Engineering Drafting
In the 1930s, the core of a mechanical engineer's education was learning how to accurately convey technical illustration in order to plan and construct machines and factories. Neault would eventually put his work to good use in designing the layout of production lines for the C.W. Post cereal company of Battle Creek, Michigan.
An engineer was taught the "ability to think in the graphic language, to visualize shape and to visualize size," and the various tips of the drafting sets let them communicate that thought and visualizaiton with other similiary trained engineers.
As a textbook from just before Neault's colelge days put it (perhaps a bit grandiously, but not incorrectly),
The position which drafting occupies as a fundamental course of study for the profession of engineering gives it at once a place of prominence and importance. It is not alone useful in itself but is indispensible for the study of all engineering subjects. When properly presented and taught it develops engineering concepts, exact thinking, systematic methods and an appreciation of the relation of science and the practical arts to the progress of civilization. (Svensen, 1927, 5)
This sentiment no doubt was what had Neault keep his drawings sets from college for his entire life. More than that though, with his working career spanning the late 1930s to the 1980s, it is very likely that he used these sets to draw and letter his plans throughout his career (computer-assisted drafting (CAD), though invented in the late 1960s for the automotive industry, layout did not widely arrive in most areas of engineering until the 1970s and the industry-wide standard software AutoDesk/AutoCAD was founded in 1982).
Works Cited
Svensen, Carl Lars, Drafting for Engineers: A Textbook of Engineering Drawing for Colleges and Technical Schools (New York: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1927).