The romance of engineering

THE electrical industry is nearly 70 years old and what do we find as a result of 70 years of endeavor? At the very time when we, of all people, should be pointing with pride to the achievements of our industry and looking forward to even greater opportunities, we find among our younger engineers and engineering graduates a feeling of uncertainty born of the war´s tremendous crosswise forces. With it has come a question whether some form of collective bargaining arrangement might not produce a feeling of general security, despite the corollary that it would probably reduce all participants to a common denominator and diminish the chances of those with outstanding initiative and brains from making rapid progress in their chosen fields of engineering. What has happened? Is the romance of engineering so dead that material gain is the only factor of any importance? I hope not. In the closing decades of the last century, a boy would watch trains go by and yearn to become a locomotive engineer. There was something romantic about the great iron horse disappearing in the distance with its load of cars, and as the boy grew older the only change in his ideas was the preference for an engineering and design activity rather than one of actual operation.