confine ourselves to the average
successful man in engineering.

Thus you have, roughly, the engineering type. I have sketched only the
major characteristics. The minor characteristics embrace many features.
There is patience, for one--patience to labor long with difficulties;
concentration, for another; application, for a third; certain student
qualities, for yet a fourth. Many graduate engineers have gone off into
other work immediately after leaving college because of a clearly
defined dislike for detail in construction. The average successful
engineer will be a man interested in the shaping of the details of his
machine or bridge or plant. To many, details are irksome. If the young
man who is reading this book knows that he dislikes a detail of any
character whatsoever, unless he be possessed of the creative genius of a
Westinghouse or an Edison, he would better take up with some other
profession. For engineering, in the last analysis, is the manipulating
of detailed parts into a perfect whole--whether it be a bridge or a
machine or a plant.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The boy's father always wanted to be a carpenter.

IV

THE FOUR MAJOR BRANCHES

The four major branches of engineering are civil, mechanical,
electrical, and mining. I give them in the order of their acceptance
among engineers. Each is separate from each of the others, and each is a
profession in itself, and as distinctive from each of the others as is
the allopathic from the homeopathic among men of medicine, though not
with quite the same distinction. Whereas the several groups of
physicians seek to relieve pain and correct disorder by way of
diversified channels, the several groups of engineers each work in a
field of endeavor actively apart from each of the other groups.
Sometimes one group will lap over upon another group, in certain kinds
of construction work, but even then the branches will hold sharply each
to its own.

Civil engineering embraces, roughly, all work in the soil. The surveyor
is a civil engineer. He constructs dams, builds viaducts, lays out
railroads, and in the war, where he was known as a pioneer, he was
responsible for all tunneling and trench projects, besides keeping the
highways clear and the wire entanglements intact. Civil engineering is a
profession which keeps its followers pretty well out in the open. A
civil engineer will go long distances, and frequently must, in order to
get to his work, and, having reac