The Russian System.

The new idea which appears here and there among the technical schools is to incorporate shop work with the essential parts of the old courses. This has been done in three ways: (1) by mixing shop work with the duties of each week, as at Moscow;² (2) by consolidating the shopwork in a year following the school course, as at St. Petersburg; (3) by requiring a certain amount of shopwork as a condition of admission to the school work, as at the Royal Foremen School of Chemnitz.

The Russians alone among European nations are entitled to the credit of attempting to reform the technical training of engineers and mechanics by mixing workshop instruction with other elements of the polytechnic course. Their success is remarkable. It adds great force to Russian examples and precedents to know why the polytechnic schools there are of such rare excellence. The popular impression of Russia does her great injustice. The educated Russians are highly educated and accomplished people. Part of this intelligence is due to the intermixture of the German population, which began soon after the death of Catherine and has continued to the present time; but the general truth remains.

Now, when they began about fifty years ago to attend to the development of their internal resources in a scientific manner, they started in the most sensible way, by sending commissioners to study the systems of technological education of Western Europe. These men win- page 10 nowed Europe for ideas. These ideas they carried to Russia and expanded into schools which surpass in completeness of equipment and affluence of resources any in the ether countries of Europe, with the possible exception of the École Polytechnique at Paris. Russian wealth gave German ideas of education great expansion and development.

Russia is the lee shore upon which the choicest educational pebbles may be gathered. In studying Russia one sees all European technological education epitomized; and the whole plan of the new education in Russia may be seen in the two schools of technology at St. Petersburg and Moscow. In each school is an ample, well equipped manufacturing machine shop where the students see good work done by skilled mechanics and are taught to do such work themselves; the course of study is otherwise substantially the same as in the German polytechnics. In each shop a definite number of hours of work are required of every student, with this difference in the plan, that at Moscow, the shop work is mixed with the duties of every week of the six-year course; at St. Petersburg it is consolidated into a fifth year, after all the school work of the four-year course has been finished. At Moscow no week passes without shop work; at St. Petersburg no shop work is done till the beginning of the fifth year, which year is wholly devoted to drawing and shop work. The two schools differ also in this, that at St. Petersburg all the students are externs, at Moscow about one-third are boarders.

The requirements for admission at St. Petersburg are more exacting than at Moscow, but the course is a year shorter; so that graduates of the two schools stand on about the same level, aspire to and compete for the same positions, viz, foremen, superintendents, engineers, &c., and achieve success in kindred fields. Substantially all the graduates of each school find satisfactory employment. This is specially true of the mechanics, who compose more than two-thirds of the entire number of graduates, on account of the greater demand for their services. At St. Petersburg the same fifth year of practical training is required of chemists, and the most ample provision is made for them.¹ For this there is no counterpart at Moscow.²

The chemists are taught the most important forms of applied chemistry as found in Russian industries. In the immense laboratories of applied chemistry, and under the control of the professor of chemistry, are a distillery, with a capacity of 1,000 gallons of alcohol a day; a dye-house, where the dyer—the best one in St. Petersburg—handles 100 pounds a day of woollen, cotton, and silk goods; a soda works, which yields 1,000 pounds of soda ash per diem; and a number of iron works, consisting of blast furnace, puddling ovens, Bessemer plant, and foundry, where several tons of iron a day are handled.

Every student who would graduate in chemistry at the end of the fifth year must take charge of these miniature factories in turn, with the foreman at his elbow, buy raw material, subject each step in the manufacturing treatment to test conditions, and account to the professor for everything.

The mechanics enter a shop, where they learn pattern making in the wood room, casting in the foundry, forging in the smithy, and iron working in the machine shop. A large collection of examples of students' work from this school in the museum of the Rose Polytechnic shows that they attain marvellous proficiency in each department.

This view of the Polytechnic at St. Petersburg may fairly enough conclude with the statement of the important fact that the new bridge over the Neva, the finest in Russia, was built under the superintendence of the Polytechnic engineers, and every piece of iron used in the structure was tested in the physical laboratory of the institution. This result, contrasted with the condition of the country forty years ago, when English, German, and American engineers were called upon to do Russian engineering, tends to confirm the judgment already given of the value of Russian technological education.

At Moscow the school training is substantially the same as at St. Petersburg, drawing being made a little more prominent; but the shop work is managed very differently. Great prominence is given to the manufacturing element in it. The first room into which the writer was shown, about 40 feet square, was occupied by drawing tables, where expert mechanics connected with the school were engaged in making projects and solving mechanical problems for different manufacturers in and about Moscow. This work results in orders from the manufacturers for machinery, which are filled in the workshops of the school. The sales of machinery in 1881 and 1882 amounted to 60,000 rubles annually, and this amount has increased since that time.

In the management of the workshop practice for the students there are one or two remarkable features. For the first three years, of 32 weeks each, the boys work 14 hours a week, or 1,344 hours; for the last three years, 10½ hours a week, or 1,008 hours. For convenience and for economy in the use of shop room and materials, wood work, forging, filing, &c., are taught during the first three years in separate rooms, the boys passing from one to another in turn. By this means that portion of the time in each boy's training during which he cannot produce much salable work is spent where he will waste as little as possible and advance to the producing stage of his apprenticeship as fast as possible. But during the last three years the apprentices mingle with a hundred workmen in the manufacturing business of the shop. The doors are always open, and the younger students have free access to the large shop in "off hours," so that the atmosphere of business envelops them all. But this isolation of the preliminary training is not complete. The writer saw in the smithy six forges for regular workmen standing opposite three tor the students, and a steam hammer in this room was in almost constant use by the journeymen. In the foundry there are two connecting rooms; in one, which is quite small, the students were work- page 13 ing on small moulds, while in the larger, students and journeymen together were handling large castings.

To give zest to the rather tedious work of the first three years the boys hear lectures on practical topics, such as the best cutting angle of files, the set of saw teeth, &c., which may not make them any better mechanics, yet tends to improve their general intelligence.

The only point in the place that strikes an American as arbitrary is that each squad of the younger boys must stay in each room of the elementary workshop a certain number of sessions, whatever its rate of advancement. Those who master the prescribed work are assigned better and better work of the same kind in the different rooms, and those who fall below the standard have no opportunity to " make up."

The kind of work done in these schools is generally the same; but there is rather more variety at Moscow. In the store-room of that school may be seen a great variety of machinists' tools, lathes, small hydraulic engines for watering lawns, hangers, face plates, drilling machines, &c. In 1882 an engine of thirty horse power was in process of manufacture, and the whole work, including the casting of the flywheel, was done on the premises.

There is a marked advantage in the consolidation of the shop work at St. Petersburg; but in weighing the two plans it is necessary to remember that the Government demands the diploma of the institute as a passport to the much coveted positions that lie in its gilt, and the fifth year is indispensable to obtain the diploma. The practical difficulty of retaining the students after such a course as the school gives in the first four years, under different conditions, becomes at once apparent.

An American who would study technological education can use a part of his time to no better advantage than in becoming familiar with page 14 these two Russian schools. All the officers speak French and most of them German.