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MANUFACTURING EDUCATION.

Since the commencement of the existence of the Citizen, we have embraced every opportunity which presented itself of impressing upon that numerous and important section of the community engaged in mechanical and manufacturing industry, the importance of a correct knowledge of the principles of their respective trades. To impart this constitutes a leading object of the Mechanics' Institution, and on its successful fulfilment must depend a great deal of the ultimate welfare of its members, in a pecuniary point of view. We attach the highest value to the elevation of the mind of the working-man-to raising his standard of moral and of social right-to teaching him to look upon his employers, not as men from whom it is his duty to get as much, and to whom he ought to give as little as he can effect, but as individuals associated with him in providing for the wants of the human race, and in furnishing, by the union of pecuniary capital with skilful labour, the means of supplying those objects for which the progress of civilization continually creates new demand. But this is not enough. Individuals may rise above their class,-almost, we were going to say, above their nature, and in poverty and rags, despised by those around them, and unknown to all that might lend them sympathy and support, manifest a dignity of intellect and virtue, which would appear as if specially bestowed to show what excellence humanity might attain. But a class of men cannot be so gifted. An operative driven out of work by the introduction of a new machine, or displaced by the excessive fluctuations in demand, to which commercial gambling so often leads, cannot address his family, who cry for bread, on the excellence of that science by which machinery is invented, or the advantages which arise by labour being assisted and directed by great capital. The operative must first be made comfortable in his worldly means; he must be able, when at work, to earn enough to enable him to enjoy, with his family, domestic happiness and content on the day consecrated to bodily repose; and what is of equal value, he should be possessed of such resources, that when the branch of trade by which he has lived has died away, whether

by the caprice of fashion, or the invention of new modes of manufacture, he can apply himself to some kindred art, and even avail himself of the change, to better his condition. For this, he must be skilled. No labour is ultimately remunerative unless it require skill; and to enable the workman to learn the principles by which his skill must be directed, should be the main object of the Mechanics' Institute, of Dublin.

For successful industry, labour must therefore be skilled, and workmen must be educated in the principles and practice of their respective trades. This applies to all classes of workmen,-to the superintendent who earns £500 a year for general inspection of the progress of a factory,-to the labourer, who, engaged in the lowest offices, gains but a shilling daily; it is necessary to the higher workman exactly in proportion to his income, for it is his superior skill, joined to moral integrity, which qualifies him for the best situation. The management of a large factory requires indeed a fertility of resource, which resembles in a great degree, the skill necessary to regulate the movements of an army in an enemy's country, and in presence of a superior force. Every day, new and unforeseen circumstances arise. Prices fluctuate, and when purchasing, we must be guided, not by the price at which the manufactured article could now be sold, but by our calculations of what the price may be when brought into the market, perhaps after an interval of many months. We have seen as much generalship displayed in avoiding loss from fluctuations of this kind, as might be paralleled with the best retreat described in history.

The qualifications necessary for the successful management of a factory, independent of the capital and credit by which it is established, are of many kinds, of which we only purpose alluding to a few. First, the manager must be thoroughly conversant with the means of determining the true value of every raw material that he requires to buy. If he be obliged to take the word of the seller; if he be guided only by what others are paying for an article which he believes to be the same, he is liable to con

tinual loss and imposition. Of this, even in Dublin, we have known very many and gross examples. Thus, in glass making, it is necessary to use an alkali: for crown glass, it is a mixture of potash and soda that is used; but for flint glass, potash alone should be employed, as soda colours the glass green. The price of good potash is £30 per ton; that of soda is £15 per ton; and I have known glass makers to be paying the high price for an alkali which was two-thirds soda, and was worth consequently, but about £20 per ton. The quantity of glass made from a ton of alkali cost the maker therefore £10 more than it ought, and besides, it was necessarily much softer and worse coloured than it ought to be. This fraudulent alkali melts down the sand quicker than the true potash, and hence, to save a little coals, the inanufacturer was induced to buy it. Glass makers buy also red lead at a high price, in ignorance that a smaller quantity of litharge, which is very cheap, might be used with the same effect. In like manner soap boilers who do not make their own soda, and we believe that in Dublin none but Mr. Jones makes for himself, are very seldom able to determine the real value of what is sold them; they buy at the price of the day, and it is generally, only when they find floating on their coppers, a great quantity of fat not saponified, that they discover that the alkali was not worth half what they paid for it.

The management of all processes performed in the factory must be minutely understood, not merely as to practical details and receipts, which have been handed down from one time to another, and acted upon with good results; but also, with the greatest minuteness possible; the scientific principles on which they are founded, and the theories by which they are explained; these departments of knowledge are equally necessary for the successful management of a factory. The success, particularly in an economic point of view, of manufacturing industry, depends upon an acquaintance with details of which the mere man of science is totally unconscious, and hence very frequently where the direction of a factory has been given to a person whose scientific knowledge was extensive and precise, the result was total failure of the concern, and great loss to the proprietors. On the other hand, if the manager be only acquainted with such processes as he may have learned by rote from others not more skilled, the slightest change of circumstances may deprive him of his only

means, and leave him destitute of resources, and incapable of devising new processes in place of those that had become useless. If a new dye-stuff be introduced; if an ore, which had been for a long time employed, becomes exhausted, and a new variety be introduced instead; it requires considerable scientific skill to determine the best possible way in which it can be treated. If in an ordinary process, something unexpected and unusual occurs, it is necessary to trace its origin, and determine the conditions by which its recurrence may be avoided. The competition which exists in all departments of industry renders the slightest reduction of expense, in the making of an article that is much used, of great importance; and it is only by a clear perception of the principles of an operation, that the proper steps may be taken for rendering it less costly.

Examples illustrative of the necessity for this two-fold skill, might be accumulated to any amount; we shall here only introduce a few, and these belonging to the latter class, as it requires no examples to convince the world that merely scientific men may be unsuccessful in the direction of commercial matters. The benefits accruing to the arts from purely scientific labours are less generally appreciated. Before the discovery of chlorine, the bleaching of linen, by exposure to air and moisture, occupied from four to six months, and could only be carried on successfully in some countries, as Holland, where the great dampness of the air, rendered its action more decided; but when Berthollet applied the power of chlorine, the process was rendered available in every country, and reduced in duration to a week. At present, it is usually completed in a day, and if there were any reason for such rapidity, 100 pieces of grey calico could be turned out of an ordinary bleach works, finished in six hours. In addition to the time thus saved, the process is cheaper, as the manufacturer may pass through his hands one hundred times as much goods: and it is safer; the goods are much less injured; fabrics are now made so delicate, that the exposure necessary for the bleaching by the old process would have totally disorganized the fibre.

The steam engine was created in its perfect form by one of the most wonderful men that ever lived, James Watt of Glasgow. He was a working optician, but he did not improve the steam engine by rule of thumb processes or old receipts; he was a scientific man of the highest order, and even before his great invention, his society was courted, and his talents valued by the most distinguished

men. He first of all discovered the scien- | tific principles by which the structure of the steam engine should be governed, and then he made the engine. There was nothing merely practical in it. He never tried would any thing do. At no stage of his labours did Watt give the engine any form that was not

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immediate consequence of scientific reasoning, or that does not remain part of its most complete form at the present day.

This scientific education, which enables the workman to invent new processes or to improve those previously in use, assumes its greatest value, when it is necessary, not merely to sustain the success of manufactures which have already been established, but to create new manufactures for a country, to develope its resources previously unexplored, or to introduce with safety branches of art which flourished already in a neighbouring and rival nation. It is then that science becomes the leader of the industry of the country, and warning the too sanguine of the false lights that might lead to unprofitable outlay, encouraging in their path those who are disheartened by the absence of immediate profit, it thus becomes the protector and pioneer of the arts and of industrial progress, and may give stability to what was at first but a praiseworthy exertion of patriotic enthusiasm.

Thus at the close of her first revolution, France found that all Europe was arrayed against her independance, and that by the fleets of England, all intercourse with foreign nations was prevented. At every point of her frontier she was menaced by a foreign foe, and there did not exist in her arsenals a pound of powder, for making which the nitre had always been brought from the East Indies. There was not in the country the means of making a pound of soap, or of importing from the Colonies a particle of sugar. The scientific men of France came to their country's aid, they imitated the processes by which nitre forms naturally between the tropics, and within a month battles were gained with gunpowder, fabricated of home-made nitre. Inexhaustible sources of sugar were discovered in native plants; the carrot, the parsnip, and finally the beet-root were found to yield supplies, which from the last-named substance were so abundant and so cheap, that its cultivation now furnishes the sugar used by the greater part of Central Europe. For the manufacture of artificial soda, the process of Leblanc was invented, which has been so successful as not only to have supplied the place of the Spanish Barilla on

which France had been previously dependent; but since its extensive introduction into England by Muspratt and Cookson, to have reduced the price of soda to about one-third, and to have increased the soap manufacture in Great Britain tenfold.

The necessity of this combination of scientific and practical knowledge, becomes remarkably evident on looking over the nature and history of improvements in the arts. Not one patent in one hundred ever repays to the inventor, a farthing of his outlay. Many partially acquainted with scientific principles, but destitute of mechanical experience, fix on some idea of increasing power, or of modifying mechanical arrangements, which on actual trial is found to be inferior to numerous arrangements previously established. On the other hand, where an individual takes out a patent for a mechanical process, of which the theory remains unknown to him, his patent is invalidated by the slightest alteration in detail, of which many at once present themselves to one who understands its principles. His labours are therefore in such case at once appropriated by his more skilful rivals, and they are led, most likely, by their knowledge to improve his process another stage, and so outstrip him.

We have selected our illustrations of the necessity for this mechanical and scientific skill from the ordinary manufacturing trades; but in other departments it is just as necessary. In Cornwall, not many years ago, an ore of copper, which is now extensively and profitably worked, was thrown aside because it differed in appearance from that with which alone the miners were conversant, and it was by the accidental visit of a skilful chemist that its value was recognised. In Cornwall also, although not in the same mine, a valuable ore of manganese was for a long time thrown away, because the persons managing the concern, and who were only copper miners, mistook it for common ironstone. It has come to our knowledge, that ores have been bought and sold at prices sometimes far above, and sometimes far below their real value, from the inaccurate mode of assaying used by the unskilled persons to whom that important office was entrusted, and thus mining adventure rendered still more uncertain and hazardous, than the varying conditions inseparable from underground operations required.

In engineering, the necessity of this combination of skill, is more evidently remarkable than in, perhaps, any other branch of practical science. In striking out lines for

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hundred and twenty; of these, about ten either die or leave the school from various causes, and hence, the number appointed is generally about one hundred and ten. The following list contains the distribution, according to the latest returns we have been

Land Artillery
Sea Artillery
General Staff

Marine Engineers
Military Engineers
Geographers
Hydrographers
Marine (Navy)

railways or canals; in deciding upon the
proper angle to be given to slopes for em-
bankments, and the precise relation between
the amount of cutting and filling, which
may bring hill and valley to the most de-
sirable inclination at the least possible ex-
pense; there is required an amount of able to obtain :-
knowledge of scientific principles upon the
one hand, of experimental facts for which
no principle can rigidly be assigned, upon
the other, besides a degree of tact in the
combination of the two, which, only a mind
well trained to accurate reasoning, and to ba-
lance probabilities can acquire or command.
The number of questions in practical me-
chanics, particularly of liquids and vapours,
for which pure science supplies positive so-
lutions, is very limited. Experience, or ex-
periment unenlightened by principle, ex-
plains still fewer, and is especially danger-
ous from its tendency to class together,
facts, superficially agreeing, but differing
completely in their essence. The combi-
nation of the two, is alone capable of guid-
ing the great works, whether public or of
private enterprise, on which so much of
European progress, and especially the im-
provement of our own country, at present
essentially depend.

Mining Engineers

Prior to 1837- In 1837. In 1838.

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Civil Engineers
Gunpowder and Saltpetre

Works
Tobacco Works

Troops of the Line

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It is evident that this school is really a military institution; its main object being to supply the army and navy with competent engineers. Hence it is observable that prior to 1837, the numbers entering the It is, however, only recently that the ne- army preponderate enormously; but that of cessity for this peculiar practical education late years the proportion is completely has been felt; the enormous developement changed. The change is, however, much given to every department of social indus- greater than at first sight would appear. try, by the long peace with which Europe has At the final examination, the pupils are been blessed, and the intense spirit of com- catalogued in the order of their excellence, petition which it created between countries and the first man chooses his own apas well as individuals, with the desire to econ-pointment, then the second, and so on; omise time as well as money, led to the trial of new processes of manufacture, as well as new modes of communication, for which the spirits of the preceding epoch, engrossed with schemes of military aggrandizement, had not sought. In one respect indeed, this education had been required, and it was, in that department,given with splendid success; the colossal enterprises of Napoleon depended upon rapid execution for most of their results, and hence, a corps of skilful engineers was wanted; to create that corps the Polytechnic school was formed, and a course of engineering study, combining the highest scientific, with the best practical instruction, was drawn up, which has produced more beneficial results in France, up to the present day, than almost any other of her institutions. But the men educated in that school were, and are still reserved to the state; they all receive government appointments. The number of students admitted annually is about one

no man can select his place until all those more distinguished than he is, have been served. But it is found that the military places are left for the inferior men; the four or five best men always become mining engineers, and pass to the school of mines, according as there are vacancies. The great crowd of good men then distribute themselves as civil and military engineers, and the artillery and the troops of the line are supplied with those only who cannot get any thing else. But although it be in a civil capacity that the best polytechnic students enter the service of the state, yet they all become dependent on the government, and the nation at large cannot claim their services. It is only by special grace, that a mining engineer belonging to the school of mines can pass to a private employment, and then only, as it were, on furlough, for a specified time, and liable to be recalled if the government require his services. It is the same with the civil en

sary to all practical occupations. At the end of the year there is an examination, and such students as do not give promise of distinction from their intelligence and industry, are dismissed from the school.

This examination having been successfully undergone, the student is required to declare what is to be his profession, as his subsequent studies must be directed specially with reference to it. The professional departments are,

First. Construction of machines and mechanical arts.

Second. Construction of edifices and public works, including railways, canals, roads and bridges, heating and lighting of buildings and cities. In a word, civil engineering and architecture.

gineers (Ingenieurs des Ponts et Chaus- selves to the same objects, in order to obtain sées). a well grounded knowledge of those departFor the foundation of an institution fit-ments of science and art which are necested to render the country independent of the whim of its rulers, in the matter of practical education, and to place at the disposal of the public a class of well informed engineers, directors of manufactories and architects, France is indebted to the exertion of one of her most eminent and eloquent scientific men, M. Duinas, and one already distinguished for activity and benevolence, M. Lavellée. To the former the conception of the idea, and the management of all the details is due; but without the spirit and single-mindedness of the latter the project could not have been achieved. In a country like France, where every thing was done by the government and with its aid; where all funds for science and education came from the state, a school was to be founded in direct opposition to the dearest object of the government; and the experiment, an important one in France, of professional education in private hands, was to be tried. When Dumas spoke of the scheme to Lavellée, the difficulty was the funds. Lavellée said, I am worth so much a year, I must retain a small sum to live upon, I place the rest at your disposal for the support of the school till its capabilities are fairly tried, and if it fails I shall regret the loss of so good an institution, but not of the money. His noble self-denial was not put to the proof beyond the first few weeks. On the day on which the school was opened, the number of applicants was double that which the building could accommodate; and there issues from its walls, annually, for the last six years, an average of one hundred and eighty fully educated practical men, conversant with every means of combining art and science, so that they may most benefit each other.

This institution is called the central school of arts and manufactures, (Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures). Its object, as stated in the prospectus issued by the managers, is, to educate civil engineers, superintendants of workshops, managers of factories, and teachers of the sciences applied to the arts.

The complete range of study to fulfil these objects extends over three years. The student at entrance is strictly examined in arithmetic, vulgar and decimal,-in algebra and geometry; and to obtain a respectable place at entrance, an elementary knowledge of the calculus is necessary. For the first year all students apply them

Third. Technical chemistry, including tanning, manufacture of pottery, glass, oil of vitriol, chloride of lime, prussiate of potash, alum, soda; vinegar making; preparation of colours, sugar, the chemistry of dying; in a word, the chemical arts in their most extended sense.

Fourth. Woking of mines and metallurgy.

During the second and third years of their studies, the candidates apply themselves, by reading, by lectures, and by working practically, to the acquisition of a complete knowledge of the branches that they may have selected. At the end of the second year another examination is undergone, to test the progress made, before the student is admitted into the third and final class; and at the termination of the entire course, a strict and practical examination must be passed through, before the diploma of capability to exercise the profession chosen, can be granted.

What renders the final examination of great interest to the students, and a security to the public that they shall be properly qualified, is the following:

A few days before the examination, a problem is given to each student, of the following kind, according to his profession,

Let us suppose he is to be a manufacturing chemist. A capitalist places at his disposal £10,000 to commence manufacturing hard soap; and for that, to prepare his own soda. He is required to draw, according to a scale, plans of every portion of the factory, of such magnitude that the capital in his hands should get it fairly into

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