Fall 1981

Stevens Alumni Association, Inc.

Robert TIt ton "Learned Man of Science"

Thurston "learned man of science"

by Geoffrey W. Clark

Stevens' first professor of mechanical engineering from 1871 to 1885, Robert H. Thurston, conceived of the engi­neer as a "learned man of science," an idea which underlay Stevens' pioneering educational and research programs in the 19th century. Respected internationally for his 574 articles and 21 books, Thurston promoted his view of engineering as applied science in his many professional activities: he was a founding editor of Science, a founding member of the American Institute of Mining Engineers, the first president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and a founding member of the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education. Thurston's ideas and programs were important for Stevens in two ways; they helped to win support for the institute's science­oriented engineering education from traditionalists who favored training of mechanical engineers in shops, and they helped to establish Stevens' tradition of science­based engineering curricula.

Robert H. Thurston

A year after the founding of Stevens in 1871 as the first engineering school dedicated solely to the education of mechanical engineers, Professor Thurston wrote his first article arguing for scientific education for engineers as a complement to the traditional training of mechanical engineers in shops. The engineer had to "cultivate knowl­edge of the physical laws" in order to "make use of scien­tific principles in planning work ," and the best way to obtain such knowledge was to attend a college similar to the advanced French and German technical schools upon which Stevens was modeled . He reiterated this theme in a speech before the first graduating class of Stevens in the spring of 1875. He advised the graduates to build upon their scientifically-derived Stevens education by erecting

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a superstructure of detailed applications in the world of practice. Graduates would always find value in the higher mathematics of Cardan, Lagrange, Laplace, Gauss, and others, in thermodynamics which Thurston considered "the science of exact sciences," and in the work of chem­ists and metallurgists like Liebig, Wohler, Calvert, and Bunsen on the materials of engineering. However, Thur­ston did not reject all shop practice and included it in mechanical engineering curricula as a complement to theory. Thurston summed up by describing Stevens' edu­cational programs as combining both "theory and practice. "

Actually, the idea of combining "theory and practice" was not new. The primacy of scientific methods in the education of mechanics, and the combination of "theory and practice" in the mechanic arts had been promoted since the 1830s by forward-looking Americans. Well­known men of science like Alexander Dallas Bache of the U.S. Geodetic Survey and Joseph Henry of the Smithson­ian Institution had fostered the spread of science-based mechanical instruction in private and public high schools in many American cities during the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. Bache and his circle worked with the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia to establish only somewhat suc­cessful high school programs for mechanics which in­cluded mathematics, drafting and a hands-on experience in shop practice. However, the prevailing method of training mechanical engineers before Thurston's pioneer­ing and comprehensive programs was practical, on-the­job training in entrepreneurial shops. The idea of a college curriculum combining "theory and practice"was in direct conflict .with the established traditions which not only educated mechanical engineers but also introduced them

Thurston s lecture room

FALL 1981

to the social and professional circles of engineer­entrepreneurs. Thus, a great value of Thurston's contri­bution was that it successfully implemented a program combining science and practice which was acceptable to entrepreneurs.

How did Thurston obtain the knowledge to implement such a program? What was his own education like, and how did he come to teach at Stevens? In the 1850s, Thur­ston had taken the science course in the Providence Pub­lic High School, and, according to his own account, he recognized at the age of 16 that the future of engineering lie in the application of scientific methods. Since Thur­ston was born into a well-to-do engineering family who manufactured steam engines, he had an inclination to obtain an engineering education. He chose Brown Uni­versity, however, where he obtained a broad education while earning civil engineering and bachelor of arts de­grees in three years. After serving as an engineering officer with the U.S. Navy during the Civil War, Thurston taught natural philosophy (physics) in addition to naval engi­neering at the Naval Academy. At Annapolis he pub­lished several technical papers on steam engines and the iron industry in the Journal of the Franklin Institute. These publications gave young Thurston a wide reputa­tion for being an engineer with foresight, and they brought him contacts with scientists like the physicist and chemist Henry Morton, the editor of the Franklin Insti­tute's Journal. When Morton became the first Stevens president in J 870, he tapped Thurston for the position of professor of mechanical engineering.

During 1870-71 Professor Thurston designed Stevens' original sequence of mechanical engineering courses which came after liberal arts, sciences and drafting

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cours'es in the freshman and sophomore years. The con­tent of the mechanical engineering courses has been rec­ognized by historians of engineering education as pio­neering in character. Up to 1870 mechanical engineering programs in colleges were based largely on shop work or overlapped with civil engineering courses. But Thurston designed a fully developed and rational program for ju­niors and seniors which was approved by prominent engi­neers and scientists before it was put into place in 1871. Professor Thurston's mechanical engineering courses covered three main aspects of the emerging field. There was (I) a scientific approach to the study of materials and prime movers, (2) a research laboratory in which students participated, and (3) teaching of practical applications of theory through shop work, visiting lecturers, field trips, and senior theses.

Thurston included properties of materials because they were major determining factors in the design of modern steam engines, boiler, and their accessories; students studied the strength , elasticity , and ductility of metals in different applications . Thermodynamics, the study of prime movers and power, was fundamental to all mechan­ical devices, however, and therefore students studied many different kinds of engines and determined friction and lubrication values, loads , and calculated the efficien­cies of different boilers and fuels . Since there were few texts on these subjects, Thurston spent considerable time composing lectures and writing textbooks. His three­volume Materials of Engineering ( 1883-84) and his classic text A Manual of the Steam Engine for Engineers and Technical Schools (1891) were widely used in mechanical engineering programs at other engineering schools.

Thurston's most notable and well-known accomplish­ment was his founding of the first American mechanical engineering laboratory to conduct funded research. He obtained the idea for thi s laboratory from the work of Morin and Tresca and the French Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, and also cited as precedents the research of Tregold and Hodgkinson in England and work done by the U.S . Arm y Corps of Engineers. Thurston's laboratory was planned in 1871 when the prMessor gathered testing devices such as dynamometers and steam engine indica­tors. In 1872 he designed and had his students build his "autographic torsion testing machine" to determine the strength of materials. It was exhibited at the National Academy of Sciences and was used in commercial re­search in 1873 , and after Thurston 's death , it was exhibit­ed at the Smithsonian Institution and is now on display at the Samuel C. Williams '15 Library on campus. In 1875 the laboratory received a major grant from the U.S. gov­ernment to test metal alloys used in boilers, but the bulk of the research contracts was with manufacturing and railroad companies. Although admittedly "commercial," Thurston believed that participation in this research ac-

a great value of Thurston s contribution was that it successfully implemented a program combining science and practice which was acceptable to entrepreneurs

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tivity gave his students a practical and yet "scientific" laboratory experience by saying that "scientific investiga­tion and research in all departments of engineering are coming to constitute the main lines of advance and the principal occupation of scientifically trained graduates of schools pursuing advanced work." I n addition Thurston thought that laboratory equipment should be "live," i.e., the same kind of tools, devices, and machines used in the field should stock Stevens' laboratory.

If the "theory" in the curriculum consisted of sciences, higher mathematics , engineering science, and scientific laboratory methods, the "practice" consisted in foundry and shop training, lectures by experts, field trips and senior theses. Professor Th urston thought that shop work was not central to a curriculum which included advanced courses in physics and chemistry and that it was usually an occupation of "trade schools." He thought it to be an "essential feature," however, of professional training of mechanical engineers which, if it wasn't taught in high school, had to be included in the curriculum. Shop ac­quainted the student of scientific theory with the methods of "trades subsidiary to engineering" upon which the mechanical engiheer was dependent when he designed apparatus. The professor liked to point out that Archi­medes, Galileo, and Leonardo were all skilled in using their hands, and that students needed to obtain "knowl­edge acquired at their finger ends."

Practical education was also provided by well-known guest lecturers such as Alexander Lyman H olley who was instrumental in introducing the Bessemer furnace to

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America and J .E. Hilgard of Bache's circle in the U.S. Coastal Survey. For Thurston, such lectures had dual functions , namely to introduce students to problems of engineering in the context of business and to provide faculty with knowledge of the state of the art in the practice of the profession. Other Stevens programs which integrated "practice" into the curriculum were readings of foreign technical journals in French and German, field trips to industrial sites, and a senior thesis consisting of either original research or an investigation into a particu­lar development in mechanical engineering in the field .

During his career as professor of mechanical engineer­ing at Stevens and later as director of the Sibley College of Mechanical Engineering at Cornell after 1885, Thurston popularized mechanical engineering education as an engi­neering editor of Science, and as a frequent contributor to other professional, educational, and trade journals. Thur­ston wrote scores of articles and delivered speeches before professional societies on the utility and evolutionary na­ture of engineering as applied science, and on the ideal way to professionally train engineers for the business world.

What specifically were Thurston's ideas on education? And where did Thurston get his ideas from? Professor Thurston used the occasion of his inaugural speech as first president of the ASME in 1880 to outline his view that progressive utilitarian and evolutionary results came from the application of science to engineering. As in other contexts, he ascribed his ideas to his reading of the Eng­lish utilitarians and Herbert Spencer, the popular 19th

FALL 1981

century engineer-become-philosopher. Using Spencer's argument that civilization was evolving and progressing through increasingly pervasive use of scientific methods in industry and transportation, Thurston thought that engineers, especially mechanical engineers, could use sci­ence to increase productive capacities. Thus, society would be supplied with cheaper goods in greater numbers resulting in the growth of the overall wealth of mankind.

His inaugural speech ascribed an educational function to the ASME. The society should generate and dissemi­nate technical knowledge by encouraging research and publishing papers; members should realize that the high­est utilitarian functions, the "greatest good for the great­est number," came from education of the people in scien­tific methods and the useful arts. In addition, Thurston envisioned a modern science-based society in which war­like behavior would be su pplanted by a cooperative inter­action based on scientifically-derived ind ustrial relations . U sing Spencer's "ethics of cooperation," Thurston pro­posed that "scientifically correct conduct" based on the care of one's self and then of one's family would inevitably lead to the care of fellow citizens and ultimately of man­kind . As his later articles attest, Thurston retained his faith in this utilitarian and Spencerian amalgam of ideas for the rest of his life.

Thurston's ideas on ed ucation often appeared idealistic and romantic. For example, he never tired of promoting his scheme for an ideal "symmetrical" system of technical education for the United States. He marshalled the thoughts of contemporary authorities , educational theor­ists, and ancient philosophers to support his position; he repeatedly wrote of Plato's call for useful education in the Republic, Milton's outline of an educational system to train all classes of people for practical occupations in the Tractate on Education, Comenius' plan to found a uni­versity to teach Baconian method and applied sciences, and the English engineer John Scott Russell's call for the establishment of British state supported "people's techni­cal schools" on the French and German model. It made no matter that his favorite philosopher in other contexts , Spencer, was against state supported education. For Thurston, state schools could function systematically and efficiently - two traits the professor valued highly. His scheme called for an educational system which would include primary education consisting of the three Rs and manual training, secondary education bifurcated into trade schools and pre-professional schools, college level professional and polytechnic schools, topped by a na­tional university for conducting pure research. Ideally, all liberal arts and pure science disciplines in addition to drafting and shop training, would be taught on the pre­professional level. Thus, engineering schools could con­centrate on higher mathematics, scientific engineering knowledge , and applications in research , design and

The professor liked to point out that Archi­medes, Galileo, and Leonardo were all skilled in using their hands, and that students needed to obtain "knowledge acquired at their finger ends. "

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experimentation. In this way, the status of engineers would rise because engineering education would be put on the same footing as schools of medicine and law.

Lastly, Thurston envisioned a key role in the world of business for engineers who would bring scientific meth­ods to industrial systems. Through technical improve­ments in apparatus , through redesign of the processes of production, and through their rationalization of the work place, engineers could act as "the most essential element of the trilogy in which capital, labor and mind play their several contributing parts." ] n a characteristic analogy, the professor compared the managerial role of the engi­neer to that of a mechanical engineer applying the laws of thermodynamics; the job was to maximize the potential energy of the whole industrial system in order to assure the same kind of efficiency that was sought in prime movers , i.e. , "producing a maximum, minimizing all wastes of time, labor, material , capital , and brains." Engi­neers could use "applied energetics" to increase produc­tivity for the benefit of all mankind. The managerial role of engineers put forth by Professor Thurston was similar in its basic assumptions to the ideas of scientific manage­ment pioneers, Frederick W. Taylor and Henry Gantt, graduates of Stevens in 1883 and 1884, respectively.

In sum, Thurston 's educational ideas ran the gamut from advanced notions of "theory and practice" to ro­mantic symmetrical systems to prescient views on the engineer as manager. Perhaps without his optimistic util­itarian and Spencerian views, he might never have had the commitment to design the program as well as he did . No doubt the publication of his educational ideas putting a high value on the scientific study of engineering in such journals as Engineering News and Scientific American helped to win support for ME programs which blossomed across the country in the 1870s and 1880s. Thurston's lasting contribution to engineering education in general and Stevens in particular, however, were his substantive contributions in curriculum, research laboratories and textbooks - all of which were accepted by the establish­ment in spite of its shop culture.

Geoffrey W. Clark is an associate professor in Stevens ' Humanities Department.

Thurston thought that engineers, especially mechanical engineers, could use science to increase productive capacities. Thus, society would be supplied with cheaper goods in greater numbers, resulting in the growth of the overall wealth of mankind.

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