Not too long ago, I asked a young engineer to build an item of equipment.

It was not very complicated; when the temperature rose above a certain level, a relay should close, which would energise a socket outlet to power a cooling device. At the same time, if the temperature fell below a certain level, the cooling device should switch off and a hatch should open and then close by itself automatically within a few minutes.

I thought that, with a bit of mechanical work involved (the hatch and the hatch actuator), it might take the engineer a week to do the project. I made allowance for the fact that the engineer was a graduate. After one week, I asked him to tell me how he was doing. He told me that he had scanned the Internet and nothing like the device I had asked for existed. I ignored the fact that, statistically, it was dead certain that at least 20 devices in the entire world probably existed to do exactly what I wanted and that he had just not scanned the Internet with sufficient diligence.

So, I told him, no, no Internet; I want you to make this thing. I told him that, firstly, I needed the thing and I thought he should do something which was challenging. A week later, he still was not finished and said he was scanning the Internet to find a circuit diagram which he could use. At this point, I contacted his university and asked if he had really graduated. I got to speak to one of his lecturers, who said, well, yes he had, but “you know . . .”

Before anybody takes this as an obscure reference to the race of the student, let me assure you that this was not the point at all. So I asked the lecturer, what actually do you mean, “you know”? And the lecturer said: “Internet generation, can’t think for himself.”

Anyway, as an engineer, he was quite useless: no sense of urgency, no original thought, not practical. So he went.
And I thought, what he needs is a solid dose of John Orr Tech.

I originally started as an engineering student at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), although I graduated from the University of Cape Town (UCT). The later university’s thinking was that student vacations were a time when people piled into a VW kombi and disappeared off into the country, trailing a cloud of blue smoke, even when the engine was in perfectly good order.

Wits, however, made engineering students work during vacations. In my second year, we all had to spend a month at John Orr Technical College, in the workshops. We were taught the craft of filing, welding (gas and arc), turning, tin smithing, milling and black smithing.

To give you an idea, for the filing class, we were given a piece of steel 100 mm × 100 mm × 8 mm thick. This we had to file into a G-clamp shape. Then we had to tap it and fit a threaded rod, a wing nut and a clamp. It took three days to finish it and three weeks to recover from the blisters. With the welding class, burns followed blisters.

All the lecturers were artisans and very good ones. They had dealt with engineering students before and they had many ways to control them. They used excellent teaching methods. They would watch you make, over two days, without interference, a fantastic mess of what you were trying to make and then you would start all over again.
I learned. I do not know if students still go to John Orr Tech, but I hope so.

Currently, there are plenty of young engineers who are ‘Internet Generation’, and one wonders how they get by. It might be that, because the Baby Boomers (children of people who served in World War 2) are mostly retiring, nobody notices how inept the young engineers are. Under these circumstances, the current shortage of engineers is neatly dealt with by the fact that young engineers will not solve the problem and will have to wait for the Internet to catch up. Oh well. I still have the toolbox I made at John Orr . . . 42 years ago.