The Responsibility of an engineer

Title

Creator

Chase, Stuart

Language

English

Year

1966

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Abstract

Condensed from the Technology Review (November, ’30).

Fulltext

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF AN ENGINEER I once wrote a book and ended it with these lines: “Prosperity in any deeper sense awaits the liberation of the engineer. If the owners will not get off his back I, for one, would not be sorry to see him combine with the wayfaring man to lift them off. A complicated technical structure should be run by engineers, not hucksters. But the engineer is the modem Prometheus in chains.’* I have been asked to be more explicit. It is good to end a book with a ringing climax, but not quite so good to be forced to explain all its implications. I recognize, however, my duty to state my reasons. Since James Watt tinkered with Newcomen’s engine, the technician has been increas ingly interfering with our economic structure. Before Watt, the majority of men and women everywhere were capable of providing their own food, shelter, clothing and entertainment in what ever locality they found themselves. They were steeped in the traditions of wresting their own necessi ties from the soil, the wa ters, the forests about them. They may have done it with deplorable inefficiency, but they did it. Shipwreck a group of them on an unin habited but fertile island, and they knew how to carry on. Year by year since 1765, the mass of mankind has been losing the ability to carry on. Shipwreck an as sorted crew' of bookkeepers, truck drivers, machinists and advertising men on an island, and I would not give them two months* survival. Today the millions live in total and sublime ignorance of the forces which feed, shelter and clothe them. For all they know, switches produce light, and chain stores food. The functioning of the economic process rests in the heads of March 1966 25 a few thousand experts. Is it too much to say that if 100 key technicians left their posts they could seriously cripple a great city like New York? To make matters even more potentially precarious, each expert is so highly spe cialized that he has little if any conception of the work of the others. There is no General Staff, understanding the whole process, and corre lating the vital nerves of transportation, communica tion, power, water, food sup ply, which furnish the com munity’s economic substra tum. Specialization makes for economies, as the Progress Boys are tireless in pointing out. I am enough of a Pro gress Boy myself to admit that we stand to.gain more than we lose by the emer gence of the technical arts and the economic specializa tion which they have created. But this should not blind us to the chances taken and the risks involved. Some four million unemployed last win ter must be back in the han dicraft age when unemploy ment was virtually unknown. In brief, you engineers have been raising consider able hell, along, with your not altogether heavenly im provements in economic life. And the point I wish to stress is this: you have been doing the horse work while letting somebody else — chiefly the business man — take the res ponsibility. It seems to me that the responsibility should be squarely yours. You have remade Western civilization, and created at the same time certain malignant evils — actual, like technological un employment; potential, like a smash-up due to over-spe cialization. You should shoulder the burden of miti gating these evils. States men, philosophers, generals, poets, may lead self-support ing communities, but only engineers may lead a great, interlocked economic struc ture. In a sense the modern world is not Jed at all. It simply flounders. In the United States, for instance, the real action of the Re public is provided by busi ness men affiliated with large corporate enterprises. The great majority of these busi ness men neither know nor care where the ship of state is headed. 26 PANORAMA At the heels of the busi ness man follows the en gineer. The former says: Let there be light, and the latter provides it . . . Let there be 1000 oil wells (in a pool where wasteless ex ploitation requires but 100) and they are obediently drill ed. . Let there be the highest building in the world (to choke an already throt tled Grand Central station) and it is built . . . Let there be an almost ulra-violet lamp (to sell to the millions who believe in advertising) and, brave in nickel and alu minum, it is properly cons tructed. . . . You get the point. The engineer has built the mo dern world, but only at the bidding of his master’s voice. The master knows not a cranji shaft from a piston rod, but he knows what will sell. The world is not plan ned tjy the business man, for he has no plan. It is not planned by the engineer, for hitherto that has never been his function. He has cons tructed endless detail — but always as directed. So far as I know, the little town of Radburn in suburban New York, designed specifically lor the motor age, is the big gest single project involving a social-economic goal ever permitted to the engineering mind in this country. It will probably be the most con venient, comfortable, the safest, and perhaps the most sightly suburban town to live in that the nation has ever known. The business man has stepped aside — taking a modest six percent — to let the engineer run the show. It is my conviction that the engineer can run far big ger shows than the town of Radburn to the satisfaction of (1) the people who are to use them or work in them, (2) the investor, (3)* himself, and (4) the technical require ments of the country’s fu ture development. Suppose, for instance, that broadvisioned engineers had had the past century in charge as directors — or co-directors if you will. Would they have permitted: The depletion of our fo rests at a rate four times an nual growth? The violation of1 all laws of geology in the exploita tion of petroleum pools? The criss-cross and dupli March 1966 27 cation in the transportation system? The neglect of cheaper waterways for the profitable exploitation of high cost railways? The exhaustion and ero sion of soils and the floods which follow? The bottle necks and traf fic tangles of metropolitan districts? The building of skyscra pers faster than the means to empty and fill them? The desecration of every highway in the country with millions of square feet of cigarette, cosmetic, and soap appeals? That a century of the en gineering mind controlling, or helping to control, econo mic forces, would have made a wasteless world is, of course, highly problematical. Mistakes would have been made; loss and leakage taken their toll. But I am inclin ed to believe that a good half of the man-power which now runs to waste might have been salvaged, with the result that poverty would have been quite finally abo lished, unemployment enor mously diminished, the acci dent rate drastically reduced, and a cleaner, safer, more comfortable, more sightly, more integrated nation have been our heritage. When I speak of the en gineering mind, I mean a mind that is professional, not commercial; dedicated to building, not to profitmaking; that is done with false modesty and has the courage to accept the job of taming the billion wild horses which Watt let loose; that thinks straight and hard; hates waste and confusion, dirt and despair; that never stoops to the adulterated. Plato once called for phi losopher kings. Today the greatest need in all the be wildered world is for philo sopher engineers. — By Stuart Chas e, Condensed from the Technology Re view (November, ’30) 28 Panorama

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