profession so coming, the respect for men of his profession multiplies among laymen.

It is not too much to say, therefore, that engineers are destined to fill places of great political power. It is to be hoped that they are.

Whether they do or not, the future at this writing amply promises it, and so forcibly that it may well be included as existing for the engineer, as being a part of the future of the engineer.