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tz West Point. _ wanting in the old time shop, but as well were way tracks rape a mists cranes lift with beams and bed ates, ‘engines, and other mas- vemachifery with celerity and edse. If you | e you see also the little reside the door, where in the early , the seene and a plensing odor It was not thus in the “chalk ' use the elegant and burnished machine of to-day, in which each curve in the has been the study of an artist, each screw and bolt modeled after the most approved scientific formula, where the cross feeds, the disengaging gears, the stop, as well as the go- ahead mctions, have been by one maker taken _ from another, and altered and changed beyond the recognition of its author, until like the _ ‘bones of the pauper, it is something “nobody ‘ owns.” _ I can perhaps convey some idea of what the old time machine shop had, by naming some - of the many things it did not have. While it did have, as you will infer, a foundry at one end anda smith shop:at the other, and be- _ tween them little else:that smoke and grit, fortunately the latter got so well ground into _ the apprentice boys of those days that it stuck _ to them all their dives; and served to help ‘them out of many a difficulty. » here were no platiers there, no slotters or shapers, no boring ‘mills; and all we boys knew of their existence were tales told us by bibulous tramp machinists) who, wandering |. out in the then far west, filled us with wonder "as we satabout dia ubrdial noontime and list- . ened to the tales they told of the big tools _ they had woork done at Matty Baldwin’s, in the Allaire, the Secor, or Novelty works, or at But not alone were all these _ twist drills, exeept of the home made pattern, ‘screw cutting machines, relieved taps, etc. while jigs, standard gauges, and reamers were either among the things not yet dreamed of or among those only hinted at as being possible in the far off machine shops of the millen- ‘nium. There was there, to be sure, the wabbling grindstone in tlie corner, above which hung the white lead keg, emptied of its paint, but filled with water which dripped on the revoly- ‘ing stone, graduated as to the quantity escap- ing by a loosely fitted pine plug in the bottom. In the center of the shop stood the cannon ‘stove, about which ‘was heaped up fortifica- tions of ashes, coal dust, and shop litter, and around which the cub machinist, petticoat lamp in hand, skirmished at night, stumbling and barking his shins against the’ broken horse power machines and corn shellers that lay in ambush for him in the darkness, Those of you who have chosen mechanical engineering as a profess on, and who are to| deyise and direct the .vast engineering plants of the future, will never have among your experience anything akin to what all the old- er members of the profession haye had, of the upright drill of the chalk age. You will never enjoy the luxury of hanging on the outer end of a scantling, the other end of which was under a beam, or the vise bench, and where between you and the beam a jour- neyman machinist, sitting on the floor with an iron brace and a flat drill, calmly and leisurly bored holes in a fire frontor mended a broken casting. When I said calmly, I meant calm— ly, so long as the cub held the/lever steadily, and the flat drill found no blow “Hole in the casting into which to drop in and stick fast; for when this eappened, the plate would slip out from under the scantling, the wimble, the lever , and the cub usually came down togeth- er ina pile on top of the prostrate journey- man, who, scrambling from out the wreck, and alternately nursing a jammed fiinger and rub- bing a bruised leg. added briliancy to the tableau with the blue light of his profanity. Neither will any of you ever enjoy the pleasure of being sent down with the work- men, some bitter cold winter,morning, into the wheel house, to help chop out the old pitch- back water wheel which the night before had locked its icy arms with the forebay. Neither, after this has been accomplished, will you have a distinct remembrance how, for days afterward, the old wheel would revolve with diminishing speed, until shafts, and wheels, | and pulleys, all through the shop, almost come to a standstill, loaded mide of the wheel had passed the top of itsrevolution, and then with gathering mo- tion for a few moments everything would fairly buzz with unwonted speed as the loaded | side goes down. Tam sure that no graduate of Sibley col- loge will ever have any experience in cutting | bolts and tapping nuts with the appliances of | As I before said, there were | this by-gone age. no bolt cutting and nut tapping machines in the old time shops of which I speak; and I never look upon one of these elegant and pol- ished thread cutting machines, in which the ; time > budding blossoms grace its bor- | leevers labor of the attendant consiats in lift- ing the bolt up on the machine, and gently | turning a lever to clamp it in its jaws, and then push it forward until it comes in contact with the well shaped dies, which, under a stream of self pumped oil, cut onita clean, smovth, and uniform sized thread, and which when finished is dropped into the sawdus bath below, but that I am reminded of the well named jam plate, of my youth, and the flat sided taper taps that kept it company. The rule of the smith was to suage down ‘the end of the bolt until it would enter the ' nut, and the barbarous screw jamming tools, ‘aided by the strained muscles and the sweat- ing brows of the apprentice boys, bruised and ‘the nut, so they would fit together. So uneven _ Were their sizes, that each bolt and nut were | fitted to each other, and when taking downa | machine, woe betide the fellow who got them mixed. I find that my time will not permit a descrip- tion of all the tools of the old machine shop ew and crude as they were. The old bull lathe, with the wooden shears (iron strapped) and the slide rest, and hand turning tools that belonged to it, have either been changed beyond recognition or buried under the scrap heap of the past. Neither can I describe even a few of the innumerable contrivances we were compelled to made in order that our scant tools could be make to do work which the new art improved tools of to day would make nothing of doing. But all this had its value When every day brought anew necessity, each day as well brought a new device for its accomplishment, until the machinist who learned his trade in those days, and in shops that had but few tools, had re- sources of experience and of expedients that gave him courage to attempt almost anythiug. It 1s a great pity that there has not been pre- served by means of cuts and drawings, some of these exceedingly ingenuions makeshifts in the way of impromptu boring machines, fac- ing off tools, drilling apparatus, and screw cutting attachments on engine lathes, etc. Many of them were curiosities in which odd wheels picked out of the scrap heap, joined with jiggers of all kinds and shapes, tied with clamps and long bolts made to do service as short ones, by having strung on them as wash- ers a lot of worn-out nuts the whole turned with acrank by hand, or by a rope, which, turning several corners, reaches sumewhere a revolving pulley for the required power. New and improved tools have done away for the necessity of such contrivances, and they have also done away, I fear, with the skill and ingenuity then required in the work- man. There were giants in those days, in the way of workmen, who, with only a hammer, a chisel, and a file, could fit up in elegant style the strap joints and connecting rods which to- day come finished and polished from the ma chine tools without the aid of either. These were the days when the ways of lathes were chipped and filed, as were the guides for steam engines, and, indeed, all plain or dressed parts of machines. »| Ihave not thus rehearsed the story of the “chalk age’’ simply to tell you what pluck, energy, and untiring industry then accom- plished, but to give you an idea of the supe- | rior, advantages you who are now before me, and who are seeking to become skilled in the | mechanic arts, possess over those who have traveled over this road before you. If, with the same high aims, the same un- daunted courage, you start on this journey, aided as you are by all these fortunate sur- would | until the ice-| | roundings, there will be no reason why thecom | ing engineers may not at the last lay down their | work with the same feeling of satisfaction as do the engineers of the present, as they look back on what has been accomplished in the | | | half century just passed. And need I say | that if the world’s progress is to be aided by a | corresponding epoch of gneat inventions, if it is to have its civilization, its commerce, its industrial pursuits, as well as its education and the general welfare of all, advanced with the same steady, onward march in the years | that are to come ag it has had in the years | that have gone, it will be to the engineers which the technical institutes, the manuel training schools, are to furnish, we must look for its accomplishment. If you are inclined to think lightly of the task that is before you, if you are inclined to think disparagingly of the artisans and engin- eers of the past, and of what they have done, ust fora moment, think of what has been accomplished by them in the fifty years or so | just gone Of course, you cannot remember the time when there were no railroads, no locomotives no steamships, no telegrap wires on land or |erbles under the sea, or scarce of the time | when the telephone had no existence, except in the imagination of Shakespeare when he spoke “of airy sounds, that sylable men’s names,’’ You can searce conceive of the time when there wore not, as there now is, immense man- | ufacturing establishment all over this land in | which everything, most delicate | screw within your watch to the most ponder—~ j from the ous engine, is turned out by machinery. 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