FRANCIS 1. CURTIS Monsanto Chemical Company, St. Louis, Missouri
INTRODUCTION
Civilization is a frail thing. Many times many peoples have advanced to positions like ours but they have never held them for long. Civilizations which are in the growth stage constantly tend to spread outside the land or lands of their original birth and to convert to themselves other societies originally foreign. Science in general and engineering in particular are in that growth stage today in our western civilization. They are pressing forward constantly into new areas of human activity, and in a sense converting them. So, just as we have the isolationists and internationalists in the political field of our civilization, we have the same types in engineering. They are like those who in the Middle Ages hated the people over the hill or in the next valley and those who caught the vision of the Church Universal. The primary engineers are those who are engaged in applying the results of science to the practical ends of man, but there is a very large group who may be called secondary, consisting of those who are applying enginewing training and techniques to all of the varied problems of lie. You will find even in our engineering societies many who will not credit the secondary group with being engineers at all. Those of you who are old enough will remember that Gilbert and Sullivan sang that every one of us was born either a little liberal or a little conservative. Those of us who are liberal must not accept even that static point of view, but must convert the conservatives to a better understanding of an expanding universe. The part-time practitioners are the extenders of the fringes of the profession, and the fringe area of one generation becomes the solid ground of the next. From the original kernel of design engineering the profession has gone on to control the processes of production, of research, of sales, and finally of management. While this is particularly true of the chemical and other strictly technical industries, there are still further fields for the engineer to conquer in those industries not usually considered technical, where his training and logical thinking in the analysis of problems and in the synthesis of decisions, will prove of supreme value, if to them he can add vision. We must look outward and not invard. THE ENGINEER AS A MAN
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Whether or not the maioritv " " of engineers are to be classified as primary or secondary, it still remains that what the engineer is as a man is more important than what he is as an engineer. Man is a social as well as an
individual animal, and his life, active, intellectual, and spiritual, as an individual, must be bound into his l i e as a social being if happiness is to result. A half man is always unsatisfied. Millions have been spent for research to study material failures, but relatively little for the investigation of the individual's problems. The work of the scientist and the engineer in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, brought to the world the greatest material prosperity it has ever known, and achieved its greatest accomplishments in this regard in the United States, and still thinks itself a success. Those of you who have traveled I know have been struck immediately by the difference in the standard of living of the common man in the United States from his fellows even in western Europe, and compared to eastern Europe and, even more so, other parts of the world, western Europe in this time was a paradise. One has only to take a cruise around the Caribbean, as so many Americans do nowadays, to have vividly brought home to him the truth of this statement. I do not mean for a moment to think or to say that all is well in the United States. We have very many plague spots. We have room for civic hetterment in every city and town in the country. We have work to do in this field by the thousands and thousands. We think we are good because we do not look. Our advantage is relative, not absolute. We pride ourselves on the accomplishment of full employment and that is a tremendous gain, but have we in the real sense of the word, full employment at all? We have hours spent on the job, but are those hours fully employed? How many manhours are used up in standing idle? How prevalent is the delightful practice of featherbedding? Here is a frontier for the future, equivalent to the ideal of full employment in the past. We have not properly used the saved hours that science has given us, and science has not seemed to have the answer how to do so. The oracle only mumbles and we must look elsewhere for direction. These great accomplishments of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the work of men largely concerned with material things. Hence they have toppled in the rest of the world, and the structure they have built is staggering in the United States. Greatness lasts only &the spiritual. The material is always evanescent. The great truths of religion, the great works of art. of literature, and of music are universal. largely independent of time and place, though even they have been submerged from time to time when material concerns became excessive. As a matter of
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fact, even in this field we possess hut a fraction of what man has created throughout his long career. From history our yield is still small. What has happened, it seems to me, is that the excessive preoccupation of the last two hundred years with the individual man, has caused an equally excessive reaction of social man. Both are wrong. The result has been the trend to state socialism in various forms; in Europe, a trend quite obvious since World War I. Whatever you call it-conventional socialism, nationalization, fascism, or communism-the common trait is a succession of waves of submergence of the individual in the state. That is, the world says the individual has made a mess of things-nd we must admit he haswith his blind insistence on his own individual, materialistic fortune. The thesis of the materialists has resulted in chaos. The fact that a sick world is jumping from the tossing boat into the swirling water, makes no difference. You will say that it mill not happen here and it is true that the United States is the last chance, hut Americans are much too concerned with economic security and too little with spiritual. Socialism, with the help of many true liberals, bas succeeded in fixing many of its concepts here. One cannot now look forward to makiig a fortune except as a windfall. Social man has reacted vigorously against individual man, and, as in all revolutions, has gone too far. An interesting article in the April, 1948, number of the magazine Fortune, called "What does make the boss work," shows the effect of taxes and the depreciation of the dollar since 1939 on the so-called higher incomes. With an apparent income of $5000, real income is $3000. If one jumps to an apparent income of $25,000, real income is $10,000. But if one should by some skill ascend to an income of $150,000, real income is only $28,000. I t is easy to see the unfortunate position of the man with the apparent $150,000 income. The demands made upon him are based on the appearance and not the reality. It is the intention of the so-called liberals that there shall not he any more great fortunes. What has happened in England can happen here. But there is more. According to the Bureau of Internal Revenue, estate tax returns show that estates of over $10,000,000 declined almost 50 per cent in a ten-year period. In the same period, estates of $1,000,000 declined 8.9 per cent and estates of $500,000 to $1,000,000 declined 10.2 per cent. On the other hand, the government returns show a small increase in estates under $200,000 and a substantial increase in estates up to but not exceeding $100,000. During these last fifteen years there has been a proportionate gain in the incomes of the lower income groups. This has had a very decided and desirable effect on this country, and as a matter of true fact, should have been brought about long ago by socially minded individualists if there had been many. Only Henry Ford astounded us in a forgotten era with his five dollar minimum day. We are now in a position of
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having plenty of demand for goods and no risk capital to help the engineer to fill it. The golden goose may not have been killed but it's not laying well. It is obvious that the position of the $3000-a-year man and the $50,000-a-year man, with respect to risk capital, is quite different. It may be that on his scale of living the $3000-a-year man has some surplus which he wishes t o save, but he certainly cannot take any great risks with that surplus. He has to buy something extremely safe. Whereas a man with an effectiveincome of $50,000 can afford to put some of it into venturesome businesses in the hope of high returns. It is the venture of today which makes the jobs of tomorrow. The Government is no solution. Who ever heard of a politician sticking his neck out? So we have a situation where the pendulum again has swung too far and we have cut off our eals to shut off the radio. There is a pretty good likelihood, therefore, that the young American must face the future where his previous American ideal, a fortune, will not exist. Such a future is staggering to the materialist, the believer in only the here and the now, because he has nothing left. We have seen plenty of evidence in Europe where people mill not work for money when they find it will not purchase things, a somewhat logical conclusion, if things are all that count. If the pattern of future existence is to he as I have shown it, we cannot lie down and say that nothing can he done, hut everyone who wishes to achieve happiness must re-evaluate himself in relation to the nonmaterial rewards of existence, and start now. Many engineers know nothing of religion; some have a little knowledge well buried in childhood; but most recognize at least that truly religious people lead happy lives. It is barely possible that it might be worth looking into. Certainly an open mind would do so. Engineers are used to mechanical drawing and not often do they take t o the more artistic type where they may express feelings and emotions which they have in viewing a landscape or a beautiful face. To say that they cannot draw is to say that they cannot learn to write. The process is similar and no more difficult. There is a great field for adult amateur expansion in the realm of art. Even more untouched by the amateur is literature. There are almost no people who write for fun, but one might suspect from the intense satisfaction achieved by those professionals who do write, that something might be gleaned here which would add to the well-roundedness of existence. When we come to music, we do have a field to which the engineer seems to lean. I n interviewing many thousands of technical men applying for positions, I have found that of those who have hohbies, something over 50 per cent will he concerned with either photography or music. The leaning to photography is easy to understand since it is a scientific process. Music may be a little bit harder but it does have a very definite mathematical basis mhich may be appealmg to the engineering mind, and its mechanical reproduction is an engineering process itself mhich may in time con-
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vert many from the form to the substance. At any rate there is enough indication that the engineer has turned to music, to make one feel confident in suggesting that they turn to it in greater numbers and with greater participation. Almost everybody was forced on dreary afternoons to learn some instrument as a boy, which he promptly forgot as soon as practicable. It can he picked up, and even if childhood had no practicing days, the adult can still start. The greatest outlet for social energy is in the field roughly classified as social or civic service. There is no one of our towns or cities that does not have some devoted hand carrying the torch of civic improvement. They are on all the committees, to which they devote large amounts of time and energy, and they could use a great deal of help. There is no one of you who can ride through your city and really look around you, which most of us do not do, and fail to see a thousand things by which it could be bettered. Why not do something about it? I t is almost axiomatic that those of the older generation have a duty to the younger in their own trade and field of endeavor, and certainly from what we can see, the younger engineers can take plenty of help. All the engineering societies are interested in this problem. They have few workers. Get behind them. In so doing, the engineer, without losing his belief in the individual, can remold that belief with social consciousness and stop the slipping of the world into the absolutism of state control, the hand that numbs. THE ENGINEER IN EDUCATION
Ideals without works are nothing. We must transfer our ideals into practice in our particular kind of life. All of us should feel a responsibility for education the whole of our lives. Each man must in some way educate his successor, and the college or university, though crucial, is only a part. We have in engineering the difficult situation that we are now on top, and many unfit are rushing in. The day of the amateur in science seems past. Men now enter scientific pursuits to see what they can get out and not what they can put in. They are not influenced by a driving pressure to be a scientist for knowledge's sake. The force of the ideal has waned, as so many ideals have, and we have only the material left. I remember discussing with a young chemical engineer being interviewed for employment, why he chose chemical engineering for his life's work. He told me quite frankly that he had looked over the possible vocations and decided that engineering was one of the most likely in which he could make money most quickly. Having come to that major demarcation he then looked over engineering and came to the conclusion that he would arrive at the delectable state of a large income most expeditiously in chemical engineering. Apparently he did not seem to he influenced by the statistical evidence that chemical engineers make the best husbands. That man was not a chemical engineer, he was merely a trained workman.
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This always happens in a dominant movement of the day, and is happening to engineering. There is a rush into the field, but is the material suitable? I would like to see education put on a drive to solve this moot question of aptitude testing. Much has been done within the last twenty-five years but much more remains. We have no good methods of analysis other than marks which give only a portion of the story, and personal opinion, better than nothing but still weak. The first principle of industrial training courses is to train the trainers, and we need better teachers. Why should we assume that any graduate student who needs the money is a born teacher? We must always remember that as the professor is, so will be the students, and many of the difficulties which arise when t,he student obtains employment may be attributed to the example and instruction he had in the schools. Industry is always the first to decry the professor as an old "fudduddy," but what does it do to help? In my company we are just setting in motion an experiment which may point a t least one possible way. We are setting up this year an industrial leave of absence for a professor of chemical engineering, who will come to us a t a suitable salary, with moving expenses paid, and will work for us in one of our divisions for a year, after which time he will return to the university. In this way we hope that he will obtain a first-hand knowledge of how an industrial concern operates, what its good points and what its had points are, and I am certain that he will he a better adviser and teacher to his students from that time on. If we can interest enough chemical companies in putting in plans of this kind, in ten years we should have run through a great number of teachers of chemical engineering, certainly enough to have had an influence on the groups at large. Perhaps we will no longer find students with no conception that there is shift work in the world. Tvo great mistakes are being made a t the present time: the first by the professors that the universities are turning out graduates of prdfessional standing; and the second by the industrialists that the universities are turning out graduates of professional standing. Most engineering courses, a t least in the chemical field, seem to make the bland assumption that all of their graduates will be design engineers. Little provision is made for the large majority who will go into production, sales, research, and management. Little differentiation is made in their training from those who will design fractionating columns and chlorinators. I think this problem deserves a great deal of study by engineering faculties. It is by no means simple and I am fully aware of many of the pitfalls, hut I can only point out that we must set up our goal before we try to determine the steps to attain it. There is no such thing as completing an education. It must be continued by the university graduate ad infinitum, not only in the engineering field, but in the nonmaterial as well. Ifthis principle is accepted, industry has some responsibility for providing opportunities; older engineers have responsibility of guiding and edu-
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social adjustment to the circumstances of our life and age, not that men should be indifferent to abuses or reforms, but cranks' minds are elsewhere. To summarize, it is the kind of man one is, rather than how much one knows, that counts. We in industry cannot expect the university to do it all. I t is the job of industry to set up training courses to further fit engineers for production, design, sales, and eventual management. If this is so, is the development of type courses a major opportunity for our engineering societies? Few companies can afford the research to design proper courses, but many could set them up and carry them out if given a reasonable pattern to follow. For production we need emphasis on human relations, but of an intensive type, since a production man deals with a relatively constant group. The production man needs to know cost accounting, upside down and inside out. Sometimes it seems to be going in both directions. Graduate engineering studies would be extremely useful, with constant yearly reviews of development in the field. For men who are slanted to sales, obviously human relations take on a different aspect. One is dealing with large numbers of people with whom sometimes one is hardly acquainted, hut who must be converted to liking sometimes within five minutes. There is the whole world of commercial practice, contracts, billing and lading, shipping and freight problems, not taught in the ordinary engineering course. For the design and research engineer human relations play a somewhat smaller part, though they are never unimportant. Graduate engineering and more close following of new developments in the engineering field, are vital, but most important is the building of curiosity and keenness for new ideas, both of them rare phenomena. We need more research in engineering in industry. For such varied ends it is quite obvious that varied means THE ENGINEER IN TECHNOLOGY must be used, and the ends themselves will determine What is management looking for in the engineer? the means. For what does it pay? The answer is character and personality foremost. First is the ability to get along THE ENGINEER IN MANAGEMENT with others, without which the highest grade point Everything that has been said so far goes for the average is worthless. Evenness of temper comes in development of ability in management, but the greatest here: the manic-depressive is rarely a worthwhile characteristic of a good manager is lack of specializaassociate. Some degree of forgetfulness of self would tion. In reverse this means broadness, but broadness be highly desirable, though somewhat rare in these is not achieved through shallowness, through never times. This is far more serious than appears on the having known details, but rather by successive specialsurface. It is gen6ral experience that the man who is izations left behind. I t is very difficultto leave specialthinking of himself and the effect of events on himself ization behind. One sees it happen over and over rarely creates anything except disorder. The ability again, where men are hanging on to what they had for self-criticism, so rare in the young, will propel a better let go. It is very difficult to see younger men career faster than an uncle vice-president. Such is also coming along and becoming more expert than you in a true of those who stand on their own feet-the self- field in which you were once acknowledged to be of imramrodded. It might seem superfluous to speak of portance. The bitterness of the oftmade comment that loyalty, and personally I feel that loyalty is a rather as one grows older one knows less and less about widespread virtue, and can be quite reasonably counted more and more, has a real foundation in fact. on in the majority of technical men. In fact, it is my It is also probably impossible to let the intellect lie experience that they lean backward in this regard. fallow for years and then realize that one is falling However, this situation only points up the few cases behind in the race and try to pick up. Relaxation is which fail. Finally i t is desirable to have a reasonable important if never complete, and it is surprising how cating younger; and even the younger can return to their universities and give the students a picture of what is coming. Possibly the sharpest blow to the young engineer, when he obtains a job, is to find that he has been chosen as much, and sometimes more than as much, for his personality as for his technical accomplishments. The lack of good personality development is a grave criticism of education. All has not been "led out" that was there. It would he sound practice to have personality development and accomplishment count for a degree as much as examination in calculus. The moral in a book on calculus which I once had, which said, "What one fool has done another can do," is just as applicable here as in the strictly engineering phases of education. I have a feeling that such a policy would produce more successful engineers, and I am certain that it would produce more successful human beings, but it would force a whole recasting of the process of education. The general purpose of most education is the acquisition of knowledge, but the greatest aim of living should he the attainment of wisdom. Wisdom teaches us how to use the knowledge we have gained and how to use i t in the best possible manner. In every group of people there are usually some individuals to whom problems are brought, whose advice is asked for and looked up to. It is hard to define wisdom, but apparently somewhat easy to recognize it in those who have it. I do not think for a moment that wisdom can be taught, in the university or possibly anywhere else, but I do think the university can point out the necessity and desirability of acquiring wisdom as well as knowledge, and indicate avenues of approach which through the years will enable that attainment. To thoroughly define a problem alone is a long first step toward its solution. To ignore it invites trouble.
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complete mental relaxation is in a large fraction of the human race, including university graduates. Here is the key to the dissatisfaction of many men, brilliant in their youth, who find themselves outdistanced in middle age by those originally not so brilliant. They have let rubber tires grow around their minds as well as their middles. It is easy to spot the man who has never been through the mill. It shows up a t ahnost every point. It is only those who have learned details and then learned to forget them and to see the general principles clearly, who succeed in management. For the manager, knowledge of human relations is supreme. The best are those who know how to pick men and then how to rely on them, and the last ability is rarer than the first. The ability to pick men is partly instinctive and seems to be tied to the ability to judge them, the beginning of wisdom. To say a thing is instinctive is merely to admit or to name a process we know nothing of. The Greeks thought lightning to be a bolt from Zeus, because they were ignorant of its real nature. All they had was a word for it. The engineer in management must understand finance. There is no value in large research and engineering programs without financing to provide the capital to build and operate the plants. Understanding a balance sheet points out rocks ahead, or indicates smooth passages, the advantage of which must not be missed. In many instances the sins of omission far outweigh those of commission, but unfortunately it is very difficult to see a vacuum. We spend our time criticizing what has been done, without looking carefully at what might have been done. If we cannot have both, the best financial guidance must be preferred over the best engineering. This opens the door wide to economics, psychology, and the study of world conditions. In fact, one might state that there is no facet of human experience not of importance to a good manager. From management of a business to management of a nation should be but a natural step.
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theorists and booklearners, turning out their ideas, saying them over and over until they and many others believe them, without having more of their feet on the ground than a ballerina in a toe dance. CONCLUSION
The greatest danger in life is security. The fish in the ocean has not progressed much since early geological times. The whole land animal world is based on those adventurous fishlike creatures who first wriggled out of the water and started the risky business of trying to live on land. Over and over animal species have started as small efficientcreatures; with prosperity they have grown larger; for one reason or other the procedure has been to become more specialized for convenience, or more and more armored for security. A change in the circumstances no longer favoring the convenient form has resulted in the wiping out of the species. The couceutration on security has prevented nimbleness and ability to meet changing circumstances, and produced a cumbersome creature which went down before the assaults of smaller individuals, less specialized. anthropologist^. tell us that the main reason for the dominance of man has been that he is still a rather generalized animal capable of doing many different kinds of things, and of living under many widely different sets of conditions. The more he specializes, the more secure he becomes, the less is his chance of survival against some new species not so conditioned. Man must have a stimulus, some form of insecurity, not necessarily financial, to continue to drive him on to attainment. The engineer is no exception to this rule. If he is full of supreme confidence in himself and what he has learned, if he does not constantly seek to enlarge the boundaries of his profession into fields not yet belonging to it, he is already building an enclosing armor. He must be able to recognize forms and practices of engineers not of the original conventional primitive kind. The engineer is not the forgotten man. He is rapidly expanding in numbers and experience. With the THE ENGINEER IN GOVERNMENT present high position of science in the public eye, the Successful politicians are men who understand the engineer, as the translator of the results of science to the reaction of people en masse. If they ever were spe- good of mankind, has a supreme chance. Can he take cialists they have long forgotten all but the bones of it and hold it? To do so he must become something what they knew, which fact is usually quite obvious. more than a pure engineer, perhaps a relatively impure They do have a feeling for the pulse of human opinion, one. for the degree to which a people may be pushed, and A higher standard of living is apparently an unstable for the distance to which i t may be led. Engineers are state of man. Over the course of history he attains it trained to think logically, to analyze carefully, to make to a degree, but cannot seem to hold it. What a huge decisions. If they can add on the characteristics of opportunity for the social sciences and religion to find the politician, they should make statesmen, but it is out why, and for statesmen to implement their findings. essential that those characteristics be added. As a We in this country, and those in others even more so, matter of fact, the lawyers trained to produce similar have been strongly jarred in our time of troubles. Our intellectual results have done it. So can the engineers salvation will lie in men who maintain their individif they will study man as well as matter. We definitely ualness against isms, parties, and states, hut who need more varieties of experience in the management of learn to exercise their individuality in accord with a this or any other country. We are hamstrung by highly developed social conscience.
