Technical

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ By this remarkable effect of Technical Language, we have the results of all the labours of past times not only always accessible, but so prepared that we may (provided we are careful in the use of our instrument) employ what is really useful and efficacious for the purpose of further success, without being in any way impeded or perplexed by the length and weight of the chain of past connexions which we drag along with us. ”

“ In order to rectify the details I have mentioned as well as some I have not mentioned, I have come to the conclusion that I must devise an entirely new technical system. Technical systems are best when they are individual. ”

“ A technical arrangement, governed then in this manner, by a technical nomenclature, can never be otherwise than confused and unsatisfactory. The reason will be sufficiently apparent, when we understand what sort of an arrangement that must be which can be properly termed a natural one. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To the spinner or weaver who almost exclusively employs women to tend his machinery, or to the manufacturing chemist whose workpeople are little more than labourers employed in carrying to and fro materials, knowing little or nothing of the scientific principles underlying the complicated processes in which they are engaged, the technical education of the workpeople may seem to be a matter of little moment. ”

“ Standardization and the control of technical processes which become more and more perfect with the increasing knowledge of scientific laws and mechanics fling the craftsman in ever increasing numbers upon the scrap heap and confiscate his precious possession, his particular little piece of property. ”

“ It supplies books and periodicals needed for the instruction of artisans, mechanics, manufacturers, engineers, and all others whose work requires technical knowledge [6] —all persons on whom depends the industrial progress of the community. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The history of invention shows how frequently important improvements in machinery are made by the workman or minder in charge of it, and adds weight to the arguments already adduced for giving technical instruction to persons of all grades employed in manufacturing industry. ”

“ Technical power means the ability of the hand to carry out the suggestions of the brain, and this will be great or small according to the speed at which the hand can understand and translate these suggestions into action. ”

“ These propositions have a much more extensive and universal sense when applied to human life, than when confined to technical use. ”

“ We have placed our psychotechnical interest at the service of economic tasks. ”

“ Your work on 'Applied Mechanics' is a great illustration of your power to grasp, to connect, and to apply the definite principles of exact science with the less definite known elements of practical problems. Abstract principles are valueless, except in application to the wants of man, and this work occupies that field with great eminence. Your work on the 'Steam Engine and other Prime Movers' deals with the principles involved in that important subject in a masterly manner, that renders comparison with any other similar work impossible. ”

“ The engineer and the scientist and the chemist, within a single generation, filled Europe and America and Asia with their vast machines, with their telegraphs, their flying machines, their coal-tar products. ”

“ Your works on Civil Engineering, Machinery, and Millwork, &c., each exhibit the powerful intellect that is invariably found in all your productions, and that place them on an eminence peculiarly your own. All your books possess a value which we, who are practical men engaged in performing many of the varied works which fall to engineers, feel to be of the very highest importance. ”

“ But it is sufficiently evident that, before the engineer can determine what form of machine will best yield to him full control of these forces of Nature, he must have sufficient knowledge of science to be able to understand what scientific principles are to be rendered available, and what phenomena of Nature are operating in the production of the power which he is to seize upon and usefully to apply. ”

“ Education and the Useful Arts.—For the successful prosecution among us of the manufacturing and mechanic arts, if not for their very existence, there must be not only the exactness of science, but also exactness or skill in the application of scientific principles throughout the whole processes, either of constructing machinery, or of transforming raw materials into finished fabrics. ”

“ The discipline of the machine process enforces a standardization of conduct and of knowledge in terms of quantitative precision, and inculcates a habit of apprehending and explaining facts in terms of material cause and effect. ”

“ ENGINEERING The material prosperity of the last century is due to the co-operation of three classes of men: the man of science, who lives only for truth and the discovery of nature’s laws; the inventor, eager to apply these discoveries to money-making machines and processes, and the engineer, trained in mathematical investigation and in knowledge of the physical conditions which govern his profession, which is the mechanical application of the laws of nature. ”

“ 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? ”

“ If you will examine any great engineering plan, whether it be the plan for a bridge or a marine engine, you will find that it is a simple bouquet of natural laws, all brought together by the engineer for a definite purpose, and every law is stamped with the + or - stamp of nature. They are the laws of weakness and the laws of strength, and these wonderful laws that preside over matter so interpenetrate one another that you cannot divorce them one from the other. ”

“ This employment of scientific knowledge for useful ends is technology, in the broad sense in which the term includes, besides the machine industry proper, such branches of practice as engineering, agriculture, medicine, sanitation, and economic reforms. ”

“ And among these, we wish that the History of Arts or Manufactures might first be undertaken as the most pleasant and profitable of all the rest, wherein should be discribed the whole Processe of Manual Operations and Applications of one Naturall thing (which we call the Elements of Artificials) to another, with the necessarie Instruments and Machines, whereby every peice of worke is elaborated, and made to be what it is, unto which work bare words being not sufficient, all Instruments and tooles must be pictured, and colours added when the discriptions cannot be made intelligible without them. ”

“ The civil engineer, the mechanical engineer, the navigator, the mining expert, the industrial chemist and mineralogist, the electrician,—the work of all these falls within the lines of the modern machine process, as well as the work of the inventor who devises the appliances of the process and that of the mechanician who puts the inventions into effect and oversees their working. The scope of the process is larger than the machine. ”

“ While the legislator is horrified at the thought of innovation, the inventor, the discoverer, and the artisan are electrified by the discovery of a new principle in physics, and delighted at its application in a new invention, and its practical operation in a new and useful machine. ”

“ It is included under the general term 'useful art.' An art may require one or more processes or machines in order to produce a certain result or manufacture. The term 'machine' includes every mechanical device or combination of mechanical powers and devices to perform some function and produce a certain effect or result. But where the result or effect is produced by chemical action, by the operation or application of some element or power of nature, or of one substance to another, such modes, methods, or operations are called 'processes.' A new process is usually the result of discovery ”

“ This question of increased production, with which we, as mechanical engineers, are so identified, is so entirely dependent upon the power of the people to consume, that I hope I shall be excused in adverting to it. ”

“ The type of mechanic which a complex industrial system requires, and which it is even now, on the whole, evolving, is one that combines an intimate knowledge of particular tools and processes with an intelligent apprehension of the system in which he works. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We need a scientific in the place of a barbarous or scholastic architecture; a scientific in the place of a traditional agriculture; a scientific in the place of an empirical engineering; we need more machinery, more economical applicatians of power, more effective processes of metallurgy and manufacture, more exact knowledge, in all these particulars, of our own condition and necessities, and of the degree in which these can be supplied by experience already attained abroad. ”

“ The increased isolation from science of any philosophy identified with the problem of the real is equally marked. For the growth of science has consisted precisely in the invention of an equipment, a technique of appliances and procedures, which, accepting all occurrences as homogeneously real, proceeds to distinguish the authenticated from the spurious, the true from the false, by specific modes of treatment in specific situations. ”

“ The technic of the laboratory instruments appealed to you exactly as does the management of a motor-car or the handling of a shotgun; most young men like to use a machine and to get mechanical results. But as to learning the insatiable love of truth, the precise observation and the inexorable deduction which are essential in the scientist, you probably have not even made a beginning. ”

“ Suffice to say that in its pages will be found matter of intense interest and immeasurable practical value to the scientific amateur and to him who wishes to obtain a knowledge of the many processes used in the arts, trades and manufactures, a knowledge which will render his pursuits more instructive and remunerative. ”

“ The knowledge so required as a general and commonplace equipment requisite for the pursuit of these modern skilled occupations is of the general nature of applied mechanics, in which the essence of the undertaking is a ready apprehension of opaque facts, in passably exact quantitative terms. ”

“ This is true, even in the new industries, chemical and electrical, for instance, where the whole industry has been built up from the beginning on a basis developed entirely by scientific method and by the accumulation of precise knowledge. ”

“ Scientific Apparatus.—While it cannot be questioned that the popular demand in this country for appliances with which to illustrate the first principles of physical science is well met by several makers of philosophical instruments in this and other cities, it is still true that, in the higher branches and grades of scientific illustration, our chief dependence for efficient apparatus is upon English, French, and German makers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The point of immediate interest here is the further bearing of the machine process upon the growth of culture, - the disciplinary effect which this movement for standardization and mechanical equivalence has upon the human material. ”

“ The topics comprise chiefly those great applications of mechanical engineering and arts, and of physical and chemical science, in which every intelligent person feels concerned; while some articles are devoted to certain purely scientific discoveries that have excited general interest. ”

“ The scientists are learning more and more consistently to think in the opaque, impersonal terms of strains, mechanical structures, displacement, and the like; terms which are convertible into the working drawings and specifications of the mechanical engineer. ”

“ There results a standardization of the workman's intellectual life in terms of mechanical process, which is more unmitigated and precise the more comprehensive and consummate the industrial process in which he plays a part. ”

“ The following illustrations will be given for the purpose of demonstrating the fact that in the higher classes of work the scientific laws which are developed are so intricate that the high-priced mechanic needs (even more than the cheap laborer) the cooperation of men better educated than himself in finding the laws, and then in selecting, developing, and training him to work in accordance with these laws. ”