The derrick is in general terms made up of steel piping. Its adjustable boom, ease of erection and durability of its material, make it a very useful appliance. The design of the derrick has not been patented.

On the erection of a 1200-ton coal pocket at Baltimore, Md., the cost of lumber erection was only $9 per thousand feet board measure, whereas the usual erection cost was about $12 per thousand. The cost of the derrick, without blocks and tackle, is about $315. For operating the derrick, a 64 by 8-inch double cylinder, double drum hoisting engine with boiler attached was used. Any standard hoisting engine will answer the purpose. One of the drums is used for operating the boom and the other for the hoisting line, a winch head being used for raising and lowering the end of the boom. Stiff legs do not interfere with this raising or lowering of the boom, which can be operated with safety for about 20 feet above the base. If it is desired to raise the boom a greater height than this above the base, an extra pair of braces should be attached on the back of the mast at the point of greatest thrust.

A CIVILIAN'S SUGGESTIONS FOR A TECHNICAL

RESERVE FOR THE ARMY*

BY

Mr. CARYL D. HASKINS

To no other people in the world is the national military establishment so completely an unknown activity as to the people of the United States of America.

The ties which bind our Army to even the best educated classes of the nation are thin and weak, and rest almost wholly on romance and other thoroughly impractical influences.

The ties of familiarity and sympathy which are inherent in the great conscription nations of Europe, and for other reasons equally inherent in that one other great nation where volunteer service alone fills the ranks, is lacking with us.

Certain old doctrines, unmodified by the progress of the last century, still serve to lull even the most intelligent. The fact that hours, not miles, are the true measure of remoteness from other lands is utterly neglected, and the miles of safety maintained by our great ocean barriers are regarded as just the same miles which constituted the protection of three generations ago.

Just why the popular attitude of mind which characterizes the vast majority of our highly educated professional classes prevails would be hard to determine, nor is it, perhaps, important that it should be determined. The average lawyer, the average doctor, in fact, one may say the average college man at, and for life after, graduation, regards the military service as a foreign thing with which he is unfamiliar and has little sympathy. This statement extends even to those who meet and have frequent intercourse with the officers of the Army, for such intercourse is almost without exception of a social character.

I venture to believe that if one hundred representative professional men in civil life were selected at random, they would be found, substantially without exception, to still cherish complete *Lecture delivered before Engineer School, U. S. A., Washington Barracks, D. C., April 26, 1911.

faith in the security of geographical isolation, in the reliability of the proverb which carries victory always with the right hand of justice, whether that hand he armed or naked, and yet more peculiarly it would be found that each one of these generally well informed and educated men, at heart, felt absolute security arising from that peculiar national egotism which has found its excuse for the last fifty years in our enormous numerical strength and our apparently inexhaustible wealth.

If one should find among this hundred cultured men one or two who did not share these views, he would probably be found to be that most painful variety of American, a jingo, than whom, I venture to believe, there are few more harmful influences in relation to national military progress.

Disavowing very definitely all jingoism, even in its mildest forms, granting definitely that a great war at any early time is most improbable, but contending, nonetheless, that peace by contract and treaty is an unstable thing and has been so in all history, a thing upon which no sane and honest person may rely; some few men of that civil life profession most nearly allied to that of the soldier have given some thought to our national conditions, from the standpoint of scientific preparedness, just as every educated man must give consideration to any measure of insurance which he understands.

The professional engineer in almost any of his specialized forms is, broadly speaking, more nearly a ready-made tool, available for military purposes, than any other citizen.

Speaking as a civilian engineer whose pastime study since boyhood has been the scientific side of the military profession, it seems to me important to the future security of the nation that the very large body of trained civil life engineers of the United States should be brought: first, into a condition of appreciation of what the military establishment is and is doing; second, to a realization that modern warfare is, broadly speaking, nothing but a carefully conducted series of engineering projects; and, third, into the closest possible touch, of spirit, cooperation, and even participation, both in the purpose and the results obtained by the Army's technical branches.

In every other nation of the world of which I have knowledge, the engineering professions of civil life are in definite cooperative relation with the Army. This is particularly true in Japan, in France, and in Italy, and, surprising as it may seem, in Great

Britain. In Switzerland, in Holland, and in Norway, and probably two or three more of Europe's so-called "minor nations,' whose organized military establishments are, however, many times larger than our own, we find a large reliance for technical, and especially engineering talent, rests upon men whose daily peacetime avocation is purely civil.

The Japanese engineer officer, who conducted the mining operations on the face of 203-Meter Hill, is the chief engineer of one of Japan's largest mining corporations.

The colonel of England's reserve regiment of electrical engineers is a conspicuous figure in England's electrical engineering industry. He is available for military counsel in his specialty, but he is no burden upon the establishment, and can not be so except under conditions of emergency.

I have in mind a French civil life engineer, conspicuous in his own rather narrow specialty, and so engrossed in definitely commercial activities as to have essentially no leisure for any purpose, who is, nevertheless, a definite cog in the wheel of military re-erve, and a conspicuously valuable aid in the special work of that branch of the service to which his knowledge most definitely can be helpful. With this preamble I venture to assert that we need in the United States of America:

First. Definite and sympathetic cooperation between civil life engineers and the Army, and,

Second. We need a technical reserve to the Army.

COOPERATION

Abandoning false modesty, I think that we may venture to boldly assert that we have more engineering talent in the United States than has any other nation, and I think we may couple with this the statement that the great body of, engineers in whom this talent is vested are quite as patriotic, quite as ready to make personal sacrifice for the common good, as is any similar group in any other nation.

The trouble lies in the fact that the idea has never occurred to them, and should it occur to them, they would not know how to go about it.

It is my hope that this condition may be completely changed by the presentation of the needs of the situation to the great national engineering societies, and through them to their membership.

Once attention is definitely attracted to the existing situation in this way, there should be little difficulty in establishing an enormously powerful national general committee, comprising civil, mechanical, mining, sanitary, and electrical engineers, whose function it should be to give cooperation, attention, and consideration to the military establishment in its technical branches, with a view to affording national support, advice, and even, I am so bold as to believe, specialized national guidance.

Whilst the men of civil life and the men of the service would be slow to admit it, I think that it is definitely true that neither class or group understands the other. Once let this condition, not of misunderstanding, but of lack of understanding, be wiped away, the cooperative condition will speedily follow.

Whilst the cooperative relation is probably more important as a national issue than the more concrete project of a technical reserve, it can not probably be stated to advantage in any more definite way at the moment than as I have already stated it.

The project of a technical reserve, however, can be presented very concretely.

The plan which follows may be all wrong; I shall be content if it is found to be so. It is necessary that the lump of modeling clay, from which a perfect image is to be evolved, should have some three-dimensional, form when it is placed upon the modeling table, and I present the plan which follows merely as a crude mass of material, to be shaped and dealt with by those more able to assail the task, but nevertheless as at least material for a beginning.

Assuming as an axiom that any adequate plan for national military preparedne-s must contemplate the provision of an effective military force of 500,000 men as a first field army; accepting as a second axiom the substantial certainty that our form of national government, the character of our population, and the temper and understanding of our educated classes will not tolerate a large standing army, we have, as an oft-considered problem, the method of immediately creating out of private citizens a military force in addition to the existant regular establishment of not less than 400,000 men, of whom the national guard, under the Dick Bill, should theoretically provide 114,000, of whom, however, some 1,700 would be generals or general staff officers, two-thirds of whom I prefer not to count.

Effectively, I presume that the national guard would yield from 80,000 to 100,000 men.