Mechanical Engineers

In Manhattan the American Society of Mechanical Engineers met for their 46th annual conference, heard speeches, discussed propositions of a good deal more specific importance to U. S. industry than the airy theorizing, the optimistic glad-handing of the average trade- conference. They talked about oil and coal, about workers who are too dainty to get their hands soiled, about workers who are too tired to function properly.

The Society of Mechanical Engineers is, incidentally, one of the pies in which Secretary of Commerce Hoover has his able finger. He spoke eloquently on the subject of:

Pure Science. "The wealth of the country has multiplied far faster than the funds we have given for pure science, and the funds administered for it in the U. S. today are but a triviality compared with the vast resources that a single scientific discovery places in our hands. Men of science here know from their own experience how seriously scientific work has been impeded by lack of resources. . . . The Carnegie Institute, the Smithsonian Institution, the Rockefeller Institute, the research activities of much .more limited but special endowments, the work of our universities, together with the work of the National Research Council and our Government agencies, have shown fine accomplishment in this field, but the whole of the income available from these sources does not exceed $10,0000,000 a year. . . . Industrial science consumes $200,000,000 annually. ..."

White Collars. "There are too many of them . . . too many college graduates," said William E. Wickenden, director of the Society for Promotion of Engineering Education. "The upper rungs of the ladder are overcrowded . . . the middle positions suffer from lack of personnel. ..."

Oil will replace coal as a fuel, said O. P. Hood, Chief Engineer of the U. S. Bureau of Mines.

Tired Workers, declared Engineer R. T. Kent, are a terrible source of waste. Science should find a way to correct fatigue in mine workers, mechanics, engineers.

Hard Coal is so difficult to get in some districts that its most im- portant use is to supply grist for the jokes of vaudevillians and car- toonists. Periodic suspension of anthracite mining "menaces national welfare," said economists and engineers. Thereupon they drafted a letter to John L. Lewis, President of the United Mine Workers, and to Major W. W. Inglis, head of the operators' committee, advising reorganization of the hard coal industry.