Page:Engineering and the university (IA engineeringtheun00chaprich).pdf/9

 definition of civil engineering states that it is "the art of directing the great sources of power in nature for the use arid convenience of man." As a broad definition this would be difficult to improve upon, and it is obvious that until science had developed far enough to be able to enunciate the laws governing the forces of nature it was impossible to have anything but empirical rules to govern engineering design and construction.

And so Engineering remained a trade, while Medicine and Law advanced in dignity and status. It became a tradition in Engineering that the only school worth anything was the school of practical experience. Even long after the sciences of Mechanics and Hydraulics had become well established courses at Universities, such studies were neglected by engineers whose hard practical training tended to give them little sympathy with the abstruse and often impractical and unreal problems commonly discussed by the mathematicians. From this position, at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, Engineering was rescued by a series of eminent men who, while they were all trained in the first instance as tradesmen, distinguished themselves by the zeal with which they assimilated scientific knowledge from any source available to them.

Thus Telford, nicknamed by his friend Southey "Pontifex Marimus" and the "Colossus of Roads," one of the first of the iron bridge-builders, started life as a working mason. When still on the first rungs of the ladder he so successfully climbed, he wrote in one of his letters: "I am not contented unless I can give a reason for every particular method or practice which is pursued. Hence I am now very deep in Chemistry. The mode of making mortar in the best way led me to inquire into the nature of lime. Having, in pursuit of that inquiry, looked into some books on Chemistry, I perceived the field was