Note 210 — Chapter VIII

As regards this oft-discussed matter, it seems that Herbert Spencer was of like mind with my father. Speaking in his “Autobiography of Edison,” the great philosopher says that “that remarkable, self-educated man” was of opinion that “college-bred men were of no use to him. It is astonishing,” continues Herbert Spencer, “how general, among distinguished engineers, has been the absence of education, or of high education. James Brindley and George Stephenson were without any early instruction at all: the one taught himself writing when an apprentice, and the other put himself to school when a grown man. Telford too, a shepherd boy, had no culture beyond that which a parish school afforded. Though Smeaton and Rennie and Watt had the discipline of grammar schools, and two of them that of High Schools, yet in no case did they pass through a curriculum appropriate to the profession they followed. Another piece of evidence, no less remarkable, is furnished by the case of Sir Benjamin Baker, who designed and executed the Forth Bridge—the greatest and most remarkable bridge in the world, I believe. He received no regular engineering instruction. Such men who, more than nearly all other men, exercise constructive imagination, and rise to distinction only when they are largely endowed with this faculty, seem thus to show by implication the repressive influence of an educational system which imposes ideas from without instead of evolving them from within.” (“Autobiography,” i. 337, 338.) The remarks are the outcome of Herbert Spencer's perusal of a biographical sketch of the celebrated engineer, John Ericsson. In this occurred a significant passage: “When a friend spoke to him with regret of his not having been graduated from some technical institute, he answered that the fact, on the other hand, was very fortunate. If he had taken a course at such an institution, he would have acquired such a belief in authority that he would never have been able to develop originality and make his own way in physics and mechanics.”