ere and are--all overcame great
obstacles--Lake not the least among them.

Told that he was visionary, when Lake explained, as he did in his effort
to enlist capital with which to build his first submarine boat, that he
could safely submerge his invention and steer it about on the bed of the
ocean as readily as a man can steer an automobile about the streets of a
city, that while submerged he could step out of the boat through a
trap-door without flooding the boat, by the simple process of
maintaining a greater air pressure inside than the pressure of the water
outside--Simon Lake, discouraged on every hand, finally decided to build
a boat himself, and did build one, with his own hands--a boat fourteen
feet long and constructed of rough pine timbers painted with
coal-tar--in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey. With this boat Lake
demonstrated to a skeptical world for all time that he was neither a
visionary nor a dreamer, but a practical doer among men--an engineer.

Of such stuff, then, were, and are, engineers made. Whether they
realized it or not, whether the world at large realized it or not, each
represented a noble calling, each was a professional man, each was
chiseling his name for all time into the granite foundations of a
wonderful profession even yet only in the building--engineering. Their
name is legion, too, and their names will last because of the fact that
their work, remaining as it does after them equally with the work of
followers of the finest of the fine arts, is known to mankind as a
benefit to mankind. Known by their works, the list extends back to the
very dawn of history.

For it was men of this calling, the calling of engineers, who in the
early days wrought for purposes of warfare--warfare then being the major
industry--the javelin, the spear, the helmet, the coat of mail, the
plate of armor, the slingshot; just as their later brothers, for a like
purpose, conceived and devised the throwing of mustard gas, the two-ton
explosive, the aerial bomb, the mortar shell, the hand-grenade--for the
protection, false and true, of the home. For the upbuilding of the home,
for the continuance of the home, men of this calling also it was who
conceived and shaped, among other things, the cook-stove, the chimney,
the wheel, the steam-engine, the spinning-jenny, the suspension-bridge,
the bedspring-oh, boy!--the bicycle, the sandblast, the automobile, the
airplane, the wireless.

Thus it will be seen that engi