Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/194

182 practical instruction—men who cannot merely calculate the size of parts of a machine, but who can draw it after they have calculated it, and make it after they have drawn it. These are the men whom our country sorely needs to complete the organization of its great army of industry. Indeed, I know of no more pressing material need in this country. Our land has more mechanical ingenuity in it than any other; but did you ever think of its wretched misdirection and waste for want of industrial education? If not, stroll through the national Patent-Office. Look at a few facts. In one of our most important cities are engines for supplying that city with water—erected at vast expense. The whole amount was wasted. There is ingenuity in that vast machine, there is skill in it; but, for want of education regarding certain principles involved, the whole thing is failure and waste.

Take another case. A few years since, with a small party of our fellow-citizens, I visited the West Indies in a national ship. She was a noble vessel, and her engines had cost, it is said, nearly $800,000. The engines showed ingenuity; but they were so deficient in proper elements of construction that our voyage was prolonged until we were all given up as lost and had the honor of having our obituaries in the leading newspapers! The first voyage of those engines was the last. They were sold for old iron; and the sum lost on them alone was sufficient to endow the finest institution for mechanical engineering in the world! I might multiply examples of this sort, but this is enough to show what need exists for more careful training in this direction, and I pass to a kindred department.

Another great department bearing on a multitude of industries, directly and indirectly, is. Take one among the fields of its activity. We have in the United States about seventy thousand miles of railway, and every year thousands of miles are added. I do not at all exaggerate when I say that millions on millions of dollars are lost every year by the employment of half-educated engineers. Proofs of this meet you on every side. Lines in wrong positions, bad grades and curves, tunnels cut and bridges built which might be avoided. All of us know the story.

But this is not all. Hardly a community which has not some story to tell of great losses entailed by bad engineering in other directions. I have known the traffic of a great city street interrupted for a year, because no engineer could be found able to make the calculations for a "skew arch" bridge, a thing which any graduate of a well-equipped department of engineering can do. I have known a city subjected to enormous loss by the failure of its water-supply system, because the engineer employed made no calculation for the friction of water in the pipes. I know a whole district sickened by miasma, because a half-taught engineer was intrusted with its drainage. We must prepare men for better work; and, for every dollar thus laid out, we shall create or save thousands.