Abstract
IT is not so very long ago that engineers, at any rate, became willing to recognise that technical training had an academic side at all. Almost the first, and still undoubtedly the greatest, representative of the academic side of our profession was the late W. J. Macquorn Rankine, who, after eighteen years of practical engineering experience, became professor of engineering in Glasgow in 1855, and held the chair until his death in 1872, and some of whose pupils have occupied, and now occupy, very high positions in the profession for which he did so much. Perhaps it may be said that Rankine was by nature rather a physicist dealing with engineering problems than an engineer (in spite of his love for the “three-foot rule” 2) dealing with engineering problems. But only those of us who have had occasion carefully to study his work from the point of view of trying to teach subjects similar to his can ever know what an extraordinary physicist he was. But up to the years 1870 and 1880, Rankine's pupils and their contemporaries were not yet old enough to influence the body of the engineering profession, and there still existed a pronounced dislike on the part of an enormous number of engineers to anything academic, a dislike which can hardly be realised now by those who see the various professional bodies vieing with one another in their endeavours to ensure that their members shall have a proper and complete scientific training.
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The Academic Side of Technical Training 1 . Nature 72, 256–258 (1905). https://doi.org/10.1038/072256a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/072256a0