Chapter 4

Engineers, in the abstract, are such men. The accumulation 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 passed 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 municipal 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 confrères.

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 practitioner 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 shores 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 municipal 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.

XI

WHAT CONSTITUTES ENGINEERING SUCCESS

A graduate of Cornell, in the class of '05, after placing away his diploma where it could not trouble him through suggestiveness, accepted a position with a large manufacturing concern in western Pennsylvania. He was twenty-three years old. He went into the shop to get the practical side of certain theories imposed upon his receptive nature through four long years of study in a mechanical-engineering course. The concern manufactured among other things steam-turbines, and this young man, having demonstrated in school his particular aptitude for thermodynamics--the study of heat and its units in its application to engines, and the like--entered the erecting department. Donning overalls, and with ordinary rule in his hip pocket--as against the slide-rule with which he had worked out his theoretical calculations during his college years--he went to work at whatever was assigned him as a task by his superiors--shop foremen, assistant superintendent, occasionally an engineer from the office.

This young man did many things. He helped to assemble turbine parts; carried word of petty alterations to the proper officials: assisted in the work of making tests; made detailed reports on the machine's performance; screwed up and backed off nuts; in short, got very well acquainted with the steam-turbine as manufactured by this company. He knew the fundamentals of machine construction, and an understanding of the details of this particular type of turbine therefore came easy to him. He worked shop hours, carried his lunch in a box, changed his overalls every Monday like a veteran. Usually his overalls more than needed changing, because he was not afraid of the grease and grime with which he came into contact throughout the day. He liked the work and went to it like a dog to a bone. He was applying in a practical way what he had learned in college of a theoretical nature, and finding the thing of amazing interest.

He made progress. In time his work was brought to the attention of the chief engineer, and one day, when the president of the company, who was also an inventor of national repute and responsible for the design of the turbine being manufactured by the organization, wanted to make certain bold changes in the design, the chief engineer sent for the young engineer whose work in college in thermodynamics had won for him certain honors, with the result that our hero found himself presently seated opposite the president at a table in the latter's office, engaged in working out calculations on his slide-rule--calculations beyond the powers of the president, because he was not a heavy theoretician. This call was a big advance indeed, for it marked him as a man of promise--a "comer"--in the concern. The president liked the ease with which the young engineer "got" him in the matter of the proposed changes, and quite before either realized it both were talking freely, exchanging ideas, in the field of turbine construction generally. The young man unconsciously was driving home the fact that he was a capable engineer, one who, while still lacking in broad experience, was nevertheless possessed of the proper attitude toward engineering as a whole to compel the interest and attention of his superior.

The young man eventually was sent out upon the road as an erecting man. In this work he discovered certain operating faults in the design, and, reporting these faults to the home office, observed that not a few were remedied in subsequent designs. He moved about the country from place to place, setting up and operating steam-turbines, until there came the blissful day when he was called back to join the engineering staff in work covering design. Laying aside his overalls, he emerged as a crisp young engineer in a linen collar and nifty cravat--although not till later did he don a cream-colored waistcoat--and thereafter his hours were seven instead of nine. With a desk and a stenographer he entered upon work of a somewhat statistical character. He followed the designs of rival companies as best he could through their advertising and articles covering their respective designs appearing in the technical journals, and about this time also applied for admission, and was granted it, in the foremost engineering society embracing his particular branch of the profession. He was still making progress.

Likewise, he was rapidly becoming an expert in the field of steam-turbines. His work in the shop, together with his experience on the road, both as an erecting man and operating engineer, had eminently fitted him for valuable service in the home office as an engineer overseeing design. His work in charge of design, where his knowledge of what had given service both good and bad in details of construction while he was in the field, was extremely valuable to the designer himself, was rapidly rounding him out as a steam-turbine man. His salary had gone up apace with his progress; he had met the right girl at a club dance in the suburban town where he had taken modest quarters; he was rapidly headed toward success both as an engineer and a citizen. He had been out of school probably six years, and was still a very young man, with all the world practically before him.

One day he was asked by the chief engineer of the concern to journey to New York, and read a paper before his engineering society at one of the regular annual meetings, on the subject of thermodynamics in its relation to the company's own product--the turbine. He tipped over his chair in his eagerness to get out of the office and on the train. He realized the importance of this opportunity. He was to appear before his fellow-engineers--the best and most capable and prominent in the profession--and to appear as an authority on his subject! The thing was another step forward. He prepared a paper, basing it on his six years' experience in steam-turbines, and when he reached New York had something of value to tell his brother engineers. The meeting was held in the afternoon, and, dressing for the part, he stepped out upon the platform before a gathering of some eight or nine hundred engineers and delivered himself of his subject with credit to himself and to his organization. Not only that. In the rebuttal, when engineers seated in the auditorium rose to confound him with questions--engineers representing rival turbine concerns--he proved himself quick at the bat and more than once confounded those who would confound him.