Editors of other technical journals are invited to reprint articles NOTE. The Club, as a body, is not responsible for the statements and opinions advanced in its publications. Vol. XXIX. APRIL, 1912. No. 2 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. OSTWALD'S ENERGETICS AS A MORAL FORCE AND LAW, AND IVES' COLORIMETER AND COLOR PHOTOGRAPHY, HENRY HESS. Annual Meeting, February 13, 1912. Introductory. It is usual that your President begin his year with an address pertaining more or less closely to the affairs of your Club. But you are familiar with these from their quite thorough discussion in connection with the adoption of certain changes in its constitution -possibly certain changes that were advocated, discussed, and not adopted made you still more familiar with your Club's difficulties and the problems confronting your chosen administrators. I shall, therefore, touch but briefly on this subject. This Club is not simply a club: it is far more a technical society than the social organization usually termed a "club." It is, moreover, a very active technical body. If proof were needed, you need but consult the committees on meetings of our large national technical societies; one and all will assure you that it is a most difficult thing to get good material for two meetings a year; yet you are able to assemble a fair audience twice a month, not infrequently even to tax the resources of this auditorium. Much credit is due your very efficient Chairman of the Committee on Meetings, Mr. Swaab, but not even he could secure so active attendance were the body of our membership itself not far more representative than mere numbers indicate. The papers presented during the past year have covered a wide range; they have been read not only by members of your Club, but men of high standing in the nation and of international renown have gladly availed themselves of the opportunity of securing so appreciative, able, and influential an audience. Occasionally a member would like to hear about a subject somewhat more closely akin to the problems presented in his particular specialty; his suggestions are more than welcome; they are eagerly solicited, and, if he should be too modest or too self-depreciative himself to present a paper, he can suggest some one he thinks would have something interesting to say, and can then himself add to the interest of the occasion by an active participation in the discussion. But this very dual nature of this organization, this duality of social club and technical society, brings in its own difficulties. We have a house to maintain, and the maintenance calls for means. We have but one chief source of income-that from dues. These dues are lowfar lower than those of any organization giving its members what your Club does. Nor is it desirable to raise these dues, as that would press hardly on a considerable portion of our membership that, with the modesty or distaste to push itself in the marts of the world, or from the largely inherent tendency of the working engineer to do, rather than to get, is not overburdened with pelf. We have a membership around the 600 mark; the income barely suffices to keep things moving, and allows laying by of but little for the future; frequently, even, your officers have to pledge their credit when returns are not made so promptly as they should be, while liabilities must be met. Two hundred new members would provide an income sufficient to relieve the situation; 400 would spell comparative affluence. It is not yet so long since the year was new that the suggestion for a New Year's resolution is out of place; it might even be that a New Year's resolution, a trifle belated, would escape the usual fate of a prompt forgetting. Why will not each one of you register a vow with yourself to bring in at least one new member before the month is out? And a second one next month? I believe I may venture to assure you that your most self-sacrificing and hard-working Treasurer, Mr. Stier, would be pleased to place on the bulletin board, engrossed, if you like, the name of that member who has succeeded in bringing home to the greatest number of new men that, by joining you, they have performed a civic duty, while benefiting themselves. I It is a source of much gratification to me, and of still greater pride, to find myself occupying the presidency of this Club, through the suffrage and at the call of so representative a body of men, recruited from every branch of that ablest and most self-sacrificing and hard-working and hard-worked profession of engineering. should like to express that appreciation and thank you in fitting periods, but, though I may be able to talk long and much on various things, words fail where my feelings are most deeply concerned. Yet it was with regret that I first found myself in the Chair some months ago, to fill out the unexpired term of our late revered and lamented President, Mr. Christie. Twice you called on Mr. Christie to serve you, and while that honored him, yet you, or any other body, honored itself far more in being able to secure the response of a man such as he to its call. OSTWALD'S ENERGETICS AND CULTURAL HISTORY. Instead of regaling or wearying you with a recital of my own views or work, I crave your indulgence in laying before you some matter taken from a recent work in German by that dean of our profession, Dr. Wilhelm Ostwald, "Die Forderung des Tages"-"The Demand of the Day." It is true that Dr. Ostwald is more generally known as a chemist, creating and marking an epoch, and as an inspiring teacher, and that he would, therefore, not generally be considered a dean of engineers, yet true engineering in its widest sense was a decidedly fundamental activity of his. The particular essay that so profoundly impressed me that I wished to gain your appreciation by bringing it before you was Ostwald's lecture on "Energetics and Cultural History." Were its author a writer aspiring to the older distinction of the classic culture, I should hesitate to thus crib, but engineers are broad-minded, and desire only to give the widest. spread to their discoveries and teachings; let that be my apology. Ostwald defines energetics as that scientific conception which considers the physical idea of energy as the one which, for the time being, presents the most exact gathering of physico-chemical facts and laws. Dr. Grechen pointed out that energetics is first a theory of physical phenomena, and that a connection of its results and methods of thought with the problems of the higher mental life is not immediately apparent. Energy, as the term is today scientifically defined, has but a loose connection with the moral quality of the same name. To the engineer, energy is a physically measurable quantity, best known to us as mechanical work. As chemistry teaches that coal, graphite, and carbon all represent the same substance, carbon, insofar as each of these may be changed into the other, so does physics teach that mechanical work may be changed into heat, light, electricity, chemical effects, etc. As impossible as it is to increase or decrease a given quantity of carbon by the most complicated transformations, so impossible is it to increase or decrease a given amount of work by the most intricate transformations. For both there rules the law of conservation. That which we can neither create nor destroy we call a substance; thus the chemical elements have the character of substances, as have also work and its transformation products. These latter are given the common term "energy," while the science of the laws governing the manifold transformation of energy is "energetics." Prefacing that this is all well known, Ostwald answers the question for the reason of this repetition by the statement that these laws not only regulate, but even make possible, our very existence. Life is based on a continual change of energy in our body; with the instant of interruption of this change death ensues. But not only individual life, but all social life also, is directly dominated by the laws of energy. That a speaker may appear before you is due to the energy of some means of conveyance; that you hear a speaker is due to the energy conveyed from his vocal cords to you in soundwaves; that you understand a speaker is based on the energy of your own mental activity. That is why we must, first of all, be practicers of energetics, long before we may choose any other view of the world why nothing may happen without the participation of energy in various forms! While the fact of energy is an every-day one, with the term not nearly so well known, the condition is exactly reversed as to culture. The word is generally familiar, but an agreement between any two or three educated people as to a definition will be hard to secure. There are many definitions of this term which it would seem impossible to give a common denominator. But the usefulness of energetics will show itself in its ability to embrace all of the many sides of the cultural problem. All life, individual as well as social, utilizes those forms of energy that it comes into contact with for its own purposes by suitably transforming them. The result of this transformation. may be great or little, as compared with the energy expended, much as a skilled artisan may, in a given time, do tenfold the work of an unskilled one. Ostwald makes the extremely significant assertion that the measure of culture is the efficiency of transformation of raw energies to human purposes. As the teachings of the schools have robbed most of us of an untrammeled vision, an explanation and a justification are in order: All ancient culture was based on the existence of slavery. Only through it could a few acquire that leisure and the means essential to free scientific pursuits. This resulted in the involuntary equation of possession of slaves with high mentality, and the despising of all technical work as fit only for slaves. But the ancients themselves disproved this original hypothesis, since among the chief furtherers of culture there were found more and more slaves and freed men, because culture is based on work, technical as well as mental; between these two also the difference grows increasingly less. If we can imagine ourselves back into the probable initial condition of human development, we see before our mental vision a being that is not superior to its surroundings by either strength, speed, invulnerability of covering, or otherwise advantageously fitted for the fight for existence; it is also not guarded against dying out by such protection as is found in a particularly simple organization or by great fecundity. A single quality differentiates this being from others, that of increasingly freeing itself from the influence of changing conditions of existence by the formation of new, or the intentional retention of old, beneficial conditions. It is this quality that finally gave to this weakly and poorly fecund race the dominance of the earth. Wherein lies the essence of this advance? What is the basic principle involved? Ostwald answers his question that man learned to apply one transformer of energy after another, using and bending to his purposes first the native energy of his own muscles, then that of other men (slaves), of animals, of plants, and finally the anorganic energies (wind, ground wealth, water power). The possession of energy in the sense of physical energy or the generalized idea of work means the domination of the world. If, today, more than ever before, the ownership of mobile capital carries with it this domination, it is because capital represents the most concentrated and most readily transformable form of energy. It is often said that man acquired the domination of the world by his reason, and that reason carries with it the concentration of great power in the individual. This is true so long as reason is directed |