2 Engineers and the Nation’s Future
2Eric A. Walker
3 It is an honor and a pleasure to be a speaker for the distinguished Franklin Lectures in the Sciences and Humanities. The subject that I would like to talk to you about is one that I know you’ll be hearing a lot about in the near future. More and more the question keeps cropping up---what are the responsibilties of the engineering and science communities in the future development of the nation? What are the responsibilities of science and engineering to humanity? And in which direction should we be moving?
4 From the engineering point of view, there are some who believe that the engineering profession should stick strictly to the technical end of the business. There are others, however, who believe that engineering must broaden its responsibilities. Yet there is no agreement on how this broadening should be done, or through which instruments.
5 In spite of the engineering developments that have reshaped the modern world, there has often been a tendency in the popular mind to confuse the goals and purposes of the scientists on the one hand with those of the engineer on the other. Yet the distinction is clear enough.
6 In basic terms, the job of the scientist is to inquire into the workings of nature and to seek the understanding of them---to accumulate scientific information for its own sake.
7 The task of the engineer, however, is to use this information in the most practical and effective way possible, to create the devices and systems that are needed for the comfort, convenience, and progress of modem man.
8 Developments of the past several decades, however, have somewhat altered this basic distinction between science and engineering. The rapid and extensive growth of research, in industry, in educational institutions, and within the government itself, has tended to pull the scientist and the engineer closer together, and blur the differences in their separate approaches to the requirements of modem life. The engineer, in his design of new and sophisticated devices, has become increasingly dependent upon the newly-found knowledge of the scientist, and does more research himself. And the scientist himself has frequently found it necessary to work hand-in-hand with the engineer and at times be a designer and engineer.
9 So today, in the public’s mind, there seems to be no clear- cut distinction between the activities of the scientist and those of the engineer. Yet the distinction does exist.
10 In his book, ‘‘Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,’’ C. P. Snow pointed out that a great gulf exists between this science-engineering complex on the one hand, and the rest of the population---particularly, he says, the literary intellectuals---on the other. Snow blames this gulf on the lack of communication between the two groups and he says that it well could be fatal to the Western world.
11 Yet, the gulf is deeper, broader, and somewhat different from that, and the real problem is not in communications as such. The real gulf today, I believe, lies between what science and engineering are capable of doing for mankind on the one hand, and what the average citizen is getting as a result of all this knowledge, on the other.
12 There was a time, up until a few decades ago, when we were a nation of practical doers who could put together machines and do almost anything. We developed the telegraph, the telephone, the sewing machine, and the cotton gin. Men like Edison came along and provided a score of practical inventions for this nation and for the world. Almost anything engineers did to harness nature then was considered good. The engineer was the builder of the highways, bridges, skyscrapers, and the designer of the industrial machinery and the processes that made our factories grow. And at first, if the highways got a little crowded, or the fumes from the factory darkened the skies, or if the tightly packed skyscrapers crowded too many people together in one spot---well, that was considered the necessary price of progress.
13 During those years, we did almost nothing about pure science. We believed and demonstrated that necessity was the mother of invention. We knew how to make good Kentucky rifles before we knew anything about the science of metallurgy. And steam engines worked successfully and provided power before we understood the laws of thermodynamics. Yet as a result of our inventiveness, our ingenuity, and our practical know-how, we built up an economic base that enabled us to support pure science, art, music, and literature.
14 But then along came World War II, and men recognized that the war would be won and our nation would survive only by the development of weapons and systems not yet in existence. We began to mobilize our scientific and technical resources on a scale never before witnessed.
15 Our success during the war in the large-scale use of newly found scientific knowledge in the production of military weapons---especially the atom bomb---taught us several important lessons. It not only emphasized the importance of the essential link between discovery and application, but it made us conscious of our neglect, as a nation, of basic research. And most importantly, it provided us with a model of what could be accomplished through an organized process of research, development, pilot production, and final product.
16 At the end of the war, it was apparent that, in many areas, our wartime achievements had direct application to peacetime goals, and it seemed evident that, in some respects at least, a continuation of the methods and practices which had brought us military success might be desirable in peacetime. And since it was also evident that a great deal of the success in the war had been the result of our own scientific discoveries, it seemed neither desirable nor possible for us to depend, as we had largely done before the war, upon European sources for basic scientific information. If the United States was to maintain its technological superiority and stay ahead of the rest of the world, it seemed obvious that we must not only continue to nourish and use science but that wide-scale scientific research should be supported as a national policy.
17 The result, of course, was that the government, which had been the major supporter of science during the war, continued in the business of providing funds and personnel for scientific research. Support was given for research in the semi-private and private sectors of the economy by giving research contracts to industry and to universities and other non-profit organizations.
18 In short, basic scientific research came to be accepted as an essential national activity, and our political leaders, our industrial leaders, and indeed the general public itself became convinced of its importance as a basis for the continued economic progress and general well-being of the nation. And, as Americans usually do, we jumped in with both feet. Within a few years our support for basic science exceeded that of all the rest of the world put together. And the number of papers and publications in pure science rose astronomically, as did the number of Nobel Prize winners. Indeed, so assiduously did we follow the path of pure science that during the last 18 years we have won 40 Nobel Prizes in the science fields alone---more than any other single nation. And in 1968, the United States won all the Nobel Prizes in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, and physiology.
19 Now the consequences of this attitude toward research have been widespread. There is no doubt that our organized and well-supported research activity has kept America in the forefront of modern science. And it is apparent that some of our industries have learned to integrate research and development laboratories into their systems---to their own benefit and that of the customers who use their products.
20 It is true that, in some areas, our industrial enterprise has profited from the ‘‘spin-off’’ of government-sponsored activity. But perhaps the most significant consequence of this large-scale government support of research has been the new opportunities and challenges that have been opened up and that have prompted us to take a more careful look at the whole complex process by which new scientific knowledge can be converted into useful goods and services.
21 Until a few years ago, we seem to have made the assumption that so long as we provided enough funds for basic research, the new knowledge we discovered would almost automatically be translated into products and systems and services that would enrich our lives and create general prosperity. And indeed there is evidence that in some instances this sort of transfer occurs quickly. Yet in the past few years, we have had reason to question how widespread this process of transfer really is. Many of our Congressmen and other public officials have begun to wonder whether the fantastic sums of public money that are being poured into basic research are really paying off in terms of practical progress. In many instances it would appear that knowledge is accumulating at such a rate and to an extent that it cannot possibly be used effectively without a more conscious effort to put it to practical use for the good of humanity.
22 We are filling our libraries with an almost unbelievable amount of new knowledge, and we ask ourselves what practical use can be made of all these facts, theories, and discoveries. Is the growth of our funding of basic research disproportionate to the growth of our gross national product? Can we continue to give an ever increasing share of our GNP to science? If so, who gets less---welfare, health care, highways, or old age pensions? Should we not examine more critically the whole process of innovation and invention, the means by which basic knowledge is actually applied to practical use? Have we failed to give proper attention to this vital step in the process?
23 The trouble is that, while we have expended a good deal of money on pure science, we have not done enough on the engineering end of the problem for our people. Now once again Americans are beginning to ask the question: ‘‘Of what value is pure science to me?’’
24 It is my belief that the average citizen in America today looks around him and is not satisfied with what science and engineering have given him. Let me rephrase that and say that the public is not satisfied mainly because there are many things that could be done for the citizen which are not being done by the scientists and engineers who are using public money. Today we are witnessing a great deterioration in the quality of our lives, caused principally, I believe, because of this situation. For example, we have gone to the moon, and here on earth we have very fine automobiles, very fine airplanes, and in many places very fine highways. But the average citizen still can’t get from one place to another rapidly and safely.
25 How do you think the average motorist feels when he hears that our space vehicles can travel 25,000 miles per hour on the way to the moon, when he must spend the same hour in bumper to bumper traffic getting between his job and his home a few miles away? Programmed highways have been on the drawing boards for years, but no one has done anything about building one. There is no dignity left in trying to get from say New York to Washington, or from University Park, Pennsylvania to Auburn, Alabama by present methods. There is no comfort---in fact it’s an indecent struggle.
26 Our travel methods, which are now concentrated mainly in travel by air and automobile, are obviously going to decline still further as our ground transportation from airport to city gets more complex, more dirty, more vulgar, and more uncivilized. The airports themselves have become overloaded, garish, trashy, Uttered, and noisy. A recent issue of Saturday Review defined an air traveler as a man who spends 60 per cent of his time in traffic jams getting to the airport and 40 per cent in traffic jams in the air.
27 Alan S. Boyd, former Secretary of Transportation, said recently that the problem of sufficient airport access capacity is plaguing every major airport in the world. For example, the line of cars waiting to get to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport last Thanksgiving, he said, stretched five miles. The Los Angeles International Airport had to go on the air every hour during the day prior to last Christmas to warn of the parking-space shortage. Air traffic controllers trying to get to work at Miami International were stalled in traffic for two and a half hours just trying to get from the entrance of the airport to the terminal.
28 If the access roads are crowded, it is clear that the airport runways and air corridors will become even more crowded in the years ahead if something isn’t done. Airlines are receiving on the average one new jet a day. General aviation adds eighty-five new planes a week to the airways. Thus we can expect a doubling of takeoffs and landings at FAA controlled airports within five years and a quadrupling by 1980. Last year, airlines carried more than 150 million passengers, and companies claim they are adding new passengers at the rate of 40,000 a day. If these figures are accurate and the trend continues, more than one and a half million passengers will climb aboard airliners each day in 1980.
29 Ground transportation by train has become almost torture, and no one in America seems to be doing very much to bring it back to its former state of respect. Indeed, Americans are becoming envious of the solutions the Japanese and the Canadians apparently have found for their high-speed rail transportation and they wonder why we cannot do the same. It hardly seems possible that only a hundred years ago this May, Leland Stanford drove the last spike to complete the transcontinental railroad that was supposed to be the beginning of a new era for passenger travel across country. Now, after a century of railroading, the long-haul passenger business is almost bankrupt. According to a recent issue of Saturday Review, it is quite likely that there are fewer passengers riding the nation’s trains today than in 1869. The paradox is that while we have more than 200,000 miles of railroad track in the forty-eight contiguous states--- which is more than any other nation---two-thirds of that track lies unused and rusting. Six years ago, Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island urged a study of railroad potential in 22 heavily populated, heavily traveled corridors. It was found that modern passenger trains could cut airway and highway congestion significantly between cities 150 and 350 miles apart. Yet virtually nothing is being done. It has been estimated that a single railroad track can transport as many passengers per hour as a twenty-lane expressway. And modern high-speed trains, running on electricity and using existing rights-of-way, would cut our air pollution, thin our traffic jams, and prevent unnecessary highway projects from chopping up the heart of our cities and countryside.
30 The problem of pollution---of the air, the land, and our streams---is getting more severe each year, and solutions that are being attempted are obviously far from adequate.
31 Our garbage is not properly disposed of, old automobiles are left lying around everywhere, and beer cans and trash abound in our parks and along our highways. Our sewage plants are overloaded and primitive, and very little experimentation is going on with new systems, while our streams are polluted with trash, sewage, chemicals, and hot water.
32 Chauncey Starr, dean of engineering at UCLA, says in a recent publication that many of our environmental pollution problems have presently known engineering solutions---but the problems of economic readjustment, political jurisdiction, and social behavior---loom as very large obstacles. If we continue on the current path, he says, it will take many decades to put into practice the technical solutions we know today. As a specific illustration, the pollution of our water resources is completely avoidable by engineering systems now available; but, in fact, interest in making the economic and political adjustments to apply these techniques is very limited. In most cases town fathers just don’t want to take the risk of trying new and expensive systems. And I wouldn’t either if my reelection hung on the failure of an engineering experiment. It has been facetiously suggested that, as a means of motivating people, every community and industry should be required to place its drinking water intake downstream from its sewage discharges.
33 We will soon spend millions to probe the atmosphere of Venus and Mars, while the air here on earth remains polluted with dust and heat with which we cannot cope. Indeed it may be a good thing that ships from other planets are not sampling our atmosphere---the conclusion might well be that life cannot possibly exist on earth.
34 While we have developed an efficient voice transportation system, and can talk to almost anyone all over the country, our delivery systems for written messages, food supplies, fuel supplies, packages and such is woefully inadequate. Certainly, new and better methods of making deliveries---such as the use of pneumatic tubes for letters and parcels, which have been used for years---must be rediscovered and developed.
35 Our educational system seems so cluttered that we have forgotten that the purpose of an educational system is to give everybody as much education as he wants and can use. But now we seem determined to give everybody the
36 same kind of education regardless of whether he is ready for it or can use it. Our educational system seems to have become completely disconnected from what society needs. We are educating people who cannot make use of their education, and so we have thousands of untrained unemployed with at least an equal number of jobs unfilled. Obviously a re-study of the whole educational system, to make it useful for people and society, is again needed.
37 Our governmental systems have never seemed so inadequate. We are saddled with systems like school boards, school districts, town meetings, borough councils, district government, and county government, many of which overlap; while at the same time there is little or no clear definition of what the states are supposed to do and what is reserved for the federal government.
38 To support all this we have an amazingly complicated taxation system which taxes things more than once, which taxes more things out of proportion to their usefulness and taxes inequitably between the rich and the poor. The whole governmental system may be creaking toward a collapse of its own weight, unless something is done soon.
39 In the field of medicine we are capable of producing numerous devices for the benefit of patients---yet many of these developments never get to the marketplace simply because there is no profit in producing them. For example, earlier this year a young Marine corporal was fitted with a newly developed electronic arm at the Temple University Health Science Center in Philadelphia. The new type arm responds to brain signals which are picked up by way of probes in the shoulder. The arm, which can be flexed at the elbow, swung from the shoulder, and rotated at the wrist, is described as ‘‘fantastic’’ by both its user and those who witnessed its use. Yet it is likely that such a device will never be produced in any sufficient quantity because of the heavy cost of production and the little or no profit involved.
40 Finally, our cities continue to exist with overcrowding, ghetto living, deteriorating buildings that are a haven for rats, lack of open space, and conditions so miserable for some of our citizens that both mind and body are withered. What values have we set for ourselves as a nation when some men must live in such primitive conditions while others cruise the universe in germ-free, sterile space cabins.
41 It is only fair to say, of course, that there is evidence that we have begun to recognize the housing challenge, at least in some quarters. For example, the National Academy of Engineering is talking about a proposal put together some time ago by the President’s Office of Science and Technology for an Interagency Family Housing Demonstration Program. This would leap over local codes, union rules, and antiquated assembly processes to build good houses inexpensively.
42 Recognizing that real innovation in the construction of housing units is technologically possible and highly desirable, but that development of new techniques has been hampered by the fragmentation of the industry, code constraints, rigid labor practices, and government apathy, the OST proposed an extensive project, to be undertaken jointly by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Defense. The idea was to start from scratch, so to speak, by securing a large area outside the jurisdiction of local building codes or other restrictions, and attack the problem of family housing in much the same way that a large and complicated weapons system is attacked, through a program advancing from small-scale field experimentation and evaluation to prototypes, to large-scale procurement for demonstration purposes. Every possible use is to be made of new techniques and innovations. It is expected that by using government construction funds to demonstrate the practicality of advanced building systems, the stage could be set for substantial improvement in low-income housing nationally. Projects of this sort, I think, are badly needed. For it is clear to me that if improvements don’t come in all these situations we will reach a time when people will demand that something be done. And after all, it is the average citizen who is paying the bill in this country.
43 It is my feeling that these problems, taken together, are as severe as they were when we were menaced by enemies during the first and second World Wars. We all know that during those wars, the nation’s and the people’s entire energies were devoted to overcoming our problems. We turned our entire attention to the practical aspects of science and engineering to get something done---something that was needed immediately in the face of clear and present danger. We mobilized all our resources. I believe that we are again in the middle of a crisis---a clear and present danger---although many of us don’t recognize it as that yet.
44 Perhaps what must be done again is that the whole country should be mobilized to solve these national problems--- government, industry, the public, pure scientists, applied scientists, engineers, and businessmen. Perhaps we could have a ‘‘call to arms’’ in which the Federal and State governments recognize that the solution to these public problems is important and crucial. Perhaps with the end of the Vietnam War we can turn our attention---our whole attention and not partial attention---to the solution of such problems. Perhaps there could be a four-year period in which the whole country ‘‘wars’’ on the deterioration of the quality of our life. This would take mobilization of all our efforts, from the highest level on down, including the Department of Defense, the Space Agency, the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Engineering, and all our universities.
45 What, you may ask, will we be doing about basic research while we have our energies turned toward practical problems?
46 Basic research did not suffer permanently when we devoted all our energies to the practical problems of two world wars. And I think that history has proven that as soon as any war is over we have redirected our attention to catch up on all the basic research which we might have done and did not do. We have been hearing a great deal recently from scientists about the need for more support for basic research. There has been a great deal of talk about the lack of support by the federal government in basic research and even statements to the fact that our superiority in science is going to fade away unless something is done about it immediately. Really, I put very little stock in such comments. People---and this country as well ---get somewhere only by doing something that is difficult to do. That is why we stretch our muscles and that is why we train and exercise and exert ourselves. I suspect that there would be nothing wrong with having a squeeze on basic research once in a while---if only to sharpen our wits and increase our efficiency. Anyway, I think it’s a bit difficult to claim that we are losing our superiority in basic science when in the past year we have won all the Nobel Prizes there are in science.
47 There is no doubt in my mind that if we turn our attention now to practical problems and are willing to wage a war against the deterioration in the quality of our lives--- even for as short a period as four years---the advance we could achieve for humanity would be phenomenal. And it would set us apart as a nation for all to follow---a nation which is willing to seriously approach the problems of its citizens and find the solutions for them. To do so would not be a difficult task when one considers that approximately ninety per cent of all the scientists and engineers who ever lived are alive today.
48 Certainly a large share of the blame for our slowness to act on these national problems must be laid to technology itself---to the engineer who has traditionally confined his interests all too narrowly to his technical specialty, and who is only beginning to take his proper place in the mainstream of social activity. It seems to me that, more than any other group, the engineering profession must accept this new responsibility wholeheartedly.
49 The world of the engineer can no longer be limited to the concerns of business and industry, or even to the traditional requirements in the field of public works. Along with the rest of society, the engineer is faced with the task of finding solutions to these pressing problems of modem life--- problems which lie in the public sector of our economy. Basically, many of these problems are engineering problems. To a large extent, their ultimate solutions will depend upon the willingness and ability of the engineering community to provide society with the kind of help and advice that is needed to solve them.
50 Engineering must, and is, more and more recognizing the importance of the social sciences, the humanities, and the communication skills in the undergraduate programs. It is evident that the engineer of the future will be called upon more and more to play an increasingly active role in the solution of complex social problems. He will have to cope not only with the physical forces, as in the past, but with biological, social, and political forces. As a consequence, engineering education in the years ahead---as well as science education---will have to impart a thorough knowledge of the many non-technical aspects of modern life. And the humanities, too, must begin to learn more and more about the professions of science and engineering, and must learn to work more closely with their colleagues in these fields.
51 Just as our government has financed big science, it must now finance big engineering. But the engineers must prove that they are able to take government money to solve the people’s problems and give them what they need to be productive, efficient, and contented citizens. To make a start in solving these national problems would bring us a great deal more prestige as a nation---prestige that we have been losing for the past several years.
52 Lincoln reminded us that a house divided against itself cannot long stand. So too, a nation that devotes a great deal of its energies and resources to pure science without an equal return in practical benefits for the citizens who are paying the bill, cannot hope to have the support of its citizens. We must not forget, as we reach out into the universe, that this government was founded to ‘‘insure domestic tranquillity’’ and to ‘‘promote the general welfare’’--- right here on earth.
53 April, 1969