n law. When a bridge
is opened and tested, the written laws in some countries and the unwritten
in others, and the pride and the sense of responsibility of the designer
and builder of the bridge demand that he, the creator of the bridge, be
the first to enter it and the last to leave it; and should the bridge
collapse, he has to take the immediate consequences of his neglect of the
time-binding laws.

Rarely are the affairs of engineering done with the entirely selfish
motive of merely acquiring immediate selfish gain, for even when this
could be traced--this unworthy thought disappears in the halo of the glory
of the accomplishment. Mr. Eiffel did not erect his tower to haunt Paris
with the sight of a steel skeleton towering over the city of daring
thoughts. His tower stands to-day as a mechanical proof of mathematical
formulas proving the possibility of erecting tall, self-supporting
structures and thereby serving future humanity. The Time-binding capacity
of humans creates and formulates new values for the service of mankind.
Again, no student of the Arts of Engineering could ever forget himself to
the point of claiming his accomplishments, no matter how marvelous, all to
himself. No wondrous discovery of modern electricity, not even the talking
from one hemisphere to another, is rightly the accomplishment of any one
man, for the origin of the discovery can be traced at least as far back as
the days of that barefooted shepherd boy Magnus, who first observed the
phenomena of magnetism.

In an attempt to trace and evaluate the time-binding faculties manifested
in the Arts of Engineering, one is at once astonished, and bewildered, at
the confusion and contradictions unrealized in the mass of evidence, and
how pathetic and deplorable is the sight of hundreds of thousands of
workers in the field of engineering toil and creation who unconsciously
submit to the degradation, in silent consent, of seeing their marvelous
collective achievements chained to space-binding aims.

Upon the completion of this book I was astonished that there are such a
small number of engineers who have the intuitive feeling of the greatness
of the assets at their command and of the gravity of their liabilities
concerning affairs of humanity. I was eager to have my book read and
analysed by a few leading engineers. The late H. L. Gantt being no more
with us, I then turned to Walter N. Polakov, Doctor of Engineering;
Industrial Counselor; Chairman