Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1871 [PAGE 287]

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279 has worn off, becomes a little tiresome, and it requires effort, enthusiasm and ability on the part of the instructor to keep it up, but it can be kept up. All our students drill. These companies are under the immediate command of the students who take military tactics as a study. We shall open on the 13th of September a drill hall, 60 feet by 120, with a large platform, giving space for 300 spectators, and also a lower story devoted to large machine shops. I am delighted with the success we have met with in the teaching of mechanical engineering, in a practical way. I inquired of the schools I saw abroad, as to that point, and found they had tried shops, and in most cases abandoned them, but the difficulty they had was this : their students never expect to be laborers like ours ; they simply expect to be mechanical engineers, and have charge, in the way of superintendence, of large manufacturing interests, maybe. But this matter of labor is of great consequence. I said to our Professor, "We have $2,000 to buy books and apparatus to illustrate mechanics." He said to me : "Let me make the apparatus we want." I said, u Yery well, if you think you can make it as quick as you can buy it, do so." There were several applicants for the course of mechanical engineering. He went into a vacant shop that he got, bought some tools, and made patterns of a steam engine. He wanted one of peculiar construction for illustration. When he got it at work, he wrote to Mr. Corliss, the proprietor of the well known Corliss engine, for the privilege of making the valve gear, of the Corliss pattern. Permission was given, and he sat down to make his drawings of the valve gear adapted in size to his own engine. He invented a better one, and obtained a patent on it— better than the Corliss invention, because it does better work and is cheaper ; the whole engine can be made as cheap as the Corliss cut off. They made our apparatus of various kinds, put steam heating into the building, and various other things. They are making castings for a 20 horse-power engine that they say shall run so smooth that standing with your back to it, you cannot tell whether it is running or not. The beauty of it is, that it has inspired such intense zeal, that every old book of mechanics in the library has been rumaged, and we have been obliged to send abroad for books. They have taken out patents, and one of the students has rented a shop, and is making a patent windmill. I am delighted with the result of this shop practice.

LABOR FOB STUDENTS.

Mr. Roberts—Mr. Chairman, I have been quite interested in your description of the working of your Institution, and I wish to say that