respondence school and
studied nights, taking up, among other things, the subject of mechanical
drafting. When twenty-two years of age he applied for, and got, a
position as draftsman in a small company developing a motorcycle. He was
well on his way upward.

He spent a year with this company. He learned much of value to him not
only about mathematics, but about engineering as a whole as well. One
day he decided that the field was restricted--at least, too much so for
him--and he left and went with a Westinghouse organization in
Pittsburgh. His salary was in the neighborhood of a hundred and ten
dollars a month. He remained with the company two years as a designer,
and then, having saved up sufficient funds to meet his needs, went to
college, taking special work--physics and chemistry and mathematics. He
remained in school two years. When he came out, instead of returning to
the drafting-room and the theoretical end of the work, he donned
overalls once more and went to work in the shop as an erecting man. Two
years afterward he was chief operating engineer in a small cement-plant
in the Southwest, his salary being three thousand dollars a year. A year
of this and he returned East, at a salary of four thousand dollars a
year, as operating engineer of a larger plant. Then came a better offer,
with one of the largest, if not the very largest, steel-plants in the
country, as superintendent of power, at a salary of five thousand
dollars a year. When the war broke out, or rather when this country
became involved in the war, my friend Smith, at a salary of ten thousand
dollars a year, became associated with a staff of engineers brought
together into a corporation manufacturing shells. And all before he was
barely in his thirties!

A young man still, what lies ahead of him can readily be surmised. Smith
will follow engineering on salary until he is probably forty, when he
will enter upon a consulting practice, and at fifty retire with
sufficient money to keep him in comfort the remainder of his days. Nor
will he be an exception, as I have stated in the opening paragraph. The
profession is crowded with men who have worked up from equally humble
beginnings. Indeed, one of the foremost efficiency engineers in the
country to-day began as an apprentice in a foundry, while another, fully
as well known in efficiency work, began life in the United States navy
as a machinist's mate. Automobile engineers, whose names, many of them,
are