at it is a force generally
exercised for good--despite the World War--I myself, as an engineer, can
truly testify. With some fifteen years spent on the creative end of the
work--the drafting and designing end--I have yet to see, with but two or
three rare exceptions, the genius of engineers turned into any but noble
channels.

Thus, engineering is not only a wonderful profession, with the
activities of its followers of utmost importance, but also it is a
profession the individual work of whose pioneers, from Watt to
Westinghouse and from Eiffel to Edison, has been epoch-making.

For when James Watt, clock-repairer, tinker, being called into a certain
small laboratory in England more than a century ago to make a few minor
repairs on a new design of steam-engine, discovered, while at work on
this crude unit deriving its motion from expanded steam and the
alternate workings of a lever actuated by a weight, the value of
superheated steam for power purposes, and later embodied the idea in a
steam-engine of his own, Watt set the civilized world forward into an
era so full of promise and discovery that even we who are living to-day,
despite the wonderful progress already made in mechanics as represented
among other things in the high-speed engine, the dynamo, the airplane,
are witnessing but the barest of beginnings.

Likewise, when George Westinghouse, inventor of the airbrake, having
finally persuaded the directors of the Pennsylvania Railroad, after many
futile attempts in other directions, to grant him an opportunity to try
out his invention, and, trying it out--on a string of cars near
Harrisburg--ably demonstrated its practicability as a device for
stopping trains and preventing accidents, he also--as had Watt before
him--set the civilized world forward into an era full of promise and
discovery as yet but barely entered upon, even with the remarkable
progress already made in industry alone in the matter of regard for the
safety of human life--Westinghouse's own particular blazed trail through
the forest of human ignorance this same airbrake.

So with other pioneers--with Eiffel, in the field of tower construction;
with Edison, in the field of electricity; with the Wright brothers, in
the field of aerial navigation; With Simon Lake, inventor of the
submarine boat. All were pioneers; all set the civilized world forward;
all--though this perhaps is irrelevant, yet it will serve to reveal the
type of men these pioneers w