Edward W Chan

The Iron Ring Stamp

"Ritual of the calling of an engineer / Rite d'engagement de l'ingénieur"

Canada Post issued a stamp commemorating the 75th anniversary of the iron ring ceremony which welcomes graduating engineers into the profession on the 25th of April 2000.

A brief summary of the iron ring and its history is reprinted below from the 1999-2000 undergraduate admissions booklet from the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, University of Toronto:

"More than a symbol of a hard-earned degree, the Iron Ring represents the engineer's responsibility to society. In 1925, H.E.T. Haultain (I guess the Haultain building is named after him, a.k.a. the building with the slowpoke reactor), a professor in Civil Engineering at the University of Toronto, wrote to Rudyard Kipling (a nobel prize for literature winner and author of "The Jungle Book") and asked him to devise a ceremony incorporating a statement of ethics for young engineers. Since that time, students graduating from U of T Engineering have received the Iron Ring in this ceremony as a reminder of the moral and societal obligations of the engineer. This tradition is shared by all engineering schools in Canada."

The source for the above image is <http://www.canadapost.ca/CPC2/phil/stamp/images/006stamp.jpg> obtained December 30 2000.

The stamp was designed by Darrell Freemen in a tête bêche format (i.e. the stamp and the inverse of it form the image of a complete iron ring). The stamp depicts the iron ring with images of Canadian Engineering Accomplishments: the pacemaker (biomedical, chemical, electrical, mechanical, materials), the High Level Bridge at Lethbridge, Alberta (civil), the world's largest microwave transmission network (electrical, computer), and the industrial installations of Polymer in Sarnia, Ontario (chemical, mineral). If you look closely at the math formulae behind the factory scene, I think that it is the formula for the arc length of a parametrized equation (MAT 197S!).

This stamp is available for one year from the issue date and comes in panes of 16 x $0.46 stamps from Canadian Postal Outlets. For more information, visit Canada Post On-Line.