Technical mastery

“ 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. ”

“ A very shrewd artisan said to me: ``When a young mechanical engineer comes among us fresh from college, only able to make figures and pictures, we rarely have much respect for him: the trouble with the great majority of those who come from technical institutions is that they don't know as much about practical methods and processes as we know.''
I felt that there was truth in this, but, as things were, hardly dared tell this to the trustees. ”

“ To these advantages of technical education, as affecting the workmen themselves as well as the progress of the industry in which they are engaged, must be added the general improvement in the character of the work produced, resulting from the superior and better-trained intelligence of those who have had the benefit of such instruction. ”

“ It will be seen from the foregoing that a complete system of technical education must make provision for the training of those who are to be occupied as journeymen or foremen in different branches of trade or industry, and also for those who aim at becoming managers or masters or heads of manufacturing firms, scientific advisers or professional engineers. ”

“ We are only just discovering that the much-lauded technical education will not make him an engineer or a shipbuilder or an architect. You may give him the tools and the elementary rules, but the rest he must do himself. ”

“ The engineer is the how-to-do-it man. This technical man of action comes in many varieties—mechanical, electrical, [Pg 16] metallurgical, ceramic, industrial, civil, instrument, and chemical, to name a few. ”

“ There is, moreover, a domain in which special technical training is proper. It is the domain of the industrial school, for giving a certain theoretical knowledge of persons who will be engaged for life in the mechanic arts. ”

“ As evidence that technical information is not essential for success in an engineering profession, attention is called to the fact that a considerable number of men who took a course in one of the major divisions of engineering have practiced in another branch with reasonable success. ”

“ What such manufacturers require are the services of a few skilled engineers, artistic designers, or scientific chemists. From the manufacturer's point of view, therefore, technical instruction is not so much needed for the hands he employs in his work as for the heads that direct it. ”

“ He too is an engineer with scientific and technical knowledge and training that control the most delicate of machines ever at the mercy of the elements, and engineer and scientist have supplied him with instruments and equipments embodying the results of refined research and investigation. ”

“ The advance of technical invention will make it possible in the end to transform all mechanical work into supervision. But the process will be long and partial, we cannot wait till it is completed, especially as times will come when technical knowledge will stand still, or even, it may be, go back. ”

“ Why not then follow this general usage, and adopt ‘technology’ as the science of trades, arts, or professions, and thereby obtain consistent and convenient terms to designate the two divisions of education—technical education, that given in the workshop, &c., and technological education, that which should be given as supplementary to all such technical education? ”

“ They urge that, in the interests of the technical industries themselves, the great need is for a training which shall be more than technical,—which shall be thoroughly scientific. Wherever scientific and technical education attains its highest forms in institutions of University rank, the aim is not merely to form skilled craftsmen, but to produce men who can contribute to the advance of their respective sciences and arts, men who can originate and invent. ”

“ He glanced at a list of technical schools. He would call each of them and ask them to submit a list of lab technicians. He would also look over the field of technicians still left in private enterprise. ”

“ The technical work of the engineer requires him to write notes, letters, and reports in a clear, correct, and concise manner. He must be able to read both technical and non-technical writing quickly and accurately. His advancement will depend upon the impression which he makes upon his superiors. ”

“ The thoroughly competent performer must at least possess the intellectual power of profiting from this experience. A candid consideration of his own experiments must guide him in the selection of the better methods, in the discrimination of the more appropriate subject-matter, in the avoidance of his own peculiar failings, and in the cultivation of his own peculiar strength. The technical career of the master is up to a certain point always a matter of growth. The technical career of the second-rate man is always a matter of degeneration or at best of repetition. ”

“ In one of the sinking spells which was thought to be the last, my father rushed into the room. I still see his pallid face as he tried to cheer me in tones belying his assurance. "Perhaps," I said, "I may get well if you will let me study engineering." "You will go to the best technical institution in the world," he solemnly replied, and I knew that he meant it. ”

“ Thus it has come about that the communication engineer has become an original investigator and is extending the boundaries of human knowledge and supplementing the advances of pure science to find solutions for his various and sundry problems. ”

“ The complications of modern industry due to scientific discoveries make it necessary for the worker who aspires to real success to have a good foundation of general education on which to build his technical skill, and the complications of human nature make it equally necessary that the beginner shall find his way into work that is suited to his tastes and abilities. ”

“ By virtue of this same training, as well as by force of current practical interest, the technologist and the professional man are, like other men of affairs, necessarily and habitually impatient of any scientific or scholarly work that does not obviously lend itself to some practical use. ”

“ To do this work is to give a great impetus to pure and to applied science.
Two classes of men come to the front in the development of engineering: the one, men of deep scientific knowledge, to whom advance of knowledge is due, the other the great constructive engineers; men who can work in the large and can manage great enterprises with scientific accuracy and practical success. Everywhere the tendency in training is away from mere craftsmanship and towards power of administration. ”

“ It will not make an engineer of you. But read it carefully, use good judgment and common sense, do as it tells you, and my word for it, in one month, you, for all practical purposes, will be a better engineer than four-fifths of the so-called engineers today, who think what they don't know would not make much of a book. ”

“ Without wishing for a moment to depreciate the merits of any other body of men, I think it will be conceded that the objects proposed by the engineer, and the acquirements, knowledge, and experience that he must possess before he can practise successfully, are at least equal to those of any other profession, particularly after the practical examples exhibited to the world of the great benefits that engineering has already conferred upon mankind. ”

“ When clear ideas have been acquired upon the subject, after careful observation and practice, the comparative ease and certainty with which complete mastery over the most obdurate materials is obtained, opens up the most direct road to the attainment of commercial as well as of professional success. ”

“ The training in technique which they supply has a bearing on the every day life around them which stories of Longfellow's life have not. But that technique, divorced as it is from its purpose, its use or final disposition, is as valueless as a crutch for a man without arms. An elaboration of technology through instruction in the general principles of physical science, industrial and political history and the aesthetics of industry only emphasizes the absence of the really significant factors. ”

“ The chief engineer of any electric plant, of any municipal water-works, of any railroad, of any steamship must have the most profound and intimate knowledge of the details of construction and the method of operation of the machine committed to his charge. Recognition of this fact by the engineering profession is so complete and perfect as to be almost unconscious; and no man whose reasoning faculties had been trained by the exact methods of engineering could forget it for a moment. ”

“ The plodding clerk, without an iota of mechanical knowledge, may perfect a system or an office appliance which will prove of vast benefit to himself and his fellows. The scientist may discover new forces and make new applications of old principles which will make the world marvel,—and so on through the whole category of crafts, occupations and professions. ”

“ Without this power the engineer cannot hope to practice his profession with any chance of success. The formation of correct habits of thinking and working, habits of observing, of classifying, of investigating, of discriminating, of proving instead of guessing, of weighing evidence, of patient perseverance, and of doing thoroughly honest work, is a method of using that power efficiently. ”

“ He who would accomplish most in the profession of the mechanical engineer must best combine scientific attainments—and especially experimental knowledge—with mechanical taste and ability and a good judgment refined by engineering experience. ”

“ It is presumed by us that there will be more young men, wishing to become good engineers, read this work than old engineers. We will, therefore, be all the more plain and say as little as possible that will tend to confuse the learner, and what we do say will be said in the same language that we would use if we were in the field, instructing you how to handle your engine. ”

“ The truth is that the eyes and the fingers—the bare fingers—are the two principal inlets to sound practical instruction. They are the chief sources of trustworthy knowledge as to all the materials and operations which the engineer has to deal with, No book knowledge can avail for that purpose. ”

“ We know that the larger requirements of modern Engineering demand that its practice should be classified237 under distinct branches, such as harbours, navigations, water works, gas works, lighthouses, or railways, not to mention electrical and sanitary engineering, and other branches of modern growth, all of which cannot possibly be advantageously practised by any one member of the profession; for no one mind can grasp the theoretical knowledge, and no one life can compass the practical experience, to enable a man to attain eminence in all these departments of modern Engineering. ”

“ Your first position is that of a master mechanic, who is capable of drawing plans and writing minutely a specification whereby the engineer may know what a well constructed machine is in every particular. He knows the parts and relations of both as constructor and operator, and you are supposed to be the foreman in the shop of repairs. The living person is the engine, nature the engineer, and you the master mechanic. ”

“ Now the inventor and engineer type do not exist only in the world of engineering and mechanics, though it is in that world that they are the most clearly recognized; for they exist in all walks of life. In literature, inventors write novels; in business life, they project railroads; in strategy, they map out new lines of effort. In literature, the engineer writes cyclopædias; in business, he makes the projected railroads a success; in strategy, he works out logistics and does the quantitative work. ”

“ The self-constituted engineer, dazzled with the beauty of some, perhaps, really original contrivance, assumes his new profession with as little suspicion that previous instruction, that thought and painful labour, are necessary to its successful exercise, as does the statesman or the senator. Much of this false confidence arises from the improper estimate which is entertained of the difficulty of invention in mechanics. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This is a very great achievement, and can only be done by engineers of the greatest skill and steadiness. It was long, indeed, before any man could do it, and even now there are [Pg 41] engineers who dare not take the risk. ”

“ Engineers of the present day do not volunteer such general information without charge, or give such a variety of practical mechanism slightly but clearly described, and principles reduced to practice. ”

“ Just now I was comparing the two kinds of knowledge which the theorist and the engineer can have of a machine, and I allowed the advantage of absolute knowledge to practical experience, whilst theory seemed to me mainly relative to the constructive industry. ”

“ The second, How shall we construct a machine that shall most efficiently embody and accord with not only known scientific principles, but also with all well-settled principles of engineering practice? ”

“ All apprentices are given instruction by engineers and foremen in physics, chemistry, knowledge of materials, model making, foundry work, algebraic calculation methods, the handling of graphics, curves, statistics, price calculation, machines and tools and particularly the principles and functions of internal combustion engines. ”