Among good mechanical appliances that have been proved to be highly valuable to the civil engineer may be mentioned the excavating machine, which answers well for certain soils and situations, though not for all; and the dredger of Messrs. Bruce & Batho, for excavating from the inside of piers in water.
In manufacturing chemistry, which, with its numerous mechanical appliances, is much indebted to mechanical science and engineering, great advances have been made during the last dozen or twenty years. Aluminum has been brought into practical use to a large extent, it being at once a very light metal and a very cleanly one. "Anthracine," obtained from coal tar, has been manufactured largely for the purpose of producing the various brilliant dyes now so common.
New materials for making candles have been manufactured, in some cases by purely mechanical means, such as boiling together for some hours, at a pressure of several hundred pounds per square inch, neutral grease and water, when the water takes up the base, viz., glycerine, and leaves the grease as an acid grease. This same effect has been noticed in some steam boilers, where the same water, without admixture of fresh, has been used over and over again with surface condensers. Then, again, large rotating chemical furnaces have been introduced; and improved glass furnaces--particularly tank glass furnaces, in which the batch is put in at one end, and the working holes are toward the other end--have cheapened the actual production of glass, and are being worked largely on the Continent, and to some extent in this neighborhood. Toughened glass has made some progress for certain purposes. Besides the improved and extended use of glass in lighthouse illumination, it has again been pressed into our service for other purposes, through our greatly extended knowledge of the laws of optics.
Spectrum analysis has become of practical use, and photographs of the various Fraunhofer lines in the spectrum have been taken as permanent records of each experiment. That such extended knowledge should have been developed by that one little instrument, the lens, is but natural; for the lens is at once the means by which we discover the extreme magnitude of some portion of the infinite works of the Almighty in the architecture of the heavens, and by which we appreciate to some extent the extremely minute markings of a diatom that one cannot see with the naked eye. At the same time we feel sure that there are other markings still smaller, as every increase in the power of the microscope has always rendered visible some markings still smaller than the last; and in like manner has every increase in the power of the telescope developed more worlds and suns far away from our system and beyond our Milky Way. An approach to the infinite in minuteness and to the infinite in magnitude and distance is thus furnished to us by one instrument alone.
There was but one further observation that he would venture to make, and it is this.
When one looks back upon the goodly list of clever men and benefactors of the human race, who have lived, say, during the last hundred years, one is sometimes tempted to wish that more of those scientific men, who have had the most brilliant ideas, and been our greatest discoverers, should have striven to carry out their discoveries into practice. For instance, take Faraday's beautiful discoveries in electricity. It was, in a manner, left to Sir Francis Ronalds, Professor Daniell, Professor Wheatstone, Fothergill Cooke, Dr. Siemens, and others, to develop from those discoveries the "intelligence wires," and "bands," that now encircle the earth, and unite nations, and do so much to prevent misunderstandings.
It is gratifying to know that the engineering profession has not been forgotten when honors have been conferred on distinguished men; and among others may be named Sir William Fairbairn, Sir John Rennie, Sir Peter Fairbairn, Sir Charles Fox, Sir William Armstrong, Sir Joseph Whitworth, Sir John Hawkshaw, Sir John Coode, Sir William Thomson, Sir Joseph Bazalgette, Sir Charles Hartley, Sir Charles Bright, Sir James Ramsden, Sir John Anderson, Sir George Elliot, Sir Daniel Gooch, Sir Henry Tyler, Sir Samuel Canning, Sir Edward Reed, and Sir Frederick Bramwell. With many noble examples before us, and with signs of an improvement in many branches of commerce, he trusted that the latter part of the present century will, with somewhat greater exertion of thought and enterprise on our parts, be marked, not only by numerous small improvements, but by many substantial inventions for the good of mankind.