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 of Committee on Service and Information,
Fuels Section, A.S.M.E., and Robert B. Wolf, Vice-President of A.S.M.E. In
them I found, to the full, a very sympathetic understanding and my esteem
grew as I became more intimately acquainted with the character of their
work and their accomplishments. Both have done a most remarkable work in
their respective lines. It will not be an exaggeration to say that their
work, together with the work of the late H. L. Gantt and Charles P.
Steinmetz, may be considered as the first—to my knowledge—corner-stones of
the science and art of Human Engineering, and form the first few volumes
and writings for the New Library of the Manhood of Humanity. These books
and pamphlets are based on facts analysed scientifically, marking the
parting of the way of engineering thought from the past subjection to
speculative fetishes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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