principally
concerned prominently mentioned. The same thing cannot be said of the
unsuccessful attempt at the building of the first sky-scraper, for here
the architect, with unusual modesty, has not given history his name,
this omission being possibly due to the fact that the building was
unsuccessful. If an engineer was employed on this particular
undertaking, the architect had, even at that early stage of his
profession, learned the lesson of keeping all except his own end of the
work in the background.

The distinctive naming of our profession does not seem, however, to go
back any farther than the period of 1761, when that Father of the
Profession, John Smeaton, first made use of the term, "engineer," and
later, "civil engineer," applying it both to others and to himself, as
descriptive of a certain class of men working along professional lines
now existing and described by that term.

Remarkable progress has certainly been made in actual achievements since
that time, and I know of nothing more impressive than to contemplate the
tremendous changes that have been made in the material world by the
achievements of engineers, particularly in the last hundred years. This
was forcibly impressed upon me a short time ago, while in the company of
the late Charles Haswell, then the oldest member of this Society, who,
seeing one of the recently built men-of-war coming up the harbor,
remarked that he had designed the first steamship for the United States
Navy. The evolution of this intricate mass of mechanism, which, from the
very beginning of its departure from the sailing type of vessel, has
taken place entirely within the working period of one man's life, is as
graphic a showing of engineering activity as I think can be found.

Our activities are forcibly shown in many other lines of invention and
in the utilization of the forces of Nature, particularly in the
development of this country. We, although young in years, have become
the greatest railroad builders in history, and have put into use
mechanical machines like the harvester, the sewing machine, the
telephone, the wireless telegraph, and almost numberless applications of
electricity. Ships have been built of late years greatly departing from
those immediately preceding them, so that at the present time they might
be compared to floating cities with nearly all a city's conveniences and
comforts. We have done away with the former isolation of the largest
city in the