Page:Engineering as a vocation (IA cu31924004245605).pdf/39

 boom in railway building and the demand for civil engineers was so great that for many years it was almost impossible to find enough to go around. At the same time the need for skilled designers of engines and machinery led the mechanical engineers to form a distinct body as distinguished from civil engineers. The old distinction between civil and military engineers was lost forever and to-day we have engineers. The old qualifying terms remain but the lines, for a time so distinct, are each day becoming fainter. The real distinction now exists as between engineers who design and build stable structures and those who design, build and sell engines and machines.

By common consent the man who is to-day known as a civil engineer is one who deals with statics, and the man who is known as a mechanical engineer is one who deals with kinetics, the electrical engineer being a cross between a physicist and a mechanical engineer, having a marked strain of conceit common to youth; the electrical engineer being comparatively an infant, but very husky. Mechanics is that part of the science of dynamics which treats of the laws governing the interaction between forces and solid matter. Statics is a branch of mechanics treating of the action of forces upon bodies at rest, or in a state of static equilibrium; that is, of balanced forces. Kinetics is a branch of mechanics treating of the action of unbalanced forces and the movement of solid