AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CIVIL ENGINEERS
INSTITUTED 1852
TRANSACTIONS
Paper No. 1178
ADDRESS AT THE 42d ANNUAL CONVENTION,CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, JUNE 21st, 1910.
By John A. Bensel, President, Am. Soc. C. E.
I know that to some of my audience a satisfactory address at asummer convention would be like that which many people regard asa satisfactory sermon—something soothing and convincing, to theeffect that you are not as other men are, but better. While I appreciatevery fully, however, the honor of being able to address you, Iam going to look trouble in the face in an effort to convince you that, inspite of great individual achievements, engineers are behind other professionalmen in professional spirit, and particularly in collective effort.
Whether this, if true, is due to our extreme youth as a profession,or our extreme age, is dependent upon the point of view; but I thinkit is a fact that will be admitted by all that engineers have not asyet done much for their profession, even if they have done considerablefor the world at large.
Looking backward, our calling may properly be considered theoldest in the world. It is older, in fact, than history itself, for mandid not begin to separate from the main part of animal creation, untilhe began to direct the sources of power in Nature for the benefit, ifnot always for the improvement, of his particular kind. In Biblehistory, we find early mention of the first builder of a pontoon. Thiscreditable performance is especially noted, and the name of the partyprincipally concerned prominently mentioned. The same thing cannotbe said of the unsuccessful attempt at the building of the first sky-scraper,[465]for here the architect, with unusual modesty, has not givenhistory his name, this omission being possibly due to the fact that thebuilding was unsuccessful. If an engineer was employed on this particularundertaking, the architect had, even at that early stage of hisprofession, learned the lesson of keeping all except his own end of thework in the background.
The distinctive naming of our profession does not seem, however,to go back any farther than the period of 1761, when that Father ofthe Profession, John Smeaton, first made use of the term, "engineer,"and later, "civil engineer," applying it both to others and to himself,as descriptive of a certain class of men working along professionallines now existing and described by that term.
Remarkable progress has certainly been made in actual achievementssince that time, and I know of nothing more impressive thanto contemplate the tremendous changes that have been made in thematerial world by the achievements of engineers, particularly in thelast hundred years. This was forcibly impressed upon me a short timeago, while in the company of the late Charles Haswell, then the oldestmember of this Society, who, seeing one of the recently built men-of-warcoming up the harbor, remarked that he had designed the firststeamship for the United States Navy. The evolution of this intricatemass of mechanism, which, from the very beginning of its departurefrom the sailing type of vessel, has taken place entirely within theworking period of one man's life, is as graphic a showing of engineeringactivity as I think can be found.
Our activities are forcibly shown in many other lines of inventionand in the utilization of the forces of Nature, particularly in thedevelopment of this country. We, although young in years, havebecome the greatest railroad builders in history, and have put intouse mechanical machines like the h