The First Hundred Years: Difference between revisions

THE FIRST
HUNDRED YEARS

By J. B. STIRLING
President, E. G. M. Cape and Company
Montreal, Quebec

FOUNDERS' DAY ADDRESS
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 15th, 1954

THE UNIVERSITY
OF NEW BRUNSWICK
FREDERICTON, N. B.

This is one in a series of speeches given at the University of New Brunswick and published by the University

I would like to first thank you, Mr. President, for the honour you have conferred, not upon the person of your speaker, but upon the Engineering profession, in writing as you did to say "it was decided that we should have an Engineer deliver the Founders' Day Address." It is an honour indeed for an engineer to be invited to address any audience. Too frequently members of our profession are regarded, and not without reason, as people who are inherently inarticulate, somewhat absorbed in their work, inclined to leave to others the less arduous, but somewhat more glamorous task of talking about the work engineers do or about the opinions they hold.

This year, in fact this very day, the 154 year old University of New Brunswick is celebrating the One Hundredth anniversary of the institution of instruction in engineering within its halls and that celebration may be regarded as unique in that, up to this date at least, no other university in Canada has embarked upon the celebration of a similar event. Indeed the building in which the first lecture in Engineering took place dates back to 1828 and itself constitutes a museum piece among Canadian collegiate buildings.

The one hundredth birthday of a Canadian university still attracts some attention in academic circles, there being only five known as engineering degree granting universities which have to date attained that antiquity. In the United States the entrance of another university to this charmed circle is in the news with some regularity in recent years and, of course, in Europe it can almost be said that universities of less than 100 years of age are the exception rather than the rule.

But Engineering is a relatively young profession, and while many great engineering works and monuments of the past, dating back to those great Egyptian and Roman structures, have endured through the ages, it was not until during the past 150 years that formal instruction in engineering in the universities began. The reasons for this would make an interesting subject of research, and undoubtedly these reasons would be linked, among others, with the fact that public works were carried out by military engineers, and where works were sponsored by private interests they were frequently under the supervision of men trained in pure science who would have been puzzled by today's expression "applied science."