Chapter 3
So the young graduate need entertain no fears on the ground of possible errors when starting out. Merely he must go slow; take his own good time on a job; ask all the questions possible of his engineer neighbors. Frankness in engineering, as in any other walk of life, pays. The bluffer is not wanted. No man knows it all, and certainly no engineer knows all there is to know about his profession. Time was when this might have been true; but it isn't true to-day. The work of engineering research and development has become so complex that engineers are forced to specialize. The engineering graduate, entering upon his first job, will discover early that he, too, must specialize. This will not be difficult, owing to the fact that his engineering education has been general and designed to embrace in a liberal way all practice. Drawing, as he will, from this liberal source that which he finds necessary in the solving of his initial problems, he will find himself within a short time becoming, willy-nilly, a specialist.
In the earlier years there should be considerable study done after hours on the part of the graduate engineer. Because his education has been general in the field, and he now holds a position with a company manufacturing steam-turbines, say, he must "wise up," as the saying goes, on the subject of steam-turbines. It will do him no harm to trace back to its source all progress made in the field of turbine engineering and construction. He will find no scarcity of books on the subject, and with every hour spent with these volumes he will become more valuable to the organization employing him. Likewise, if he find himself working for an electrical manufacturing concern, and himself a graduate in electrical engineering, if the product be only a single line, and so small a thing as spark-plugs, it will profit him greatly to read whatever has been printed on the subject of spark-plugs. So with the mining graduate in the matter of the different processes of recovering minerals; so with the civil graduate, especially in the concrete field of construction, which has made rapid strides in the past few years--the graduate should absorb as much as he can of the available works printed on the subject. Indeed, this is the profession of it, in that the practitioner must ever be alive and alert to what is being done and has been done from the beginning in his chosen line of endeavor.
Next must come fealty. The graduate on his first job must believe--and if he does not believe ought to change connections--that the product of his company is the best in the market. This need not necessarily be true; but he must feel that it is true. For only in this way can he put the best that is in him into his work. Industry--and the engineer is the backbone of industry--is a hotbed of competition. Any organization needs all the enthusiasm it can get. Greatest enthusiasm of all must come from within its own circles. Lacking this enthusiasm within its own family, the organization as a whole suffers. The graduate must first of all supply enthusiasm to the source of his employment, because at first he can supply but very little else. He must be true to his trust in ways other than the mere doing of what he is told or producing what he is expected to produce. This attitude cannot but help him qualify for promotion, and rapidly. It is a very important factor in any engineer's advancement.
Then there is the matter of patience. The writer knows of no other qualification more fruitful of reward than patience. The word control is frequently used in this regard--self-control. Its other name, however, is patience--the thing that gives a man to try and try again until he succeeds. Engineering is a difficult profession, though not more difficult than other professions, and in the average engineer's working-day many things occur which, if he be not possessed of infinite patience, will serve to try him to a considerable degree. Patience with those below him--patience with those above him--patience with himself--these are all necessary and will prove helpful to him in reaching the top. He must accept the petty tasks with a cheerfulness no less apparent than he accepts the more important ones. He must present his own ideas to his superiors with a degree of caution which, where the ideas are rejected, will yet permit him to withdraw within himself without giving the impression of being peeved. For engineering is above all other things the interchange of ideas among men having an equal training but a vastly different quality of experience. Men of diverse experience thus drawn together make for a balanced engineering staff, and a balanced engineering staff makes for a well-organized whole. The young engineer must conduct himself in such a way that his superiors will like him for what he is, as indicated by his personality, rather than for what he knows or does in his daily work.
To sum up, then, the young engineer, having entered upon his first job, must do three or four things in order quickly to qualify for promotion. He first of all must spend time in study after his day's work is done--absorb all information having to do with the company's own product; hold himself ever alert to the company's own methods of production; watch for an opportunity whereby this production may be improved upon or the methods of production themselves improved upon. The young engineer must proceed slowly in everything he undertakes; when brought to a halt through difficulties he should instantly appeal to one or another of his associates or superiors; he must be absolutely frank in all his dealings with these associates and superiors. In this regard, also, it might be said that the young graduate, following a habit become almost second nature with him in his school-days, must keep a note-book covering his activities throughout each working-day, a book wherein he will jot down everything of value to him which comes up in the day's work. Such books often form the basis of complete text-books in after years, and, indeed, are acknowledged to be the foundation of more than one recognized authority. Though in this regard, further, such a practice is sometimes discouraged in some organizations, since it is apparent that these note-books often contain facts which the organization does not wish to have made public, being, as these notes often are, in the nature of trade secrets. However, the student with a conscience will effectively guard the secrets of his employer as contained in his note-book, holding its contents for his own use in furthering the interests of the company which employs him.
And finally--in the matter of personality--patience and regard for the foibles of others will go far toward advancing the young engineer toward success. He must never forget in his earlier years that he is embryonic in the profession; that the profession is a difficult one and with many ramifications; that if he was able to live through three normal lives he would yet know only a very little of what there is to know about his chosen work. Thus he will conduct himself in a manner designed to win the interest and affection of men who are superior to him. Life to-day consists more than ever of service, and no man can go the path alone. Service--assistance one to another--makes up the sum total of life. No engineering graduate--no young man in any walk of life--can progress far without assistance, however brilliant as a student and capable as a man he may be. If he will but bear this last in mind--this and the other even more important truth, that as a man gives so shall he receive--that a dollar spent in charity means two dollars in the bank--I mean that exactly--then the heights themselves will beckon to him at an early age.
"Early to bed and early to rise"; "take care of the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves"; "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush"--we don't need--the engineering graduate does not need--that form of admonition. It means nothing and is false. What alone counts for success is a considerable regard for the rights and privileges of others, the unfortunate as well as the fortunate. Greed never brought success that was lasting to any one, and certainly it breeds unhappiness. Engineering is a work of service--service to others--and to the graduate who "gets" this truism will come all things of this life, not the least of which will be material rewards.
VII
THE CONSULTING ENGINEER
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 municipal 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 municipal 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 competitors--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 participation 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 assuredly 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 nobody 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 participation 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 Saturday 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 pronounced 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. Nobody can deny _that_ progress. Nobody 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 associate 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 constitutes 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 accumulation 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 pronouncedly 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.