Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/160

150 will steadily improve governmental, industrial and educational methods and raise the nation to higher than Platonian levels.

Thus, the Progress and Tendency of Mechanical Engineering have been like that of human life, in many ways. As the outcome of an evolution extending back into an infinite, or at least indefinite, past, its birth, the first sensible evidence of existence, occurred a century ago. ]ts growth involved the development of many and different phenomena, the perfection of all, in the adult, depending ultimately upon the perfection of each in the process of development. This mighty giant of modern civilization was conceived in liberty, nourished by law. Invention and protecting legislation, assuring to every man the fruit of his brain as of his hand, gave the child health and early and sturdy development. The introduction of new and great inventions in the early part of the century; the formulation in legal terms of our Constitution, of the patent-law and of a system of universal common-school education; the systematization of manufactures, and their care and support, until the advantages of foreign competitors were neutralized; the substitution in all departments of production of automatic and of labor-assisting machinery; the reduction of all productive vocations to scientific departments of mechanical engineering; legal provision for the cooperation of individuals, the invention of the corporation, the later cooperation of corporations in reduction of non-productive labor and the resultant decrease of costs and prices; the introduction of science and of practically applied science into the curriculum of the schools and colleges; the provision of technical and professional schools for the constructive arts and professions; the gravitation of the management of the productive, and of all industrial, operations into the hands of scientifically and practically expert men, who supplement the learning of schools by the perhaps higher learning of the arts and of the professions—all these have illustrated the progress and tendency of mechanical engineering during the nineteenth century and the plainly distinguishable tendency of the time points the way in which the twentieth century is to further illustrate this progress and tendency, in even more marked degree.

In the future, as in the recent past, the progress of invention and of the mechanic arts will undoubtedly be still onward and upward, with a still accelerated motion; the discoveries of the century may be expected to be more important and more imposing than ever before; the work of the world will be performed with a more complete system, and industrial operations of every sort will be carried on on a still larger scale. The now familiar motors, developing the energies of Nature and supplying the powcr needed to do the work of the world, will be, undoubtedly, still further improved and developed, and it may be hoped, if not fairly expected, that a new method of utilizing the latent powers