Excerpt from The A. Vander Naillen School of Practical Engineering
Over forty-four years ago we were actively engaged in the construction of some of the most important railroads in the east, when the fact was forced upon us that the young engineers we took as assistant showed very little practical knowledge of the details of the work intrusted to their care. Almost every day walls had to be torn down, roofs altered and culverts relaid, owing to an undue preponderance given to the theoretical teaching in the engineering schools. One of the most prominent and perhaps the oldest chief engineer in this country, used to say: "My assistants would calculate me out of hearth and home, but I can not trust a single one of them with the driving of a pile or to put the foundation under a culvert."
To remedy this evil in a certain measure, and at the instance of several chief engineers, I concluded to open a school where practical engineering should be taught, and the principles of construction shown in their simplicity, disembarrassed of all the technical bulwarks put around them by an old-school fogyism.
We started our school in Pittsburg, Penn., in 1864, and afterwards, at the instance of some of the most prominent citizens of Chicago, we removed to that city.
Our school grew more and more prosperous, and in 1871 we had certainly the most efficient and best equipped polytechnical school of the west, when the disastrous fire which destroyed almost the entire city of Chicago reduced our school to ashes. The nervous shock said conflagration caused on some of our beloved ones decided us to remove to California, where we have been established since 1874. Our school has proved successful beyond expectation, as the actual positions occupied by our graduates indubitably show. Many of them are chief engineers to-day, and we do not know of a single student among the several thousands that graduated with us who does not do honor to his alma mater.
Our school, thus bringing the profession of the engineer within the reach of any good, common intelligence, could not fail but meet with a good deal of opposition from interested sources, and so it did.
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