AN ENGINEER’S ALPHABET Gleanings from the Softer Side of a Profession Written by America’s most famous engineering storyteller and educator, this abecedarian is one engineer’s selection of thoughts, quotations, anecdotes, facts, trivia, and arcana relating to the practice, history, culture, and traditions of his profession. The entries reflect decades of reading, writing, talking, and thinking about engineers and engineering, and range from brief essays to lists of great engineering achievements. This work is organized alphabetically and more like a dictionary than an encyclopedia. It is not intended to be read from first page to last, but rather to be dipped into here and there as the mood strikes the reader. In time, it is hoped, this book should become the source to which readers go first when they encounter a vague or obscure reference to the softer side of engineering. Henry Petroski is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and a professor of history at Duke University. He has written broadly on the topics of design, success and failure, and the history of engineering and technology. His fifteen books on these subjects include To Engineer Is Human, The Pencil, The Evolution of Useful Things, Success through Failure, and The Essential Engineer. In addition to his books, which have been translated into more than a dozen languages, Petroski has written numerous general-interest articles for publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal, and he writes regular columns for both American Scientist and ASEE Prism. Petroski is a Distinguished Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers and is a Fellow of both the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the Institution of Engineers of Ireland. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.
Other Books by the Author To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design Beyond Engineering: Essays and Other Attempts to Figure without Equations The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance The Evolution of Useful Things Design Paradigms: Case Histories of Error and Judgment in Engineering Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America Invention by Design: How Engineers Get from Thought to Thing Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering The Book on the Bookshelf Paperboy: Confessions of a Future Engineer Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering Success through Failure: The Paradox of Design The Toothpick: Technology and Culture The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure
AN ENGINEER’S ALPHABET Gleanings from the Softer Side of a Profession
Henry Petroski Duke University
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, ˜ Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City Singapore, Sao Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107015067 c Henry Petroski 2011 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2011 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Petroski, Henry. An engineer’s alphabet : gleanings from the softer side of a profession / Henry Petroski. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-01506-7 (hardback) 1. Engineering – Philosophy – Miscellanea. 2. Technology – Philosophy – Miscellanea. I. Title. T14.P473 2011 601–dc23 2011020065 ISBN 978-1-107-01506-7 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
To Stephen and Laura
Preface
This abecedarian is one engineer’s collection of thoughts, quotations, anecdotes, facts, trivia, arcana, and miscellanea relating to the practice, history, culture, and traditions of his profession. The entries, which represent the distillation of decades of reading, writing, talking, and thinking about engineers and engineering, range from brief essays on concepts and practices that are central to the profession to lists of its great achievements. This book is at the same time an anthology, a commonplace book, and a reference volume. My approach in composing the entries has generally been to convey as much information in as little space as possible, to create more of a dictionary-like than an encyclopedia-like sense of the topic under discussion. In no case is an entry meant to be definitive or exhaustive, and so references to further information are provided freely. However, I have included no references to the World Wide Web, not only because web sites can come, go, and change so unpredictably, but also because it can be easier to query a reliable search engine than to type in correctly a long web address. This volume is not intended to be read from first page to last, but rather is meant to be dipped into here and there as the mood strikes the reader, with the alphabetical arrangement promoting serendipity. In time, it is hoped, this book will become the source to which readers come first when they encounter a vague or obscure reference to something related to the softer side of engineering. To minimize the need to follow cross-references, some especially relevant information is paraphrased, rather than repeated verbatim, in separate entries. An index of proper names is included to aid the reader seeking to locate references vii
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Preface
to individual engineers and to specific engineering institutions, organizations, projects, or landmarks. Many of the entries in this volume may seem woefully incomplete, even by dictionary standards; I encourage readers to send me additional information that could help flesh out a topic in a possible future edition. Suggestions for additional entries are likewise welcome. I also would appreciate hearing about any inaccuracies that may have crept in and persisted throughout the writing and production process. I can be reached through the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Duke University, Box 90287, Durham, NC 27708, or via e-mail at petroski @duke.edu. Needless to say, any errors that are here are my responsibility alone. Some of the entries in this compendium were published first in my “Refractions” column, which appears in each issue of ASEE Prism, the magazine of the American Society for Engineering Education. A few other entries first saw the light of day as short essays in the Wall Street Journal and other publications. But the overwhelming majority of the material contained herein is original with this volume. I am grateful to Peter Gordon and his colleagues at Cambridge University Press who embraced this project with enthusiasm. I am indebted to Michael Fisher, an early reader, for his persistent encouragement and for his good sense about what to leave out of a book like this. And, as always, I am grateful to my wife, Catherine, for her sympathetic reading of the manuscript in its earliest form and for her critical reading of it in its latest. Having lived as the spouse of an engineer for forty-five years (and as a daughter and a mother of engineers), she has developed a keen sense of the beast and its professional habits. Henry Petroski Arrowsic, Maine Summer 2011
A abbreviations. As frequently as engineers find themselves using the words engineer and engineering, they do not appear to have agreed on any single standard or official shorthand for the words. Among the abbreviations I have seen used are egr., eng., engr., eng’r., and engng. – none of which is especially mellifluous or, in isolation, unambiguous. Abbreviations are not meant to be pronounced as such, however, and as long as the context is clear there should be little need to worry about them being misunderstood. Even so, the arrangement of the letters in these abbreviations is not especially typographically graceful, and situations can arise where confusion might result, as in a university setting when a course number is designated Eng. 101. Is this Engineering 101 or English 101 or Energy 101? Engineers dislike ambiguity, and so the imprecision of an abbreviation for our own profession is annoying, to say the least. It is apparently this aversion to ambiguity that has led engineers to introduce less-than-logical abbreviations for themselves. And it may well have been the potential confusion over what “eng.” designates (engine, engineer, engineering, English, engrave, etc.) that led to the introduction of the unconventional, unpronounceable, and ungraceful abbreviation egr. for engineer, and sometimes its natural extension egrg. or egrng. for engineering. Although many common abbreviations have multiple meanings, the context can be expected to make clear which one is intended. 1
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acronyms
Unfortunately, the words engine, engineer, and engineering often occur in the very same context. Although my dictionary shows me a full page of words beginning with eng, I find only a few words starting with egr – egregious, egress, egret. Such arrangements of letters may not themselves even look like full words; the latter may look as if they are truncated versions of regress and regret. In any case, they are not likely to need an abbreviation. While it may be specific, egr. is a clumsy abbreviation; I do not feel comfortable with it. Hence, I tend to use it only when I have to distinguish an engineering course from an English course at my university. The lack of a single, straightforward, and dignified abbreviation for the engineering professional troubles me. Medical doctors invariably identify themselves by appending M.D. to their name, and lawyers have appropriated the courteous Esq. The registered professional engineer can use P.E., of course. However, because fewer than a third of all American engineers are registered, the majority of (unlicensed) engineers cannot legally use those letters. Medical doctors also are regularly addressed as “Doctor,” prefixing their names with Dr., and lawyers are frequently referred to as “Counselor,” at least in court. Although it has been proposed that engineers identify themselves as Egr. So-and-So, engineers have not yet gotten together, in America at least, on how they wish to identify themselves or how they wish to be addressed (but see, prefixes for engineers’ names). acronyms. Acronyms are not exactly the same as abbreviations, of course; however, the terms are often used as if they were synonymous. Strictly speaking, an acronym is a collection of initial letters or groups of letters of the words of a name or phrase that combine to form a new word, as “sonar” is formed from “sound navigation ranging” and “radar” from “radio detecting and ranging.” Although
acronyms
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such acronyms might be said to be impure, in that they do not employ a consistent use of initial letters only, the latter is especially clever because the palindromic character of the word echoes the principle of the invention. The physical principle behind sonar is effectively the same as the one bats and dolphins use to navigate. Sonic devices were first developed by humans following the sinking of the Titanic and were used to detect icebergs. The technique was adopted for submarine navigation during World War I, but the word sonar was not coined until World War II, in imitation of the word radar. In practice, the term “acronym” is frequently used more loosely to refer to any collection of letters that designates a (preferably) pronounceable title or phrase, as NASA stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration although it is not, strictly speaking, a word in its own right. Nevertheless, this abbreviation is commonly and officially pronounced as if it were a word, “nasa,” and, inexplicably, sometimes (incorrectly) as if it were the city Nassau, the capital of the Bahama Islands and a county on New York’s Long Island. Some older staff members who were associated with NASA’s forerunner, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which was established in 1915, pronounce each letter (“N-A-S-A”) in keeping with the way to which “the N-A-C-A” was referred to by its distinct letters, as in “the N A C A Ames Aeronautical Laboratory near San Francisco.” The agency often appeared in print as N.A.C.A., with the periods signaling that the letters were to be pronounced individually. Some long-time NASA staff members at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, recall that when the space agency succeeded the N.A.C.A. in 1958, it was common to see “N.A.S.A.” on highway signs in the vicinity of the center. Ironically, now many younger NASA workers refer to the NACA as “Nacca,” if they are not aware of its history, culture, and traditions. (These and other
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acronyms
anecdotes, in the context of the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory – as the Center was previously known from 1917 to 1958 – are captured in the aptly titled Engineer in Charge, written by James R. Hansen and published in 1987 as part of the NASA History Series.) How one pronounces NASA thus serves as a kind of shibboleth for identifying true old-timers in the organization. Many of those who recall when NASA was established also remember a joke that was current at the time. It was said that the C in NACA became the S in NASA to symbolize that the cents sign in the budget of the former became a dollar sign in that of the latter, an allusion to the enormous resources NASA enjoyed during the heyday of the space race. It is ironic that in the late 1990s, when money for space exploration was not so plentiful, NASA suffered repeated embarrassments attributed to its philosophy of “faster, better, cheaper.” Some so-called acronyms could never be confused with words. When the Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor program was a highly visible part of the Department of Energy’s effort to develop a fuel self-sustaining nuclear power program, engineers, managers, and environmentalists alike got comfortable reciting the vowel-less string of letters LMFBR as if it were the slogan for a brand of cigarettes, as was LSMFT, which stood for “Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco” and was emblazoned on the bottom of every pack of “Luckies.” There was no pretension in either case, however, that the letters formed a word. The advent of computer languages and large computer programs began a fad of naming them with clever acronyms, sometimes more forced than forceful. (Who would guess that BFX stands for “Bridge Fabrication error solution eXpert system”?) Some of the early efforts were rather successful and unforced, however, and this seems to have spurred later imitators into uncharted territory. Among early computer languages was COBOL, which
acronyms
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stands for “COmmon Business-Oriented Language.” The name of the scientific-oriented language FORTRAN nicely characterizes its “FORmula TRANslation” qualities. The example of BASIC, coined in 1964 to stand for “Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code,” further illustrates how the rules of forming acronyms, even the best of them, are sometimes bent and often forced to fit the desired acronym. Whether legitimate or not, whether clever or not, whether pronounceable or not, acronyms and engineers seem to go together. Engineers are notorious for sprinkling acronyms liberally throughout their writings and speeches. It is a fair criticism of many an engineering presentation that it is incomprehensible to the uninitiated. This is frequently acknowledged in books and written reports by the insertion of a much-needed list of acronyms and abbreviations in the front matter or as an appendix. However, reading such a report can be a two-handed exercise in flipping back and forth between the text and the list. It is unfortunate that this is so, but few engineers appear able to control themselves when it comes to the use of acronyms. The alternative to a list of acronyms is the widespread habit of engineers to put the abbreviation or acronym in parentheses immediately following the first use of the term that is acronymized. (Engineers also like to coin verbs from nouns.) Thus, it is common to find strewn throughout engineering reports parentheses filled with strings of capital letters. This method works fine when one reads the report from beginning to end; however, there can be confusion and frustration when the reader dives into a later chapter of a report – beginning on, say, page 51 – and finds acronyms used there that may have been introduced anywhere in the previous fifty pages. (This kind of problem is not unique to engineering, of course, as is clear to anyone who has read an article published in an English or history journal and has found in the 201st footnote an abbreviated
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“alphabet of the engineer”
reference to a work that might be fully described in any one of the previous 200 notes. Neither scholarly articles nor technical reports tend to be typographically attractive or user friendly.) Increasingly, engineers and others are beginning to be more sensitive to how their reports look, and they are being more circumspect about how they use acronyms and the parentheses that pack them into text. Indeed, it is increasingly the case that one finds abbreviations and acronyms used unobtrusively, with the meaning clear from the context. Thus, when an article first mentions an organization such as the National Society of Professional Engineers, there will be no parenthetical statement of the obvious: that its abbreviation is NSPE. Rather, the next time the organization is mentioned, which typically occurs in the next sentence or paragraph, the abbreviation NSPE is used without comment. This method makes for neater, cleaner, and more easily read reports. “alphabet of the engineer.” In his autobiography, James Nasmyth (1808–1890), the Scottish engineer and inventor of the steam hammer, wrote often of his learning to draw and of its importance for the practice of engineering. According to Nasmyth: “Mechanical drawing is the alphabet of the engineer. Without this the workman is merely ‘a hand.’ With it he indicates the possession of ‘a head’.” Using mechanical drawing figuratively as well as literally, Nasmyth allowed for it to represent the ability of the creative engineer to conceptualize and communicate ideas, and thereby lead technological innovations and enterprises. Engineers cannot easily be leaders beyond the technical sphere without also having a sense of their own profession’s culture and traditions, and it is in this sense that Nasmyth’s phrase has been adopted as the title of this book. An Engineer’s Alphabet is meant to call attention to the importance of putting the quantitative engineer
ancient engineering
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in touch with qualitative language and thought, emphasizing the importance of both sides of the brain to truly creative engineering. See James Nasmyth, Engineer: An Autobiography, new edition, Samuel Smiles, ed. (London: John Murray, 1885). The alphabet metaphor was also used by Robert Fulton (1765–1815), who is perhaps best known for his work on the steamboat. Before devoting himself full time to engineering and inventing, Fulton worked as a portrait painter, first in Philadelphia and later in England. It was while he was abroad that he published A Treatise on the Improvement of Canal Navigation (London: I. and J. Taylor, 1796), on whose title page he is identified as “R. Fulton, civil engineer,” the relatively new designation for the profession that distinguished its practitioners not from the yetto-be-coined “mechanical engineer” but from the military engineers who had traditionally been responsible for large projects. In the preface to the book, Fulton reflected on the concepts of invention and improvement, observing that “the component parts of all new machines may be said to be old.” It is in this context that he wrote that “the mechanic should sit down among levers, screws, wedges, wheels, &c. like a poet among the letters of the alphabet, considering them as the exhibition of his thoughts; in which a new arrangement transmits a new idea to the world.” When that new arrangement produces a “new and desired effect” Fulton notes, its creator possesses that quality “which is usually dignified with the term Genius.” The word genius is, of course, etymologically related to the word engineer through the Latin gignere, which means “to beget.” ancient engineering. In 1774, Benjamin Franklin wrote that “it has been of late too much the mode to slight the learning of the ancients.” Indeed, his writing anticipated thinking in some circles today. Contrary to conventional
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ancient engineering
wisdom, engineering is not a modern endeavor: It is as old as civilization. In fact, it can be argued that the beginnings of civilization and of engineering were coeval, and that civilization as we know it cannot exist without the practice of some form of engineering. The first engineer whose name we know is said to have been Imhotep, the royal architectengineer to Pharaoh Zoser. Imhotep flourished in Memphis, Egypt around 2650 B.C. and is credited with building the Step Pyramid of Sakkara, the oldest Egyptian example of the genre, and thereby is said to be the inventor of pyramids generally. These ancient engineering achievements continue to awe and inspire. The works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) have, of course, had a seminal influence on Western thinking. Of special interest to engineers should be the “minor work” attributed to Aristotle that has been translated into English as “Mechanical Problems.” In it, questions of scale and structure are discussed in ways fully meaningful to modern engineers, even though the arguments used may appear to have been primitive mechanically. Although the authorship of the work is sometimes disputed, it is still contained in Aristotle, Minor Works, translated by W. S. Hett (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980). The oldest surviving written work on architecture and engineering is believed to be De architectura, which was written in the first century B.C. by master builder Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, now known to us simply as Vitruvius. His book summarizes the state of the art of building and describes related Greek and Roman technology so that the emperor, Caesar Augustus, could understand the quality of existing buildings and judge proposed construction projects. Vitruvius’s treatise was considered authoritative well into the Renaissance. The standard English translation of De architectura was made by Morris Hicky Morgan and was published posthumously in 1914 by Harvard
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University Press under the title The Ten Books on Architecture, in which the term “book” refers to a subdivision of the entire work – what today we might call a chapter. In 1960 it became available in a paperback edition issued by Dover Publications. For more on ancient construction, see Rabun Taylor, Roman Builders: A Study in Architectural Process (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Sextus Julius Frontinus was a Roman patrician who had a distinguished career as a military engineer and became governor of Britain and, later in the first century, curator aquarum, or superintendent of the water supply of Rome, what today might be called a water commissioner. After assuming this office, he inspected the system of aqueducts and their appurtenances and published (in 97 A.D.) a comprehensive report, De aquae ductibus urbis Romae, in which he described the nature of the water supply and its uses, including wasteful practices and misappropriation of water by the installation of unauthorized pipes. The book provides great insight into Roman civil engineering. Its manuscript was discovered by the American hydraulic engineer Clemens Herschel (1842–1930) in 1897 in the Monte Cassino Monastery, which is famous for being on a remote mountaintop in central Italy. Herschel was educated at the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard and in Europe and has been described as a “brilliant linguist” as well as a talented engineer who invented the Venturi tube for measuring pipe flow. He translated the manuscript into English as The Two Books on the WaterSupply of the City of Rome and published it privately, distributing it among his friends. Some engineering societies also acquired copies of the book and for years used them as prizes for distinguished technical papers. Herschel’s translation of Frontinus was later published in London by Longmans, Green (second edition, 1913), and was reprinted in 1973 by the New England Water Works Association.
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applied science
Some secondary sources that provide insight into how engineering was practiced in ancient times are: L. Sprague de Camp, The Ancient Engineers (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963), a popular treatment of the subject; J. G. Landels, Engineering in the Ancient World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); and the opening chapters of James Kip Finch, The Story of Engineering (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1960). See also Henry Hodges, Technology in the Ancient World (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970) and the opening chapters of Richard Shelton Kirby et al., Engineering in History (New York: Dover, 1990). applied science. Engineering is sometimes wrongly defined simply as “applied science,” implying that it is little more than the application of scientific principles. This is a gross oversimplification of the nature of engineering, which in practice includes a considerable measure of art and judgment in design in addition to knowledge of scientific principles and application of the scientific method. A commonly cited counterexample to the notion that engineering is nothing more than applied science is the invention and development of the steam engine, which occurred over the course of a century and predated the science of thermodynamics. Indeed, thermodynamics was developed at least in part to explain the principles behind the working steam engines that in the eighteenth century had come into widespread use pumping water out of mines. For more examples, see The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems (New York: Knopf, 2010). architects vs. engineers. In ancient times, construction and other technical projects were under the direction of a master builder, who in Greek was known as an architekton, or arch technician, and in Latin as an architectus. It is from these classical words that the modern word “architect”
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derives. In time, the architect became more interested in aesthetics, space, and form than in efficiency and function, even as new materials and more complex machines were developed in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. By the nineteenth century, the architect became less and less concerned with or versed in the structural and mechanical principles behind large bridges and powerful machinery, and the modern engineer emerged as the principal designer of these artifacts. When the American Society of Civil Engineers was founded, in 1852, it was called the American Society of Civil Engineers and Architects. However, the organization was not very active in its early years, and in 1857 the separate American Institute of Architects was founded, suggesting that even then relations between engineers and architects were not as cordial as they might have been. In 1868, the engineering group was reorganized and dropped architects from its name to become simply the American Society of Civil Engineers. Conflicts between engineers and architects have arisen over the course of time, most often precipitated by one camp attempting to encroach on what was seen as the turf of the other. In the 1920s, for example, engineers objected when it was suggested that architects be put in charge of determining the location and design of a bridge across the Delaware River at Philadelphia and, later in the decade, when architects in New York State moved to prevent engineers from acting as principals in all except industrial building projects. Some such incidents came to involve the interpretation of registration laws for architects and engineers. See, for example, Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America (New York: Knopf, 1995), pp. 201– 203. While there is potential confusion and conflict between the architect and the engineer and their respective roles, there necessarily must be cooperation between the
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architects vs. engineers
professions for most large building projects. A firm that provides both architectural and engineering services, such as designing not only the functional space and facade but also the supporting structure of a skyscraper, is known as an architect-engineer (AE) firm. This term became commonly used during World War II to refer to those companies providing professional services on large projects for the Army. AE firms typically designate themselves as such on their letterhead. Some choose to emphasize the engineering first, thus designating themselves engineerarchitects (EA). Related designations include architectsengineers-planners (AEP), engineers-architects-planners (EAP), and related permutations, combinations, and variations of these and similar terms and the letters designating them. It is a common complaint among engineers that architects sketch buildings that turn out to be an engineer’s nightmare to provide with an underlying structure and to build. The Sydney Opera House is a classic example; its design was selected from a sketchy architectural concept submitted in an international competition. Although it stands today as an icon of the Australian city that houses it, the project took a long time to complete, came in well over budget, was the cause of great enmity between the architect (who resigned before the complex was completed and never returned to Sydney) and engineers, and was badly in need of repairs well before the end of what should have been its useful life. Such horror stories are in sharp contrast to success stories such as the Sears Tower and the John Hancock Center, two Chicago skyscrapers famous for the design cooperation between the architect Bruce Graham (1925–2010) and the structural engineer Fazlur Khan (1929–1982), both of whom were members of the Chicagobased architect-engineering firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. For more on Khan, see Engineering Architecture: The Vision of Fazlur R. Khan, written by his daughter,
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Yasmin Sabina Khan, herself an engineer, and published by W. W. Norton in 2004. arm waving. Engineers often find themselves in the position of having to deduce a result from a set of technical assumptions and natural laws, often in an experimental or mathematical context, and to communicate that result to colleagues in a meeting or at a conference. When the logical and scientific argument is not made clearly, often because it is not fully understood by the presenter, he or she is said to engage in “arm waving.” In general, any fuzzy explanation of how one idea or conclusion follows from another is referred to as arm waving. The expression appears to have its origins in the nervous use of the arms when one is at a blackboard or before a screen onto which the incompletely understood or insufficiently developed material supposedly being explained is displayed. The practice is sometimes also referred to as “wing flapping.” artist-engineers. Engineers are not generally known for their involvement in the fine arts, although there have been some notable exceptions. Alexander Calder (1898– 1976), now best known for his mobiles and stabiles that have become part of the cultural infrastructure, earned a mechanical engineering degree from Stevens Institute of Technology and worked as an engineer before studying art. His early works exploited his talent for creating wire sculptures, some of which he animated in a performance piece known as Calder’s Circus. His engineering background greatly influenced the design of his later larger works, in particular his mobiles and stabiles, many of which could form the basis for homework exercises in the elementary engineering science courses of statics, dynamics, and strength of materials. See “Once an Engineer . . . ,” American Scientist, July–August 2009, pp. 282–285. See
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artist-engineers
also Calder: An Autobiography with Pictures (New York: Pantheon, 1977). A lesser-known engineer-artist was Manierre Dawson (1887–1969). He received a civil engineering degree from Chicago’s Armour Institute, which in 1940 merged with the Lewis Institute to form the Illinois Institute of Technology. According to Randy Ploog, an art historian at Pennsylvania State University, “one of the great mysteries of modern art” has been why Dawson began to produce abstract paintings in 1910, before acclaimed European artists such as Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944) did so. According to Dawson himself, his art was influenced by his engineering and mathematics courses, and his early paintings “were based on coordinates and curves suggested by parabolas, hyperbolas and circles,” which are so familiar to engineering students. Ploog, an expert on Dawson, prepared an exhibition illustrating how the artist’s civil engineering background contributed to his abstract works. The show opened at Penn State in 2009 and subsequently traveled to the Illinois Institute of Technology, Virginia Tech, and other campuses. Gelett Burgess (1866–1951), famous for the nonsense verse about a purple cow (“I never saw a Purple Cow / I never hope to see one / But I can tell you, anyhow / I’d rather see than be one.”), was also educated as a civil engineer. According to Ploog, Burgess “wrote the first American account of modern European painters,” including Picasso and Matisse, and it was Burgess’s engineering background that caused him to explain Cubism “by comparing it to the multiple views of a mechanical drawing.” There have been and are other notable artist-engineers, of course, including the famous genius “artist, engineer, and scientist” Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). Perhaps the best known “architect, artist, engineer” practicing today is Santiago Calatrava (born in 1951). His designs for train stations, skyscrapers, and bridges – works of art in their own
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right – became well known throughout Europe as works of integrated art, architecture, and engineering. Calatrava’s earliest completed works in the United States were an addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum, which was distinguished by its movable wing-like steel sunscreen known as a briese soleil, and the glass-floored, cable-stayed, gnomonmasted Sundial Bridge in Redding, California. Unfortunately, Calatrava’s dramatic design for a transportation center at the rebuilding site of the New York World Trade Center was scaled back for budgetary reasons. Construction on the Calatrava-designed Chicago Spire, a 2,000foot-tall helical condominium building on the city’s lakefront, was foreclosed on in 2009 with only its foundation having been completed. Of course, there are countless engineers of all specialties who paint, sculpt, and follow other creative pursuits. Like so many other misconceptions about engineers, the one that they use only the left side of their brain has plenty of examples to disprove it. asphalt cookies. This youth-outreach activity for students in grades 4 through 8 was created by Joanna Ambroz, a civil engineering graduate student at the University of Nevada. Sometimes called “chocolate asphalt cookies,” the recipe was developed to demonstrate how asphalt is made and how it works. First, “chocolate asphalt” is made by heating up a combination of cocoa powder, milk, sugar, and butter and keeping it warm in a crockpot. Like real asphalt, this is a liquid when hot but it turns into a solid when cooled. A separate mixture of dry materials, consisting of regular and quick oats, walnuts, and coconut is prepared. This represents the “aggregate” that is mixed with asphalt to make a stronger and more durable road surface. The dry aggregate food mixture and hot chocolate asphalt can be mixed together in bowls or large paper cups,
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asphalt cookies
just the way real aggregate and hot asphalt are mixed in a drum mixer. When the asphalt thoroughly coats the aggregate, the mixture can be spooned out onto a sheet of waxed paper, covered with a second sheet of waxed paper, and then spread out by means of a tin can or rolling pin. This step corresponds to a heavy construction roller compacting and smoothing a new road surface. As the demonstration mixture cools, it hardens into a cookie, in a way analogous to what happens to real asphalt. After about twenty or thirty minutes, the students who participate in this activity can eat the cookies or take them home – along with stories about highway paving – to their parents. See also the magazine of the Society of Women Engineers, SWE, for November/December 1995.
B back of the envelope. This phrase refers to the practice of making a rough sketch of a design or making a very preliminary calculation for the purpose of recording an idea, demonstrating the practicality of a scheme, estimating the magnitude of a phenomenon, or communicating the essence of a concept to a colleague or potential client. A “back-of-the-envelope” sketch or calculation is often the result of an idea or question that arises away from a desk or regular workspace, and so whatever is handy is used as the recording medium. The phrase evidently dates from times when there were few telephones, let alone laptop computers and e-mail, and when hotels did not conveniently put little pads of notepaper on the table beside the bed. A supply of paper was not taken for granted, as the evidence of so many reused diary pages and other palimpsests attests. Indeed, it has even been said that Abraham Lincoln’s ”Gettysburg Address” was written on the back of an envelope as he rode the train from Washington to the Pennsylvania battlefield. Other versions have it that Lincoln wrote the speech in pencil on a brown paper bag, metaphorically still the “back of an envelope.” Recall that the speech was only 272 words long. The back of an envelope was almost always blank and, except for the slight ridges associated with the construction of the envelope, provided a clean and unimpeded surface on which to draw, write, or calculate. Furthermore, an envelope with a letter inside, especially the multipage 17
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back of the envelope
letters that were commonly written in earlier times, would have had a certain bulk and stiffness that would have made it more like a pad of paper than a flimsy empty vessel or plain sheet of paper, thus making it ideal, and particularly so in the absence of a desk or other hard surface, for holding in one hand and writing on with the other. Even more so, the stiff European cigarette box, with its sliding drawer turned upside down, would have been a virtual desk or drawing table. Hence the equivalent British term, “back of the cigarette box.” The term “back of the napkin” has also been used, although, like a tablecloth, the front or back might serve equally well for sketches and calculations. An excellent exposition of the concept and use of backof-the-envelope calculations is provided in the book, Back of the Envelope, by Frank Jankowski (Pittsburgh: Dorrance, 1999). In his introduction, Jankowski notes that a metaphorical “back-of-the-envelope” calculation may be made on a paper napkin, on a sheet from a note pad, or even on the back of a business card, and he goes on to give a concise characterization of the practice: The notion of “back-of-the-envelope” goes beyond the doodling on the back of a used letter conveyor. It often implies an analysis and result which the casual observer might view in disbelief, a result far beyond what would be thought possible with so little space in which to work and so few supporting facilities. That implication carries farther to suggest that the doer is an individual with superior intellect and accomplishment.
Jankowski gives a number of examples of back-of-theenvelope calculations, as does Jon Bentley in his essay “The Back of the Envelope,” which appeared originally in his column “Programming Pearls,” in the magazine Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery. The essay is reprinted in Bentley’s book Programming Pearls (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1986).
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One reader who wrote in response to Bentley’s column related the following story of a back-of-the-envelope calculation: I come from the coast of Maine, and as a small child I was privy to a conversation between my father and his friend Homer Potter. Homer maintained that two ladies from Connecticut were pulling 200 pounds of lobsters a day. My father said, “Let’s see. If you pull a pot every fifteen minutes, and say you get three legal per pot, that’s 12 an hour or about 100 per day. I don’t believe it!” “Well it is true!” swore Homer. “You never believe anything!” Father wouldn’t believe it, and that was that. Two weeks later Homer said, “You know those two ladies, Fred? They were only pulling 20 pounds a day.” Gracious to a fault, father grunted, “Now I believe it!”
One of the original examples given by Bentley relates to a proposal to provide a computer-based mail system for the 1984 Summer Olympic Games. By taking into account the number of messages that would be expected and the capacity of the telephone lines that would be available, the system was calculated to be workable as long as there were 120 seconds in each minute of use! The simple calculation saved the company a good deal of embarrassment and the Olympic athletes a great amount of frustration. The advent of the computer did not diminish the need for back-of-the-envelope calculations. Indeed, it can be argued that there was never a greater need for the ability to do quick and simple calculations to check the computer. A noteworthy anecdote is told of the engineer Mario Salvadori (1907–1997), who headed his own consulting firm and who believed that “in the last analysis all structural failures are caused by human error”: When my engineers come to me with millions of numbers on a high rise, I know there is one number that tells me a
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back of the envelope lot of things – how much the top of the building will sway in the wind. If the computer says seven inches, and my formula, which takes thirty seconds to do on the back of an envelope, says six or eight, I say fine. If my formula says two, I know the computer results are wrong.
When his engineers brought incorrect computer results to their boss, they were sent back to their computers. Metaphorically they were sent “back to the drawing board,” another phrase from the engineering office that has been assimilated into general usage. As is the case with many an engineering achievement, the origins of back-of-the-envelope calculations have sometimes been attributed to scientists. As one reader of Jon Bentley’s column wrote, I’ve often heard “back-of-the-envelope” calculations referred to as “Fermi calculations,” after the physicist. The story is that Enrico Fermi, Robert Oppenheimer, and the other Manhattan Project brass were behind a low blast wall awaiting the detonation of the first nuclear device from a few thousand yards away. Fermi was tearing up sheets of paper into little pieces, which he tossed into the air when he saw the flash. After the shock wave passed, he paced off the distance traveled by the paper shreds, performed a quick “back-of-the-envelope” calculation, and arrived at a figure for the explosive yield of the bomb, which was confirmed much later by expensive monitoring equipment.
While it certainly should not be doubted that Fermi did what is reported, that is not to say that the idea of a quick and simple experiment or calculation originated with him or should bear his name. Nevertheless, back-of-theenvelope problems, that is, those that can be solved literally on a scrap of paper, have also been termed Fermi problems or Fermi questions, with the answers called Fermi estimates. See Clifford Swartz, Back-of-the-Envelope
back of the envelope
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Physics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). To illustrate that the back written on or drawn on need not be that of an envelope or even a piece of paper, there is the story of John Stevens (1715–1792), the American inventor who, after years of tinkering, came up with an idea for an improved steamboat engine. According to one account: The story goes that he awoke one morning with a new scheme for the eccentrics and connecting rods and, finding no pencil and paper handy, sketched it with his finger between the shoulder blades of his wife lying in bed beside him. “Do you know what figure I am making?” he asked as she awoke with a start. “Yes, Mr. Stevens,” she replied. “The figure of a fool.”
An engineer himself also pointed out how foolish backof-the-envelope drawings may appear in some contexts. The aeronautical engineer and materials scientist James E. Gordon (1913–1998) in his classic book Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down (New York: Da Capo, 1978) wrote of the limitations of a back-of-the-envelope sketch: Formal engineering drawings are very necessary when components have to be made by the usual industrial procedures, but they are troublesome to make and may not be needed for simple jobs or amateur work. For anything of a commercial and potentially dangerous nature, however, it is my experience that a firm can look remarkably silly in a court of law if the only “drawing” they can produce is a sketch on the back of an envelope.
See also “On the Backs of Envelopes,” American Scientist, January–February 1991, pp. 15-17, which is reprinted in Remaking the World (New York: Knopf, 1997). This entry augments those essays.
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backups and redundancy
Engineers also speak of an “envelope of experience,” usage of which derives from the so-called imaginary enclosure – the “envelope” of a graph’s data points – that defines their extreme values. To go “beyond the envelope” or to “push the envelope” is to design artifacts and systems that exceed prior experience and thus enter into the realms of uncertainty and risk. backups and redundancy. Engineers tend to be conservative individuals, and as such they like to see a little redundancy in the systems they design and rely on. This belt-and-suspenders tendency manifests itself in many ways. Long before the advent of PowerPoint presentations, speakers were notoriously anxious about their 35-mm slideshows working properly. The anxiety was fed by incidents of jammed projectors, blown-out bulbs, and improperly loaded carousels with slides that were upside-down, sideways, backwards, or hopelessly out of order. To obviate such disasters, some speakers traveled with their own preloaded and pretested carousels, and some also carried duplicate sets of slides on overhead transparencies and printouts of those. This redundancy approach was carried over to early PowerPoint presentations, for it was often the case then that computers and projectors did not communicate easily. Such behavior was encouraged by horror stories. One of my colleagues often told of giving a talk when the power went out. He was proud of his reaction: He passed his slides individually around the room so the seminar attendees could hold them up to the window and view them by sunlight. Better small than nothing. I had a similar experience that called for a different approach. I was giving the keynote speech at a meeting. Everything started out normally. My PowerPoint presentation, which was on
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success and failure in design and relied heavily on the images of bridges projected on the screen, worked perfectly for about the first ten minutes of the talk. Soon, however, there was an ominous hummm and the lights in the room went out, and the projector and microphone went dead. There was little choice but for me to raise my voice and continue in the dark, describing the slides that should have been there for all to see. Some thoughtful person opened the side doors to the ballroom, which let in some natural light from the windows across the vestibule. This illuminated the lectern and at least gave the audience something to look at. After another five minutes or so, the projector went on as suddenly as it had gone off. I quickly ran through the slides I had been describing in words only and, having caught up, continued with my talk – until the projector failed again and then after another couple minutes came on again. As we learned later, city workers had inadvertently cut some buried power lines outside the hotel. The resumption of power to the projector was thanks to the quick-thinking organizer of the meeting, who had pulled his truck up on the sidewalk and run a series of three extension cords – scavenged from around the ballroom – between his truck’s DC-to-AC inverter and the projector. The second outage occurred when someone tripped over the cords, separating them. I eventually did get through my PowerFailurePoint presentation, and it appeared to be well-received, no doubt as much for the quick thinking and fast response of the engineer-organizer as for my dogged determination to complete the talk. Afterwards, there were plenty of goodnatured jokes and jovial compliments. Power had been restored to the hotel via its emergency generators, and people went their separate ways to committee meetings, dinner, and other commitments. My wife and I went up to
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badges of engineering societies
our room to drop off my computer, which as insurance I had carried with me in addition to the memory stick containing my presentation. Unfortunately, the hotel did not have as much redundancy in its power system. Its emergency generators were not capable of both keeping the lights on and running the elevators reliably. We found ourselves having to descend under our own power a dozen flights of redundant, although obviously necessary and certainly welcome, firestairs to get to dinner on time. (From “Speaking of Failure,” ASEE Prism, January 2011, p. 25.) badges of engineering societies. Also known as pins, badges of distinction were once worn on watch chains but now are often worn on the lapel of a jacket to identify members of a society and to distinguish members of different grades. Among the oldest badges is that of Phi Beta Kappa. The society’s famous key, which evolved from the original square badge, did not come into use until decades after the society’s founding in 1776. (For more on keys, see keys of honor societies.) The idea of a badge to be worn by members of the American Society of Civil Engineers was proposed in the late nineteenth century because, as the society had grown, the secretary could not know every member personally. To save everyone the embarrassment of having to ask individuals whether they were members, they were expected to wear their badges when traveling to or participating in national meetings. The first design for an ASCE badge was adopted in 1884. It consisted of the letters “ASCE,” the society’s founding date of 1852, and a depiction of the engineer’s surveying instrument known as a wye level, all on a blue shield. This design was not universally popular among members, however, because lay people did not recognize the level and mistook it for all sorts of irrelevant devices. According to one account:
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Several traveling salesmen were getting acquainted in the usual manner; one dealt in hardware, another in dry goods, a third sold groceries. One of them turned to the wearer of the [ASCE] badge, who happened to be sitting with the group, and glancing at the blue shield remarked, “I see that you handle laundry machinery.” “What makes you think so?” asked the engineer. “That’s easy,” replied the salesman, “Your pin has a picture of a clothes wringer on it!”
As a result of such experiences, the badge was redesigned and in 1894 a simpler one was adopted, on which appeared only the words “American Society of Civil Engineers” and “founded 1852,” within a modified shield shape whose sides were cycloidal curves (see Civil Engineering, November 1930, p. 143). The original badge, which was issued to more than a thousand members before 1894, became rare and was prized especially by ASCE members who joined the Society before the new badge was adopted. The new design was maintained until the late twentieth century, when the date was dropped and the typography altered. By the end of the century, the design of the badge was less commonly displayed on Society stationery and banners, it having been largely displaced by a logo consisting of the italic letters ASCE with the horizontal bar of the
Original (left) and redesigned ASCE badge
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badges of engineering societies
A replaced with three wavy lines – all meant to suggest the dynamism of the society. In a subsequent tinkering with the logo, italic letters were replaced with Roman, perhaps to symbolize stability. The idea of an identifying badge remains in the form of the name tags that are expected to be worn by attendees at meetings, ostensibly to present their names to strangers, but in fact increasingly to serve as a mark of the registration fee having been paid. At some meetings, staff members of the sponsoring society serve as guards at the entrance to meeting rooms to turn away anyone, even speakers who had already contributed their thoughts and time to preparing a paper for presentation, without a valid registration badge. (For more on name tags, see “What’s in a Name Tag?” American Scientist, July–August 2007, pp. 304–308.) Some badges are very understated and subtle, with no letters or symbols readily recognizable by the uninitiated. The badge of the National Academy of Engineering, for example, is simply a small navy-blue ribbon rosette about three-eighths of an inch in diameter. Institutions in the British tradition usually have crests and their members tend to wear neckties or scarves bearing the society crest or logo, although American societies are less likely to emphasize such sartorial trappings. Still, these societies do frequently display distinctive banners at meetings and their prouder members often wear society badges or pins on their lapel, especially if these distinguish the wearer as belonging to a higher membership class. However worn or displayed, engineering society crests, emblems, pins, and logos come in a wide variety of designs. Many incorporate overt engineering symbolism. The emblem of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers is in the form of a four-leaf clover sometimes incorrectly said to be a shamrock. The crest of the Institution of Engineers, Malaysia, features a pencil and a slide
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rule. Like many modern corporations, engineering societies have come increasingly to give over the redesign of their logos to image consultants, often to the great disappointment of members with a sense of history and a respect for tradition. After many years of competition and discussion, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers finally merged, in 1963, with the Institute of Radio Engineers to form the transnational Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a new badge was born. The shape of the original AIEE badge resembled a kite, giving a nod to Benjamin Franklin’s famed experiments. The badge’s border and cross member represented an electrical circuit known as a Wheatstone bridge, complete with a galvanometer and a compass needle, thus making the important connection between electricity and magnetism. Beneath the meter was the equation C = E/R relating current to voltage and resistance via Ohm’s Law. Above the meter were the letters A.I.E.E. This was truly the badge of an engineering society, and one no doubt designed by committee. The original badge lasted only five years before it was redesigned to take on a more stylized form only suggestive of a kite. Inside its border were the letters of the society, with the A above and the I below the two E’s connected with linked circles representing the fact that “electricity surrounds magnetism and magnetism surrounds electricity.” The IRE badge was in the form of a triangle, evoking today an upside down highway yield sign, containing the letters IRE and a representation of the so-called “righthand rule,” which relates the direction of the current in a wire to that of the magnetic field induced around it. The new IEEE badge was a merger of those of the AIEE and the IRE, with only the kite shape of the former and the right-hand rule icon of the latter retained, albeit in slightly altered form. The kite outline was more softly rounded and pointed, and the straight and curved
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badges of engineering societies
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
(a) Original badge of AIEE, 1892; (b) Redesigned AIEE badge, 1897; (c) Institute of Radio Engineers badge; (d) IEEE badge, dating from 1963
arrows were reversed in direction, so that the current arrow pointed upwards, ad astra. The new badge bears no letters or equations, eliminating the need to transliterate it into different alphabets, a fitting touch for a new organization that sought a strong international presence. See John D. Ryder and Donald G. Fink, Engineers & Electrons: A Century of Electrical Progress (New York: IEEE Press, 1984), pp. 44, 222–223.
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bents and bridges. The distinctive “bent” that Tau Beta Pi, the honor society encompassing all fields of engineering, has used as its symbol since 1885 holds a special place in bridge-building history. Bridges erected on long timbers were far more stable when the outermost supports were angled so their bases were farther apart than their tops, an advantage recognized even in Roman times. Bridges with members thus battered or “bent” offered increased stability, especially in the presence of a swift river current that provided a serious risk of sideways collapse. While some designers of smaller bridges still use the classic bent configuration today, most large bridges are supported by reinforced concrete or Tau Beta Pi key, steel frames configured in such a way as known as “the to achieve lateral stability without the bent” trapezoidal geometry. Yet even though the columns holding up a modern highway bridge may not be inclined, the frame-like assemblies are still referred to as “bents.” Bents are also used to support other bridgelike structures, such as pipelines and aqueducts. The Bent of Tau Beta Pi is the name of the honor society’s quarterly magazine, which, except for a period around World War I, has been published continuously since 1906. A representation of the Tau Beta Pi bent can often be found embedded in the walkway leading up to an engineering building on a college campus, and a much larger and upright model of one can frequently be found enshrined as a monument nearby. The magazine of the electrical engineering honor society Eta Kappa Nu is named The Bridge. (It should not be confused with the magazine of the same name published by the National Academy of Engineering.) Rather
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biographies of engineers
than referring to a structure that crosses a river or valley, the electrical engineers’ bridge refers to the Wheatstone bridge, an electrical circuit that has long been employed to measure an unknown resistance. By extension, it can also be used as a sensor or gauge to determine physical quantities that influence the resistance of a wire, such as its length, thereby indirectly measuring the strain in structure to which the wire is bonded. The device is named after Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875), the English scientist and inventor who developed but did not invent the bridge circuit. One of the founders of Eta Kappa Nu wanted to choose the caduceus as the symbol of their society, without realizing that the medical profession had already adopted it. biographies of engineers. The classic work of engineering biography is the nineteenth-century multiple-volume Lives of the Engineers, by Samuel Smiles (1812–1904). Smiles was a Scottish writer, editor, and reformer who in 1857 began to publish a series of biographies of leaders in British industry, presenting the engineer as a hero and role model. Smiles’s Lives of the Engineers was published serially in 1861–62 and became very popular, remaining in print throughout the Victorian era. The Lives provided a popular introduction to engineering through heroic portraits of engineers such as Thomas Telford and George and Robert Stephenson. An abridgement of Smiles’s Lives, edited by Thomas Parke Hughes, was published under the title, Selections from Lives of the Engineers, with an Account of Their Principal Works (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966). For an extensive, if somewhat dated compilation of biographies of engineers, see the several installments by Thomas James Higgins, “Book-length Biographies of Engineers, Metallurgists, and Industrialists,” Bulletin of Biography, January–April, 1946, pp. 206–210;
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May–August, 1946, pp. 235–239; and September– December 1946, pp. 10–12. Higgins later published “A Biographical Bibliography of Electrical Engineers and Electrophysicists” in Technology and Culture (Winter 1961, pp. 28–32; and Spring 1961, pp. 146–165). See also Higgins’s, “The Function of Biography in Engineering Education,” The Journal of Engineering Education, September 1941, pp. 82–92. Whether there is a biography of a specific engineer can often be determined via a comprehensive library catalog, such as that of the Library of Congress, a union catalog, or a suitable search engine. There is a Biographical Archive of American Engineers in the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C. World wide web-based search engines are naturally helpful for locating more recent biographies; however, they cannot be wholly relied on to uncover biographies written before the computer age. There are many notable autobiographies written by engineers, including that by James Nasmyth (1808–1890), the Scottish engineer. However, although the book James Nasmyth, Engineer: An Autobiography (new edition, London: John Murray, 1885), was ostensibly written by him, historians suggest it was really ghost written, rather than just edited, by Samuel Smiles. The excellent Sir Henry Bessemer, F.R.S.: An Autobiography, was published by the offices of the magazine Engineering in 1905. The autobiography of Michael Pupin (1858–1935), From Immigrant to Inventor (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1923), was a best seller in which “Pupin presented a version of professionalism that linked the engineer to a conservative, moralistic ideology,” according to Edwin T. Layton, Jr., in his Revolt of the Engineers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). More recent engineer autobiographies and memoirs of note include that of Ben R. Rich,
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Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994). My bookshelf contains a variety of biographies of civil and structural engineers that I have found interesting and insightful. The humanist Peter Jones has written Ove Arup: Masterbuilder of the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006). Arup (1895– 1988), who was born in England and educated in Germany and Denmark, established a consulting engineering firm that worked on such iconic structures as the Sydney Opera House and Paris’s Beaubourg Centre. The worldrenowned firm is widely referred to simply by its founder’s last name. The American structural engineer and educator Hardy Cross (1885–1959) is the subject of Hardy Cross: American Engineer, by Leonard K. Eaton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). In the days before digital computers, Cross’s moment distribution method (also known as the Hardy Cross method) was widely used to design buildings. He also devised other efficient approximating techniques to analyze flow in networks of fluid conduits or electrical conductors. A collection of Cross’s essays and speeches, edited and arranged by Robert C. Goodpasture, was published as Engineers and Ivory Towers (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952). Bridge builders have been the subject of biographies of themselves and their works. Perhaps the most celebrated of these books is David McCullough’s The Great Bridge (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), the story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the members of the Roebling family who were responsible for it. An earlier biographic treatment of the same topic is by David B. Steinman, himself a bridge builder. His book is The Builders of the Bridge: The Story of John Roebling and His Son (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945). Another book about the Roeblings is Washington Roebling’s Father: A Memoir of John A. Roebling, edited by Donald Sayenga
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(Reston, Va.: ASCE Press, 2009). A biography and critical appraisal of a lesser known, in America at least, yet no less significant bridge builder is Robert Maillart: Builder, Designer, and Artist, by David P. Billington (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Another bridge builder’s biography is the book by Robert W. Hadlow, Elegant Arches, Soaring Spans: C. B. McCullough, Oregon’s Master Bridge Builder (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2001). Many autobiographies are self-published, and these often contain extremely interesting insights into the careers and minds of reflective engineers. In the early twentieth century, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers sponsored a biography and autobiography series. See Chapter VI of Eugene S. Ferguson’s Bibliography of the History of Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: Society for the History of Technology and MIT Press, 1968), for an indicative list of older autobiographies and sources for more. Further sources of biographical information about engineers can be found in shorter formats. Memoirs are official notices or reports in addition to being autobiographical works. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, biographical memoirs and obituaries of deceased colleagues, written by professional associates, appeared often in such society Transactions as those of the American Institute of Mining Engineers, the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Volumes in the book series Memorial Tributes are issued periodically by the National Academy of Engineering and published by the National Academies Press. They honor deceased members of the Academy through essays written by “contemporaries or colleagues who had personal knowledge of the interests and the engineering accomplishments” of the honorees. Biographical sketches of engineers also appear often as obituaries in professional
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biographies of engineers
magazines and journals, as well as in the New York Times, which is well indexed. Among notable collections of brief biographies of engineers are: Richard G. Weingardt, Engineering Legends: Great American Civil Engineers, 32 Profiles of Inspiration and Achievement (Reston, Va.: ASCE Press, 2005), and Ioan James, Remarkable Engineers: From Riquet to Shannon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). The author of each of these volumes makes a point of including biographical sketches of women engineers, with the latter volume having also a broad international flavor. Authoritative reference sources for biographies of selected engineers include the British Dictionary of National Biography. This standard work, originally comprising sixty-three volumes published between 1885 and 1900, is supplemented by later volumes. The DNB, as it is familiarly known, served as a model for the Dictionary of American Biography, also a standard reference work, which comprises twenty volumes issued between 1927 and 1936, plus supplements issued at later dates. Another source is the National Cyclopedia of American Biography. Some engineering societies have published specialized biographical dictionaries. The American Society of Civil Engineers published Volume I of A Biographical Dictionary of American Civil Engineers in 1972 and Volume II in 1991. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ Mechanical Engineers in America Born Prior to 1861 was published in 1980, the centennial of the society’s founding. A useful source for biographies of engineers of all nationalities is Roland Turner and Steven L. Goulden, eds., Great Engineers and Pioneers in Technology. Volume I: From Antiquity through the Industrial Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981). It is not clear that a subsequent volume was ever published. In 2002, the British Institution of Civil Engineers published the first volume, covering
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the years 1500 to 1830, of its outstanding A Biographical Dictionary of Civil Engineers in Great Britain and Ireland (London: Thomas Telford, 2002). Volume II, covering the years 1830 to 1890, was published in 2008. books by and about engineers. A number of books by and about engineers have become widely known and read by engineers and nonengineers alike. Among these are books by several engineers and writers on engineering whose names one is likely to hear uttered in unelaboratedon references. David Billington, Eugene Ferguson, Samuel Florman, and Walter Vincenti fall into this category. These and other engineer-writers have captured the essence of engineering and engineering issues in their books: David Billington. David P. Billington (born in 1927), a professor of civil engineering at Princeton University, is the preeminent theorist and critic of structural engineering. His The Tower and the Bridge, published by Basic Books in 1983, is the seminal work on the subject of its subtitle, The New Art of Structural Engineering. He has written influential books on the Swiss engineer Robert Maillart, including Robert Maillart’s Bridges: The Art of Engineering (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979). Billington’s The Innovators: The Engineering Pioneers Who Made America Modern (New York: Wiley, 1996) was the first of a projected multi-volume series on the role of engineers in the industrial development of the nation. The Innovators is itself an innovation in scholarship on the history of engineering, for in this book Billington shows how equations and their application in design are influenced not only by technical considerations but also by social factors. His Power, Speed, and Form: Engineers and the Making of the Twentieth Century, written with his historian son David P. Billington, Jr., appeared a decade later (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). Billington has long been an innovator in engineering education.
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books by and about engineers
Eugene Ferguson. Eugene S. Ferguson (1916–2004) was a mechanical engineer turned historian of technology who, among other significant works, published in 1977 an article in Science (August 26, 1977) titled, “The Mind’s Eye: Nonverbal Thought in Technology,” in which he traced the development of visual and other nonverbal thinking and related it to the nature and practice of engineering and technical drawing and discussed the nature of engineering design. The ideas in that article were incorporated, in a greatly expanded form, into Ferguson’s book Engineering and the Mind’s Eye (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), which soon became widely read for its insights into the importance of visual and other forms of nonverbal thinking to engineering design and education. Ferguson was also responsible for the still-useful Bibliography of the History of Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: Society for the History of Technology and MIT Press, 1968). James Kip Finch. James Kip Finch (1883–1967) wss a member of the engineering faculty at Columbia University from 1910 to 1952, during which time he also served as dean. He wrote about the history of that institution, engineering education, and engineering generally. Among his notable books are Engineering and Western Civilization (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951) and, for a more general audience, The Story of Engineering (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1960). A selection of his historical essays, which appeared originally in Consulting Engineer, was edited by the consulting engineer Neal FitzSimons (1928– 2000) and published under the title, Engineering Classics (Kensington, Md.: Cedar Press, 1978). Samuel Florman. With the publication of his book, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, in 1976, Samuel C. Florman (born in 1925), a registered professional engineer and vice president and general manager of a New York construction firm, became recognized as engineering’s
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most visible and articulate apologist. The book, which celebrates the profession of engineering and conveys the joys of its practice to a general readership, received wide praise from engineers and nonengineers alike, being reviewed in such general readership magazines as The New Yorker. It has become an often-referred-to modern classic. A second edition was published by St. Martin’s Press in 1994 and became available in paperback in 1996. An ardent advocate of a five-year engineering curriculum, such as exists at Dartmouth College, his alma mater, Florman had earlier published Engineering and the Liberal Arts: A Technologist’s Guide to History, Literature, Philosophy, Art, and Music (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968). Among that book’s stated purposes were “to advocate the cause of liberal education for engineers,” something for which Florman continued to be a spokesman, and “to explore some of the ways in which engineering is related to the liberal arts, thereby providing natural bridges of interest and concern between the ‘two cultures’.” Florman has served as a contributing editor to Harper’s magazine and, from 1982 to the later 1990s, wrote a regular column, “The Humane Engineer,” for Technology Review. In addition to Engineering and the Liberal Arts and The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, his books include Blaming Technology: The Irrational Search for Scapegoats (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), The Civilized Engineer (St. Martin’s Press, 1987), and, comprising a selection of “Humane Engineer” columns, The Introspective Engineer (St. Martin’s Press, 1996). Florman’s The Aftermath (St. Martin’s Press, 2001) is a fictional account of how a group of engineers who survive the devastation of the Earth by a comet go about rebuilding civilization. Richard Meehan. The books of this engineer-author include Getting Sued and Other Tales of the Engineering
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Life (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981) and The Atom and the Fault: Experts, Earthquakes, and Nuclear Power (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), which relate realworld experiences of a geotechnical engineer struggling with matters ranging from the elements of field work in Southeast Asia to ethical issues surrounding the siting of nuclear power plants in California. Walter Vincenti. Professor emeritus of aeronautical engineering at Stanford University, Walter G. Vincenti (born in 1917) is the author of one of the most significant engineering books of the later twentieth century. What Engineers Know and How They Know It was published in 1990 by Johns Hopkins University Press. The book has become widely known for its insights into the intellectual nature of engineering design. The heart of the book consists of five case studies from aeronautical engineering history. With economist Nathan Rosenberg, Vincenti also wrote Britannia Bridge: The Generation and Diffusion of Technological Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978). Richard G. Weingardt. The structural engineer Richard Weingardt (born in 1938) is also an accomplished writer. His ten books include Engineering Legends: Great American Civil Engineers, 32 Profiles of Inspiration and Achievement (Reston, Va: ASCE Press, 2006) and a biography of George W. G. Ferris, the namesake of the amusementpark ride. Weingardt also writes regular columns on the profession and leadership in the magazine Structural Engineering and Design and in the journal Leadership and Management in Engineering. In addition to being a prolific author, Weingardt is also an accomplished artist, whose favorite subjects for oil paintings are scenes relating to American Indians and the Western landscape. In addition to these and other engineer-authors and their works, there are a number of books by journalists, writers, and historians about engineers and engineering
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projects that have become touchstones for their subjects. Among these are: Engineers’ Dreams. This book by Willy Ley, first published in 1954, described such then-grand future projects as an English Channel tunnel, floating island airports, and large-scale wind, wave, and solar power installations. Also described in Ley’s book were schemes to dam the Congo River, thus creating an enormous lake in central Africa, and building a dam across the Strait of Gibraltar, thus lowering the level of the Mediterranean Sea and reclaiming land for the surrounding countries. A second edition of the book was published in 1964, with additional chapters describing projects by the Dutch to reclaim land from the North Sea and the Russians to maintain the level of the Caspian Sea. See “Engineers’ Dreams,” American Scientist, July–August 1997, pp. 310–313, which is reprinted in Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering (New York: Knopf, 2004; Vintage Books, 2005). For more on Willy Ley, see Chapter VIII of Marsha Freeman, How We Got to the Moon: The Story of the German Space Pioneers (Washington, D.C.: 21st Century Science Associates, 1993). The Great Bridge. This epic story of the Roebling family and its essential role in the building of the Brooklyn Bridge was written by historian David McCullough and published in 1972 by Simon & Schuster. McCullough also has written The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977). The Soul of a New Machine. This popular book by Tracy Kidder, first published in 1981, is very much an engineer’s book. It relates the drama of the design and development of the Data General minicomputer, Eclipse MV/8000, which was unveiled in 1980. One of the engineers highlighted in the book was Tom West (1939– 2011), who was described as “the computer engineer
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bridge-building contests
incarnate” in his obituary in the New York Times for May 28, 2011. bridge-building contests. A popular elementary-school science and engineering project is to build a model bridge out of such familiar materials as popsicle sticks, toothpicks, uncooked spaghetti, or drinking straws held together with marshmallows, gum drops, or an appropriate adhesive. Constructing model bridges made of lightweight and easily worked balsa wood (or basswood) and glue is an especially common design contest for older students, and there are national competitions for balsa-wood bridges made by high-school and college students. Typically, the bridges must span a specified distance and allow for a test load to be applied in a certain way, such as by adding sand to a bucket suspended from the structure’s midspan or by adding weights to the top of the bridge. Trials determine which bridge can carry the greatest load without breaking. Sometimes, the model bridges are weighed before being loaded, and the bridge achieving the greatest load-to-weight ratio is declared the winner. In addition, deflection allowances are sometimes imposed, and aesthetics can also play a role in determining a contestwinning bridge. The American Institute of Steel Construction and the American Society of Civil Engineers annually sponsor a national competition among college students to design and build a twenty-foot long steel bridge. A bridge of this size is heavy and unwieldy enough to require a well-practiced team to succeed in its erection. The student teams compete to assemble the prefabricated parts of their bridge in the shortest period of time, and the completed bridge is then judged using weight, strength, stiffness, and aesthetic criteria. Such competitions have a strong pedagogical component, in that the students necessarily must apply what
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they have learned in the classroom, and more, to a realistic project. bug. This common term for an error encountered in running a computer program has a history that is much older than the digital computer itself. “Bug” as a term for a glitch or error generally was apparently current as shop slang as early as 1878, for in that year Thomas Edison (1847–1931) used the word in a letter in which he described his style of invention: The first step is an intuition and it comes with a burst, then difficulties arise–this thing gives out and then that – ‘Bugs’ – as such little faults and difficulties are called – show themselves, and months of intense watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success – or failure – is certainly reached.
The term was also used in a famous passage on the engineering profession written by Herbert Hoover and published in his 1952 memoir. (The passage is quoted in this book’s entry a great profession.) There is a persistent story of the original bug being a moth found in a malfunctioning early electronic computer running in the Naval Research Laboratory. The intruder was preserved encased in Lucite; however, the tale appears to be apocryphal. Another story, which describes a moth “beaten to death” in 1945 by a relay of the Mark II computer and preserved taped to the logbook held in the Naval Museum at the Naval Surface Weapons Center in Dahlgren, Virginia, has been given more legitimacy. That incident, as reported in the Annals of the History of Computing 3 (July 1981): 285–286, enabled the operators to say they were debugging the computer whenever the commander entered the room and asked, “Are you making any numbers?”
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The most persistent story about a moth being the first computer “bug” was promulgated by the pioneering computer scientist Grace Murray Hopper (1906–1992), who participated in the invention of the business-oriented computer language COBOL and became a rear admiral in the Navy. According to her version, on September 9, 1947 a moth was removed with a pair of tweezers from the Mark II computer at Harvard University, and thereafter “when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.” This moth was also said to have been taped into a logbook, which contains the notation, “First actual case of bug being found.” The logbook is preserved in the National Museum of American History. See Laurence Zuckerman, “If There’s a Bug in the Etymology, You May Never Get It Out,” New York Times, April 22, 2000. See also J. M. Fenster, “COBOL,” American Heritage’s Invention & Technology, Fall 2010, pp. 48–50.
C calculators. The prototype of the now-ubiquitous and inexpensive hand-held battery- or solar-powered electronic calculator was produced in 1966 by Texas Instruments engineers Jack S. Kilby, Jerry D. Merryman, and James H. Van Tasse. Its dimensions were 4–1/4 by 6–1/8 by 1–3/4 inches, and it weighed 45 ounces. The technology, created at TI under the code name Cal-Tech, was licensed by the early 1970s. The Pocketronic calculator went on sale in Japan in 1970 for the equivalent of $395, and became available in the United States in 1971 for $345. In January 1972, the HP 35, the first scientific pocket calculator, was offered to the public by Hewlett-Packard at a retail price of $395. The introduction of this and soon other “scientific calculators” that could handle trigonometric functions as well as the basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of the Pocketronic caused much debate among engineering professors at the time as to whether such calculators gave students who could afford them an unfair advantage over those who could not. The latter had to continue to use a slide rule, of course. There was no resolution of the academic debate as to whether electronic calculators should be banned from exams before the point became moot because the price of calculators dropped to where they were generally considered as affordable as a good slide rule. For example, in 1976 a TI-30 scientific calculator could be bought for $25; within years of their introduction, simpler electronic 43
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calculators could be bought for less than $10 and soon were being given away in advertising promotions. The calculators were also being used by virtually every high school student, and the concepts of memorizing multiplication tables and doing long division had gone the way of the slide rule. With the introduction of easily affordable pocket scientific calculators, the sale of slide rules, which had already been declining because of decreasing enrollment in engineering schools, plummeted. In 1973, Keuffel & Esser, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of slide rules for more than a century, began to sell Texas Instruments pocket calculators. Early calculators were essentially electronic slide rules, and that indeed is what they were called. The machines enabled engineers to carry out design calculations and analysis much more quickly and accurately. Engineering managers, however, who tended to be the older members of a firm and who usually no longer did tedious design calculations, were frequently reported to continue to keep a slide rule in their desk drawer. See also slide rule. Among the issues that surrounded the introduction of scientific calculators was who should purchase them in an engineering firm. One engineer argued, “Why should I go out and spend $150 to $300 or more for a calculator? If an engineer can do four times as much work with a calculator, it’s the company that benefits. Therefore, the company should pay.” Some companies did pay for calculators to distribute to or circulate among their engineers, but others did not because they felt the small devices could be too easily stolen. The Boston environmental engineering firm of Camp, Dresser & McKee gave advice for dealing with another aspect of supplying calculators: “Be clear about who is and who is not eligible to get a calculator; it becomes a status symbol. If there is not a clear policy in
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advance as to who will get one, there may be hard feelings. CDM makes clear that only an engineer – not a designdraftsman – is eligible for one.” The largest single group of pocket calculator users in the mid-1970s was said to be university students, who “typically do more theoretical calculations.” With the decline in prices that has come to be expected with popular electronic devices, the issue of who paid for calculators became moot. The design history of the electronic calculator is related concisely by Mike May in “How the Computer Got Into Your Pocket,” American Heritage of Invention & Technology, Spring 2000, pp. 47–54. For an indication of the state of the art of pocket calculators in the mid-1970s, and for illustrations of many of the calculators available at the time, along with their prices, see Gene Dallaire, “Pocket Electronic Calculators Zoom,” Civil Engineering, February 1975, pp. 39–43. Centennial of Engineering. The one-hundredth anniversary of engineering in America was celebrated in 1952 to coincide with the centennial of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the country’s first permanent national professional engineering organization. At the time of the society’s founding, the term “civil engineer” included all engineers who were not military engineers, and so the organization welcomed those practicing the rudiments of what would later come to be called mining, mechanical, and other forms of engineering. In time, there were formed specialized societies for mining engineers, mechanical engineers, and others. A 3-cent U.S. postage stamp – then sufficient to mail a first-class letter across the country – was issued to commemorate the Centennial of Engineering. See Centennial of Engineering: History and Proceedings of Symposia, 1852–1952 (Chicago: Centennial of Engineering, ca. 1953).
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cheers of engineers
cheers of engineers. A November 26, 1993 letter from Gene Shalit to the editor of the New York Times recalled a popular cheer once chanted at the University of California. It was full of allusions to the mathematics so familiar to engineering students everywhere: E to the x, dy! dx! E to the x, dx! Secant, cosine, tangent, sine, Three-point-one-four-one-five-nine; Square root, cube root, Q.E.D. Slip stick! Slide rule! ’ray U.C.!
Similar cheers have been recalled by other engineers. According to an item in The Bent of Tau Beta Pi (April 1949, p. 68), those pledging the honor society at Iowa State College (I.S.C.) in the late 1940s were required to wear brown and white robes, hang a large replica of the society’s key, known as “the bent,” from their necks, and “holler at the top of their lungs” the following: E to the x, dy, dx, E to the x, dx. Secant, cosine, tangent, sine, 3 point 14159 Square root, cube root, BHP Slide rule, slip stick, I.S.C.
The fact that the main difference between the California and Iowa State cheers is the replacement of the abbreviation for the Latin phrase quod erat demonstrandum that signals the conclusion of a mathematical proof with the engineering term for measuring power, BHP, which stands for both brake horsepower and boiler horsepower, suggests that the latter engineering students were more applied than the former. A letter to the editor of The Bent (July 1949, p. 116) expressed surprise at reading that the cheer was used only by pledges at Iowa State, for all
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students at Purdue University knew it as the “Engineer’s Yell,” with the final two lines replaced by: Square root, cube root, B.T.U. Slip stick, slide rule, Yea, Purdue!
Whereas BHP would have been perfectly appropriate for a school whose sports teams are known as the Boilermakers, BHP does not rhyme with “Purdue”; hence the change to the thermodynamic measure of work, the British Thermal Unit (B.T.U.). One reputedly bowdlerized version of an MIT cheer has a familiar ring: E to the U, dU, E to the X, dX Cosine! Secant! Tangent! Sine! 3-point-1–4-1–5-9! Integral! Radical! V dV Slipstick! Slide rule! M.I.T.!
See also fight songs for engineers. cities and other places named for engineers. Many places around the world bear the names of engineers, although this is neither widely known nor generally recognized. Very often the reason for naming the location was that the engineer played a significant role in its founding or development or in creating the infrastructure that made it accessible. Among American cities and towns named for engineers is Port Jervis, New York, located on the Delaware River in the southern part of the state. John Bloomfield Jervis (1795–1885) began working on the Erie Canal and eventually became supervisor of the Delaware and Hudson Canal in the vicinity of the site that now bears his name. The great bridge builder, John A. Roebling (1806–1869), is remembered in the name of the town of Roebling, New Jersey, located on the Delaware River near Philadelphia, which
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cities and other places named for engineers
was built as a company town by the firm of John A. Roebling’s Sons in the early twentieth century. The town of Port Eads, Louisiana, at the tip of the Mississippi River Delta, is named after James Buchanan Eads (1820–1887), who in the late nineteenth century installed a system of jetties to keep the mouth of the Mississippi open to shipping from the Gulf of Mexico. Crozet, Virginia is named for Claudius Crozet (1790–1864), the French-born American engineer who taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and served as the State Engineer of Virginia from 1823 to 1832 and again from 1837 until his death. Kirkwood, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, is named after James Pugh Kirkwood (1807–1877), chief engineer for the Pacific Railroad, who was tasked in 1850 with making recommendations for a line westward from St. Louis. The route finally chosen was a difficult one, and so why it was chosen has long confused historians. One explanation has been that land developers persuaded Kirkwood to route the railroad through what was to be the first preplanned community west of the Mississippi in exchange for a promise that the town would be named after him. There is also a Kirkwood, New York, which is located between Binghamton and the Pennsylvania border. Engineer Kirkwood worked for the Erie Railroad when the nearby Starrucca Viaduct, which was instrumental in developing the area, was constructed. See Marty Harris, “Happy Birthday James Pugh Kirkwood,” Webster-Kirkwood (Missouri) Times, online edition, March 23, 2007. More than four thousand feet high in Washington’s Cascade Mountains is Stevens Pass, named after the first nonnative American credited with discovering it. John Frank Stevens (1853–1943) was responsible for overseeing the building of the Great Northern Railway. His railroad experience made him an excellent choice to serve as chief engineer from 1906 to 1908 for the construction of the Panama Canal, where one of the most challenging problems was
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how to move the enormous amounts of earth that had to be excavated. Employing an efficient rail-car system to do this was a key factor in the project’s ultimate success. Among places in America that recognize engineers collectively is Engineer Mountain. This 13,218-foot peak, located about twenty-five miles north of Durango, Colorado, in the San Juan Range of the Rocky Mountains, was named for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. A corps team surveyed the land in 1873 to establish the boundary of the Ute Indian reservation and to look into reports that there were valuable minerals in the area. There is also Engineers Country Club, a golf course established in 1917 in Roslyn Harbor, New York. It was the site of the 1919 PGA Championship. In Manhattan, at Fifth Avenue and East 90th Street, the entrance to New York City’s Central Park is designated Engineers Gate. Although such a designation may refer to mechanics and artisans, who were often referred to as engineers in the nineteenth century, the name is one that can be appreciated by professional engineers today. Parsons Boulevard, a prominent street in the New York Borough of Queens and an important express stop on the subway line connecting it to Manhattan, is named after William Barclay Parsons (1859–1932), a distinguished engineer who was responsible for building the original New York City subway system. civil engineering. The term “civil engineer” was first used in the eighteenth century to distinguish civilian engineering practice from that engaged in by the military. Among the first to call himself a civil engineer was John Smeaton (1724–1792), an Englishman who engaged in activities that today would classify him as a consulting engineer. Smeaton employed the term “civil engineering” to distinguish his work for clients on windmills, lighthouses, harbors, and other civil works, from that of military engineering.
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civil engineering
Indeed, in its earliest usage, civil engineering simply referred to any engineering that was not military. As defined in the 1994 Official Register of the American Society of Civil Engineers: Civil Engineering is the profession in which a knowledge of the mathematical and physical sciences gained by study, experience, and practice is applied with judgment to develop ways to utilize, economically, the materials and forces of nature for the progressive well-being of humanity in creating, improving and protecting the environment, in providing facilities for community living, industry and transportation, and in providing structures for the use of mankind.
This echoes the classic early nineteenth-century definition of civil engineering. It was drafted in 1827 by Thomas Tredgold (1788–1829), a largely self-taught engineer who is identified in the Institution of Civil Engineers’ biographical dictionary as a “technical author and consultant.” His, and ICE’s, definition and elaboration on its objectives was composed in anticipation of the institution seeking a royal charter. As adopted, it reads in part, with modernized punctuation: Civil engineering is the art of directing the great sources of power in nature for the use and convenience of man, being that practical application of the most important principles of natural philosophy which have in a considerable degree realized the anticipations of Bacon, and changed the aspect and state of affairs in the whole world. The most important object of civil engineering is to improve the means of production and of traffic in states, both for external and internal trade. It is applied in the construction and management of roads, bridges, railroads, aqueducts, canals, river navigations, docks, and storehouses for the convenience of internal intercourse and exchange; and in the construction of ports, harbours, moles, breakwaters, and light houses,
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and in the navigation by artificial power for the purposes of commerce. . . .
The allusion to Bacon is to the English lawyer, philosopher, and founder of modern science, Francis Bacon (1561–1626), who in his lifetime would come to assume the titles Lord Verulam and the Viscount of St. Albans. Bacon considered all knowledge to be his province, and he emphasized the importance of empirical evidence and inductive thought in the development of new knowledge and inventions “for the use and benefits of men.” See J. G. Watson, The Institution of Civil Engineers: A Short History (London: Thomas Telford, 1982); Hans Straub, A History of Civil Engineering: An Outline from Ancient to Modern Times, translated by Erwin Rockwell (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1964). codes and standards. Building codes are basically local laws or regulations governing construction within a jurisdiction. It is often said that the first “building code” was the four-millennia-old Code of Hammurabi, which held Babylonian builders responsible for the houses they built. It was a harsh code: for example, if a house collapsed and killed its owner, the builder was put to death. Strictly speaking, however, the Code of Hammurabi is more a moral than a building code in the engineering sense, because it is punitive rather than prescriptive of load limits and other quantitative measures intended to obviate failure. A standard is an agreed upon design practice, procedure, or specification of an industry or profession. The development of standards is generally identified as a sign of professionalism, in which voluntary committee efforts go toward writing standards that are adopted widely. Standards incorporate the considered judgment of experienced engineers, especially with regard to the design of structures, machines, and other artifacts on whose safety and reliability the lay public depends. Standards of practice,
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also called codes, are intended to define and disseminate what a profession considers at the time of their promulgation best practice in design. The story of the origins and development of the Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers is representative of this process. The background to the story begins in the nineteenth century, when steamboats were plagued by exploding boilers, in large part because they were inferiorly manufactured and inappropriately operated. Federal legislation regulating steam boilers was called for as early as 1824. In the early 1830s, the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia was granted federal funds to develop a testing program, the results of which served as the basis for 1838 legislation requiring independent inspections of boilers. The lack of standardized inspection criteria made the law ineffective, however, and explosions continued to plague the steamboat trade. Finally, in 1852, a regulatory agency was created, which led to a diminution of deaths due to steamboat boiler explosions. See John G. Burke, “Bursting Boilers and the Federal Power,” Technology and Culture, April 1966, pp. 1–23. Stationary boilers used in factories remained unregulated, however. One incident, the 1854 explosion of a boiler in a Hartford, Connecticut engine room, led a group of local businessmen to organize the Polytechnic Club, which was devoted to the rational study of the properties of steam and the causes of boiler explosions, which conventional wisdom blamed on acts of God, demons in the boilers, and bogus chemistry. The study group rationally concluded that boilers exploded when steam pressure exceeded the ability of the boiler to contain it: a cause that should be able to be controlled. The Polytechnic Club redoubled its efforts after the 1865 explosion of a boiler on the Sultana, a Mississippi River steamboat carrying Union soldiers freed after the Confederate surrender at
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Appomattox. The death toll, estimated to be as high as 1,500, made it the worst marine disaster in America up to that time. In the wake of the Sultana disaster, some Polytechnic Club members formed the Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company, incorporating it in 1866. The company served manufacturers with expert advice on choice of materials, design, manufacture, and installation of boilers that were to be insured. The Hartford’s inspections soon came to be accepted by municipal and state authorities as certifying boilers as safe, thus greatly reducing the occurrence of explosions, at least where the inspections were properly carried out. Still, explosions continued elsewhere, and in 1880 a number of engineers met to form the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, a group founded to establish “with scientific precision” standards for threads on nuts and bolts and procedures for testing the strength of iron and steel. A code of practice for the latter purpose was put forth as early as 1884, which laid the groundwork for a comprehensive boiler code. This was not forthcoming from government groups, however, and it was not until the early twentieth century and some catastrophic explosions that the political climate was right for the ASME to increase efforts to produce a boiler code. It was to be promulgated by the engineering profession, rather than individual government bodies, which were beginning to pass disparate rules of their own. The first ASME Boiler Code was approved in 1915, and it has developed into the principal means for ensuring the safety of boilers and pressure vessels of all kinds, including nuclear reactor vessels. A history of the code is contained in Wilbur Cross, The Code: An Authorized History of the ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code (New York: American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 1990). Announcements and current developments relating to the code, as well as questions and interpretations of the
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code, are contained in each issue of the ASME’s monthly magazine, Mechanical Engineering. Engineering standards began to proliferate in the early part of the twentieth century, and in 1916 the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Institute of Mining Engineers, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and the American Society for Testing Materials collectively created the Joint Committee on Organization of an American Engineers Standards Committee to coordinate standards-writing efforts. The American Engineering Standards Committee was established in 1918, and its membership soon included government and industrial bodies involved and interested in the creation of standards. The AESC was reorganized in 1928 as the American Standards Association, which allowed for the participation of such groups as trade associations, and the ASA became affiliated with the International Standards Association. The ASA was reorganized in 1966 as the USA Standards Institute (USASI), which in 1970 was renamed the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). It coordinates the voluntary consensus standards system in the United States and approves American National Standards, making sure they are not in conflict. An office in Brussels coordinates efforts with international standards bodies and represents United States interests abroad. Membership in ANSI includes national and international companies, government agencies, institutions, and professional, technical, trade, labor, and consumer organizations. The American Society for Testing and Materials dates from 1898, when it was known as the American Society for Testing Materials. ASTM has as its objective “the development of voluntary consensus standards for materials, products, systems and services.” ASTM comprises “one of the largest management systems for the development of standards documents used around the world.” Perhaps the
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organization’s most tangible product is the multi-volume Annual Book of ASTM Standards. The process whereby professional organizations establish codes and standards came under attack in what has come to be known as the Hydrolevel Case. This legal dispute involving the responsibility for code-writing committees was between the Hydrolevel Corporation, a manufacturer of a boiler feed-water indicating device, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The incident began with the drafting of a letter jointly by the vice president of the Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company and the vice president for research of McDonnell & Miller, a subsidiary of the International Telephone & Telegraph Company that dominated the U.S. market for heating-boiler safety controls. The letter sought an interpretation of ASME’s Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code regarding boiler feed-water indicating devices. The two individuals drafting the letter were also, respectively, the chairman and vice chairman of the ASME subcommittee on heating boilers, and the chairman drafted a response to the letter of inquiry. The resulting interpretation of the code was claimed to have been used by salesmen of McDonnell & Miller to discredit Hydrolevel’s product. When Hydrolevel complained to ASME, an unsympathetic response came from the same subcommittee, which by then was chaired by the McDonnell & Miller executive. Hydrolevel sued ASME, Hartford Steam Boiler, and ITT. The latter two settled out of court in 1978; however, ASME fought the charges that it had conspired against Hydrolevel in violation of federal antitrust laws. In 1979, a U.S. District Court ruled against ASME, which was fined $7.5 million. The appeal went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled against ASME in 1982. The case has become a defining one for the responsibility of a professional society for the actions of its committees. See Nancy Rueth, “Ethics and the Boiler
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codes of ethics
Code: A Case Study,” Mechanical Engineering, June 1975, pp. 34–36. codes of ethics. Codes of ethics for engineers were talked about in the late nineteenth century; however, it was not until 1912 that such a code was formally adopted. The first organization to do so was the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. Many other societies soon followed suit, seeing the adoption of codes of ethics as a means of furthering the professional status of engineers. Now, virtually all engineering societies have adopted codes of ethics to which their members are assumed to subscribe when they join. Codes of Ethics vary widely, and a sense of that variation can be conveyed by quoting from a few of them. The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology has drafted the following Fundamental Principles, which have been adopted by some engineering societies: Engineers uphold and advance the integrity, honor and dignity of the engineering profession by: 1. using their knowledge and skill for the enhancement of human welfare; 2. being honest and impartial and serving with fidelity the public, their employers and clients; 3. striving to increase the competence and prestige of the engineering profession; and 4. supporting the professional and technical societies of their disciplines.
The American Society of Civil Engineers adopted the above fundamental principles in 1975 and added the following Fundamental Canons to the ASCE Code of Ethics: 1. Engineers shall hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public in the performance of their professional duties. 2. Engineers shall perform services only in areas of their competence.
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3. Engineers shall issue public statements only in an objective and truthful manner. 4. Engineers shall act in professional matters for each employer or client as faithful agents or trustees, and shall avoid conflicts of interest. 5. Engineers shall build their professional reputation on the merit of their services and shall not compete unfairly with others. 6. Engineers shall act in such a manner as to uphold and enhance the honor, integrity, and dignity of the engineering profession. 7. Engineers shall continue their professional development through their careers, and shall provide opportunities for the professional development of those engineers under their supervision.
The ASCE Code of Ethics continues with “Guidelines to Practice under the Fundamental Canons of Ethics,” which elaborate on each of the canons. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, on the other hand, adopted in 1990 its own unique and more concise Code of Ethics, which reads in full as follows: We, the members of the IEEE, in recognition of the importance of our technologies in affecting the quality of life throughout the world, and in accepting a personal obligation to our profession, its members and the communities we serve, do hereby commit ourselves to the highest ethical and professional conduct and agree: 1. to accept responsibility in making engineering decisions consistent with the safety, health and welfare of the public, and to disclose promptly factors that might endanger the public or the environment; 2. to avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest whenever possible, and to disclose them to affected parties when they do exist; 3. to be honest and realistic in stating claims or estimates based on available data;
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computer 4. to reject bribery in all its forms; 5. to improve the understanding of technology, its appropriate application, and potential consequences; 6. to maintain and improve our technical competence and to undertake technological tasks for others only if qualified by training or experience, or after full disclosure of pertinent limitations; 7. to seek, accept, and offer honest criticism of technical work, to acknowledge and correct errors, and to credit properly the contributions of others; 8. to treat fairly all persons regardless of such factors as race, religion, gender, disability, age, or national origin; 9. to avoid injuring others, their property, reputation, or employment by false or malicious action; 10. to assist colleagues and co-workers in their professional development and to support them in following this code of ethics.
For introductions to the problem of engineering ethics, see, for example, Robert J. Baum and Albert W. Flores, eds., Ethical Problems in Engineering, 2nd ed. (Troy, N.Y.: Center for the Study of the Human Dimensions of Science and Technology, 1980); James H. Schaub and Karl Pavlovic, eds., Engineering Professionalism and Ethics (New York: Wiley, 1983); and Mike W. Martin and Roland Schinzinger, Ethics in Engineering, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004). computer. Before the days of the digital computer, a “computer” was simply a person, and more than likely a woman, who carried out a usually repetitive computational task. For more complex and extended calculations that involved a lot of repetitive steps, a team of human computers was often employed, each one passing on to the next the result of a single calculation. If they sat at tables arranged in a more-or-less circular pattern, the result of
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the last operation in a series could be passed back to the computer responsible for the first operation. In this manner, the group of human computers performed much as a do-loop does in an electronic computer program today. In the early twentieth century, the Englishman Lewis Fry Richardson (1881–1953) conceived of a scheme to predict the weather by using 64,000 human computers. His idea was to have the computers sit in tiers around the inside of a gigantic spherical theater on which would be a map of the globe. By starting with the temperature, pressure, and wind velocity at various locations around the planet, the computers could predict changes everywhere on Earth. See Brian Hayes, “The Weatherman,” American Scientist, January–February 2001, pp. 10–14. The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) was developed at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. When the machine’s switch was thrown by John W. Mauchly (1907– 1980), a physicist, and J. Presper Eckert, Jr. (1919–1995), an engineer, on February 14, 1946, the ENIAC became the first large-scale, general purpose, electronic digital computer to operate. The developers of the ENIAC, apparently wishing to avoid anthropomorphic terms in describing the workings of their device, were the first to use the term “program” in conjunction with a computer. The powerful table- and desktop machines known as personal computers began to appear in increasing numbers in engineering schools and offices in the early 1980s. They largely replaced mainframe computers in most routine, and sometimes not-so-routine engineering work, much as the laptop later replaced the tabletop and desktop personal computer. Reliance on personal computers and computers generally, especially on the black-box software that has proliferated, has been blamed for everything from the loss of engineering judgment to engineering failures. See
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“Failed Promises,” American Scientist, January–February 1994, pp. 6–9. concrete. Modern concrete is commonly a mixture of water, sand, aggregate (typically crushed stone), and a binder known as Portland cement, which cures and hardens to a rock-like mass. Plain (unreinforced) concrete, also known as mass concrete, was used in Roman times; steel-reinforced concrete can be traced back to the midnineteenth century, when iron bars and mesh were embedded in it to improve strength and inhibit the development of cracks. Large-scale applications of reinforced concrete increased in the early twentieth century. Because concrete is often incorrectly called “cement” by lay persons, the usage of the words serves as a kind of shibboleth distinguishing the technically literate from the technically illiterate. Hoover Dam, located on the border between Arizona and Nevada, is one of the most storied of concrete structures, containing 3.25 million cubic yards of the stuff. The first large bucketful (containing eight cubic yards) of wet concrete was poured on June 6, 1933, and another was added on average every two-and-a-half minutes over the course of the next two years, with the last being placed on May 29, 1935. At the dam construction site, each bucketful of concrete was carried by an elaborate system of cableways that spanned Black Canyon and operated twentyfour hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. Hoover Dam is also famous for having had water pipes embedded in the concrete to act as a cooling system to carry away the so-called heat of hydration that is released as concrete cures. If left to itself, the mass of concrete in the dam would have taken about a century to cool to ambient temperature. Because concrete shrinks as it cools, the structure would have wanted to pull away from itself and therefore develop cracks. To solve the
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problem at Hoover Dam, the concrete was poured into numerous adjacent massive blocks, which shrank as the chilled water running through the pipes carried away the heat. This naturally left gaps between the blocks, but the gaps were filled with cement grout – essentially concrete without the bulky aggregate, which in Hoover Dam consisted of boulders as large as eight or nine inches across – to produce a monolithic structure whose material has aged well. At a symposium held on the occasion of the dam’s seventy-fifth anniversary, a concrete expert noted that there were no signs of leakage. See the symposium proceedings: Richard L. Wiltshire, David R. Gilbert, and Jerry R. Rogers, eds., Hoover Dam 75th Anniversary History Symposium (Reston, Va.: ASCE, 2010). Concrete, especially when it has been freshly poured, seems to attract people seeking to impress their initials into it and practical jokers who have more diabolical motives. There is a story about the construction of one of the diversion tunnels at Hoover Dam. These tunnels were to carry the water of the Colorado River through the canyon walls and so around the construction site, thereby enabling it to be kept dry so the concrete could be placed and the dam could be built up. After the rock had been blasted loose and removed, the tunnels had to be lined with concrete so a smooth surface was presented to the flowing water. The concrete lining was poured behind wooden forms, which were removed when the material had set. Once, when the forms were removed, it appeared that a worker had been entombed in the lining. In fact, the “body” was a set of empty overalls and a hard hat that had been arranged in the wet concrete to give the impression that a man was buried in the hardened stuff. Some joke! Its perpetrators were tracked down and fired by the legendary dam engineer Frank Crowe (1882–1946), whose nickname was “Hurry Up.” He did not want such foolishness to slow down and threaten the schedule of his construction project.
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In 2008, when the new Yankee Stadium was under construction in New York, a mischievous worker who happened to be a Boston fan threw a Red Sox jersey into some wet concrete, evidently with the intention of putting a jinx on the new baseball field and its home team. Somehow, word got around that the deed had been done, and some co-workers who were supposedly New York fans reported where the malcontent was working on the day of the incident. A great deal of time and effort was spent jackhammering away the hardened concrete in the area where the jersey was suspected of being buried. After five hours of cutting through two feet of concrete, the tattered red-andwhite uniform shirt bearing the name Ortiz and the number 34 was found and removed, presumably undoing the curse. concrete canoes. Boats made of wire-reinforced concrete were fabricated in the mid-nineteenth century in France, and the concept was put into large-scale practice during both world wars. In the late 1960s, renewed interest developed worldwide in making boats of ferrocement, in which multiple layers of light mesh, such as window screen, were embedded in thin sections of cement mortar. The first ferrocement concrete canoe is generally believed to have been made in 1970 by engineering students at the University of Illinois, in Urbana, who were given the assignment to design a canoe out of concrete in an honors class taught by Professor Clyde E. Kesler. These students used #3 (i.e., 3/8-inch diameter) reinforcing rods and four layers of chicken wire to construct a 370-pound canoe whose average thickness of mortar was one-half inch. The first inter-university concrete canoe race is said to have occurred on May 16, 1971, between teams of civil engineering students from the University of Illinois and Purdue University. The Purdue canoe weighed only 125 pounds, however the Illinois team won by taking three of
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five heats on the 1,240-foot course. Since 1988, concrete canoe competitions have become annual events sponsored by the American Society of Civil Engineers in conjunction with Master Builders, the part of the international chemical company BASF that manufactures construction chemicals such as admixtures that go into making lightweight concrete. In addition to the canoe races proper, including a 100-meter sprint and a 600-meter race involving turns, each student team must prepare a descriptive display of its design and make oral presentations explaining it. See M. K. Hurd, “World’s First Concrete Canoe Race,” ACI Journal, September 1971, pp. N10–N11. See also “Concrete Canoes,” American Scientist, September– October 2000, pp. 390–394. Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. This council was founded in 1969 as the Joint Committee on Tall Buildings. The international and interdisciplinary (incorporating engineering, architectural, and planning interests) organization was “established to study and report on all aspects of the planning, design, construction, and operation of tall buildings.” One major focus of the Council’s work has been the publication of a comprehensive series of monographs on tall buildings in an urban context. The name was changed to its present form in 1976 to represent an interest in the impact of skyscrapers on their surroundings. Between 1978 and 1981 the Council published its fivevolume Monograph on the Planning and Design of Tall Buildings, which constitutes a comprehensive resource for specialists working on high-rise buildings. The Council has been the customary arbiter of height records for skyscrapers. In 1996, it declared the recently completed Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to be the tallest building in the world. The ruling recognized that, although a communications antenna atop the Sears Tower reached higher than the spire of the
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Petronas Towers, the antenna was not an integral part of the Sears structure the way the spire was of the Petronas. The decision was not a popular one, especially in Chicago where the Sears Tower was located. No doubt at least in part in response to criticism, in 1997 the Council designated four distinct categories of tallest building, defined and measured by distance from the building’s entrance to: (1) the structural or architectural top, (2) the highest occupied floor, (3) the highest roof, and (4) the tip of a broadcast antenna. Thus, the definition of tallest building in the world became ambiguous, and at any given time there could be more than one “tallest building.” Under the 1997 designations, the Petronas Towers remained the tallest structure, whereas the Sears (now the Willis) Tower was the tallest measured to the top of its highest roof or to its highest occupied floor, and the World Trade Center north tower in New York was tallest when antennas were included. Of course, such records could only stand as long as the buildings did and were not surpassed. In 2004, Taipei 101, the 101-story tower in Taiwan, took over as the tallest building in all categories. It was surpassed in 2010 by the Burj Khalifa, located in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, whose occupied floors number 163. craft tradition. Engineering is often said to have developed out of the craft tradition, in which manual dexterity with tools and an artistic sense were more commonly employed in devising and making artifacts than an analytical method, which characterizes modern engineering. Robert Stephenson (1803–1859), elected president of the newly formed Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 1849 and president of Institution of Civil Engineers in 1855, is reported to have said of engineering during his lifetime, “We have found it a craft, and we have left it a profession.” cut-and-try. This is a method, as its name suggests, of achieving an end by trial and error, by “the cut-and-try
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methods of the mechanic, rather than by the rational analysis of the scientist.” In engineering, the term is used in contrast to analytical approaches whereby designs are sized and optimized by calculation. “Cut-and-try” is sometimes confused with the close yet antonymic phrase “cut-anddried” (sometimes written “cut-and-dry”), which connotes a method or process that is well established and involving little guesswork. Presumably the latter phrase comes from the fact that lumber that is cut and properly dried will not shrink or distort after it is employed in building and construction, thus providing a predictably reliable structure.
D definitions of engineering. See economics and engineering; engineer; engineering. design. Arguably, it is design that is the central activity of engineering, with all other engineering pursuits following from and in service to design. Design is a process of synthesis, as opposed to analysis, which is more akin to what scientists do. Thus, design is the aspect of engineering that distinguishes it from science. According to Joel Moses, once dean of engineering at MIT, “Design is the soul of engineering.” In America, it has been traditional for separate contracts to be let for the design and the building phases of large construction projects. In contrast, in the designbuild concept, the same firm is responsible for both the design and the construction phases. Proponents of this system, which has been more common in Europe, argue that design-build contracts are more economical and efficient and result in better quality design and construction. Opponents argue that separate contracts better ensure the benefits of competition. The proponents prevailed in latetwentieth century America, where design-build contracts went from about 3 percent of contracts negotiated in 1987 to more than 33 percent in 1997. When a new building, bridge, or other structure is desired, a design competition can be held to which entries are invited from a select group, resulting in a closed competition, or from anyone who cares to enter, resulting in 66
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an open competition. The entries are often put on display and public opinion invited before the entries are judged by a distinguished committee. There are often prizes for the top entrants, with the most coveted prize being an actual commission to complete a detailed design and have it realized. The sponsor of a design competition may or may not choose, or be able financially, to build the winning entry. Design competitions have been criticized for encouraging mediocrity and exploiting professionals. Competitions have also been praised for encouraging innovation and giving unknown designers a chance to show off their talents. Design competitions have long been more common in Europe than in America, although they have been used increasingly of late. See “Design Competition,” American Scientist, November–December 1997, pp. 511–515 and “Drawing Bridges,” American Scientist, July–August 1999, pp. 302–306. Unlike a professional design competition, a design contest is typically engaged in by students. A design problem, with defined constraints, is posed and student entries are pitted against one another. Familiar design contests might involve building a balsa-wood bridge that will support the greatest weight relative to its own weight, constructing a vehicle powered by a rubber band that will negotiate a certain maze, enclosing an egg in a minimum weight package in such a way that it will survive, uncracked, when dropped from a rooftop, and designing a microelectronic circuit that will perform a given task. Among the design contests perhaps most frequently promoted in American engineering schools are bridge-building, constructing a concrete canoe that will float, and egg-dropping competitions. Dilbert. This cartoon-character engineer began to gain prominence in the early 1990s in the syndicated comic strip of the same name. The strip, drawn by Scott Adams, who worked with engineers before beginning to caricature
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them, developed a devoted readership that followed the daily office activities of Dilbert and his co-workers. Dilbert has been described as “a nerdy but lovable engineer” and as “Everyengineer,” although I am not sure that his shortsleeved shirt and curling tie is the image of themselves that engineers wish to have propagated. The comic strip is in fact more often about the sociology and psychology of the workplace than about engineers and engineering. In 2007, a video titled “The Knack” featured Dilbert as a child with his mother in a doctor’s examination room. As little Dilbert sits beside her on the exam table, his mother explains that she is worried about her child because “he’s not like other kids.” When the doctor asks her to elaborate, she tells of leaving Dilbert alone for a short time only to come back to find that he had disassembled the clock, television, and stereo. When the doctor assures her that such behavior is “perfectly normal,” she adds that what really worries her is that Dilbert used the components to make a ham radio set. The doctor mutters, “Oh, dear,” and explains that normally he would run an EEG on the child but that the device was not working. In the meantime, Dilbert has gotten down from the exam table, opened up the EEG machine, and fixed it. When he sees this, the doctor admits that Dilbert’s condition was worse than he had feared. He turns to the mother and announces, “I’m afraid your son has . . . the knack.” The doctor explains that “the knack” is a “rare condition, characterized by an extreme intuition about all things mechanical and electrical – and utter social ineptitude.” When Dilbert’s mother asks if her son can “lead a normal life,” the doctor responds, “No, he’ll be an engineer.” When she hears this, she begins to sob. Young Dilbert, who is generally quiet throughout the vignette, comes across as a charming little boy, politely listening to adults talk about him. While his mother explains
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her concerns, he dangles his legs, like a pair of pendulums, sometimes in and sometimes out of phase with each other. When the doctor hits Dilbert’s right knee to test the boy’s reflexes, he utters a little “oop,” and both legs rise. This kind of playful touch to his personality separates Dilbert from the nerds. He is a real kid with a real sense of humor. When he gets the inoperative EEG machine to start, Dilbert ironically becomes the hero of the drama. While the doctor and mother had been talking, Dilbert fixed what the doctor evidently could not. There is no stigma to having “the knack” to do this and so be destined to be an engineer. After all, it is engineers who design and understand the workings of the countless medical devices that enable doctors to diagnose and treat all kinds of conditions. What is disappointing about the video clip is the seemingly gratuitous characterization of engineers as being socially inept. Little Dilbert in the doctor’s office demonstrates none of the ineptitude he exhibits as a grown-up engineer in his comic strip. Perhaps it is something about engineering education that changed him. (Adapted from “Diagnosing Dilbert,” ASEE Prism, April 2007, p. 22.) disasters and near-disasters. A number of famous, and infamous, engineering accidents, failures, and disasters have come to be alluded to by catchwords and without elaboration. All technically literate persons – engineers or not – should be conversant in these incidents. Among them are the following: Bhopal. This town in south-central India was the location of a Union Carbide pesticide plant that leaked a toxic cloud of methyl isocyanate gas on the morning of December 3, 1984. Thousands of people were killed and many more were badly injured when the gas attacked their nervous system. The accident was blamed on some water being erroneously mixed in a tank that became overpressurized and exploded, thus releasing the poisonous
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substance. Investigations into the causes of the accident revealed a poorly operated plant with inadequate safety and containment systems. See “Toxic Vapor Leak,” in When Technology Fails, Neal Schlager, ed. (Detroit: Gale Research, 1994), pp. 403–410. Challenger. The space shuttle Challenger exploded on January 28, 1986, seventy-three seconds after its launch as Flight 51L from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The subsequent investigation, conducted by a presidential commission, revealed there were differences of opinion between engineers and managers about the wisdom of launching the shuttle at the time because of the uncertainty of the performance of the O-ring seals at the unusually low temperatures that existed at launch time. The story of Challenger has become a classic case study of the tensions that can arise in engineer-manager relations. Roger Boisjoly (born in 1938), one of the engineers who opposed the launch, became an articulate advocate for whistle blowing. For a concise summary of the Challenger accident, see Chapter 10 in Paul H. Wright, Introduction to Engineering, second edition (New York: Wiley, 1994). For a book-length critique of the accident, see Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture and Deviance at NASA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Citicorp Tower. At 914 feet, Citicorp (now Citigroup) Tower is among the tallest buildings in New York City. It attained another kind of notoriety in 1995 when an article in The New Yorker magazine made public what had been generally known only among structural engineers: that the Citicorp Tower had been in possible danger of collapse shortly after it was completed in 1977. (The story did not become public at that time primarily because there was a newspaper strike in New York.) The building, it was learned, had been constructed with bolted rather than the welded connections with which it was first designed. The unique steel frame required to build the tower rested on
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columns located at the midpoints rather than at the corners of the structure, and this configuration in conjunction with the bolted connections made it susceptible to failure by toppling over in certain quartering winds. When the building’s structural engineer, William LeMessurier (1926–2007), discovered the problem, he took it upon himself to make the fault known to the owners and to lead efforts to correct it expeditiously. LeMessurier, who is the subject of the magazine article, also began to lecture on the structural engineering and ethical implications of the incident, giving his talk the provocative title, “Why Citicorp Did Not Fall on Bloomingdale’s.” See Joe Morgenstern, “The Fifty-Nine-Story Crisis,” The New Yorker, May 29, 1995, pp. 45–53. Columbia. After the hiatus in space-shuttle missions following the Challenger disaster in 1986, launches resumed with renewed confidence. After all, lessons had been learned from that failure and presumably had been applied within the shuttle program. However, there was a hardware condition that persisted: the shedding of insulating foam from the external tank during launch. Because the relatively lightweight foam did not seem to do significant damage to the shuttle proper, it became an accepted anomaly. When an errant chunk of foam about the size of a briefcase impacted the leading edge of a wing of Columbia during its launch in January 2003, some engineers expressed concern that it might have damaged the heat shield there. Managers downplayed the problem, apparently arguing in part that nothing could be done about it anyway while the shuttle was in orbit. Upon reentry on February 1, hot gases infiltrated through the damaged wing section and led to the disintegration of the spacecraft over Texas. Deepwater Horizon. In the spring of 2010, this oil drilling rig was operating in mile-deep water in the Gulf of Mexico when leaking gas from the well led to an explosion,
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which in turn caused a fire and the subsequent sinking of the rig. This in turn damaged the piping rising from the well and touched off an oil leak that continued for about three months. Undersea cameras transmitted real-time, aroundthe-clock images of the oil spewing from the damaged well and of robots working to cap the well. An uneasy alliance between scientists and politicians from Washington and engineers and managers from BP (the global oil company that owned the well) and other oil companies and contractors ostensibly had them working toward a common goal, but attempt after attempt to stanch the oil failed. It was only after about three months and as many as five million gallons of oil were released into the gulf waters that the well was successfully capped. Early on, the spill was attributed to mechanical failures in a device known as a blowout preventer, which was supposed to close off the flow of oil in the case of an accident. Various investigative panels ultimately identified the root cause of the spill in cultural issues related to how workers interacted with the technological system and in management and organizational issues within BP and between BP and the companies that owned and operated the rig. Fukushima. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, located on the eastern coast of the Japanese island of Honshu, about 160 miles north of Tokyo, was badly damaged by the massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami that struck the region on March 11, 2011, leaving more than ten thousand people dead. Six nuclear reactors were located at the plant, and those that were operating at the time the earthquake struck shut down automatically, as they were designed to do. Emergency cooling systems began to operate to keep the nuclear fuel from overheating, but when the tsunami struck it destroyed power lines bringing external electrical power to the plant. This triggered emergency diesel generators to begin operating, but their fuel supply had been damaged by the tsunami and
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soon battery power had to be relied upon. However, it was exhausted after about eight hours, and without proper cooling the temperature of the nuclear fuel began to rise. Fuel in reactor cores suffered meltdowns. Hydrogen gas produced in the process built up and led to explosions that damaged the reactor buildings and released radiation. In addition, used fuel in storage pools began to heat up because concrete structures had been cracked by the earthquake and were not maintaining a proper water level. More radioactivity was released into the atmosphere, and people within miles of the plant, including an area that had already suffered catastrophic damage due to the earthquake and tsunami, were advised to evacuate. In attempts to keep the nuclear fuel from further overheating, seawater was used to cool it, thereby rendering nuclear plant components virtually unrecoverable because of the corrosion that would result. The accident revealed weaknesses in the design of the plant and its emergency response systems, both technical and human, and led to renewed scrutiny of nuclear power plants throughout the world. Germany, for example, pledged to eliminate entirely its dependence on nuclear power within about a decade. Hyatt Regency. In July 1981, this Kansas City Hotel was the scene of the worst structural engineering disaster in American history. A pair of skywalks, suspended one above the other by steel rods hung from the roof, tore loose from the rods and crashed to the floor of the hotel lobby, which was crowded with people attending a Friday afternoon tea dance. A total of 114 people died and many more were injured as a result of the accident. The cause of the collapse of the skywalks was traced to a structural design change that was made during construction: a single long rod – intended to pass through the upper walkway and support the lower walkway – was replaced with a pair of shorter rods, one of which terminated at the upper walkway and the second of which was offset from
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the first to support the lower walkway from the upper. This design change effectively doubled the bearing stress between an upper-walkway box beam and the washer held by a nut around the supporting rod, which consequently pulled through the box beam, beginning a chain reaction of failed supports. The structural engineers who designed the walkways were found guilty of “gross negligence, misconduct and unprofessional conduct” by an administrative law judge. As a result, the engineers lost their professional licenses in Missouri. See, for example, chapter 8 of To Engineer Is Human (New York: Vintage Books, 1992). Texas A&M Bonfire. Erecting an enormous pile of logs the size of telephone poles on the Texas A&M University campus in anticipation of igniting it on the eve of the football game between the A&M Aggies and the arch rival University of Texas Longhorns was a tradition that dated from 1909. Over the years Bonfire, as its ardent supporters had come to call it, grew to major proportions, encompassing thousands of vertically stacked logs reaching as high as 110 feet. Although the university administration attempted to limit its size to half that height, Bonfire was largely a student-run tradition with little official oversight. On November 18, 1999, the stack of logs still under construction collapsed without warning, killing twelve and injuring dozens of other students. The collapse was investigated by a special commission, which found multiple structural and behavioral causes of the accident, leading to a ban on future Bonfires until safeguards could be put in place. Among the questions that arose in the wake of the tragedy was whether designing and building such a major structure without a professional engineer being involved was in violation of the Texas Engineering Practice Act. See “Vanities of the Bonfire,” American Scientist, November– December 2000, pp. 486–490, which is reprinted in Pushing the Limits (New York: Knopf, 2004), pp. 180–193.
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Three Mile Island. On March 28, 1979, Unit 2 of the nuclear power plant on Three Mile Island, which is located in the Susquehanna River near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, suffered a loss-of-coolant accident and a partial meltdown of fuel in the reactor core. The accident, attributable to a stuck valve, was aggravated by multiple operator errors, and there was some release of radioactivity. In the wake of the accident, Three Mile Island became synonymous with the dangers of nuclear power, whose use then became increasingly unpopular in the United States. No new nuclear power plants were ordered for decades after the Three Mile Island accident, and some already on order were cancelled. See “Three Mile Island Accident,” in When Technology Fails, Neil Schlager, ed. (Detroit: Gale Research, 1994), pp. 510–517. World Trade Center. When a terrorist truck bomb exploded in the parking garage beneath the World Trade Center in New York City on February 26, 1993, Eugene J. Fasullo and others were riding down to lunch in an elevator in the North Tower of the building complex. With the power out, the elevator stalled and began to fill with smoke. Having worked on the design of the tower as a young structural engineer with the building’s owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Fasullo knew that the construction materials used in the blank wall facing forced-open elevator doors could be scratched through with the keys, paper clips, and nail clippers that the trapped occupants had in their pockets. After three hours of cutting, digging, and scraping at two walls, the group broke through into a bathroom and pulled themselves out of the disabled elevator. Then, after walking down more than fifty flights of darkened stairs, Fasullo, who was then Director of Engineering and Chief Engineer of the Port Authority, made his way to the flooded crater left by the bomb in the underground parking area. He assessed the structural damage, which was significant, and within fifteen hours
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had organized a general plan for shoring up columns left dangerously unsupported when the 125-foot diameter hole was blown through the basement floors. In the aftermath, Fasullo became a key spokesman for the Port Authority in communicating the condition of the building and the status of the recovery operations. He proved to be a most articulate spokesman for leadership in the engineering profession throughout the emergency and in the weeks and months that followed. Fasullo had been instrumental in forming and leading the Partnership for Rebuilding Our Infrastructure. This network of influential engineers became active in the early 1990s in the New York metropolitan area, where infrastructure problems were especially acute and where politicians rather than engineers were dominating the decision-making process. Under Fasullo’s leadership, the partnership had sponsored a conference in 1991 to formulate a “Vision of Leadership” for the engineering profession. The outcome was published as a booklet titled, A Vision of Leadership: Role of Engineers in Rebuilding Our Infrastructure. See Timothy L. O’Brien, “The Reconstruction of the Trade Center Has Been a Tall Task,” Wall Street Journal, April 7, 1993, p. 1. The 1993 incident was, of course, dwarfed by the events of September 11, 2001. The 1,365-foot-tall towers, suffered extensive structural damage when hijacked commercial airplanes were deliberately crashed into their upper floors. The first plane struck the south tower, and shortly thereafter a second plane crashed into the north tower. The fires ignited by jet fuel were fed by office furnishings and paper. The heat of the fires elevated the temperature of those steel columns that had withstood the impact, and they began to soften. After about one hour, with the top of the building in flames, the north tower collapsed under the weight of the floors above the impact zone bearing down on the weakened columns. The collapse of the
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south tower followed soon after. Although the design of the structure naturally played a role in how the collapse was initiated and progressed, the ultimate cause of the failures was obviously the impact of the fuel-laden airplanes. Although there have been persistent conspiracy theories about how and why the towers collapsed, the structural engineering explanations involving severed columns and burning fires have remained more convincing to the vast majority of engineers. See Federal Emergency Management Agency, World Trade Center Building Performance Study: Data Collection, Preliminary Observations, and Recommendations (Washington, D.C.: FEMA, 2002). For more on disasters, see David R. Chiles, Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology (New York: Harper, 2002); Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, with new afterword and postscript (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999); Neil Schlager, ed., When Technology Fails: Significant Technological Disasters, Accidents, and Failures of the Twentieth Century (Detroit: Gale Research, 1994). drafting tables. Before the days of computer workstations, engineers often worked at drafting tables. These were higher than a typical office desk, so the tables required the use of a stool rather than a desk chair. The incline of the table top was adjustable; however under normal circumstances few engineers inclined them more than about 20 degrees off the horizontal. This was, of course, still enough of a slope to encourage pencils to roll off the surface. Indeed, one of the common explanations for the hexagonal shape of wood-cased pencils is that they were more likely to stay put on a drafting table. In fact, the hexagonal shape results in a more efficient use of wood. See The Pencil (New York: Knopf, 1990), pp. 207–208. In an engineering office, the drafting tables were usually arranged in neat rows. Each table typically had clamped
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Rows of drafting tables in an engineering office
to it a small fluorescent light on an adjustable arm, which facilitated working on detailed drawings and calculations. A slide rule was usually sitting on the table, as were the engineer’s T square, triangles, pencils, and scales. The height of the tables made it convenient for engineers to gather around one to confer over a drawing or blueprint, which could be large, unwieldy, and easily torn, and so not easily carried about. With the engineer working at a drafting table sitting on his stool, his eye level was not as different from that of those standing beside him as it would have been had he been sitting at a desk. An architect’s office might not have looked very different, except that the architects would likely have been dressed more flamboyantly than the engineers, who usually wore white shirts and ties. duty of an engineer. John Frank Stevens (1853–1943) began his engineering career in Maine, where he was born; however, he made his reputation by locating and constructing, under primitive conditions and over mountains, such railroads as the Canadian Pacific and Great Northern. His experience earned him for a period (1905–1907) the job of chief engineer for the Panama Canal project, a position he
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held by prior agreement only until the work was on track. He published his reminiscences of these efforts under the title “An Engineer’s Recollections,” which appeared serially in Engineering News-Record from March 21 through November 28, 1935, and later in book form (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1936). Near the end of these reminiscences, Stevens had the following to say about engineering and duty: The word “engineering” is a very comprehensive one, of great scope and extensive application, and covers activities whose limits are boundless. And so the engineer, although he may be educated along some special lines, must ever regard himself as something more than a component part of a machine. By reason of his favored position in the realms of science he owes a duty to the world beyond the mere service which he may give in the practice of his purely technical specialty. We are daily confronted with grave problems requiring legislation, and many of these problems, if correctly solved, must be solved by the aid of engineers.
E economics and engineering. Engineering and economics are inseparable. Indeed, they are linked in one of the most quoted and paraphrased definitions of engineering, which comes from the self-made engineer Arthur Mellen Wellington (1847–1895). In 1876 he published a series of articles on railroad layout in the Railroad Gazette, which the next year were published as a book. A decade later, a greatly expanded and revised edition was published as The Economic Theory of the Location of Railways: An Analysis of the Conditions Controlling the Laying Out of Railways to Effect the Most Judicious Expenditure of Capital (New York: Wiley, Engineering News, 1887). The now-classic definition reads: It would be well if engineering were less generally thought of, and even defined, as the art of constructing. In a certain important sense it is rather the art of not constructing: or, to define it rudely, but not inaptly, it is the art of doing well with one dollar, which any bungler can do with two after a fashion.
This is often found paraphrased in a shorter version to serve as a definition of an engineer: “An engineer is someone who can do for one dollar what anyone can do for two.” The definition has become so familiar that it is frequently cited, in various modified forms, without association with Wellington. Thus, Nevil Shute used it as an epigraph for his posthumously published novel, Trustee from 80
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the Toolroom (New York: Morrow, 1960): “An engineer is a man who can do for five bob what any bloody fool can do for a quid.” The epigraph is identified as “Definition – origin unknown.” The close association of engineers with economics is seen to be a negative characteristic by some, who interpret the Wellington definition in a pejorative sense because it suggests that anyone can do what engineers do, just not as economically. Indeed, engineers are often wrongly accused of sacrificing aesthetics or style or safety for economic concerns. There is seldom an insensitive tradeoff of the one for the other; however, certainly some engineers might rightly be accused of having a “tin” eye when it comes to aesthetics. Ultimately, it is economics that is most commonly linked with engineering. According to William Barclay Parsons (1859–1932), who was chief engineer for the original New York City subway system, It is not the technical excellence of an engineering design which alone determines its merit but rather the completeness with which it meets the economic and social needs of its day.
This quotation begins the 1951 book Engineering and Western Civilization, by James Kip Finch (1883–1967). Like Parsons, Finch was educated at Columbia University and received his engineering degree from its School of Mines. He spent much of his career teaching there, serving as dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, successor to the School of Mines, in the 1940s. The key role that economics plays in engineering was emphasized in the 1990s when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration launched a number of space exploration missions designed to be “faster, better, cheaper.” There followed a number of embarrassing failures of these missions, prompting many critics to make the
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observation that engineers could satisfy any two of the criteria, but not all three simultaneously. Economics also comes into play in a big way in engineering when projects are bid for construction. Once the design of a bridge, say, has been completed, a request for proposals can be advertised to the construction community, members of which can then bid on the project. Even though the bids are based on the same design drawings and specifications that are made available to all bidders, the estimated costs of construction can vary widely. Although letting bodies can be obligated by law to accept the lowest bid, that is not always the case, and aesthetics, the reputation of the bidder, and other intangible factors can be taken into account. Economics is an important factor although not – by far – the only one used in engineering decision making. education of engineers. At Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, on June 9, 1778, George Washington issued a call for engineering education in America: Three Captains and nine lieutenants are wanted to officer the Companies of Sappers: As this Corps will be a school of Engineering it opens a prospect to such Gentlemen as enter it and will pursue the necessary studies with diligence, of becoming Engineers and rising to the Important Employments attached to that Profession as the direction of Fortified Places, etc. The Qualifications required of the Candidates are that they be Natives and have a knowledge of the Mathematics and drawing, or at least be disposed to apply themselves to those studies.
In early nineteenth-century America, the only engineering school was the military academy at West Point. Well into the century, civil engineering training was obtained either on-the-job, such as by working on the Erie Canal, or by self-study, as was done by James Buchanan Eads (1820– 1887) in St. Louis. Civilian engineering schools began to
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appear slowly, the first being established in 1819 as the American Literary, Scientific and Military Academy founded in Norwich, Vermont by Alden Partridge. (This institution later became Norwich University, now located in Northfield, Vermont.) Half a century later, in 1870, there were twenty-one engineering schools, although a total of only 866 engineering degrees had been conferred by that time. In 1896, there were 110 engineering colleges, and by the turn of the century, approximately 10,000 students were enrolled. By the end of the twentieth century, there were of the order of 300 schools offering engineering degrees, with a total enrollment of the order of a quarter million. See Lawrence P. Grayson, The Making of an Engineer: An Illustrated History of Engineering Education in the United States and Canada (New York: Wiley, 1993). For a British perspective, see George S. Emmerson, Engineering Education: A Social History (Newton Abbot, Devon.: David & Charles, 1973). egg-drop competition. This classic student design contest requires that an uncooked egg be dropped from a good height, such as off the roof of a three-story engineering building, onto a concrete sidewalk below and land unbroken. Students are challenged to design an egg packaging system that achieves this goal. Besides a surviving whole egg, among the criteria for judging a winner are the weight of the container or device and its aerodynamic characteristics, such as wing span, or parachute area, or time to touchdown. All other things being equal, the winner might be the lightest, most compact package that delivers the egg to the ground in the fastest time in one piece. Egg-drop competitions are commonly sponsored by mechanical engineering groups such as student chapters of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The American Concrete Institute has sponsored a competition to design a plain or reinforced concrete
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Sycamore samara that inspired a contest entry
egg protection device, and winners can come from any discipline. One spring at Duke University, a winning entry in the egg-drop competition was developed by an environmental engineering student whose egg occupied the position of the seed in a large cardboard model of one-half of a sycamore maple samara, that is, the tree’s seed pod with an attached wing. When dropped from the roof of the red-brick engineering building known as Old Red, the device soon reached a steady (but not egg-breaking) rate of descent, with the egg falling nearly vertically and the tip of the wing tracing out a right circular helix. It was a beautiful example of a nature-inspired design of very appropriate technology. Another egg-based challenge is the egg-catapult competition, in which the object is to employ a student-designed catapult to pitch a raw egg into a frying pan located twenty feet away. Both the catapult and drop exercises understandably result in many engineering failures from which students are expected to learn how to do better on their next try. “electronic engineer.” When the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (founded in 1884) and the Institute of Radio Engineers (1912) decided to merge, it was at first thought that the name of the new organization would be the Institute of Electrical Engineers. Dropping the word
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“American” was consistent with the aspiration to become a truly international organization. However, the abbreviation IEE was already taken, by the long-established British society known as the Institution of Electrical Engineers. Furthermore, although the AIEE had already included electronics as a subdivision, some IRE members wished to recognize the growing field more explicitly. There still ensued some debate as to whether the singular or plural form of electronic should be used; that is, whether the new society should be called the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers or the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. While the merger became effective on January 1, 1963, the final form of the name was not decided until February of that year. Those who favored the singular form were advised that an “electronic engineer could only be a robot, operating by internal tubes or transistors.” Since the new IEEE wished its members to be dues-paying flesh-and-blood engineers, the singularists relented and the society’s name included the plural, “electronics engineers.” See John D. Ryder and Donald G. Fink, Engineers & Electrons: A Century of Electrical Progress (New York: IEEE Press, 1984), pp. 222–223. “Elegy to an Engineer’s Sweetheart.” In the mid 1950s, these anonymous “words of advice” were making the rounds of engineering magazines, including The Bent of Tau Beta Pi (February 1955, p. 13): Verily, I say to you, marry not an engineer; For an engineer is a strange creature possessed of many evils; Yea, he speaketh eternally in parables, which he calls formulae; He wieldeth a calibrated stick which he calls a slide rule, and his Bible is a handbook. He thinketh only on stresses and strains and without end on thermodynamics. He showeth only a serious aspect and seemeth not to know how to smile.
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engineer Neither does he know a waterfall save by its power, nor a sunset except that he must turn on the lights, nor a damsel except by her live weight. He carries always his books with him and entertaineth his sweetheart by steam tables. Verily, though his damsel expecteth chocolates when he calls, she openeth the package but to find ore samples. Yea, he holdeth his damsel’s hand but to measure the friction thereof. His kisses are only to test viscosity, and in his eyes there shineth a faraway look, but neither that of love nor longing – rather a vain attempt to recall the formula. There is but one key to his heart – that is Tau Beta Pi. The one love letter which he yearneth to receive is an “A”; When his damsel writeth of love and signeth with “X”s, he taketh not these symbols for kisses–but for unknown quantities. Even as a boy he pulleth girls’ hair to test its elasticity; As a man he discovereth different devices, for he would count the vibrations of her heartstrings and reckon the strength of her materials. He seeketh ever to pursue scientific investigations; Even his flutterings he counteth as a vision of beauty, and inscribeth his passion as a formula. His marriage is a simultaneous equation involving two unknowns–and yieldeth diverse results! Verily, I say to you, marry not an engineer.
engineer. There are equally many definitions of engineer as there are of engineering. One was put forth by Joseph Bordogna, when he was assistant director of engineering at the National Science Foundation. He considered engineers to be society’s “master integrators”: I like to think of the engineer as someone who not only knows how to do things right, but also knows the right thing to do. This requires that he or she have a broad, holistic background. Since engineering itself is an integrative process, engineering education must likewise be integrative.
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See Joseph Bordogna, “Making Connections: The Role of Engineers and Engineering Education,” The Bridge, Spring 1997, pp. 11–16. See also engineering; scientists vs. engineers. engineer. The English word engineer appears to be rooted in the Old French word engignier, meaning “to contrive” and having to do with a device like an engine, or engin. That word in turn came from the Latin ingenium, meaning natural disposition, ability, skill, or talent; especially, in this context, an ingenuity to beget machines or devices. Some attempts to clarify the roots of the word engineer are contained in the book edited by the Committee on History and Heritage of American Civil Engineering of the American Society of Civil Engineers, The Civil Engineer: His Origins (New York: ASCE, 1970). See also letter to the editor, Engineering Times, April 1993, p. 5. Engineering News-Record. This magazine of the construction industry traces its origins to April 1874 in Chicago, where it was published under the title, Engineer and Surveyor. Its purpose was to fill what its editor and proprietor, George H. Frost, described as “the vacancy now existing in the Engineering literature of the country.” By the second issue, dated May 15, 1874, the title had been changed to Engineer, Architect and Surveyor, and by January 1875 to The Engineering News, which was described as a “Journal of Practical Science and Public Improvements.” It began weekly publication in 1876 and moved its offices to New York in 1879. The name was changed to Engineering News and Contract Journal in 1882, but was changed back to Engineering News in 1887, when Arthur M. Wellington joined the staff as co-editor with D. McN. Stauffer, who had served as editor since 1883. John H. Hill, who in time would join James H. McGraw in forming the important technical publishing company of McGraw-Hill, purchased Engineering News in 1911. See “The Story of
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‘Engineering News’” by Charles Whiting Baker, Engineering News-Record, April 5, 1917, pp. 6–10. See also Eugene S. Ferguson, “Technical Journals and the History of Technology,” in Stephen H. Cutcliffe and Robert C. Post, eds., In Context: History and the History of Technology (Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh University Press, 1989). Engineering Record traces its origins to December 1877, when it was started by Henry C. Meyer in New York as The Plumber and Sanitary Engineer, with Charles F. Wingate serving as editor. In 1880, the publication became a weekly and its name was simplified to The Sanitary Engineer. Meyer also took over editorial direction at this time. Another name change occurred in 1886, when the paper became The Sanitary Engineer and Construction Record, and again in 1887, when it became known as The Engineering and Building Record. The name Engineering Record was adopted in 1897, and the magazine was sold to James H. McGraw, who transferred it to the McGraw Publishing Company in 1902. See “Development of ‘Engineering Record’,” by E. J. Mehren, Engineering News-Record, April 5, 1917, pp. 2–5. Engineering News was merged with Engineering Record in 1917, at the time of the formation of the McGraw-Hill Publishing Co., and was initially edited by Charles Whiting Baker. He was succeeded as editor by E. J. Mehren in 1918. Engineering News-Record continued to be an excellent source of information on construction and structural failures and on construction costs around the country. The covers of the weekly construction magazine have been emblazoned with the large letters ENR since 1980, when its full name, Engineering News-Record, was relegated to small letters and “included as if it were a subtitle.” The magazine became increasingly known simply as ENR, and in 1987 the name of “the McGraw-Hill construction weekly” was legally changed to ENR. Also then, the words Engineering News-Record were dropped entirely from the
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cover. According to the editors writing at the time: “This is not an engineering magazine; it is the construction industry’s weekly news magazine. It is a mix of business and technical news and features, many of them exclusive features such as our widely used cost indexes and rankings of contractors or design firms.” The words Engineering NewsRecord reappeared under ENR on the cover of the August 10, 1989 issue. Since 1966, the first issue of January each year lists on the editorial page of Engineering News-Record “those who made marks” in the construction industry the previous year. From that list is chosen an individual who receives the magazine’s highest honor, the Award of Excellence, which is announced in a subsequent issue. The award winner’s portrait appears on the cover of the magazine, which also carries an extensive feature article on the individual. The winner of the award was formerly known as the ENR Man of the Year; however, in 1994 Ginger S. Evans, construction chief of the Denver International Airport, became the first woman to be so honored by ENR, and was designated Woman of the Year. Since then, the person selected has been known as an Award of Excellence Winner. Award of Excellence Winners are “honored for leadership in key issues of their times,” and they are considered by ENR to be “construction’s best.” (An Engineer of the Year award is also given by the magazine Design News, based on a vote by the readers of the magazine.) ENR’s annual review of the top 500 design firms provides insight into the industry. See also “History Week by Week,” Engineering News-Record, September 1, 1949, pp. A24–A32; “A Century of Probing the Future,” by Waldo G. Bowman, Engineering News-Record, April 30, 1974, pp. 507–533, passim. At 358 pages, this centennial issue of Engineering News-Record was described at the time as “one of the largest magazines ever published.” Its text was in effect a sixteen-chapter book, titled Probing the
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Future, which was distributed to the magazine’s 112,000 subscribers. engineering science. Just as science is fundamentally the study of naturally occurring objects and phenomena, so engineering science is largely the study of made objects, of their interaction with each other and with nature, and of natural phenomena that affect their behavior. Galileo’s 1638 book, published in Italian under the title Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche, intorno a` due nuove scienze is considered the first book on modern engineering science. An English translation, by Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio and first published in 1914 under the title Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, is available as a Dover paperback. For a historian’s view of engineering science, see Edwin Layton, “Mirror-Image Twins: The Communities of Science and Technology in 19th-Century America,” Technology and Culture, October 1971, pp. 562–580. For a twentieth-century view of a practitioner, see Walter G. Vincenti, “Engineering Theory in the Making: Aerodynamic Calculation ‘Breaks the Sound Barrier’,” Technology and Culture, October 1997, pp. 819–851. According to Vincenti (p. 843), “theoretical engineering science is very much a design-like activity in its crafting of specific solutions to difficult problems, often in the face of alternative choices and a need for approximation.” In essence, design concerns itself with synthesis, whereas science concerns itself with analysis. A distinction between engineering design and engineering science has been made much more strongly in engineering education, under the watchful eye of the profession’s accreditation authority, than in engineering practice. “engineers.” Many entrepreneurial individuals who have nothing to do with the profession of engineering have identified themselves as engineers. Thus, a barber might
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call him- or herself a “hair-styling engineer” and a lawn care person might be called a “mowing engineer.” Such usage has long irritated American engineers, already tired of being identified as train operators. Among the benefits of licensing and registration laws is the authority to restrict the use of the term “engineer.” Before such laws were common, however, there was a proliferation of nonprofessionals describing themselves as “engineers,” and Engineering News-Record began to note the “titles of various aspiring individuals who, possessing none of the educational or experiential attributes of the engineer, have sought to magnify themselves by appropriating the term ‘Engineer’ modified by some adjective which they felt described best their own peculiar qualities.” In its issue of June 12, 1924 (p. 1036), Engineering News-Record published a list of more than 100 such modifiers, ranging from “Amusement” to “Short Story.” The practice continues with the usage of “building engineer” for someone with no formal educational or professional certification who oversees the operation of a physical plant. British chartered engineers – the rough equivalent of American licensed or registered professional engineers – have also been irritated by the practice. In a country of about sixty million people, about two million of them hold the job title “engineer.” For example, workers who fit and maintain central heating systems are called engineers. There is concern that such practices do not encourage young people to study engineering at the university level and thereby threaten the technological future of the nation. “Engineer’s Creed.” Near the end of the twentieth century, many older engineers who were educated around mid-century recalled seeing hung prominently in engineers’ offices, usually along with their framed certificate
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of professional registration, a copy of the “Engineer’s Creed.” In 1968, when I and other new engineering faculty members at the University of Texas at Austin were welcomed by our dean, a copy of the creed, suitable for framing and hanging in our office, was included among the items in our orientation package. Some engineers have continued to display the Creed, which they consider an important symbol of professional responsibility, and carry a copy of it in their wallet or briefcase. It reads: As a Professional Engineer, I dedicate my professional knowledge and skill to the advancement and betterment of human welfare. I Pledge: To give the utmost of performance; To participate in none but honest enterprise; To live and work according to the laws of man and the highest standards of professional conduct; To place service before profit, the honor and standing of the profession before personal advantage, and the public welfare above all other considerations. In humility and with need for Divine Guidance, I make this pledge.
This version of the Creed was adopted in 1954 by the National Society of Professional Engineers. According to Engineering Times (December 1999, p. 1), the version was a revision of an earlier creed that was developed in response to the request of professional engineers for “a statement of philosophy of service, similar to the medical doctors’ Hippocratic Oath, that could be used in ceremonies or for recognizing individuals.” The NSPE reproduced the Creed in a format suitable for framing and in the form of a wallet-sized card. The Creed remained in use by state societies as part of the ceremony whereby officers were installed. It was also recited at the NSPE Annual Convention in conjunction with the installation of national
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officers. As late as 2010, the creed was recited by incoming officers of the American Society of Civil Engineers at their annual business meeting. See also “Faith of the Engineer.” Some younger professional engineers have wanted to see the Creed updated to incorporate more gender-neutral language and to alter the reference to Divine Guidance, which they believe to be potentially offensive. Other engineers would like to see the phrase “place service before profit,” which they take as a statement of a virtual vow of poverty, replaced with language that stresses the quality of service that engineers provide to their clients, thereby promoting more respect for engineers and, not incidentally, higher fees. Even should such changes be made, older versions of the creed are likely to survive. Another version of the Engineer’s Creed has been quoted by Adolph J. Ackerman in “The Art of Creating a Dam,” in World Dams Today ’70 (Tokyo: Japan Dam Association, 1970). It takes the form: I Take the Vision Which Comes from Dreams And Apply the Magic of Science and Mathematics Adding the Heritage of my Profession And my Knowledge of Nature’s Materials To Create a Design. I Organize the Efforts and Skills Of my Fellow Workers, Employing the Capital of the Thrifty And the Products of many Industries, And Together we Work toward our Goal, Undaunted by Hazards and Obstacles. And when we have completed our Task All can See That the Dreams and Plans Have Materialized For the Comfort and Welfare of All.
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Engineers Week I am an Engineer. I serve Mankind By Making Dreams come True.
Engineers Week. Although regularly scheduled celebrations of engineering lasting from a day to a week date back to the early twentieth century on some college campuses, a broadly organized National Engineers Week was not established until the National Society of Professional Engineers did so in 1951. Educational outreach programs, demonstrations, exhibits, and celebrations of the profession were scheduled for the third full week in February, which contains February 22, the birthday of George Washington, whose work as a surveyor at a critical time in the development of the new nation qualifies him to be considered an engineer. Washington’s Birthday used to be celebrated on February 22 as a free-standing holiday in the United States. That changed in 1971, however, with the institution of a uniform system of federal holidays that designated that they fall on Mondays, a move enthusiastically backed by supporters of three-day weekends. The date of Washington’s Birthday thus became variable. Subsequently, Presidents’ Day was established, subsuming Washington’s, Lincoln’s, and other presidents’ birthdays under that rubric. “enginerd.” According to a 1993 guide to Engineers Week at the University of Notre Dame, Rumor has it that on the eighth day God created the engineer and said “You take over from here!” While the other majors were busy contemplating the meaning of life, the poor engineer was running around trying to finish the world. Thus was born the first “enginerd.” A mere several thousand years later, the Joint Engineering Council was created and things started to look up. The JEC got together and said “Hey, this isn’t fair – engineers should have a life too” – so they created Engineers’ Week.
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This story is repeated by Anne Klimer in her The Zahms’ Legacy: A History of Engineering at Notre Dame, 1873–1993 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame College of Engineering, 1993), who also reports that, “During the week the various engineering societies sponsored a number of events from free doughnuts and juice on Metric Monday to the Calculator Toss on Thermodynamic Thursday.” Erector set. This toy was developed in the early 1900s by Alfred Carlton Gilbert (1884–1961), an amateur magician and Olympic pole vaulter who earned an M.D. degree from Yale University but never practiced medicine. Upon graduation, he expanded the Mysto Manufacturing Company, which he had begun with a partner while still a student, to make and market magic tricks. According to Gilbert’s autobiography, the idea for Erector sets came to him while observing the erection of steel girders to carry overhead electrical lines on the New Haven & Hartford Railroad, although he may also have seen the new English Meccano sets while in London for the 1908 Olympic Games. The first Erector sets were manufactured by Mysto and initially offered for sale in 1913. In 1916, the Mysto Manufacturing Company was renamed the A. C. Gilbert Company, which made Erector sets until the early 1980s. They were reintroduced into the American market in 1991 by the European Meccano Company. See Bruce Watson, The Man Who Changed How Boys and Toys Were Made (New York: Viking, 2002). A late-twentieth century survey of engineers who had become chief executive officers of major corporations revealed that as children many of them had played with construction and other creative toys, including Erector sets, chemistry sets, and the like. Many of these older engineers have lamented the fact that computer-based games have deprived younger engineers of the opportunity to
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develop a sense of the real as opposed to the virtual artifact and how it works. See “Work and Play,” American Scientist, May–June 1999, pp. 208–212. As many an older American engineer remembers playing with Erector sets as a child, so many a British engineer recalls the same of Meccano. This British construction toy was invented around 1900 by Frank Hornby, an amateur inventor, and patented in 1901. The toy, consisting of various parts that could be assembled into models, was first marketed under the name Mechanics Made Easy. In 1907, the name was changed to Meccano, an Esperantolike word coined to give a more international sounding name to the toy that was then being widely distributed outside Britain. It was promoted through model-building contests sponsored by the company. Meccano Magazine (and its American counterpart, Meccano Engineer), published by the company, provided a continuous flow of new model-building ideas. Older British engineers often reminisce about playing with Meccano sets as children, and many of them attribute the toy to providing an early attraction to engineering. See Bert Love and Jim Gamble, The Meccano System, 1901–1979: And the Special Purpose Meccano Sets (London: New Cavendish Books, 1985). See also The Man Who Lives in Paradise: The Autobiography of A. C. Gilbert (New York: Reinhart, 1954); Daniel A. Yett, “Those Fascinating Erector Sets: The History– and the Man–Behind Them,” in A. C. Gilbert’s Heritage: A Collection of American Flyer Articles and Photos, J. Heimburger, ed. (River Forest, Ill.: Heimburger House, 1983); “Beyond Tin Cans: Construction Toys and Engineers,” in the exhibition catalog Toying with Architecture: The Building Toy in the Arena of Play (Katonah, N.Y.: Katonah Museum of Art, 1997). This last essay also appears in a slightly different form as “The Toys that Built America,” American Heritage of Invention & Technology, Spring 1998, pp. 40–45.
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Lego sets are worthy successors to Meccano and Erector. The colorful plastic “automatic binding” brick-like construction toys became as familiar to children born in the latter part of the twentieth century as Meccano and Erector sets were to those growing up in the earlier part. Legos are made by the LEGO Group, a family-held business that had its origins in the small wooden-toy workshop of Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Kristiansen (1891–1958). The company began manufacturing plastic toys in 1947, with the interlocking blocks being introduced two years later. The name of the toy comes from a contraction of the Danish words leg goodt, which translate into English as “play well.” Unlike the steel components of Meccano and Erector sets, plastic Lego pieces are not easily bent, do not corrode, and come in many more colors. The design of the interlocking bricks and other parts eliminates the need for small screws and nuts, which were easily lost or misplaced in the older construction sets, leaving a child without a sufficient number of fasteners to complete an ambitious building project. Erie Canal. This great construction project, which was begun in 1817 and completed eight years later, produced a 365-mile waterway between Albany and Buffalo, New York, thus connecting the Hudson River with the Great Lakes region and providing inland waterway access to New York City. The Erie Canal has frequently been called the “first American school of civil engineering,” for young surveyors and assistants who began the project with little training or experience worked themselves up the ladder of responsibility and left the job as some of the most experienced engineers in the young nation. The canal itself, of course, transformed economically the region through which it passed. ethics. See codes of ethics; “Faith of the Engineer.”
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expert witness. When an engineering artifact or system fails to perform as designed, especially when there is an accident or injury involved, a failure analysis is usually performed to determine the cause. Failures and the resulting failure analyses are often the subject of litigation and court proceedings, which frequently involve forensic engineers. According to the founding president of the National Academy of Forensic Engineers, “forensic engineering is the art and science of professional practice of those qualified to serve as engineering experts in matters before courts of law or in arbitration proceedings.” See Kenneth L. Carper, ed., Forensic Engineering (New York: Elsevier, 1989). The concept of an expert witness is as old as the profession of civil engineering. John Smeaton, the eighteenthcentury British engineer who designed bridges, canals, and harbors, and was responsible for the famed Eddystone Lighthouse, was often called upon to provide expert testimony in court. Smeaton insisted on calling himself a “civil engineer” to distinguish his work from that of the military engineers who, prior to Smeaton’s times, were responsible for improving harbors, digging canals, and the like. Smeaton also asserted his right as a professional to be able to work on several independent projects simultaneously, to be individually responsible for dividing his time among them, and to be able to give testimony involving his professional opinion about engineering projects generally. Engineers who serve as expert witnesses usually have considerable self-confidence and self-assurance about their conclusions. The hydraulic engineer Clemens Herschel – the translator of the classic work on the water supply of ancient Rome by its water commissioner Frontinus – frequently served as an expert witness. Once, while working on a case involving a flood alleged to be caused by the presence of railroad tracks, he was asked during cross examination if another engineer of equal ability would come
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to the same conclusion about the amount of water that could pass through a culvert beneath the tracks. Herschel is reported to have replied that “any engineer coming to a different conclusion would not be an engineer of equal ability.” Engineers, like all professionals, continue to be called upon by the court to give legal depositions and to testify as expert witnesses in trials involving technical material. In recent years there have been legal challenges to the admissibility of expert testimony, and some of the resulting cases have gone the U.S. Supreme Court. Two of the most frequently cited cases are known familiarly among lawyers as Daubert and Kumho. Daubert. The 1993 U.S. Supreme Court case of Daubert v. Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals regarded an alleged connection between a drug and birth defects. Its legacy involves the admissibility of scientific evidence into federal courtrooms. The landmark decision established “Daubert criteria” for scientific evidence although it left open the question of the admissibility of engineering testimony. That question was addressed by the Supreme Court five years later in the case of Kumho Tire v. Carmichael. The Daubert criteria may be expressed in a series of questions about the scientific theory or technique offered as evidence: Can it be tested, falsified, or refuted? Has it been subject to peer review and publication? What is the potential rate of error for a particular technique? What is the degree of acceptability within the scientific community? Kumho. Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael was a landmark court case involving the responsibility of the manufacturer in an accident resulting from the blowout of a worn tire. The admission of expert engineering testimony about whether the tire was inadequately designed rested on what criteria should be used to establish the admissibility of such testimony. The U.S. Supreme Court finally
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decided, in 1999, that engineering testimony was subject to the same criteria as scientific testimony, the criteria for which had been determined by the Supreme Court in the 1993 case of Daubert v. Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals. See Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence (Washington, D.C.: Federal Judicial Center, 1994). A second edition of the Reference Manual, including material on engineering, was published in 2000. See also “Daubert and Kumho,” American Scientist, September–October 1999, pp. 402–406, and its references.
F factor of safety. In structural engineering, a factor of safety is effectively the ratio of the theoretical failure load of a beam, column, or other component to the largest actual load it is designed to carry. A factor of safety provides assurance against such uncertainties as the design load being exceeded in service, the statistical variation in the strength of materials, and the occurrence of detrimental effects during the construction and life of a structure. Factors of safety have historically varied from only slightly greater than unity, in structures where excess strength (which generally equates to excess weight) cannot be tolerated, as in spacecraft, to as high as 6, 7, 8, or even more in civilian structures whose behavior is not completely understood or whose failure would have life-threatening or severe economic consequences, as in mid-nineteenth century railroad bridges. By extension to non-structural applications, employing a factor of safety implies being conservative in design, the structure or component having reserve capability for unusual situations. The factor of safety is sometimes referred to as a “factor of ignorance” because it is intended to take into account unknown contingencies. Euphemisms such as “design factor” and “design margin,” which are sometimes used, mask the life-protecting implications of the term factor of safety. Factors of safety in living organisms have been discussed in an article by the physiologist and biogeographer Jared Diamond. He considered the strength of bones, 101
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lungs, kidneys, and other body parts and tabulated their biological factors of safety alongside those of some conventional engineering structures (see “Building to Code,” Discover, May 1993, pp. 93–98). The list puts the concept of factor of safety into perspective: System or Component Cable of fast passenger elevator Human pancreas Cable of elevator in shallow mine Cable of slow passenger elevator Jawbone of biting monkey Cat intestine absorbing arginine Cable of slow freight elevator Cable of crane Wooden building Wing bones of flying goose Leg bones of running turkey Cable of elevator in deep mine Cable of powered dumbwaiter Leg bones of galloping horse Leg bones of running elephant Leg bones of hopping kangaroo Leg bones of running ostrich Leg bones of jumping dog Human kidney Steel building or bridge Human small intestine Lungs of lazy big cow Dragline of spider Backbones of human lifting weights Shell of squid Lungs of fast small dog
Factor of Safety 11.9 10 8 7.6 7 7 6.7 6 6 6 6 5 4.8 4.8 2.5–4 3 2.5 2–3 2–3 2 2 2 1.5 1.0–1.7 1.3–1.4 1.25
Sometimes in the United States, “safety factor” is used interchangeably with “factor of safety.” This synonymous usage might lead to confusion in other countries, however, where just the opposite meaning might be intended.
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In Australia, for example, the term “safety factor” is used to mean “an event or condition that increases safety risk.” Thus, in 2010, when an Airbus A380 aircraft lost an engine due to fatigue-crack growth that led to an explosive structural failure shortly after taking off from Singapore for Sydney, the event was described as a “safety factor” in a preliminary report issued by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which was investigating the incident. The report, designated Aviation Occurrence Investigation AO-2010–089, contains a glossary defining the term. failure. Understanding the concept of failure is central to understanding engineering and the engineering design process. In fact, an operational definition of engineering may be taken to be that engineering is simply the avoidance of unintended failure. (The qualification can be taken as a reminder that sometimes engineers design things they want to fail under certain conditions, such as a fuse in an electrical circuit or in a fire sprinkler in a hotel room.) The results of the calculations engineers carry out and the data they collect and analyze in experiments would be virtually meaningless without a sense of how those results or data compare with the standard, critical, or failure values. Whenever engineers work with a steel structure, an electronic device, a sewer system, or a machine, they need to know, for example, the maximum load the structure can support, the maximum current it can take, the maximum rainfall it can accommodate, or the maximum temperature at which it can operate. Without such knowledge, there is no understanding of the limits within which the system can be operated without failure. A failure criterion is a statement of conditions under which an engineering structure or system would cease to function as intended. Failure criteria can be analytical expressions against which calculated values of responses
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to loads can be compared, or they can be qualitative statements of how effectively a design fulfills a function. In the latter category might fall the expectation that an instrument be easy to use. Whether an engineering design is acceptable depends on whether it satisfies failure criteria that are often specified at the outset of the design; and because design is an iterative process, failure criteria can change as a design evolves. Although often associated with the catastrophic collapse of a structure or the total breakdown of a system, the term “failure” can also connote the inability of a design to fulfill completely its intended function. Thus, a skyscraper that is perfectly sound structurally, in the sense that it is in no danger of collapsing, yet is so flexible that the occupants of its upper floors get queasy when moderate winds blow in a certain direction, could be said to be a design failure. The excessive flexibility of the structure should have been anticipated and the design modified. There is also a paradox associated with design: that failures, through the lessons learned from them, provide invaluable information on how to achieve subsequent successful designs. Prolonged periods of success with one type of design, however, often can lead to a sense of overconfidence or complacency, which in turn can lead to a failure. This is the “paradox of design” named in the subtitle of the book Success Through Failure (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006). An example of failure leading to success is the history of the repeated failures of suspension bridges in the early nineteenth century. By studying those failures and their causes, John Roebling came to understand what needed to be designed against to achieve a successful suspension bridge, which he did. In contrast, an example of success leading to failure can be found in the space shuttle program of the United States. Repeated problems with O-rings designed to seal booster
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rockets on the space shuttle gave engineers considerable concern about the wisdom of launching in cold weather. These concerns were played down by managers in light of the success of two dozen shuttle launches then to date. The twenty-fifth mission took place on a morning of unprecedented cold weather, and the result was the failure and explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. Some classic works on engineering failures are Rolt Hammond, Engineering Structural Failures: The Causes and Results of Failures in Modern Structures of Various Types (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956) and Jacob Feld’s Lessons from Failures of Concrete Structures (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1964) and Construction Failure (New York: Wiley, 1968). A second edition of the latter Feld book has been published as Jacob Feld and Kenneth L. Carper, Construction Failure (New York: Wiley, 1997). For a compilation of engineering failures see Neil Schlager, ed., When Technology Fails: Significant Technological Disasters, Accidents, and Failures of the Twentieth Century (Detroit: Gale Research, 1994). An abridged paperback edition was published under the title, Breakdown: Deadly Technological Disasters (Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 1995). See also Steven S. Ross, Construction Disasters: Design Failures, Causes, and Prevention (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984); John Lancaster, Engineering Catastrophes: Causes and Effects of Major Accidents, 2nd ed. (Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press, 2002); and Norbert J. Delatte, Jr., Beyond Failure: Forensic Case Studies for Civil Engineers (Reston, Va.: ASCE Press, 2009). My own extended thoughts on failure are contained in To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985; Vintage Books, 1992); The Evolution of Useful Things (New York: Knopf, 1992; Vintage Books, 1994), Design Paradigms: Case Histories of Error and Judgment in Engineering
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(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Success Through Failure: The Paradox of Design (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006); and To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, forthcoming). “Faith of the Engineer.” This 1943 statement, prepared by the Ethics Committee of the Engineers’ Council for Professional Development – founded in 1932 by seven prominent engineering societies that evolved into the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology – reads as follows: I am an Engineer. In my profession I take deep pride, but without vainglory; to it I owe solemn obligations that I am eager to fulfill. As an Engineer, I will participate in none but honest enterprise. To him that has engaged my services, as employer or client, I will give the utmost of performance and fidelity. When needed, my skill and knowledge shall be given without reservation for the public good. From special capacity springs the obligation to use it well in the service to humanity; and I accept the challenge that this implies. Jealous of the high repute of my calling, I will strive to protect the interests and the good name of any engineer that I know to be deserving; but I will not shrink, should duty dictate, from disclosing the truth regarding anyone that, by unscrupulous act, has shown himself unworthy of the profession. Since the Age of Stone, human progress has been conditioned by the genius of my professional forebears. By them have been rendered usable to mankind Nature’s vast resources of material and energy. By them have been vitalized and turned to practical account the principles of science and the revelations of technology. Except for this heritage of accumulated experience, my efforts would be
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feeble. I dedicate myself to the dissemination of engineering knowledge, and especially to the instruction of younger members of our profession in all its arts and traditions. To my fellows I pledge, in the same full measure I ask of them, integrity and fair dealing, tolerance and respect, and devotion to the standards and the dignity of our profession; with the consciousness, always, that our special expertness carries with it the obligation to serve humanity with complete sincerity.
See also “Engineer’s Creed.” famous engineers. Some engineers have achieved almost legendary status in their own lifetimes, becoming symbols of the profession for its practitioners and often for many laypersons as well. A very idiosyncratic and incomplete list of such engineers includes the following: Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Among the most recognized, best remembered, and most highly revered engineers in Britain, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859) was responsible for such major projects as the Great Western Railway (GWR) and the Great Eastern steamship. He was the son of Sir Marc Isambard Brunel (1769–1849), who distinguished himself as an engineer in his own right in both America and Britain. There are many memorials to the younger Brunel, including those located on London’s Victoria Embankment and in Paddington Station, the London terminus of the GWR. The portals to the railroad bridge he designed to cross the Tamar River in southwest England bear in large letters the inscription, “I. K. Brunel, Engineer.” Like his railway, Brunel is often referred to in Britain by his initials, IKB. Brunel conceived of his first steamship, the Great Western, as an extension of the GWR. The ship could carry enough fuel to run its steam engines continuously in sailing across the Atlantic Ocean to America. Brunel’s Great
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Eastern was a vessel large enough to carry a sufficient supply of coal to sail nonstop from Britain to India and on to Australia. Brunel engaged John Scott Russell to build the ship, and the two Victorian engineers had a tumultuous relationship over credit for its design and financial arrangements. The vessel, measuring 692 feet long and displacing 32,000 tons, was built to be launched sideways, however when that was attempted in November 1857 the ship got stuck on its ways. The embarrassing launch took three months to complete, and the ship was haunted by problems and did not prove to be a financial success. The ship was instrumental in laying the transatlantic cable in 1866; however, it was eventually consigned to being an amusement venue and was finally sold in 1888 to be cut up for the iron in its hull. No ship larger than the Great Eastern was to be built until 1907. In spite of the problems with the Great Eastern and some of his other great projects, Isambard Kingdom Brunel is remembered as perhaps the preeminent Victorian engineer. A famous photograph of Brunel standing before the checking chains of the Great Eastern was taken in 1857 by Robert Howlett. It is among the most widely reproduced of Victorian photographic portraits, and in the British National Portrait Gallery it has been known to be among the most popular postcards depicting items of the collection. See “Isambard Kingdom Brunel,” American Scientist, January–February 1992, pp. 15–19. For a full biography of the engineer, see L. T. C. Rolt, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (Penguin, 1970). The treatment in this biography of John Scott Russell led to an exchange of views between two historians of technology over the respective reputations of Brunel and Scott Russell. See George S. Emmerson, “L. T. C. Rolt and the Great Eastern Affair of Brunel versus Scott Russell,” Technology and Culture, October 1980, pp. 553–569; the review
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Robert Howlett’s 1857 photograph of I. K. Brunel
by R. A. Buchanan of Emmerson’s “John Scott Russell: A Great Victorian Engineer and Naval Architect,” ibid., October 1978, pp. 767–769; and the communication by Buchanan, “The Great Eastern Controversy: A Comment,” ibid, January 1983, pp. 98–106; and Emmerson’s response, “The Great Eastern Controversy: In Response to Dr. Buchanan,” ibid., pp. 107–113. See also “John Scott Russell,” American Scientist, January–February 1998, pp. 18–21, and Remaking the World (New York: Knopf, 1997), pp. 126–145. See also Great Britons. Vannevar Bush. Trained at Harvard and MIT, Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) was an innovative American electrical engineer who, after advancing to become dean of engineering at MIT, went to Washington to administer
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research funding, first as president of the Carnegie Institution, one of the largest supporters of pre-World War II scientific research, and later as chairman of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. He conceived of and in 1940 became first chairman of the National Defense Research Council, which evolved into the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which he directed. OSRD has been called “the greatest (and possibly the shortest-lived) applied research and development complex the world has ever known.” Bush came to be known as the “czar of research” and was featured on the cover of Time magazine for April 3, 1944. Vannevar Bush was the author of Science – the Endless Frontier, the 1945 report to the U.S. President on post-war science policy that, in proposing a national research foundation, had an enormous influence on the debate relating to how research and development was to be thought of and funded in America for several decades to follow. Although commonly thought to have laid the groundwork for the creation of the National Science Foundation, the debate on what form such an agency should take actually predated the report. For a biography of Bush, see G. Pascal Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (New York: Free Press, 1997). See also “Development and Research,” American Scientist, May– June 1997, pp. 210–213, and chapter 8 of The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems (New York: Knopf, 2010). James B. Eads. James Buchanan Eads (1820–1887), who was named after his mother’s cousin who would become the fifteenth president of the United States, taught himself engineering by reading in a merchant’s library. Eads, whose name is now synonymous with creative and daring engineering, developed a diving bell for use in underwater salvage work on the Mississippi River and
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through its use became very familiar with conditions on the river bottom. The knowledge he gained enabled him to design adequate foundations for the first bridge across the Mississippi at St. Louis. The bridge, which opened in 1874, came to be known as Eads Bridge, thus making it one of the relatively few structures that bears the name of its engineer. In the face of opposition from Scientific American portrait of the leadership of the U.S. James B. Eads Army Corps of Engineers, Eads also designed a jetty system for the mouth of the Mississippi, which kept a channel open to the Gulf of Mexico. The nearby town of Port Eads, Louisiana, was named after him. Another massive project he championed was to transport ships by rail over the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, in southern Mexico, as an alternative to a canal route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans; however, he died before such a plan could be realized. See chapter 2 of Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America (New York: Knopf, 1995). See also monuments to engineers. ´ an. ´ Theodore von Karm The aeronautical engineer ´ an ´ (1881–1963) was born in Budapest, Theodore von Karm Hungary. In 1930 he moved to the United States, where he joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology and became director of that institution’s Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory (GALCIT). He was a co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the center for rocket
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and space research that would grow out of GALCIT. The institution’s wind tunnel played a significant role in aircraft development during the 1930s and 1940s. Among von ´ an’s ´ Karm research achievements was his analysis of the alternating double row of vortices that develops behind a bluff body, that is, one having a broad flattened front, in ´ an ´ vortex a fluid stream, which is now known as a Karm ´ an ´ street. It was this kind of experience that got von Karm appointed to the committee of engineers charged with looking into the causes of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse. ´ an, ´ who while often honored as a Theodore von Karm scientist referred to himself as an engineer, is credited with articulating the distinction between scientists and engineers by characterizing scientists as studying what is and engineers creating what never was. The engineer’s autobiography, The Wind and Beyond: Theodore von Karman, Pioneer in Aviation and Pathfinder in Space, was published in 1967 (Boston: Little, Brown). See also postage stamps commemorating engineers and engineering; scientists vs. engineers. Charles Kettering. Charles Franklin Kettering (1876– 1958) was among the better-known engineers of the early twentieth century. An electrical engineer, he is credited with devising, while at National Cash Register Company in Dayton, Ohio, the first electric cash register. Kettering was one of the founders of Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (Delco), which designed automotive electrical equipment. He was the inventor of the electric self-starter for automobiles, first used in the 1912 Cadillac. He also developed lighting and ignition systems for automobiles. Delco became a subsidiary of General Motors in 1916, and Kettering was vice president and director of research for GM from 1920 to 1947. In 1998, to honor his support of the General Motors Institute, which was located
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in Flint, Michigan, the institution was renamed Kettering University. John Smeaton. John Smeaton (1724–1792) was an English engineer who worked on scientific instruments, rediscovered hydraulic cement (which had been known to the Romans), made improvements in windmills, and constructed harbors, canals, bridges, and lighthouses, among other things. He is perhaps best remembered for his Eddystone Lighthouse, located in the English Channel fourteen miles southeast of Plymouth. Because of his many engineering activities, carried out for a wide variety of clients simultaneously, he is credited with playing a key role in defining the nature of the independent consulting engineer, and was instrumental in establishing the civil engineering profession. A plaque commemorating Smeaton was unveiled in the north aisle of London’s Westminster Abbey in 1994. See Samuel Smiles, Lives of the Engineers: Harbours – Lighthouses – Bridges. Smeaton and Rennie, new and revised edition (London: John Murray, 1874). The Smeatonians, more formally known as the Smeatonian Society, is a British organization that traces its roots to 1771, when John Smeaton organized a club that dined at the King’s Head Tavern in Holborn, London. The group met with other engineers on Friday evenings for conversation about their business whenever Smeaton was in town. It began to call itself a society, the Society of Civil Engineers, and kept a register of members. According to one member, recording the events that transpired in 1778, one of the meetings was spent “cannalically, hydraulically, mathematically, philosophically, mechanically, naturally and socially.” In time, Smeaton withdrew from the club, and the society broke up in 1792. It was revived the following year, after Smeaton’s death, and came to be known as the Smeatonian Society of Civil Engineers. By 1817 it had become exclusively a dining club.
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David Steinman in a publicity pose
David B. Steinman. David Barnard Steinman (1886– 1960) was an American civil engineer who became one of the most prominent international bridge designers of the twentieth century. Among his notable structures are the Henry Hudson Bridge in New York City, the St. Johns Bridge in Portland, Oregon, and the Mackinac Bridge between the upper and lower peninsulas of Michigan. Steinman was a leader in promoting the licensing of professional engineers and the engineering profession generally, and he was the founder and first president of the National Society of Professional Engineers. He also wrote on a wide variety of topics. In addition to several technical monographs on bridge building, Steinman wrote The Builders
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of the Bridge (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945), a biography of John and Washington Roebling, designers and builders of the Brooklyn Bridge, and with Sara Ruth Watson, who taught a course in the history of civil engineering at Cleveland State University, Bridges and Their Builders (New York: G. P. Putman’s Sons, 1941), a popular treatment of the subject. Later in life, Steinman began to write poetry, and he published two volumes of verse. See Engineers of Dreams (New York: Knopf, 1994), which contains a chapter on Steinman, and also the hagiographic biography, Highways over Broad Waters, by William Ratigan (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1959). See also poetry by engineers. Charles Steinmetz. Charles Proteus Steinmetz (1865– 1923) was a German-born electrical engineer who spent most of his career, beginning in 1893, working for General Electric in Schenectady, New York. He was an unconventional person, famously refusing to comply with the policy announced by GE’s “NO SMOKING” signs. However, Steinmetz’s value to the corporation as a research engineer and consultant was so great that he was allowed to smoke his cigars with impunity. He also enjoyed getting away to his lake-house retreat, where he could work in his canoe. Steinmetz would take his papers, his table of logarithms, and rocks to use as paperweights, place them on a board resting on the gunwales, and do his calculations while the canoe floated smoothly and silently on the water. The promotional department of GE, coupled with Steinmetz’s own personality, helped make him among the most visible and well-known of engineers in the early twentieth century. (The overzealous GE publicists once even cropped and altered a group picture in which Steinmetz and Einstein – each having come to be known to the public by only his surname – stood near enough to each other to make it appear that the two were meeting one-on-one,
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Charles Steinmetz working in his canoe
as Steinmetz had done with so many other contemporary celebrities, ranging from inventors like Thomas Edison to Hollywood actors such as Douglas Fairbanks. In the latter decades of the twentieth century, this altered photo could still be found reproduced and presented as authentic.) Even after the engineer’s death, which occurred at an early age because of a congenital condition that caused him to appear hunchbacked, “Steinmetz” remained synonymous with “engineer” for many who grew up in the era when he flourished, and as late as the 1960s an engineer could find himself called “Steinmetz” by passing acquaintances. See “Images of an Engineer,” American Scientist, July–August 1991, pp. 300–303 and also pp. 3-11 of Remaking the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997). There are also several biographies of Steinmetz, including those of Jonathan N. Leonard, Loki (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1930), John W. Hammond, Charles Proteus
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Steinmetz (New York: Century, 1935), and, more recently, Ronald R. Kline, Steinmetz: Engineer and Socialist (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). Thomas Telford. Born in Scotland, Thomas Telford (1757–1834) became one of Britain’s most distinguished early modern engineers, leaving a legacy of canals, roads, bridges, harbors, and other civil works that characterize the infrastructure of Great Britain to this day. Telford’s reputation was so firmly established by the early nineteenth century that he was asked to serve as the first president of the Institution of Civil Engineers when its young membership was struggling to establish it as Britain’s first true professional society. Today, the ICE’s publishing arm is named Thomas Telford. Much has been written on Telford and his works, including the biography that constitutes Volume II of Samuel Smiles’s Lives of the Engineers (London: John Murray, 1862), and the biography Thomas Telford, by L. T. C. Rolt (London: Longmans, Green, 1958). Stephen P. Timoshenko. Stephen Prokofievitch Timoshenko (1878–1972) was born in Ukraine and studied railway engineering in Russia and mechanics in Germany. He fled the Russian Revolution in 1920 for Yugoslavia, where he found a teaching position in a newly organized school of engineering in Zagreb. He left that poorly paying academic position in 1922 to come to the United States to accept an engineering job at the small Philadelphia Vibration Specialty Company, where one of his former students worked. The position was not very challenging, however, and Timoshenko soon moved to the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company in Pittsburgh, where he served as a company consultant in mechanics problems. In 1927 he moved to the University of Michigan, where he was given a chair in research in mechanics, and in 1936 he relocated to Stanford University, where he spent the rest of his career in the United States.
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Having found American engineering textbooks to be unsatisfactory, Timoshenko wrote numerous ones himself, on subjects such as strength of materials, vibrations, elasticity, and plates and shells. In the 1950s these books were being used in almost every engineering school in America. Through these now classic books, and their later editions written with his students, Timoshenko’s name became synonymous with engineering mechanics. He was also the author of History of Strength of Materials: With a Brief Account of the History of Theory of Elasticity and Theory of Structures (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953; reprinted by Dover Publications, 1982). Timoshenko became known by his surname alone, and jokesters who argued that he was Irish and not Russian sometimes spelled it Tim O’Shenko. The prestigious Timoshenko Medal was established in 1957 by the Applied Mechanics Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and it is considered the highest award of the mechanics division and is among the most prized professional recognitions in the field. The first recipient of the bronze medal, which is “bestowed in recognition of distinguished contributions to applied mechanics,” was Timoshenko himself. Although not widely known outside the engineering profession, Timoshenko exerted an enormous influence on how engineering was taught in America. For a short biographical sketch of the engineer, see The Collected Papers of Stephen P. Timoshenko (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953). See also As I Remember: The Autobiography of Stephen P. Timoshenko (Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1968). J. A. L. Waddell. John Alexander Low Waddell (1854– 1938) was a flamboyant Canadian-born American bridge engineer who often posed wearing the medals, keys, and badges he received in recognition of his engineering work around the world. Waddell was the author-of-record of the
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classic two-volume work, Bridge Engineering (New York: Wiley, 1916), whose preparation kept many of his staff engineers in work during the slow period of domestic bridge building that occurred during World War I. The treatise became a necessary addition to the library shelves in bridge engineering offices everywhere. The firm he founded, then known J. A. L. Waddell wearing some as Waddell & Harrington of his awards and later to be known as Hardesty & Hanover, was officially editor and publisher of Waddell’s Addresses to Engineering Students, which first appeared in 1911 and was made widely available to young engineers as a career guide. Waddell himself was the driving force behind the book; his thoughts on the engineering profession are collected in Memoirs and Addresses of Two Decades, edited by F. W. Skinner (Easton, Pa.: Mack Printing Co., 1928). father-and-son engineers. Among notable father-andson pairs in the history of engineering have been the British civil engineers John Rennie, the elder (1761–1821) and the younger (1794–1874), who were responsible for several London bridges; the British pioneering railroad engineers, George Stephenson (1781–1848) and Robert Stephenson (1803–1859); Marc Isambard Brunel (1769– 1849) and Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859), the former a French-born engineer who practiced in America before settling in England and the latter considered by
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some to be among the most heroic of the Victorian engineers; John Augustus Roebling (1806–1869) and Washington Augustus Roebling (1837–1926), the American bridge engineers whose masterpiece was the Brooklyn Bridge; and Elmer A. Sperry (1860–1930), the mechanical and electrical engineer who developed a practical gyroscope, and Lawrence B. Sperry (1892–1923), whose aeronautical achievements included an automatic aircraft stabilizer. Samuel Smiles wrote a joint biography of the Stephensons, there are separate biographies of Marc Brunel and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and the bridge engineer David B. Steinman wrote a biography of the Roeblings. Steinman’s book, The Builders of the Bridge: John Roebling and His Son (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945) was eclipsed by David McCullough’s The Great Bridge (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972). In his bibliography, McCullough ungenerously comments that although Steinman “was long considered the authority on John A. Roebling,” his book “was based on superficial research and contains many inaccuracies.” The Lighthouse Stevensons. This family of Scottish engineers established itself as premier designers and builders of lighthouses, including the Bell Rock, constructed by the patriarch Robert Stevenson (1772–1850) between 1807 and 1810 in the North Sea twelve miles off the coast of Scotland, where it still stands. His son Thomas Stevenson (1818–1887) followed in his father’s footsteps. However, his son Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), turned away from the tradition established by his father, grandfather, and relatives on his mother’s side, and became a writer of such tales as Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The Stevensons are not to be confused with George and Robert Stephenson, who were associated closely with Newcastleupon-Tyne and who were instrumental in establishing the railroad in Britain. For a history of the Stevenson family,
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see Bella Barhurst, The Lighthouse Stevensons: The Extraordinary Story of the Building of the Scottish Lighthouses by the Ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: HarperCollins, 1999) and Roland Paxton, Dynasty of Engineers: The Stevensons and the Bell Rock (London: Whittles Publishing, 2011). fight songs for engineers. A number of engineering schools have fight songs that refer explicitly to engineers. Perhaps the most well-known of these is Georgia Tech’s “Rambling Wreck from Georgia Tech,” the first stanza of which goes: I’m a Ramblin’ Wreck from Georgia Tech and a hell of an engineer, A helluva, helluva, helluva, helluva, hell of an engineer, Like all the jolly good fellows, I drink my whiskey clear, I’m a Ramblin’ Wreck from Georgia Tech and a hell of an engineer.
The song, which appears to date from the early twentieth century, is apparently based on a traditional Irish drinking song, “The Son of a Gambolier,” a gambolier being a ne’er-do-well. That song begins, “I’m a rambling rake of poverty / From Tippery town I came.” In 1895, a young Charles Ives (1874–1954), then a student at Yale, composed his own version, titled “A Son of a Gambolier.” It begins, “Come join my humble ditty, / From Tippery town I steer,” which, like “engineer,” rhymes with “beer.” The piece has been arranged in a variety of musical formats, including for baritone and piano with an optional kazoo chorus. Today, of course, “Rambling Wreck” is considered sexist. In the late twentieth century, Georgia Tech appointed a diversity task force to consider how that might be addressed; however, changes proposed by the task force were opposed by current students and former graduates
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alike. Some fight songs of other schools may be considered even more offensive than that of Georgia Tech’s. For example, one reputed version of MIT’s fight song, no doubt a version that was more popular when the institute – and the engineering profession – was predominantly male, has a first stanza, chorus, and third stanza that go: Godiva was a lady who through Coventry did ride To show the royal villagers her fine and pure white hide. The most observant man of all, an engineer of course, Was the only one who noticed that Godiva rode a horse. We are, we are, we are, we are, we are the Engineers; We can, we can, we can, we can, demolish forty beers. . . . A maiden and an Engineer were sitting in the park, The Engineer was working on some research after dark. His scientific method was a marvel to observe: While his right hand held the figures, his left hand traced the curves.
The song is sometimes referred to as “Godiva’s Hymn.” A version known among army engineer battalions as “The Engineer Hymn” or “The Engineers’ Drinking Song” of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is similar. Its chorus goes: We are, we are, we are, we are, the Combat Engineers; We can, we can, we can, we can, demolish forty beers. Drink up, drink up, drink up, drink up and come along with us, For we don’t give a damn, for any Old Man, who don’t give a damn for us – Hey
The “Hey” introduces the next of numerous verses, many of which are, if not identical, then similar, at least in spirit to those in the MIT song. See also cheers of engineers.
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financial engineering. This term first came to the attention of many members of the public during the world financial crisis that surfaced in 2008. Financial engineering is responsible for the design of creative and exotic financial instruments, including the “unsecured derivatives” that were blamed for much of the trouble that led to the bailouts of banks and other financial institutions. In a 2011 interview with the Wall Street Journal, Peter Loscher, president of the German-based global conglomerate Siemens AG, distinguished between “financial engineering” and “real engineering” and clearly favored the latter. FIRST. This organization was founded in 1989 by the inventor Dean Kamen (born in 1951). Its vision is “to transform our culture by creating a world where science and technology are celebrated and where young people dream of becoming science and technology leaders.” The name FIRST may be an example of an alluring acronym coming before what it stands for: For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. Unfortunately, there is no E for Engineering in FIRST. Among the creative activities that FIRST sponsors are robotics competitions for students from kindergarten through college. Through grade 8, contestants can partake in Lego leagues; high-school and college teams participate in what are termed, respectively, Tech and Robotics challenges. Teams progress through regional to international competitions. During the 2010/11 season of contests, participants numbered about 250,000 students, more than 65,000 adult mentors and supporters, and more than 33,000 volunteers. The story of one high-school teacher and his FIRST robotics team’s progression from early engagement through national championship events has been told by Neal Bascomb in The New Cool: A Visionary Teacher, His FIRST Robotics Team, and the Ultimate Battle of Smarts (New York: Crown, 2011).
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founder societies. Five of the facets of the hexagonal seal of the United Engineering Foundation contain the abbreviations of engineering societies – ASCE, AIME, ASME, IEEE, and AIChE. The sixth bears the date, 1904. These societies constitute what are known as engineering’s “founder societies,” yet how could the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, which celebrated its centennial in 2008, be juxtaposed with a date four years before its Seal of the United beginnings? Engineering Foundation The same question might be asked of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which dates from 1963. That is when it was formed out of the merger of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (founded in 1884) and the Institute of Radio Engineers (1912). It is those roots in AIEE that give IEEE a claim to being a founder society. The UEF is actually the successor to the United Engineering Society, which is what was actually founded in 1904, thanks to the financial support of Andrew Carnegie. It was Carnegie money that made possible the Engineering Societies Building, which opened in 1906 on West 39th Street in New York City. The primary purpose of UES was to oversee this common location for the headquarters and libraries of the original founder societies – AIME, ASME, and AIEE (listed in the order of their beginnings). ASCE, which predates them all, had just built its own new building and did not join the club until 1916. In time, the founder societies outgrew their shared headquarters building and began exploring alternatives. AIChE joined the founder societies in 1958, just a few
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years before they all moved into the large and modern United Engineering Center on East 47th Street, across from the United Nations. In time, partly because of the high cost of maintaining offices in New York City, some of the growing societies wished to relocate, and so the founders agreed to sell their valuable property. (The 22story engineering center was demolished in 1997 and replaced by the 72-story Trump World Tower of luxury condominiums.) In 1998 the engineering societies each went their separate ways. ASCE relocated its headquarters to Reston, Virginia; AIME moved to Littleton, Colorado; IEEE moved its operations to Piscataway, New Jersey, but maintained its corporate office in New York City. ASME and AIChE have continued to be headquartered in New York City. Thus, almost a century after Carnegie’s effort to bring them closer together, the societies moved farther apart. A philosophical unification, as opposed to a mere physical union, of the major engineering societies never came to pass. Although they occupied neighboring offices for much of the twentieth century, their individual missions and ambitions kept them from truly uniting to give a single voice to the engineering profession. Some observers believe this has hindered engineers from achieving the status of medical doctors and lawyers, each of which group has its own unifying American professional association. The seal of the United Engineering Foundation may continue to present the image of unity among the founder societies, but the history behind it reveals otherwise. When it was formed in 1852, ASCE was the only national engineering society, encompassing all branches of engineering that were not military. However, with the development of the railroads, the telegraph, and other marvels of the Industrial Revolution, a civil engineering society did not provide a sufficiently broad umbrella under
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which mining, mechanical, and electrical engineers could comfortably gather. Thus, they formed societies of their own. With the continued proliferation of specialized engineering societies taking place well into the twentieth century, a united engineering society became an increasingly elusive goal. The separate societies grew too large and powerful to be willing to give up their independence – or share their membership. The United Engineering Foundation may stand as a symbol of what was once thought to be possible, but it is unlikely that it will ever be more than a symbol. (Adapted from “Founding Societies,” ASEE Prism, October 2008.) French tradition in engineering. The Corps des Fortifications is an elite French engineering corps, also known ´ as the Corps du Genie, which dates from the seventeenth century. It drew its members largely from French nobility. The status of engineers in this corps was roughly equiva´ lent to those in the Corps des Ponts et Chaussees, a distinguished arm of the French military engineers created in the eighteenth century to oversee the civilian works of bridges and roads. The most famous and most prestigious of the French ´ technical schools is the Ecole Polytechnique. The fore´ runner of this school, the Ecole des Travaux Public, was created by Napoleon in 1794 to prepare engineers to ´ go into public and private service. The Ecole Polytechnique provided the engineers who served in the various corps. In the nineteenth century, these engineers controlled and regulated all the country’s technologies, ranging from roads and bridges to mines, because graduates ´ of the Ecole Polytechnique went on to attend the vari´ ´ ous ecoles d’application, such as the Ecole des Ponts et ´ ´ ´ and the Ecole des Mines. The Ecole Chaussees Nationale ´ des Ponts et Chaussees, founded in 1747, is generally
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considered to be the first school of civil – as opposed to military – engineering. Its founder, Jean-Rodolphe Perronet (1708–1794) was appointed the first chief engineer of bridges and highways in France by Louis XV and was given the authority to establish a school within the corps. The ´ ´ ecoles d’arts et metiers are institutions of higher education that emphasized the manual practice of different mechanical arts. Traditionally, engineers who graduated from these ´ ecoles worked not for the elite state corps but for private industry. ´ The Ecole Polytechnique served as a model for West Point and other early engineering schools in America. ´ A brief historical introduction to the system of ecoles is contained in Eda Kranakis, Constructing a Bridge: An Exploration of Engineering Culture, Design, and Research in Nineteenth-Century France and America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997).
G gentlemen and engineers. Herbert Hoover told a story that indicated how far the engineering profession had had to come in the early twentieth century toward regaining the recognition and respect it had had during the Victorian era. According to Hoover, while he was on a steamship journey once, he struck up a conversation with a woman sitting in a deck chair next to his. After some time of wide ranging and urbane talk about cultural pursuits, the woman asked Hoover what was his profession. When he responded, “I am an engineer,” the woman recoiled and said, “Why, I took you for a gentleman.” Another distinguished and dapper engineer, William Barclay Parsons, did not meet with such skepticism. Parsons, who came from a prominent New York City family, held the position of Chief Engineer of the Rapid Transit Commission, which was responsible for the initial development of the New York subway system. In that position he designed and oversaw the construction of the city’s first successful subway line, whose initial nine-mile segment – running from City Hall in lower Manhattan to its West 145th Street station – opened for service in 1904. Shortly afterwards, fulfilling a promise that he would move on to other things when the subway was operating, Parsons resigned his position of ten years to devote time to the Panama Canal Commission on which he sat and, shortly thereafter, to become chief engineer of the Cape Cod Canal project. On the occasion of his resignation from the 128
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transit commission, the New York Times editorialized that “New York City will ever hold Mr. Parsons in high respect, not alone as an engineer, but as a gentleman who has established the fact that great public works may be carried to completion with clean hands and an unsullied reputation.” See Tom Malcolm, William Barclay Parsons: A Renaissance Man of Old New York (New York: Parsons Brinkerhoff, 2010), p. 70. Indeed, both Parsons and Hoover were outstanding representatives of their profession. Each was also a gentleman and a scholar, literally. Hoover and his wife, Lou Henry Hoover, translated from the Latin Georgius Agricola’s classic sixteenth-century work on mining, De re metallica. Parsons wrote, among other books, Engineers and Engineering in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1939). This work of history was published posthumously. G.I. Bill. The Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944, familiarly known as the G.I. Bill of Rights, committed the U.S. government to pay for the college or vocational education of all qualified veterans. The offer was accepted by an unexpectedly large number of G.I.s, so called because of the abbreviation for “government issue,” which itself is sometimes said to have originated from a misreading of the abbreviation “g.i.” for “galvanized iron.” During World War II, that abbreviation is said often to have followed inventories of metal pails and the like, although this attempt at etymology may also be apocryphal. The post-war rapid influx of new students into American colleges and universities put an especially large strain on engineering programs, which in the end turned out 450,000 engineers as a result of the G.I. Bill. Stanford University, for example, saw its enrollment increase from 3,000 one year to 7,000 the next, and the 11,000 ex-G.I.s who attended the University of Wisconsin in 1946 swelled its total enrollment from 9,000 the previous year. As a
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result of such rapid growth, temporary classrooms and living quarters were erected on open spaces at many campuses. Many of these fields of Quonset huts and surplus barracks remained standing well into the 1960s and 1970s on campuses that used them long after the other benefits of the G.I. Bill had ceased, and many an engineering student from those years recalls taking classes in distinctly different surroundings than ivy-covered walls. See Edward Kiester, Jr., “The G.I. Bill May Be the Best Deal Ever Made by Uncle Sam,” Smithsonian, November 1994, p. 128. glass half full. Someone who sees a partially filled glass as half full is an often-cited definition of an optimist. Someone who sees the same glass as half empty is taken to be a pessimist. It has been said that someone who sees the glass as poorly designed, because it is twice as large as it needs to be, is surely an engineer. Grand Challenges. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering identified fourteen Grand Challenges for Engineering in four broad areas – sustainability, health, vulnerability, and joy of living. The challenges were to: r r r r r r r r r r r r
Make solar energy economical Provide energy from nuclear fusion Develop carbon sequestration methods Manage the nitrogen cycle Provide access to clean water Restore and improve urban infrastructure Advance health informatics Engineer better medicines Reverse-engineer the brain Prevent nuclear terror Secure cyberspace Enhance virtual reality
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r Advance personalized learning r Engineer the tools of scientific discovery Greatest Britons. After televising a series of biographies of “Great Britons” in 2002, the BBC polled its viewers and asked them who were the greatest Britons. The top ten named were as follows: Greatest Britons 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Winston Churchill Isambard Kingdom Brunel Diana Spencer Charles Darwin William Shakespeare Isaac Newton Queen Elizabeth I John Lennon Horatio Nelson Oliver Cromwell
The placement of the heroic Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel just behind wartime prime minister Winston Churchill and before British royalty demonstrates how appreciative of its engineers a nation can be. Greatest Engineering Achievements of the 20th Century. The occasion of the approach of the calendar year 2000, with its odometer-like popular appeal, led a number of engineering societies to develop lists of the greatest achievements in their respective fields. The National Academy of Engineering, in its desire to convey the importance and excitement of engineering to the public, and especially to young students, focused on “the significant impact that engineers and engineering have had on the quality of life in the 20th century.” The NAE thus took on the challenge of identifying the greatest overall engineering achievements of the previous one hundred years. In all,
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more than sixty engineering organizations were engaged in the process, and nominations were considered by a committee of members of the National Academy. (The committee was kept anonymous until after the selection process to minimize the possibility of members being lobbied by the different engineering societies.) In the end, the selection process focused on aggregates of achievements to emphasize the systems nature of engineering and to be as inclusive as possible. The list of the Greatest Engineering Achievements of the 20th Century was released at a program featuring a speech by former astronaut Neil Armstrong held at the National Press Club on February 22, 2000. (This is the traditional date of George Washington’s birthday and, because of Washington’s career as a land surveyor, a date that engineers have long associated with their profession. Engineers Week, formally established in 1951 as a national celebration of the profession, usually includes Washington’s Birthday.) The list, which was integrated into Armstrong’s speech, is as follows: Greatest Engineering Achievements of the 20th Century 1. Electrification 2. Automobile 3. Airplane 4. Water Supply and Distribution 5. Electronics 6. Radio and Television 7. Agricultural Mechanization 8. Computers 9. Telephone 10. Air Conditioning and Refrigeration 11. Highways 12. Spacecraft 13. Internet 14. Imaging
“a great profession” 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.
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Household Appliances Health Technologies Petroleum and Petrochemical Technologies Laser and Fiber Optics Nuclear Technologies High-performance Materials
“a great profession.” The mining engineer Herbert Hoover reflected on his profession in his Memoirs: Years of Adventure, 1874–1920 (New York: Macmillan, 1952). His is among the most oft-quoted descriptions of the profession, and I know of at least one engineer who has an excerpt from Hoover’s much admired passage printed on the back of his business card. The full passage reads: It is a great profession. There is the fascination of watching a figment of the imagination emerge through the aid of science to a plan of paper. Then it moves to realization in stone or metal or energy. Then it brings jobs and homes to men. Then it elevates the standards of living and adds to the comforts of life. That is the engineer’s high privilege. The great liability of the engineer compared to men of other professions is that his works are out in the open where all can see them. His acts, step by step, are in hard substance. He cannot bury his mistakes in the grave like the doctors. He cannot argue them into thin air or blame the judge like the lawyers. He cannot, like the architects, cover his failures with trees and vines. He cannot, like the politicians, screen his shortcomings by blaming his opponents and hope that the people will forget. The engineer simply cannot deny that he did it. If his works do not work, he is damned. That is the phantasmagoria that haunts his nights and dogs his days. He comes from the job at the end of the day resolved to calculate it again. He wakes in the night in a cold sweat and puts something on paper that looks silly in the morning. All day he shivers at the thought of the bugs which will invariably appear to jolt its smooth consummation.
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Hoover has also been quoted as saying that “it is the purpose of engineering to increase the standards of life and living for all people.” See J. K. Finch, “The Engineering Profession in Evolution,” Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. CT [Centennial Transactions] (1953), pp. 112–125. It should take nothing away from Hoover’s eloquent description of engineering to note that, in an 1885 address to the Alumni Association of the Stevens Institute, the mechanical engineer William Kent (1851–1918) said of the responsibility of the engineer, that “his mistakes may be more serious than those which hurt only the pockets of the lawyer’s client, or those which the doctor buries six feet underground.”
H hairy-eared engineer. This jocular term has been applied to engineers who are advanced enough in age to have hirsute ears. More importantly, but no less jocularly, hairyeared engineers are believed to have worked on enough projects over the course of their career to have made every imaginable mistake. This makes such an engineer invaluable to a project where the participants do not wish to repeat past failures. In other words, as the hairy-eared engineer Marvin B. Davis has been quoted as saying, “Every project needs at least one hairy-eared engineer.” However, since the term “hairy-eared engineer” is most likely to evoke a male image, its usage is open to being termed sexist. Since the 1970s, significant numbers of female engineers have been entering the profession, and enough time has passed that some of them, too, have made their share of mistakes. Perhaps the term “hairy-eared” should be replaced by “gray-haired.” Whatever called, every project can benefit from having one of these experienced engineers aboard. half-life of technical skills. Half-life is a term used in physics to describe the time required for half of a substance to undergo a process, such as radioactive decay. The term has come to designate the period of usefulness that precedes obsolescence. In the mid-1980s it was estimated that the half-life of an engineer’s technical skills was as little as 2.5 years for a software engineer; electrical engineers 135
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were estimated to have half-lives of 5 years, and mechanical engineers 7.5 years. Such short half-lives have provided strong arguments for lifelong learning for engineers. See Ernest T. Smerdon, “Lifelong Learning for Engineers: Riding the Whirlwind,” The Bridge, Spring/Summer 1996, pp. 15–17. It has also been estimated that scientific and engineering knowledge has a geometric growth rate, or doubling time, of ten years. See National Academy of Engineering, The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2004), p. 24. This calls to mind the work of the historian of science Derek J. de Solla Price (1922–1983), who studied the doubling times of scientific knowledge by taking the volume of scientific literature as his database. He found doubling times of the order of ten years. However, de Solla Price did not think the volume of the engineering literature was an accurate measure of the growth of engineering knowledge, because, unlike scientists, engineers do not always record their achievements in the form of published papers. For some engineers, at least, the manufacture or construction of the things they design obviates the need to write a paper. See, for example, Little Science, Big Science – and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) for a sense of de Solla Price’s work. hard hat. The hard hat is sometimes taken as a symbol of the engineer, although it was developed to protect workmen. Hard hats are said to have originated during the construction of the Hoover Dam, which began in 1931 and was completed in 1935. Early on in the project, workers had to scale the steep cliffs of Black Canyon, the location of the dam, and dislodge loose rocks. Needless to say, falling rocks and tools posed a danger to the workers below, and so they began to dip their caps and hats in tar, which when
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hardened provided a makeshift protective helmet. Helmets of other kinds were also adapted to hard-hat use. The first hard hats required on a major bridge construction job were those worn during the building of the Golden Gate Bridge, which took place from 1933 to 1937. The primitive hard hats used there were made of leather and looked somewhat like army helmets. When worn by the engineers, who otherwise were usually rather smartly dressed in vested suits and ties, they provided a stark contrast in formality; the example of the engineers served to emphasize the seriousness and uniform enforcement of the model safety rules that were introduced during that bridge project. At first, workers elsewhere had to be coaxed into wearing hard hats, which were often made available in large numbers at the entrance to a construction site and were dropped off there at the end of a work shift. For purposes of hygiene, workers began to prefer their own personal hard hats, which came to be made of metal and, later, of sturdy plastic. Nowadays, everyone on a construction site, including visitors, is expected to wear a hard hat. However, as frequent letters to the editor of Engineering News-Record, the magazine of the construction industry, point out, many a picture of a bare-headed construction worker has been displayed prominently on the magazine’s cover and in its pages, providing plenty of anecdotal evidence of how often the rule is violated. Some engineers believe there should be a color coding of hard hats to represent the hierarchy of people on a construction site, with engineers’ hats being white and different types of workers wearing different color hats. This practice is followed in many organizations, but in fact the color of the hard hat an individual is wearing is not a completely reliable indicator of his or her status or trade.
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heroic engineers. The Victorian period in Britain has been referred to as the “heroic age of British engineering,” a time when engineers seemed to be larger than life and had accomplishments to match that image. See, for example, R. Angus Buchanan, Brunel: The Life and Times of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2001), especially Chapter 13. Elsewhere also, “there were engineering heroes once upon a time, like Kettering, Steinmetz, Westinghouse, Marconi. Way back when Colonel Goethals was building the Panama Canal, he was as well known as Billy Graham and Bob Hope are today.” So wrote C. J. Freund, referring in the last instances to the Christian evangelist and the comedian who flourished in the latter part of the twentieth century, in “Wanted: Engineer Heroes” in The Bent of Tau Beta Pi in February 1971 (pp. 17–19). Freund did not just lament the decline in the heroic image of engineers, he proposed to do something about it: “If $25 were collected from each of 500,000 American engineers, there would be available $12,500,000 for a big hero program.” It is not clear if Freund collected anything toward his proposed program; however, calls for greater recognition of engineer heroes continue to be heard. highway numbering system. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO, pronounced “ash-toe”) is the successor to the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO) and thereby traces its origins to 1914. Through cooperation with the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, standardizing the numbering and marking of interregional highways was among the most significant activities of the young AASHO. Before that time, there was a growing proliferation of marked roads of varying quality: “The Lincoln and Victory Highways were among the more than 250 trails that made a road map a crazy quilt of
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diverse regions of the country stitched together by privately planned highways. In addition to the transcontinentals, the trails included major north-south routes, such as the Atlantic and Pacific Highways along the coasts, and an endless array of shorter trails with colorful names ‘leading the people in all directions that they should not go’.” Following a 1917 law, Wisconsin became the first state to replace trail signs with numbers, and state highway officials of other Midwestern states embraced the idea. The AASHO became involved in 1924, when the matter was brought up at the association’s annual meeting. After further study, it was agreed that even numbers should be assigned to east-west routes (with multiples of ten being reserved for principal routes) and odd numbers to northsouth routes (with numbers ending in 1 or 5 designating principal routes). Much later, with the passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, it became necessary to establish a numbering plan and distinctive signage for the projected interstate highway system. The plan adopted is a “mirror image” of the U.S. highway system, in the sense that, while even numbers still refer to east-west routes and odd numbers to north-south routes, for interstate highways the lowest even numbers are in the south and the lowest odd numbers in the west, just the opposite of the U.S.-highway numbering system. Thus, only in the Midwest would there be possible confusion among drivers between nearby U.S. and interstate routes, and this was minimized by careful choices of numbering. See “From Names to Numbers: The Origins of the U.S. Numbered Highway System,” AASHTO Quarterly, Spring 1997, pp. 6–15. historic engineering landmarks. Many engineering societies have active historic engineering landmark programs, whereby unique and important structures, machines, systems, and events are documented and recognized for
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their significance in the development of engineering and technology. The landmarks often fall into local, state, national, and international categories, the last typically recognized in conjunction with an appropriate national entity in another country. Designated landmarks are usually marked with a plaque and may be, but are not necessarily, given special consideration with regard to preservation protection. The oldest program in the United States is the National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark Program overseen by the History and Heritage Committee (formerly the Committee on the History and Heritage of American Civil Engineering) of the American Society of Civil Engineers. Nominated projects must be at least fifty years old, must have some special significance – such as being the first of its kind or a rare surviving exemplar – and must have contributed to the development of the profession and that of at least a large region of the country. In 1966, the Bollman Truss Bridge in Savage, Maryland, was designated as the first National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark. It is the only surviving example of the first all-metal bridge design to be employed by railroads. As of 2010, the number of national landmarks designated by ASCE exceeded 200, and almost fifty international landmark plaques had been dedicated. The landmark program of the History and Heritage Committee of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers dates from 1971. It seeks, among other objectives, “to foster the preservation of the physical remains of historically important engineering works; to encourage mechanical engineers and others to become aware of their technological heritage; [and] to call attention to the noteworthy mechanical engineers who were associated with the invention, development, or production of these singular technological achievements.”
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The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers designates historically significant sites, devices, and events as milestones. The program is administered by the IEEE History Center, which is overseen by the society’s History Committee. The Electrical Engineering Milestones Program was established in 1983 “to honor significant achievements in the history of electrical and electronics engineering.” The National Historic Chemical Landmarks program of the American Chemical Society was begun in 1992. It “recognizes the profession’s scientific and technical heritage and encourages the preservation of important achievements and artifacts by honoring the location of a development of historical importance to chemistry, chemical engineering, and the chemical process industries.” history and engineering. It appears to be a common misconception that the history of engineering is not especially relevant to the practice of engineering today. Rather, the prejudice seems to be that the history of engineering is something to be studied as an avocation of retired engineers who have time on their hands. This is a short-sighted view. Reading the ancient Roman works of Vitruvius and Frontinus reveals that, conceptually, engineers two millennia ago approached problem solving very much the same way engineers do today. In particular, identifying failure modes before proceeding with a design was every bit as important then as it is now. Examples of good practice are as timeless as the nature of design; lessons learned ages ago are still valid. Unfortunately, too many engineers tend to eschew knowing the distant history of their field and therefore the same mistakes are made over and over again. The condition is not new. Vitruvius wrote about a size effect in the first century B.C., yet in the seventeenth
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century Galileo wrote about how Renaissance engineers did not understand the nature of such an effect, even though natural structures clearly exhibited it and failures of scaled-up obelisks and ships confirmed it. As an example, consider the work of John Roebling in designing suspension bridges. There were numerous failures of such bridges in the early nineteenth century. Roebling studied these failures to uncover common faults so he could design a successful bridge. In an 1841 paper, he declared that wind was the enemy of suspension bridges; identifying it as the most important natural force to design against. His Niagara Gorge Suspension Bridge, completed in 1854, was the first to stand up against the wind as well as endure the pounding weight of heavy railroad trains. When asked what made his bridge work when so many earlier ones had failed, he responded that it was successful because of the weight and stiffness of its roadway and the stays that checked any small motions induced by the wind before they could become dangerously large. Over the next century, suspension bridges evolved from iron and wooden structures to steel ones. Unfortunately, the evolving designs successively did away with the weight, the stiffness, and the stays that Roebling understood to be so essential. The process of historical amnesia progressed until the late 1930s, when bridges such as the Thousand Islands Bridge between the U.S. and Canada, the Deer Isle Bridge in Maine, and the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge in New York City were designed and built to look and be light and slender, which made them flexible and susceptible to unexpected movements in the wind. The evolutionary process culminated in 1940 with the construction in Washington state of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which had an extremely shallow and literally narrow deck. Relative to its length, the narrowness of the roadway was unprecedented, and the structure proved to be incapable of remaining steady, earning it the nickname Galloping Gertie. The bridge
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failed famously in November 1940 while being filmed in a 42-mile-per-hour wind. The conclusion of the committee that studied the failure was essentially what Roebling had concluded a century earlier: that wind is the enemy of suspension bridges. See, for example, Richard S. Hobbs, Catastrophe to Triumph: Bridges of the Tacoma Narrows (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2006). An increasing number of books on engineering history have been written and published in recent years. Among the “classics,” that is, those published more than a half century ago, is Richard Shelton Kirby et al., Engineering in History, first published by McGraw-Hill in 1956 and reprinted by Dover Publications in 1990. For further references, see ancient engineering. history of technology. In the early twentieth century, the relevance of history to engineering was as hotly debated a topic as it remains today. There were those practitioners, such as the prominent bridge engineer J. A. L. Waddell (1854–1938), who believed that professional engineers should be fully apprised of the history of their field. And there were those academic engineers who thought that history and other humanities and social science courses took up instructional time better spent on technical matters. Waddell called on the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education – as the American Society for Engineering Education was then known – to support the writing of a history of engineering suitable for use in engineering schools. However, sufficient funds were not available, and the idea languished. Around mid-century, funding did become available to establish a general education program for engineers at Case Institute of Technology. Among the new faculty members hired was Melvin Kranzberg (1917–1995), a European historian who was expected to teach a course and write a text on Western Civilization. Kranzberg had
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been active in a study of the nontechnical aspects of engineering education, and in 1956 he became chair of a committee charged with exploring ways in which the engineering education society could cooperate with the History of Science Society in developing mutually beneficial programs. It made sense to Kranzberg and a small band of historians teaching engineers that they should concentrate on technology rather than science in their courses. Unfortunately, there was not much of a professional outlet for their scholarship, because the HSS gave little time at its meetings or space in its journal, Isis, to technology. Increasingly, it became evident to the band of historians of technology that a new society with a new journal was needed. In 1957, their intentions were made explicit to representatives of HSS, and in 1958 the Society for the History of Technology was incorporated. The sociologist William F. Ogburn (1886–1959) became SHOT’s first president and Kranzberg the first editor of the society’s journal. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, who would later become president of the society, recalled that when she was a graduate student in the 1960s the young field of the history of technology was described as “just for dummies who can’t understand science.” (See American Heritage of Invention & Technology, Summer 2003, p. 60.) The sensitivity of the young SHOT organization to its engineering constituency was evident when it came time to name the society’s journal. There were those who feared that Technology and Culture might put off some engineers; however, in the end, that title prevailed over other possibilities such as Vulcan, Technics, and the pedestrian Journal of the History of Technology. In SHOT’s early years, engineers and engineers-turned-historians played active roles in the society’s operation, and the bridge engineer David Steinman (1886–1960) was set to become its second
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president. Unfortunately, he died before he could take office. For a taste of what historians of technology think of and write about engineering, see Terry S. Reynolds, ed., The Engineer in America: A Historical Anthology from Technology and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). honor societies. Tau Beta Pi was founded in 1885 at Lehigh University as an engineering alternative to the humanities honorary Phi Beta Kappa. Students in any field of engineering can be inducted into Tau Beta Pi; however, most engineering fields also have their own specific honor society. These include, with the date and institution of their founding, along with the relevant field of specialization, the following: Alpha Eta Mu Beta Alpha Nu Sigma
1979
Louisiana Tech
1979
Alpha Pi Mu
1959
American Nuclear Society Georgia Tech
Chi Epsilon
1922
Eta Kappa Nu
1904
Omega Chi Epsilon Pi Alpha Epsilon Pi Epsilon Tau
1931
Pi Tau Sigma
1915
1980s 1947
University of Illinois University of Illinois University of Illinois Kansas State University University of Oklahoma University of Illinois/ University of Wisconsin
biomedical engineering nuclear engineering industrial engineering civil engineering electrical engineering chemical engineering architectural engineering petroleum engineering mechanical engineering
146 Sigma Gamma Tau Tau Alpha Pi
hubris in engineering 1953 1953
Purdue University Southern Technical Institute
aerospace engineering engineering technologies
Typical qualifications for induction into an engineering honor society are ranking near the top of one’s class, having good character, and showing professional promise. Individual chapters of the societies are usually designated by state with a Greek letter indicating the order of founding of the chapter. Thus, for example, Manhattan College’s chapter of Tau Beta Pi is designated Xi of New York. Because Xi is the fourteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, we know that Manhattan’s chapter was the fourteenth established in that state. See, for example, “Technology and Societies,” American Scientist, March-April 1998, pp. 113–117. hubris in engineering. Archimedes claimed he could move the earth with a lever, if only he could locate a suitable fulcrum and place on which to stand. Renaissance engineers generally knew that levers, like stone obelisks and wooden ships, could only be scaled up so much before they broke under their own weight. However, it took Galileo, who opened his treatise on two new sciences with stories of well-considered things that did not work, to explain how physical considerations that may be ignored on a small scale can dominate the behavior of a larger but geometrically similar design. Unfortunately, what Galileo knew in the Renaissance was not always remembered in subsequent centuries. With the development of large-scale iron production technologies, it became possible for engineers not only to dream of larger and larger structures but also to realize them. Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the heroic Victorian
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engineer known as the “little giant,” was famous for his expansive thinking. Although his contemporaries saw the Great Western Railway terminating at Land’s End, in southwestern England, Brunel saw it continuing on in the form of a steamship carrying passengers and cargo across the Atlantic Ocean to America. His Great Western became one of the first ships to disprove the conventional scientific wisdom of the time: that no steam-powered ship could be built large enough to carry sufficient coal for such a voyage. If the Atlantic could be crossed, why not greater expanses of sea? Brunel’s leviathan steamship, the Great Eastern, was large enough to carry all the coal it would need to sail from England to the Indian Ocean. Although the 692-foot-long ship was structurally sound, it proved to be too large for most harbors and thus was a commercial failure that would eventually be cut up for scrap. A larger ship was not to be built for almost half a century. The design and development of the supersonic Concorde airliner repeated a similar pattern, with the technologically sweet aircraft seeing limited service because its sonic boom made it unwelcome over the populous environs of major airports. Other supersonic projects were abandoned as a result. The designs of engineers must be more than just strong enough and fast enough; they must also be compatible with the existing physical, social, and political infrastructure. Engineers do not manifest their hubris only in great ships, planes, and long-span bridges, of course. The science and technology writer Willy Ley, in Engineers’ Dreams (New York: Viking, 1954), described some of the grandest schemes ever imagined by engineers: damming the Congo River to create the largest lake in Africa; draining the Mediterranean Sea to reclaim the land for crowded Europe; building a tunnel between England and France. This last was, of course, realized when the Channel Tunnel opened in 1994, two centuries after the idea was first
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considered. While the Congo is not likely to be dammed in the foreseeable future, the Three Gorges Dam in China, whose construction displaced more than one million people, does now back up water on the Yangtze River for almost 400 miles, making Chongqing accessible to oceangoing shipping. The decision about whether to dam a river is more often a political decision than a technical one. Engineers can dream, but it takes political savvy and resolve, not to mention money, to start the machinery that will reshape the Earth. The ultimate success of grand engineering schemes is frequently limited by factors tangential to the main idea – by details that are decidedly low tech or even nontechnical – as was the case with the Concorde. When engineers ignore these factors or treat them as not deserving of the same careful analysis as the main technological challenge, disaster can occur. The sinking of the Titanic might not have resulted in such a tragic loss of life had the ship’s vulnerability been acknowledged by having enough lifeboats to accommodate all on board. The space shuttle Challenger might not have exploded had managers heeded engineers’ warnings about the behavior of O-rings in cold weather, rather than been emboldened by the two-dozen successful space shuttle missions that had preceded Flight 51L. And the shuttle Columbia may not have disintegrated during reentry had the shedding of insulating foam upon launch not become an accepted anomaly within the shuttle program. In short, colossal accidents tend to happen when overconfidence and complacency prevail. Engineers and managers of technology, being human, can come to believe in themselves and their creations beyond reasonable limits. When failures occur, they naturally cause setbacks although usually not the abandonment of dreams for ever grander and more ambitious structures and systems. As soon as the cause of a failed attempt is sufficiently understood and the sting of its
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tragedy is sufficiently remote, engineers tend to pick up where they left off in their pursuit of ever greater goals. This is as it should be in engineering as in life, for it is as much a part of the human spirit to build longer and to fly faster as it is to probe deeper into the atom and further into the universe than our predecessors. Just as scientists advance their knowledge by standing on the shoulders of giants, so it is that by climbing onto the spires of existing skyscrapers engineers reach for ever taller heights in their own skyscrapers. If this be hubris, it is an admirable trait that has, on balance, led to cumulative progress in which engineers and nonengineers alike take pride. (Adapted from “The Hubris of Extreme Engineering,” Scientific American Presents – Extreme Engineering, November 1999, pp. 94–104.)
I image of engineers. The perception of a poor public image has led engineers and engineering societies over the years to call for action to improve or reinvent the stereotypical image of the engineer. Comparisons are usually drawn to the images of medical doctors and lawyers and their visibility in movies and television shows. What is often meant by image is public recognition and respect; however, it is unlikely that these will be won by engineers and engineering until the education of engineers becomes more like that of doctors and lawyers. Many successful television series, from “L. A. Law” to the more recent “Harry’s Law,” have projected to the public the excitement that could be found in the legal profession. This kind of image-making prompted some engineers in the early 1990s to propose that a television series, usually referred to as “L. A. Engineer,” be developed to bring attention to their profession. Among the most articulate advocates of the idea was Norman Augustine (born in 1935), former chairman of the Martin-Marietta Corporation and a consummate champion of the profession. (See Norman R. Augustine, “‘L. A. Engineer’,” The Bridge, Fall 1994, pp. 27–29.) While there appeared to be much enthusiasm among engineers for the idea at the time, it did not develop any serious support from the American television industry or from professional underwriting or potential commercial sponsors. 150
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A successful television series based on engineers in dramatic engineering situations was produced in South Africa in the mid-1990s and was made possible through the support of engineering groups in that country. No similar level of financial or artistic support has been forthcoming in America. There have been, however, numerous successful shows about engineering projects produced by the Public Broadcasting System and by the Discovery, History, and other cable-television channels. It is unfortunate that engineers have the reputation of not being the most exciting guests at a party. One recurring anecdote has to do with looking in the Yellow Pages for the telephone number of a hole-drilling contractor to construct, say, a mine shaft, tunnel, or well. On the appropriate page in the phone book the following listing has been found: “Boring: see Civil Engineers.” imagineering. The term “imagineering” – a combination of the words imagination and engineering – was coined by Walter Elias Disney (1901–1966), whose company established the monogrammatic WED Enterprises in 1952 to carry out design and development work for Disney theme parks. The company name was changed to Walt Disney Imagineering in 1986. Among other things, “imagineers” design and develop the remarkable amusements and environments people enjoy at places such as Disneyland and Disney World. industrial design. This field of endeavor came into existence formally in America in the late 1920s, when selfconfident consultants such as Raymond Lowey (1893– 1986), a former fashion illustrator, and Henry Dreyfuss (1904–1972), a former designer of theater sets, began to redesign the appearance of everything from copying machines and telephones to cigarette packs and company logos. Industrial designers such as these were responsible for the streamlined look of the static (pencil sharpeners
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and toasters) and dynamic (automobiles and locomotives) alike that marked an era. Industrial designers also concern themselves with the location, appearance, and operation of controls, such as those on smart phones and those in the control rooms of nuclear power plants, although this activity tends now to be more closely associated with human factors engineers. According to Machine Design (November 26, 1992, p. 39) “Engineers . . . basically deal with how a product operates. Industrial designers are more concerned with how the product is operated.” industry. Engineers while still in school, along with their professors, often refer to any engineering activity conducted outside the campus environment as taking place “out in industry.” The term “industry,” for academic engineers at least, is roughly equivalent to “the real world.” infrastructure. Infrastructure is a later-twentieth century term for those parts of the built environment that previously were known collectively as public works. Although the word infrastructure in its present meaning can only be dated from the 1920s, the concept existed in ancient times, as evidenced by the Roman aqueducts, baths, and water distribution system generally. See Frontinus, The Water Supply of the City of Rome, translated by Clemens Herschel (Boston: New England Water Works Association, 1973). As part of its 1988 report on a three-year study of the condition of America’s infrastructure, the National Council on Public Works Improvement included a report card on which such categories as aviation, highways, mass transit, and water resources were graded. At the time, the average letter grade given was C and an estimated investment of $0.2 trillion over five years was required to improve it. See National Council on Public Works Improvement, Fragile Foundations: A Report on America’s Public Works (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1988).
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In the late 1990s, the American Society of Civil Engineers assumed the role of grading the condition of our infrastructure and began issuing its own report cards. Over the next decade, the average grade was a D or a D+, with the estimated investment needed to bring conditions up to a mediocre C climbing to $2.2 trillion over five years. The fiscal crises that emerged in 2008 led to the federal government passing stimulus legislation; however, in spite of infrastructure improvement being stated as a motivating factor, a relatively small portion of stimulus funds actually were used for that purpose. See American Society of Civil Engineers, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure (Reston, Va.: ASCE, 2009). See also “Infrastructure,” American Scientist, September–October 2009, pp. 370–374. The infrastructure, with the term increasingly encompassing Internet access and homeland security, is sure to remain for some time a hot-button issue politically and technically, especially as increasing calls for fiscal restraint are likely to result in a diminishing amount of funds available for improvements. The contraction of funding for infrastructure maintenance and improvement will likely prove to be a very short-sighted strategy. insight in engineering. Engineers speak of insight into problems, which is closely related to experience and judgment. M. J. French devotes a whole chapter to the concept in his Conceptual Design for Engineers, second edition (London and Berlin: Design Council and Springer-Verlag, 1985), in which he writes, “Perhaps the most important single prerequisite for good solutions to design problems is insight. From numerous instances it may be inferred that insight frequently develops by large steps – it ‘dawns’ or ‘comes in a flash’ – but the steps are separated by laborious stretches of mental spadework.” The nature of insight has seldom, if ever, been more eloquently described than it was by the Victorian engineer
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and naval architect John Scott Russell (1808–1882), who, in speaking to young students in the preface to his masterful 1865 work, The Modern System of Naval Architecture, put it as follows: Insight – that is the grand gift – insight into the nature of things you have to deal with; insight into the nature of the water that has to carry your ship, whether it will carry it, or let it sink; insight into whether the water will let your ship go easily the way it wants to go, or refuse to make way for it pliantly; insight into the wants of your shipowner, – how it is that his ship should be built, in order to serve him and bring him back the money he entrusts to your responsibility, with interest and profit, for his time, pains, and risk; insight into the fitness and endurance of all the materials you employ; insight to select for each use the fittest, best, most lasting sorts; insight to guide your hand in every line you draw, and to make you feel, as the pencil swerves a hairbreadth to the fuller or the finer line, either that you are filling the owner’s pocket, or stealing away his just gains to gratify some meretricious taste; insight to know beforehand, and make sure, that in all the perils of the sea, and in the trying moments when destruction seems to hover over the work of your hands, the dwellers in your ship, safe in the provisions of your wise forethought, may feel safe and secure, and pray to heaven to bless the builder of this good ship; insight to do all this – foresight, forethought, judgement, discipline, and skill – that matured insight is to be your highest aim and achievement, and is only to be reached by continuous thinking, earnest work, honest, unceasing toil, and a painstaking, ceaseless study of all the experience and knowledge of others, that you may be able to reach.
As alluded to here, closely related to insight is judgment. The element of considered judgment, based on precedent and past experience, is what distinguishes the professional engineer from the technologist. See, for example, John Donnicliff and Don U. Deere, eds., Judgment
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in Geotechnical Engineering: The Professional Legacy of Ralph B. Peck (Vancouver, B.C.: BiTech Publishers, 1991). intuition in engineering. Closely related to insight is intuition. The Italian structural engineer Pier Luigi Nervi (1891–1979) was a strong believer in intuition in design, and he wrote about it in his book Structures, which was translated into English by Giuseppina and Mario Salvadori: It is highly regrettable that some of the highest qualities of the human mind, such as intuition and direct apprehension, have been banned from our schools and have been overwhelmed by abstract and impersonal mathematical formulas. We cannot forget that in the distant past intuition allowed the execution of works which cannot be analyzed today by the most modern theoretical methods, and before which we must bow in reverent and humble admiration. . . . The essential part of the design of a building consists in conceiving and proportioning its structural system; in evaluating intuitively any dangerous thermal conditions and support settlements, in choosing materials and construction methods best adapted to the final purpose of the work and to its environment; and, finally, in seeking economy. When all these essential problems have been solved and the structure is thus completely defined, then and only then can we and should we apply the formulas of mathematical theory of elasticity to specify with greater accuracy its resisting elements. And we should not forget that the same results may also be obtained by model analysis, and that model analysis remains the only possible approach when the problem is too complicated to permit an analytical solution. A project cannot be studied without this first, intuitive, design stage. I have built great structures whose final dimensions were established exclusively on the basis of experimental model analysis following an initial creative design phase. . . .
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Although Nervi was writing in the mid-1950s, when the digital computer was in its infancy and not yet routinely applied to structural engineering problems, his words are as valid today, with “model analysis” understood to include “computer model analysis.” See Pier Luigi Nervi, Structures (New York: F. W. Dodge Corp., 1956). inventions without necessity. When the inventor Aaron S. Lapin (1924–1999) died, it was not he who was pictured in his obituary but rather the product for which he was best known – a can of Reddi-wip. The distinctive red-and-white label of this “product celebrity” had become an icon of American consumerism worthy of an Andy Warhol pop painting. Lapin introduced his whipped cream packaged in an aerosol spray can in 1946, and he was a millionaire by mid-century. Lapin’s company, the Clayton Corporation, did more than put whipped cream in a can. It made its own aerosol valves, which could also control the release of other consumer products, such as shaving cream. Although Clayton was one of the first companies to package shaving cream as an aerosol product, Lapin decided not to market it in competition with manufacturers who were potential customers for his valves. Aaron Lapin’s story epitomizes the dream of countless American inventors who hope to strike it rich with a niche item, a little luxury that no one but the inventor dreamed that we needed but that all of us find indispensable once it is marketed. Whipped cream certainly existed before Reddi-wip, and it can still be made with a little heavy cream and “elbow grease” – or an electric mixer. Whipping cream by hand or machine can be a touchy process, though, and it seems to go least well when warm apple pie is getting cold waiting for the topping. How much less anxiety there is to have a can of Reddi-wip in the refrigerator; however, that still does not make it a necessity.
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Contrary to conventional wisdom, necessity is not the mother of invention. Successful inventors do not necessarily search for what the consumer needs; they are constantly on the lookout for what we don’t need. We don’t need the hassle of whipping cream; we don’t need the hassle of brushing up a lather of soap with which to shave. Where ordinary people resign themselves to bother and frustration, inventors see opportunity. So many of the little things of everyday life that we take for granted have had their origins in what virtually everyone but a single inventor has cursed but lived with. Once the invention is available to us, however, we can’t live without it. The luxury becomes necessity. King Gillette (1855–1932) is famous for inventing a popular device that was not absolutely necessary. He took the advice to invent “something that would be used and thrown away,” so that there would be repeat sales, and came up with the idea of the safety razor. Skeptics did not believe anyone would buy blades that could not be sharpened, but they were wrong. Straight razors served my grandfather well, albeit with a nick now and then, and I watched my father strop the old razor once or twice during his visits home. I even recall having had haircuts finished off with a straight razor to my teenage sideburns, and watching the barber use one to shave the man in the next chair. Fortunately, most of those of my generation never had to use a straight razor ourselves, yet I expect we would have learned to live with it had Gillette not produced his improvement. I can’t say how many blades I have used since I began to shave, but Gillette was certainly prescient in counting on making his fortune by selling the consumable blades more so than the reusable razor body that held them. In 1903 he made his first sale of a lot of 168 blades. By the end of the next year, more than twelve million had been made. He became a millionaire, which gave him the leisure
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to become a utopian socialist who believed competition to be wasteful and who thought engineers should organize economic efforts in the ideal society. Yet, we remember Gillette not for this philosophy but for his razor blades. Automobile windshield wipers work somewhat like a razor, shaving the drops of water off with each pass. Not very long ago the standard device was driven by a constant-speed motor, its rotary motion converted by a kinematic linkage into a hypnotic back-and-forth sweeping one. Everybody knew that these wipers were annoying in a light rain or drizzle, with the blades rubbing and chattering over the dry spots. We all lived with this minor annoyance, adapting by turning the wipers on and off manually. Robert Kearns (1927–2005) was an inventor who figured out a more convenient way to deal with the problem, however, and he came up with the idea of the intermittent windshield wiper that is now standard. Who needed it then? Who wants to drive without it now? Kearns figured he could realize the most profit from his patented invention by selling it to auto manufacturers, and so he showed it to them. While none chose to license the device, Kearns later noticed that his idea was being incorporated into new-model cars. He sued, and his first settlement, after legal fees, amounted to 33 cents for every one of the 20 million Fords, Mercurys, and Lincolns that in the interim had been sold with intermittent windshield wipers. The story of lone inventor Kearns against the automobile manufacturing giants has been told in print and on screen. See John Seabrook, “The Flash of Genius,” which appeared in the New Yorker for January 11, 1993. The story formed the basis for the 2008 docudrama Flash of Genius, directed by Marc Abraham. Not all of the little things that we use every day bring such handsome rewards, nor are they expected to. Some inventors, usually called engineers, trade the uncertainty of independent inventing, and the entrepreneurial effort that
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its exploitation requires, for the security of a steady – if modest – income. These employees often sign agreements with their employers to assign to the company or institution any patents that arise out of the inventing the engineers are paid to do as part of their day-to-day job. Engineering of this kind might be thought of as institutionalized invention. Many now-familiar products and devices have come out of invention factories, as Thomas Edison (1847– 1931) called his laboratories. Douglas Engelbart (born in 1925) was an engineer with Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) working on augmenting human intellect through computers. In 1963, he proposed a “writing machine,” which we now recognize as a word processor, and invented the computer mouse. He also developed an early version of e-mail. Because Engelbart himself did not exploit any of these inventions, he did not realize the financial rewards of a Gillette or a Kearns; however, in time he was widely recognized for his achievements with numerous awards, including the 1997 Lemelson-MIT Prize. This prize, which “honors outstanding mid-career inventors dedicated to improving our world through technological invention and innovation,” carries a stipend of $500,000, which amounts to perhaps a fraction of a fraction of a cent for every mouse in use today. Another invention that no one realized they could not live without is the Post-it note. Arthur Fry (born in 1931), a chemical engineer with the 3M Corporation, was using some of his discretionary company inventing time when he came up with the idea of the little slips of paper with an “unglue” that did not stick permanently. He had become annoyed, as so many others may have, that bookmarks kept falling into or out of the hymnals he was using on Sunday mornings. Instead of swearing when he lost his place, he came up with a sticky bookmark that could easily be removed. He found little enthusiasm within 3M for
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exploiting his invention; however his persistence paid off with a chance to test-market the pads. The idea stuck to anyone who tried them, and within a decade of the invention of Post-its they were staples of the home and office. Not all the little items on our desks can be traced to a single inventor. The ever-useful paper clip has been around for more than a century, yet its inventor remains anonymous. What we have come to know as the Gem, after the British company Gem Ltd. that first made and marketed it, has nonetheless become a standard against which all other paper clips are compared. As with all artifacts, however, the paper clip that seems to be perfected in the eyes of everyday users is full of faults in the eyes of inventors. These severest critics of technology have: rounded its ends to reduce its propensity to tear papers; given it a lip to aid in its application; added extra bends so it can be applied from either end; and in seemingly endless variations rebent, retwisted, and reshaped what most of us thought was a perfect Gem. Hundreds of patents for improvements to the Gem have been issued over the past century, with each inventorentrepreneur hopeful of capturing a slice of the market. Patents are not necessary to manufacture something new, but rather are viewed as providing the right to exclude others from making and selling it. Unfortunately, many a would-be paper-clip magnate cannot find a manufacturing partner who wants to exercise the right to license the invention. The tens of thousands of dollars hopeful inventors have invested in the patent process and in invention marketing schemes have often led to naught. For every entrepreneur-inventor such as Aaron Lapin and his Reddi-wip, there are hundreds of thousands of engineers working away daily at institutionalized inventing, and countless pauper-inventors twisting pieces of wire into shapes that will never see a merchant’s shelf. The odds are long for becoming a millionaire like Lapin, who
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“bought Cadillacs two at a time and lived in Gloria Swanson’s furnished mansion in Hollywood,” but the free-enterprise system holds out the opportunity for those who wish to take a chance at it. There are no doubt future Aaron Lapins at work this very moment, looking with an inventor’s critical eye at something all the rest of us use without a second thought, ready to create another necessary luxury. It is people like these who have brought us smart phones and other electronic gadgets and will no doubt bring us the next big thing. (A version of this entry appeared originally as “The Uses of Useless Things,” Wall Street Journal, July 26, 1999, p. A22.) invention vs. innovation. Invention is generally considered a more informal activity than engineering, and some engineering design may be viewed as institutionalized invention. Innovation implies invention taken to a higher level, in that it connotes a degree of success in the marketplace that alters the way people think about and use technology. According to Scott Berkun, who was involved with the development of Microsoft’s popular Internet Explorer, innovation means “significant positive change.” See Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation, expanded and revised edition (Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly Media, 2010). Invention is the conception and articulation of something new. Inventions that are deemed novel, useful, and nonobvious can be patented; however, not every patented invention becomes realized as a manufactured product or an implemented process. Conversely, not all inventions are patented, with some inventors preferring to keep their idea secret, thereby maintaining a potentially longer period of protection than that granted by the patent office. The formula for Coca Cola was not patented, yet it has remained a trade secret for more than a century. Other inventors do not patent their inventions because of the cost in time and money of pursuing a patent.
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Those inventions, whether patented or not, that go on to have a profound impact on the way things are made or used are known as innovations. Thus, whereas a minor improvement in a common device such as the paper clip could certainly be considered an invention, the development of the integrated circuit that made possible the plethora of electronic devices and gadgets that are available today was definitely an innovation. Innovation drives economic growth, and with the rise of the Chinese and Indian economies there came increased calls for investing in innovation in America so the nation could remain competitive in the global marketplace. How to promote innovation became a topic of debate, however, with some politicians calling for more funding of basic scientific research and others claiming it was engineering and not science that provided a more direct route to innovation. inventors. In contrast to the popular view of the inventor as an eccentric individualist who often works alone, engineers tend to be viewed as conservative conformists who work in groups. Both stereotypic views are gross generalizations, of course, and the distinction between inventors and engineers can often be difficult to discern. Trained as an engineer, the inventor Jerome Lemelson (1923–1997) was granted more than 500 patents for inventions relating to robotics, machine vision, and the VCR, with some granted posthumously. His patent output made him America’s third most prolific inventor, behind Thomas Edison (1847–1931) and Elihu Thomson (1853– 1937), the electrical engineer whose Thomson-Houston Electric Company was merged in 1892 with Edison’s to form the General Electric Company. Lemelson was thought by some to have favored “paper patents,” whose inventions he had no intention of ever making or marketing. Rather, he aggressively sued manufacturers whom he
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claimed violated his patents, some of which did not surface from the Patent Office for years after a manufacturer was committed to a product. Lemelson was accused of deliberately keeping these “submarine patents” submerged in the paperwork of the patent process until the inventor was ready to attack. Such a strategy, whether deliberate or an innocent byproduct of a long drawn out and antiquated process, made Lemelson rich, and he became a significant benefactor of inventors and inventors to be. See “An Independent Inventor,” American Scientist, May–June 1998, pp. 222–225. The Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation was endowed by the Lemelson Foundation established by Jerome Lemelson and his wife Dorothy Lemelson. The Lemelson Center is headquartered in the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C. The Lemelson-MIT Prize, established by Lemelson and first awarded in 1995, has been called “the nation’s largest prize for innovation and invention,” coming with a $500,000 honorarium for the winner. The National Inventors Hall of Fame dates from 1973, when it was established jointly by patent attorneys associated with the National Council of Patent Law Associations and representatives of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. For a couple of decades the foyer of that office contained displays honoring inductees into the Hall of Fame. Since 1995, displays have been housed in Inventure Place, the museum that is the permanent home of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, which is located in Akron, Ohio. An updated edition of the “Black Book” published each year by the museum contains sketches of the honored inventors and the patent for which they have been recognized. For some insight into inventors, some of whom are engineers, see Kenneth A. Brown, Inventors at Work:
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Interviews with 16 Notable American Inventors (Redmond, Wash.: Microsoft Press, 1988). See also Jacob Rabinow, Inventing for Fun and Profit (San Francisco: San Francisco Press, 1990), and “From Connections to Collections,” American Scientist, September–October 1998, pp. 416–420. Iron Bridge. Generally considered the world’s first significant bridge to be made entirely of metal, this castiron structure was erected in 1779 over the upper Severn River near Coalbrookdale, England, where seventy years earlier Abraham Darby (1678–1717) had begun to smelt iron ore from the region with coke made from local coal. The bridge project was led by the architect Thomas F. Pritchard (c. 1723–1777), with the detailed design and the casting of the ten half-ribs of the structure being carried out under the direction of Abraham Darby III (1750– 1791), the grandson of the foundry’s first owner. The
Iron Bridge, which dates from 1779
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settlement that sprang up around the bridge came to be known as Ironbridge and the area Ironbridge Gorge. Iron Bridge’s 100-foot span is semicircular in profile, thus making it structurally similar to that of a classic stone arch. The cast-in details of assembly, however, resemble those of a timber structure. Iron Bridge, which remains open to pedestrian traffic, has become an icon of the Industrial Revolution. For a fictional account of circumstances surrounding the bridge’s planning and design, see David Morse, The Iron Bridge (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998). iron ring. A ring of iron, steel, or similar metal is worn by some engineers on the little finger of their working hand to serve as a reminder of their responsibility to society and to symbolize their membership in and commitment to the principles of their profession. The presence of such a ring used to be an almost sure sign that its wearer was an engineer who was educated in Canada. Although the tradition of wearing an iron ring is still most often associated with Canadian engineers, Scandinavian and other European engineers have had similar traditions, and stainlesssteel rings began to be worn by some engineers in the United States in the 1970s. The presentation of iron rings to engineers in Canada takes place at the highly ritualized Iron Ring Ceremony, which dates from the 1920s when it had its origins at the University of Toronto. It has traditionally been considered a secret ceremony, although now close friends and relatives of the recipient may be able to attend. The longsecret text for the “Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer” was drafted by Rudyard Kipling to serve as the script for the ceremony during which Canadian engineers recite the pledge known as the “Obligation of the Engineer” and receive their iron rings, the symbols of their belonging to the engineering profession. The following text
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has been reproduced by Paul H. Wright in his book, Introduction to Engineering, second edition (New York: Wiley, 1994): I, , in the presence of these my betters and my equals in my Calling, bind myself upon my Honour and Cold Iron, that, to the best of my knowledge and power, I will not henceforward suffer or pass, or be privy to the passing of, Bad Workmanship or Faulty Material in aught that concerns my works before men as an Engineer, or in my dealings with my own Soul before my Maker. My Time I will not refuse; my Thought I will not grudge; my Care I will not deny towards the honour, use, stability and perfection of any works to which I may be called to set my hand. My Fair Wages for that work I will openly take. My Reputation in my Calling I will honourably guard; but I will in no way go about to compass or wrest judgment or gratification from any one with whom I may deal. And further, I will early and warily strive my uttermost against professional jealousy or the belittling of my working-brothers, in any field of their labour. For my assured failures and derelictions, I ask pardon beforehand of my betters and my equals in my Calling here assembled; praying that in the hour of my temptations, weakness and weariness, the memory of this my Obligation and of the company before whom it was entered into, may return to me to aid, comfort and restrain.
See “The Iron Ring,” American Scientist, May–June 1995, pp. 229–232; To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, forthcoming), chapter 8. See also Order of the Engineer.
J jokes about engineers. The words of an imagined recent engineering graduate, “Once I couldn’t even spell injunear, and now I are one,” is a familiar commentary that engineers make about themselves, perhaps reflecting what they think the rest of the world thinks of them. Then there is what is perhaps one of the most popular selfcharacterizations of the engineer, which takes the form of a question-answer interchange: “How can you tell an introverted engineer? He looks at his shoes when he is talking to you. How can you tell an extroverted engineer? She looks at your shoes when she is talking to you.” Another engineer joke might go as follows: A lawyer, a priest, and an engineer were scheduled to be guillotined. First the lawyer’s neck was placed in the device, but when the executioner pulled on the latch, the blade got stuck and did not fall. The lawyer was told that it must have been a sign of a higher form of justice and that his life was spared. He walked away saying justice had indeed been served. Next the priest’s neck was locked in place. When the executioner pulled the latch, the blade also got stuck. Higher powers were again assumed to have intervened. The priest was released, and he walked away praising the Lord. Then the engineer was locked in place, and as he waited for the blade to drop, he craned his neck to inspect the mechanism of the guillotine. Just before the executioner was about to pull the latch, the engineer said, “Wait, I see the problem. And I know how to fix it.” 167
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Still another engineer joke follows the familiar formula of contrasting approaches to solving a problem: A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer were asked how to put out a fire. The mathematician considered the situation and established that a minimum number of bucketsful of water were sufficient to put out the blaze. That a solution existed satisfied him and he left assuming someone else would find the water. The physicist took numerous measurements, including air temperature, wind speed, and water pressure, and constructed a computer model of the fire. After using the model to predict how many bucketsful of water were needed, he left to write up the result as an article for a physics journal. The engineer, recognizing the urgency of the situation, ordered the bucket brigade to begin even as he began a back-of-the-envelope calculation, which was to include multiplying the resulting number of buckets of water by a large factor of safety. The fire was brought under control even before his calculation was complete, and the engineer threw his envelope on the smoldering remains. Another situational joke involves three engineers: a civil engineer, a mechanical engineer, and a software engineer, who are driving down the street when suddenly their car comes to an unexpected halt. Each of the engineers approaches the problem from his or her own professional perspective. The civil engineer says, “Let’s check the road for some kind of pavement problem.” The mechanical engineer says, “No, why don’t we look under the hood for a problem with the engine?” The software engineer chimes in: “I’ve got a better idea. Let’s turn off the ignition, roll up the windows, get out, close all the doors, and then get back in and try to restart it.” See the “Funny Bone to Pick” department of Engineering Times (October 1997, p. 10). There are light-bulb jokes about nearly every profession, so it should come as no surprise that engineering is no exception, even if the joke characterizes the engineer
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in a way opposite to the fire joke above: How many engineers does it take to change a light bulb? It depends on how you count. A forensic engineer must first determine how the old bulb blew out. A specification engineer must then determine what kind of bulb to order for the replacement. A design engineer must then create a plan to change the bulb. A junior engineer must then check the plans. A senior engineer must then seal the plans. Then a value engineer must determine if a more economical plan exists. When a plan is finally decided upon, a site engineer must supervise the installation of the new bulb. An inspection engineer must then verify that the bulb has indeed been changed properly. Given that many, if not all, of these tasks could conceivably be done by one and the same engineer, a single engineer could indeed change a light bulb. A joke about the classroom behavior of engineers has been repeated in many a faculty meeting. When the professor walks into a classroom full of freshman engineers and greets them with “Good morning,” the class responds with a hearty “Good morning.” When the professor walks into a class full of engineering seniors and greets them with “Good morning,” silence ensues. When the professor walks into a class of engineering graduate students and greets them with “Good morning,” all of them write down in their notebooks, “Good morning.” The following “Engineers’ Tale” was being circulated during the mid 1990s: An engineer dies and reports to the Pearly Gates. Saint Peter checks his dossier and says, “Ah, You’re an engineer, but you worked for a high-tech startup company and got rich. You had a good life, so you can’t come in here.” So the engineer reports to the gates of Hell and is let in. Pretty soon, the engineer gets dissatisfied with the quality of life down there. He starts designing and building improvements. After a while, they’ve got air conditioning, flush toilets and clean water . . . . The computers have all
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been upgraded and there is high definition cable TV in all the rooms. The engineer has just completed the plans for Hades World Amusement Park. Even the clocks on the VCRs are set. The engineer is a pretty popular guy in Hell. One day God calls down to Hell and Satan answers on his new cellular phone. God asks, “So how’s it going down there in Hell?” Satan replies, “Hey, things are going great. We’ve got air conditioning, flush toilets, and cellular phones. The computers are faster than ever and we have high definition television in every room. We’ve even got roller coasters. There’s no telling what this engineer is going to come up with next.” God replies, “What? You’ve got an engineer? That’s a mistake, he should have never been sent to Hell. We want him back.” Satan says, “No way! I like having him on the staff, and I’m keeping him.” God says, “Send him back up here or I’ll sue.” Satan laughs loud and long and answers, “Yeah, right! And just where are you going to find a lawyer?”
In fact, many of the jokes told about engineers put them in a fairly positive light, in that they are depicted as naively helpful, overly conscientious, and careful to a fault. In contrast to jokes about lawyers, say, jokes about engineers make them come across as likeable, if nerdy, members of society, as good citizens. (Adapted from “Laughing at Ourselves,” ASEE Prism, November 2000, p. 19.) In the mid-1990s, Engineering Times began to publish jokes and humor relating to engineers and engineering on a regular basis. See also Carolyn F. Gilkey, “The Physicist, the Mathematician and the Engineer: Scientists and the Professional Slur,” Western Folklore, April 1990, pp. 215–220. joylessness of engineering. Sandford Fleming (1827– 1915), the Scottish-born Canadian civil engineer who
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served as chief engineer of the Inter-Colonial Railway and the Canadian Pacific Railway and who developed our international system of standard time, wrote of his profession: It is one of the misfortunes of the profession to which I am proud to belong that our business is to make and not to enjoy; we no sooner make a rough place smooth than we must move to another and fresh field, leaving others to enjoy what we have accomplished.
He also wrote of the profession, after his experience with building the Inter-Colonial Railway: Engineers . . . are not as a rule gifted with many words. Men so gifted generally aim at achieving renown in some other sphere. . . . Silent men, such as we are, can have no such ambitions; they cannot hope for profit or place in law, they cannot look for fame in the press or the pulpit, and, above all things, they must keep clear of politics. Engineers must plod on in a distinct sphere of their own, dealing less with words and more with deeds, less with men than with matter; nature in her wild state presents difficulties for them to overcome. It is the business of their life to do battle against these difficulties and make smooth the path on which others are to tread. It is their privilege to stand between these two great forces, capital and labour, and by acting justly at all times between the employer and the employed, they may hope to command the respect of those above them equally with those under them.
Quoted in Clark Blaise, Time Lord: Sir Stanford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time (New York: Pantheon, 2001).
K keys of honor societies. Traditionally, a key is a charm worn by a member of an honorary society to signify membership. (In contrast, professional society insignia have tended to be in the form of badges and lapel pins.) As late as the middle of the twentieth century, when engineering was still almost exclusively a male profession, it was common for engineers to wear one or more keys and badges suspended from a watch-, key-, or tie-clip chain. By the end of the century, only the oldest generation of engineers followed this practice, and the insignia that professional and honor societies still offered their members increasingly took the form of cuff links, tie tacks, pendants, earrings, and lapel pins, as well as keys. The term key came to be applied to the older piece of society jewelry first in the nineteenth century, when pocket watches were common and were connected to men’s vests by watch chains, which also served to hold small winding keys. Some members of America’s oldest academic honor society, Phi Beta Kappa, which predated engineering and scientific honor societies by more than a century, altered their society badges by attaching the steel shank of a watch key to them. (Keys were necessary because the winding stem was not introduced in America until later in the nineteenth century. These watch keys were smaller versions of those used to wind grandfather clocks and spring-driven toys.) The modern honor-society key evolved from these early functional ones. According to Norman F. Ramsey, 172
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who as president of Phi Beta Kappa communicated greetings to the scientific research society Sigma Xi on the occasion of its centennial in 1986 and took the occasion to reflect on watch and society keys of the late nineteenth century, The early Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi keys had hollow stems at the bottom with a square internal cross section so that they could be used for winding a watch. Because the watches in those days were quite large and when carried by men were usually kept in the vest pocket, the key could be carried on the watch chain, where it was both decorative and useful. With the passage of time, the stem on the bottom of the key has become purely vestigial, first as a simple hollow cylinder and now no longer hollow or suitable for winding a watch even if one had a watch that could utilize such a key.
The key lost its function when the stem-wound pocket watch replaced the key-wound one. After the 1920s, the wrist watch became increasingly popular, and so pocket watches were often put away in drawers. The chains that once secured a watch to the vest or trousers, both of which articles of clothing had been made with a watch pocket, were no longer necessary. That did not mean that watch chains ceased to be used. As long as engineers dressed in their vested suits, it was common to see one or more society keys or badges suspended in open view from a watch chain draped across the vest, even if there was no watch in the pocket in which the chain terminated. In time, as
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vests and watch chains fell out of fashion, engineers began increasingly to display their keys on tie bars, often from a small chain that hung from the tie bar in a way that mimicked the watch chain draped across a vest. In the 1970s, as the business dress of engineers became less formal, there was concern that keys would no longer be worn at all. The Bent of Tau Beta Pi (Summer 1974, p. 28) published a tongue-in-cheek appeal to its readers for ideas on how to display the society’s key, which is known as the bent. Readers responded with ideas that ranged from affixing it to a belt buckle to embedding it in the face of a ring. (See The Bent of Tau Beta Pi, Fall 1974, pp. 31– 33; Winter 1975, p. 32; Spring 1975, p. 26.) In the meantime, women had been admitted into Tau Beta Pi, and they began to wear the bent on necklaces, charm bracelets, and as pins. Society jewelry generally began to diversify, and the key or images of it were increasingly available as cuff links, earrings, and other forms of insignia that were far removed from the historical roots of the key as a means to wind a watch. In 1968, the astronaut William A. Anders took his Tau Beta Pi bent on the Apollo 8 space flight, which orbited the moon. The key was encased in Lucite and presented to Tau Beta Pi the next year. In the late 1970s, Tau Beta Pi member Albert W. Demmler, Jr., discovered that for some years the society’s bent had been incorrectly engraved with the date of the society’s founding (in an obscure Greek number system), and he explained the error and its correction in an enigmatically titled article: “Toc, Alpha, Omega, Tic, Pi, Tic, Epsilon, Tic,” The Bent of Tau Beta Pi, Spring 1979, pp. 28–31. The key of Chi Epsilon, the civil engineering honor society, is known as the transit, for originally its general outline was in the form of a surveyor’s transit viewed head on, with the telescope in a horizontal position and the Greek letters X and E in the objective lens. This first design for
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the key was modified when it was found to resemble too strongly Tau Beta Pi’s bent. To modify the transit, in 1923 the Greek letters X and E superimposed were added in the void between the telescope and its frame. When individual members began to insert semi-precious stones and diamonds in the objective lens, the key was modified again, with a ruby in the telescope becoming standard for all Chi Epsilon keys. See Norman F. Ramsey, “Birthday Greetings from Phi Beta Kappa,” American Scientist, September–October 1986, p. 535; “Technology and Societies,” American Scientist, March–April, 1998, pp. 113–117.
L land-grant institutions. Many state colleges and universities, especially those agricultural and mechanical institutions of earlier times (the A&Ms of today), were founded and expanded with the support of the federal government following the enactment of the Morrill Land Grant Act. This legislation, introduced by Vermont Representative Justin Morrill (1810–1898), was at first defeated by Congress in 1857 and vetoed by President James Buchanan in 1859. The absence of the Southern Congressional delegation during the Civil War allowed the act finally to be passed in 1862. The Morrill Act enabled the federal government to allocate public lands to each state for the establishment and support of colleges engaged especially in “such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts.” The purpose of the act was to promote “the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions of life.” The number of engineering schools in the United States tripled to about seventy in the decade following the passage of the Morrill Act. The institutions so formed have come to be known as land-grant institutions. The Morrill Land Grant Act also encouraged the teaching of military tactics, which explains why there developed such a strong tradition of cadets at land-grant schools such as Texas A&M and Virginia Tech, whose Blacksburg campus remains centered around an enormous parade field. 176
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A second Morrill Act was passed in 1890, this one requiring states to demonstrate that admission to a landgrant college or university was not dependent on race. Where a state could not show this to be the case, a separate school had to be established. This legislation led to the founding of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, which was established in Greensboro in 1891. Known informally as North Carolina A&T, the land-grant institution is counted among what have come to be known as historically black colleges and universities. Today, when admission to land-grant and other institutions of higher learning is open to all, many of the students who attend or aspire to attend them might be hard pressed to be able to say exactly what the designations A&M or A&T stand for. Our once largely agricultural society has graduated through mechanical and technical phases to microbiological and electronic ones. land surveying. Historically, land surveying has been closely allied with civil engineering. Thus, because George Washington was a land surveyor, he is often referred to as an engineer. Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), although commonly thought of as an anti-technologist, not only practiced surveying but in that regard on occasion identified himself as a civil engineer. He once advertised his services in a broadside, which showed the land surveyor’s concerns for accuracy, data, and drawings to be not unlike those of the engineer generally: LAND SURVEYING Of all kinds, according to the best methods known; the necessary data supplied, in order that the boundaries of Farms may be accurately described in Deeds; Woods lotted off distinctly and according to a regular plan; Roads laid out, &c., &c. Distinct and accurate Plans of Farms furnished, with the buildings thereon, of any size, and with a scale of
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feet attached, to accompany the Farm Book, so that the land may be laid out in a winter evening. Areas warranted accurate within almost any degree of exactness, and the Variation of the Compass given, so that the lines can be run again. Apply to Henry D. Thoreau.
Thoreau’s famous survey of Walden Pond, complete with soundings of its depth, demonstrates his careful and organized approach to technical problems. At the bottom of an 1852 map of Concord, Massachusetts, into which his pond surveys were incorporated, appeared the credit, “H. D. Thoreau, Civil Engineer.” Beginning in the first part of the twentieth century, with the passage of professional registration laws, land surveyors and engineers came often to be licensed by the same state boards of registration, and so a self-taught surveyor or engineer such as Thoreau no longer could legally advertise his services unless he were licensed, which usually means having taken examinations. Although Thoreau lived and learned in a time before such regulation, he and other self-taught engineers did not necessarily practice without rigor or attention to detail. In Walden, Thoreau even specified the accuracy of his measurements: three or four inches in a hundred feet. Thoreau was also seriously engaged in his father’s pencil-making business. Effectively acting as a mechanical engineer, the younger Thoreau developed a handoperated mill that produced some of the purest refined graphite available anywhere in the world at the time. Consequently, in the 1840s, Thoreau pencils were said to be the best made in America. See The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (New York: Knopf, 1990), chapter 9; and “H. D. Thoreau, Engineer,” American Heritage of Invention & Technology, Fall 1989, pp. 8–16. letters after an engineer’s name. The British are notorious for appending a string of letters to their names, and
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it is not uncommon to encounter on a business card or on the title page of a monograph a name that is shorter than the alphabet of degrees and affiliations that follows it. The practice is less common in the United States, although there are some American engineers who follow the British manner. Among some historically or frequently occurring combinations of letters appended to the names of engineers are the following, which may appear with or without the periods: C.E. This is the standard abbreviation for the degree of Civil Engineer, most commonly awarded from the midnineteenth to the early-twentieth century. C.Eng. This British abbreviation, which stands for Chartered Engineer, is analogous to the American P.E. To obtain the C.Eng. designation, an individual must graduate from an appropriate engineering curriculum, serve a training period of three years, and pass examinations administered by the professional institution pertinent to the individual’s field. There are also continuing education requirements. The British engineering institutions sponsor successful candidates for the C.Eng. designation, which is actually awarded by the Engineering Council, an umbrella organization formerly known as the Council of Engineering Institutions. C.Eng. is the highest designation awarded by the Engineering Council, which also oversees the lower level qualifications of Incorporated Engineer and Technician, and serves as license to practice in the United Kingdom and the European Community. D.E.E. These letters after the name of an engineer indicate that he or she is a Diplomate of the American Academy of Environmental Engineers. D.Sc. This degree, Doctor of Science, is granted by such institutions as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is generally considered equivalent to the Ph.D. It originally differed from the Ph.D. in not requiring proficiency in foreign languages; however, that distinction has all but
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disappeared with the relaxation of foreign language requirements in American doctoral programs generally. E.I.T. These letters have stood for Engineer-inTraining, indicating that an individual has passed the Fundamentals of Engineering examination and will thus, after a suitable period of experience in a responsible engineering position, be qualified to take the Principles and Practices of Engineering exam (more simply known as the P.E. exam) to become registered as a Professional Engineer (P.E.). This abbreviation is most commonly encountered ´ ´ of young engineers seeking their first or second on resum es job. The E.I.T. designation has largely been superseded by E.I., standing for Engineering Intern. F.Eng. This honorary British designation is conferred on a small number of very distinguished engineers by the Royal Society of Engineers, formerly known as the Fellowship of Engineers. Most professional societies have a Fellow grade of membership, election to which is based on technical achievement and is strictly limited, sometimes by an arcane formula. In the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, for example, “The total number selected in any one year does not exceed one-tenth of one percent of the total voting Institute membership.” In the American Academy of Mechanics, “The authorized number of Fellows who are Members in good standing shall be four times the square root of the number of Members and Corresponding Members but not less than twenty-four.” In America, it is not uncommon to find engineers so elected identifying themselves as F.IEEE or F.AAM. M.E. This abbreviation can stand for the degree of Mechanical Engineer or Master of Engineering. Older degrees tend to be the former, while more recent degrees tend to be the latter. The master’s degree is also designated M.Eng. M.I.C.E. These letters, often found appended to the name of a British civil engineer, indicate he or she is
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a Member of the Institution of Civil Engineers. Similar designations include, in the punctuation-less British style, MIChE, MIEE, MIMechE, etc. N.A.E. This abbreviation designates membership in the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. P.E. This abbreviation for Professional Engineer may only be legally appended to the name of an engineer who is licensed. In the United States, the most common route to professional licensure or registration is to graduate from an engineering bachelor’s degree program recognized by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, to pass the Fundamentals of Engineering exam (thus earning the title Engineer-in-Training or Engineer Intern), to acquire four years of engineering experience in progressively responsible positions, and to pass the Principles and Practices of Engineering exam, also known as the P.E. exam. See also professional engineer. The use of the initials P.E. after an author’s name was not allowed in publications of the American Society of Civil Engineers until the last years of the twentieth century. The ban had its roots in the nineteenth-century origins of the ASCE, which at its beginning was the only national professional engineering society and for a long time felt it should represent all of engineering in America. Indeed, widespread recognition of professional engineering standing by membership in ASCE would have made registration and licensing unnecessary. See the editorial, “Use of ‘P.E.’ – A Badge of Professionalism,” by Louis L. Guy, Jr., in Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Education and Practice, April 1993, pp. 111–112. P.Eng. This abbreviation is used in English-speaking Canada to designate a professional engineer. An engineer may use the P.Eng. designation after his or her name upon being admitted to membership in one of the provincial or territorial professional engineering organizations. The equivalent designation in French-speaking Quebec is
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“ing.” (Ing. before a name is commonly used in European countries as an honorific. See prefixes for engineers’ names.) S.E. Prior to 1915 in Illinois, building plans could only be signed by a licensed architect, and this restriction effectively barred any engineer from practicing as a prime professional. In 1915, the Illinois Legislature passed a bill establishing provisions for the licensing of structural engineers, which enabled them to practice as professionals on equal terms with architects. Licensed structural engineers, who may use the letters S.E. after their name, are regulated by a board distinct from the professional engineers board, and thus do not have to be professional engineers in Illinois. California also has provisions for individuals to take a structural engineers exam; however, in that state it can only be taken after passing the professional engineers exam, and so Californians who call themselves Structural Engineers must thus also be registered as Professional Engineers. Associations of Structural Engineers tend to be most active in regions susceptible to earthquakes or in areas where tall structures are routinely built. The Structural Engineers Association of California was founded in 1932, and the Structural Engineers Association of Illinois dates from 1965. It was founded “in response to unique problems that had been plaguing Structural Engineers in Illinois for years.” Among those problems were that the efforts of broader engineering organizations were diluted by their many constituent disciplines and that structural engineers were experiencing problems in getting their drawings approved in Chicago, a city rich in architectural tradition and influence. letters and numerals. Careful engineers take great pains to distinguish in their handwritten work some letters from their lookalike numerals. Not taking care to do so can
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lead to embarrassment or, where critical calculations are involved, to failure. Among the letters and numerals that engineers pay special attention to are: l. On some older typewriters, there was no key for the numeral 1 because the lower case letter “l” could serve a dual purpose. Even on typewriters with both keys, some typists consistently used the letter l key for both letter and numeral 1. With the advent of digital computers, such ambiguity between numbers and letters could not be tolerated and the lower case letter l and the numeral 1 could no longer be used interchangeably. However, many an engineer, and others, who had learned typing before programming, had long ago developed the bad habit of using the letter for the numeral on their typewriters and so continued the bad habit on punched cards, a practice that usually led to an error either in programming or results. Today, of course, the problem plagues the use of e-mail addresses. It is very easy to mistake the number 1 for an l in addresses such as
[email protected]. In their written work, many an older engineer developed the good habit of writing the lower-case ell in script form (i.e., ) to distinguish it from the numeral one. Such a habit would serve us well today. O. When computer programming was in its infancy, there was often confusion between the capital letter O and the numeral 0. The computer distinguished them but some engineers and others, accustomed to using the symbols interchangeably in typewritten work, did not always remember to do so in computer work. To reduce the introduction of programming errors, many engineers developed the habit of writing zeroes with a slash through the O to make it obviously distinct from the letter O, although this caused it to resemble the Greek letter phi. This latter situation can lead to some confusion, for engineers commonly mix numbers and Latin and Greek letters in their calculations, drawings, and reports.
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Z. A carelessly scribbled “zed,” as Europeans pronounce the last letter of the English alphabet, and a pronunciation that some American engineers adopt, can be confused with the numeral 2. I once had a math teacher named Mr. Zia, who on the first day of class scribbled his name on the blackboard as ZIA. Because his sans serif Z looked like a 2 and his I a 1, he was immediately nicknamed 21A and referred to as that whenever out of earshot. American engineers often write the letter Z in the European manner, with a horizontal line across the center of the slant, which reduces the likelihood that it might be confused with its numerical lookalike. (For a similar reason, because Europeans are taught to write the numeral 1 beginning with an upstroke, so they also add a horizontal line through the slant of the numeral 7 to better distinguish it.) liberal education. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (15th edition), “by integrating the study of the humanities, social sciences, mathematics, physical sciences, and technology and by providing experience in analysis, synthesis, and experimentation, the undergraduate engineering program offers a modern liberal education.” Increasingly, the engineering curriculum has been said to constitute the liberal education of the twenty-first century, in that engineers are expected to take courses in the humanities and social sciences as well as in the sciences, mathematics, and, of course, engineering. The typical liberal arts curriculum, on the other hand, rarely requires much exposure to science or mathematics, let alone engineering or technology courses. It was this discrepancy that prompted the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to establish in the early 1980s its New Liberal Arts Program, which encouraged the development of courses and curricula that featured quantitative reasoning and technology. Even at the turn of the twenty-first century, however, unless
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mandated to do so it was the uncommon English, history, or philosophy major who ventured into an engineering course to be exposed to how the other of the two cultures thinks. libraries. Most large universities used to have a separate and distinct engineering library; however, the spread of online catalogs and electronic publishing made the bricksand-mortar and books-on-shelves version of such a specialized branch library less essential to researchers and working engineers alike. This led to the dissolution of collections and the absorption of what engineering books were retained into a university’s general collection. Nevertheless, there still remain treasures to be discovered on dusty old library shelves everywhere. Before my school’s engineering library was closed, my favorite location in it was before the extra deep shelves on which the oversized volumes were piled. These large books included elaborate proposals for great projects never realized piled on final reports of commissions charged with the investigation of infamous failures. One of my favorite sets of volumes was the report on the failure of the Quebec Bridge and its redesign. I once wished to consult John Scott Russell’s Modern System of Naval Architecture; however, it was not held by my library. Without giving it much thought, I requested the three-volume set via Interlibrary Loan, an institution of inestimable value and convenience for scholars. As was customary practice, I was notified when the books arrived and went over to our main library to pick them up. As was not customary in my experience, the books came with the restriction that I could not take them out of the building. When I saw the books I understood why. Each of the three volumes was about 28 inches high by 20 inches wide by 2 inches thick and proportionately heavy. It was virtually impossible to read them except at a large library table.
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These relics, published in London in 1865, had been sent from the Princeton University Library for me to read at my leisure in the Duke Library, and I was in awe of the generosity and trust of the system. The books have no doubt since been scanned and made available digitally, but there is nothing comparable to the experience of having to deal with the girth and heft of such physical volumes. They had the odor of old books, the texture of letterpress printing, and the sweep of fold-out plates drawn and reproduced in the age of steam. Such treasures continue to be preserved in hard-copy form in real libraries. One is the Huntington Library, which is located in San Marino, California. It has a civil engineering collection in which unique items from old design offices provide insight into how things used to be done. The Huntington also is now the home of the Burndy Library, which was formerly housed at the Dibner Institute at MIT. Bern Dibner (1897–1988) was an inventor and founder of the Burndy Engineering Company, a manufacturer of electrical connector devices whose headquarters was located just one block from the New York Public Library. His outside reading led to a special interest in Leonardo da Vinci, which he pursued during trips to Europe. There he began to buy old books and manuscripts related to the history of science. This treasure trove ultimately formed the basis of his Burndy Library. He amassed an outstanding collection, many items of which have great relevance also for the history of engineering. In the mid-1970s, much of his collection was presented to the Smithsonian Institution and, later, the remainder was relocated to MIT, where the Burndy Library was part of the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology. It was that collection that was donated by the Dibner family in 2006 to the Huntington Library. See Bern Dibner, Heralds of Science, revised edition (Norwalk, Conn.,
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and Washington, D.C.: Burndy Library and Smithsonian Institution, 1980); see also “From Connections to Collections,” American Scientist, September–October 1998, pp. 416–420. For most of the twentieth century, an Engineering Societies Library was located in the New York City headquarters building of the so-called founder engineering societies. When the societies reached an agreement to sell the building they had occupied jointly and to go their own ways with separate headquarters locations, their library holdings were offered to others. Much of the material was acquired by the independent Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology, which is located in Kansas City, Missouri. This world-class institution was endowed by the industrialist Herbert F. Hall (1858–1941) and his wife Linda Hall (1859–1938) and is located on the grounds of the estate they left. The library, which has been operating since 1946, contains not only rare and scarce items but also extensive runs of technical journals and reports. licensing of engineers. The issue of licensing was a divisive topic among engineers in the early twentieth century. According to Edwin Layton in his book, The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), some viewed licensing as “a form of collectivism little different from unionism.” The professional societies, which saw themselves as the arbiters of who was and who was not a professional engineer, opposed licensing as being a threat to their membership and influence. With the growth of state licensing of professional engineers and land surveyors in the early part of the twentieth century, interstate registration problems began to develop. The Council of State Boards of Engineering Examiners was formed in 1920, and its name was changed to the
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National Council of State Boards of Engineering Examiners (NCSBEE) in 1938. Another name change occurred in 1967, when the council became the National Council of Engineering Examiners (NCEE). In 1989, surveying was incorporated into its title, making it the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES). Among the principal functions of the NCEES is to prepare the engineering and land surveying examinations and to serve as a verifying agency for registered professionals who seek to be licensed in more than one state. See O. B. Curtis, History of the National Council of Engineering Examiners, published by the Council in 1988. In the United States, where approximately 39 percent of engineers were licensed in 1993, the regulatory process is under the jurisdiction of the individual states, whereas in Britain and commonwealth countries it is the professional societies themselves that tend to regulate who may be registered as an engineer. In Canada, each province has a professional organization that oversees the licensing of professional engineers. The various state laws and boards regulating the licensing of engineers reflect in part their being passed and constituted over the course of decades. For a survey of state “licensure board composition; board powers and operations; requirements for licensure; licensure by comity and reciprocity; license renewal including continuing professional competency requirements, exemptions, investigative and disciplinary powers; enforcement powers; and business and association practice,” see Engineering Licensure Laws: A State-by-State Summary and Analysis (Alexandria, Va.: National Society for Professional Engineers, 1997). The Mutual Recognition Document (MRD) is an agreement that was entered into in the mid-1990s by Canada, Mexico, and the United States. It enables experienced and
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licensed engineers to obtain a temporary license for foreign work for three years or for the duration of a specific project in one of the other participating countries. In the United States, the society representing the licensed professional engineer is the National Society of Professional Engineers, which was founded in 1934, largely through the efforts of the bridge engineer David B. Steinman, who became its first president. Started largely in reaction to the provincialism of the various specialized societies, the NSPE is “concerned with social, professional, ethical, and economic considerations of engineering as a profession.” The society also “monitors legislative and regulatory actions of interest to the engineering profession.” It has of the order of 50,000 members who are professional engineers or engineers-in-training. According to Edwin Layton, the NSPE “has functioned to some extent as the conscience of the profession.” The monthly newspaper of the NSPE was Engineering Times, which began publication in 1979 and contained news and comment on the engineering profession, with special coverage of matters dealing with the licensing of engineers. Discussions of ethics, including concise case studies, were a regular feature of the paper, and in the mid-1990s, departments dealing with improving the writing skills of engineers and jokes about engineers and engineering were instituted. Like a lot of other newspapers and newsletters, Engineering Times was discontinued with the rise of the use of electronic media. Among the more serious topics discussed in Engineering Times was the issue of whether to refer to professional engineers as being “licensed” or “registered.” Many within the professional engineering community believed that “licensing,” as opposed to “registration,” should be the term used to identify the hallmark of professionalism, because it implies a more decisive action. It has been
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proposed that education alone might entitle one to the title Professional Engineer, whereas the title Licensed Professional Engineer would require in addition a number of years of experience and the passing of an exam on engineering standards and ethics. See Molly Galvin, “PEs Take Challenge: Just Say ‘Licensed’,” Engineering Times, November 1995, pp. 1, 15. See also professional engineer.
M Marchant calculator. Before the advent of the digital computer, this electrically powered calculating machine, whose keyboard was suggestive of a large cash register, but with much smaller and more numerous keys, was among the most sophisticated pieces of equipment available for extensive engineering calculations. A working Marchant, with its register that moved back and forth like a typewriter carriage, had a characteristic mechanical sound that was rotary and repetitive. In an article titled “Socioengineering” (The Bridge, Fall 1994, p. 5), the aerospace engineer Norman Augustine (born in 1935) remembered the 1950s, when Marchants were “the revolutionary new electromechanical desktop computers of the day.” He went on to recall: In my first job, working in a huge room seated in formation with several acres of other young engineers, each Friday afternoon we would ceremoniously greet the beginning of another weekend by all simultaneously dividing by zero and marching smugly out the door. Our hopes for a breakthrough in perpetual motion were dashed each Monday morning when we would discover that our boss had unplugged all the machines, as he good-naturedly did each Friday evening to begin the celebration of his weekend!
For a description of the calculating power of similar machines, such as the “hand-operated, electrically driven Friden mechanical calculators” in the 1940s, see Walter 191
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G. Vincenti, “Engineering Theory in the Making: Aerodynamic Calculation ‘Breaks the Sound Barrier’,” Technology and Culture, October 1997, p. 834, where he relates how for some problems in transonic flow, “the numerical work for the four solutions took the better part of a year,” whereas “the same could be done today in seconds on an electronic desk-top computer.” materials science. Although the name of this academic discipline and research specialty contains the word science, it is commonly practiced as a branch of engineering. This is especially the case when its practitioners have a strong interest in the interrelationship between the microscopic qualities of materials and their macroscopic behavior. Many materials scientists concern themselves with the bulk properties of materials and have a special interest in how things break. In this regard, their work is indispensable to engineering better and stronger materials that are resistant to such deleterious phenomena as fatiguecrack growth and fracture. Departments of materials science are typically housed in schools of engineering, either
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as stand-alone entities or in combination with mechanical engineering, as in a Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science. For a book written from the point of view of someone educated as a materials scientist, see Mark B. Eberhart, Why Things Break: Understanding the World by the Way It Comes Apart (New York: Harmony Books, 2003). mechanical drawing. Once a required part of the engineering curriculum, mechanical drawing courses taught engineering students of all disciplines how to visualize three-dimensional objects and communicate their shape to other engineers in two-dimensional formats. All engineers were expected to produce neat and codified drawings of machine parts and assemblies using the mechanical aids of measuring scales, T squares, triangles, compasses, and the like. By paying such close attention to how their own drawings were made, engineering students were better prepared to read and interpret drawings and blueprints prepared by others. With the advent of digital computers, engineering drawings came more and more to be generated electronically and many engineering schools dropped mechanical drawing from the curriculum. With this change, many observers believe, engineering students lost some of their ability to conceptualize, visualize, and communicate graphically. Before the days of computer-based drawing and drafting, engineers and architects often used ruler-like devices marked so that scale drawings could be measured directly and without any need to use conversion factors. Such engineers’ or architects’ scales came in many models; however, the most common ones had triangular cross sections, with longitudinal semicircular grooves that provided a gripping place for picking up and moving the scale, whose edges were conveniently marked with six different scales for making a variety of proportioned drawings. Although such
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T square and versatile drafting triangles
scales are increasingly less commonly seen, some continued to be used for a while by older engineers and architects who dealt with many construction drawings. Perhaps one of the most recognized icons of mechanical drawing and the essential equipment for its practice is the T square, which has a head and blade set at right angles to each other. Before computerized drawing, all engineers learned to manipulate a pair of drafting triangles by sliding them along the blade of a T square and along the edges of each other in different combinations and orientations to produce perpendicular, Engineer’s scale in use
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parallel, and other straight lines with precision. The two right triangles were generally a 30-60-90-degree one and a 45-degree one. When used in combination with the T square, the triangles could also easily produce lines inclined 15 and 75 degrees to the datum. Once a line of any inclination had been established, the two triangles could be used in a relative sliding mode to replicate the inclination in parallel lines. Triangles were made of a variety of materials, including wood (principally pearwood, mahogany, and ebony), hard rubber, metal, and clear plastic. Old wooden drafting instruments of uncommonly fine workmanship can be objects of great beauty. For a long time, the T square was perhaps second only to the slide rule as a symbol of engineering. “T-Squares” was once a popular name for the clubs and groups formed by wives of engineers, engineering professors, and engineering students, when the profession was almost exclusively male. Not surprisingly, T-Squares often met over tea. Among the more exotic mechanical drawing devices and instruments was the French curve, which dates from the early eighteenth century. Also called an irregular curve, this flat mechanical drafting aid, variously made of wood, hard rubber, or plastic, was used to draw smooth curves through a series of points that did not lay in a straight line or on a circle or other common curve. The advent of computer-based drafting made the French curve a vanishing piece of equipment in engineering schools and offices. French curves were first manufactured in France, hence the name, and were employed to draw the intricate curved lines of domes, onion-shaped roofs, and the like. Other forms of irregular curves included those for laying out railways and ships’ hulls, with curves for the latter purpose dating from as early as the sixteenth century. All of the above were in service to the pencil and pen, often held in polished chrome mechanical drawing instruments that themselves were stored in silk- or velvet-lined
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boxes when not in use. The instruments, often made in Germany, enabled engineers to draw in ink straight lines of constant thickness and uniform weight, as well as circles of sure radius. Compasses and dividers were the key components of a mechanical drawing set, and these instruments are sometimes now confused. A compass is used to draw circles; a pair of dividers is used to transfer distances, as from a plan to a scale, or to establish by trial and error the division of a circle into equal parts. For a history of engineering drawing instruments, see Maya Hambly, Drawing Instruments, 1580–1980 (London: Sotheby Publications, 1988). Once a drawing was completed, there was often a need to copy the master so a machinist in the workshop or a steel erector at the construction site could refer to the plans. The blueprint method of reproducing engineering drawings was introduced in the U.S. in about 1876. Blueprints are photographic copies of original drawings formed by exposing sensitized paper to light that passes through a tracing, which essentially plays the role of a photographic negative. The lines of the drawing prevent the light from affecting the printing paper’s chemical coating, which can be washed away in the developing process. The exposed parts of the paper turn blue, while those parts under the lines of the original drawing retain the white color of the paper. The introduction of computers into the design office obviously reduced and eventually virtually eliminated the reliance of engineers on the blueprint process. Nevertheless, the term blueprint has come to refer to plans generally. As late as the 1960s and 1970s, descriptive geometry was a standard adjunct to a course in mechanical drawing. It involved the graphical solution of such problems as the intersection of two cylinders in space. Engineering students labored over such drawings as a means of learning how to visualize and lay out complex mechanical parts
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in the days before computers. A problem that would fall into the realm of descriptive geometry would be the nature of the intersection of a right circular cone with a right hexagonal cylinder, which is defined each time a woodcased pencil is sharpened in a mechanical sharpener. That the solutions to descriptive geometry problems are not intuitive is demonstrated by how often sharpened pencils are drawn incorrectly, even by professional graphic artists. mechanical engineering. It has been said that one way to distinguish between civil and mechanical engineering is to note that the former concerns itself with things that stand still and the latter with things that move. To put it another way, civil engineers design and build targets and mechanical engineers build weapons. Quips of this kind always seem to contain a germ of truth. Historically, both forms of engineering were often embodied in the same individual and both were necessary for developing the railroads. With the rise of specialization, civil engineers focused on alignment, grades, roadbeds, and bridges, and mechanical engineers on locomotives and rolling stock. The development of such divergent interests led to the feeling that the civil engineering societies that initially encompassed all of non-military engineering could not satisfy an increasingly diverse membership. Hence, new and more specialized societies began to be established in the middle of the nineteenth century. In America, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers was established in 1880, almost three decades after the American Society of Civil Engineers. For histories of these societies, see William H. Wisely, The American Civil Engineer, 1852–1974: The History, Traditions and Development of the American Society of Civil Engineers (New York: ASCE, 1974); and Bruce Sinclair, A Centennial History of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 1880–1980 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980).
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medical doctors and engineers. When I used to visit my long-time ophthalmologist for an annual check up, I came to expect a conversation about engineering accompanying my reading the eye chart and his flipping the different combinations of corrective lenses into place. Over the years, our discussions came to be more and more personal, and in the rear-view mirror of hindsight I can see that we came to agree that engineering and medicine were closer than they might appear. The first conversation I remember occurred shortly after my doctor learned that I was an engineer. He told me about a recent vacation on which he had taken a tour of the Paris sewer system, something he had found fascinating. He marveled at the subterranean engineering achievement right under everyone’s nose, yet out of sight and out of mind. On a subsequent visit to his office, I learned that the doctor had a son who was an engineer. On another occasion, the doctor told me he had given to his son as a gift a copy of my recently published book on the pencil. He asked me the question to which I was growing accustomed, “Why did you write a whole book on pencils?” I replied that I wrote the book to explore the nature of engineering through a simple artifact. (For a more extended answer, see “Why the Pencil?, American Scientist, March– April 2000, pp. 114–118.) During a subsequent annual check-up, there was a second doctor in the examining room, a resident learning under the veteran specialist. This did not inhibit the conversation about engineering, and in fact it became even more personal. My ophthalmologist introduced me to the resident as an engineer and author of a book on pencils. We also talked briefly about my latest book, on bookshelves, and the ophthalmologist pointed out how he had to use a double thickness of shelf to eliminate the sagging beneath his heavy medical books. I remarked about the structural significance of sagging shelves in the history of
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the bookshelf, and described how much the technological system of books and bookshelves had changed since the Middle Ages. Our conversation grew more and more animated, and soon the resident allowed that his father was a civil engineer. To my surprise, he then expressed the wish that he himself had majored in engineering as an undergraduate. He knew it to be an analytical discipline and being analytical, he now understood, was part of being a good doctor. My ophthalmologist then let us know that he had actually begun his own undergraduate studies as an engineering major. That was at a time when the freshman-year curriculum included mechanical drawing, however, and it was that course that caused him to switch to pre-med. Drawing the threads of machine screws, he told us, was not his idea of how to spend one’s career. Although an engineering student today is not likely to have to draw machine-screw threads, a good number of engineering students still do change their major on the basis of their experience in introductory courses. Among these transferees are future doctors and lawyers who might look back years hence and realize that while the elements of engineering do indeed involve a good deal of tedium and repetition, that is by no means all there is to engineering, and tedium and repetition are by no means confined to the engineering profession. To the engineers working on the Paris sewer system, its design may have involved seemingly countless calculations of gradients and flow rates; however, the end product is a monument to ingenuity, albeit a largely hidden and unheralded one, and an invaluable contribution to public health. Likewise, the screw threads that engineers once drew so meticulously represent a standardized system that enables us to walk into any hardware store and match a nut to the loose bolt in our pocket. Standardization represented a milestone in the development of our modern technological
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society. See Witold Rybczynski, One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw (New York: Scribner, 2000), p. 105. Every profession has its tedium, however it is tedium for a higher purpose. Certainly the act of examining eyes all day long, day in and day out, has its degree of repetition, but it pales against the satisfaction that a doctor must get in providing a means of correcting debilitating nearsightedness or catching a detaching retina before it leads to blindness. Medicine and engineering are in fact not that far apart in their underlying reliance on repetitive methods; however, in engineering at least the repetitiveness has now been largely overtaken by the digital computer. Engineers today are much more likely to have the role of manager – of a network of digital computers as much as of a group of people. What engineering students learn in their introductory courses, rather than being an end in itself, is a means to understanding the technology they almost invariably come to manage. It is unlikely that the tedium of practicing any profession will ever go away entirely, however, because repetition is a part of the human condition. Our hearts beat, our lungs exchange air, our eyes blink, and our bodies tire as we pursue our diurnal activities. The professions of medicine and engineering succeed as human endeavors because as their repetitive acts are mastered they become as natural as our bodily functions and the mastery that comes with practice becomes increasingly satisfying, even in its repetition. What counts in engineering school and in engineering practice is not the repetitiveness of exercises and calculations but the satisfaction with the finished product, the whole as the sum of its parts. (Adapted from “Seeing Eye to Eye,” ASEE Prism, September 2000, p. 19.) mind’s eye. This term has been used frequently by engineers to refer to their nonverbal visualization of
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concepts and designs. The nineteenth-century Scottish engineer James Nasmyth (1808–1890), speaking of his conception of a steam hammer, wrote in his 1883 autobiography: Following out this idea, I got out my “scheme book,” on the pages of which I generally thought out, with the aid of pen and pencil, such mechanical adaptations as I had conceived in my mind, and was thereby enabled to render them visible. I then rapidly sketched out my steam hammer, having it all clearly before me in my mind’s eye.
Elsewhere, Nasmyth wrote of visualizing the operation of his steam hammer “in my mind’s eye long before I saw it in action.” He further explained that he could “build up in the mind mechanical structures and set them to work in imagination, and observe beforehand the various details performing the respective functions as if they were in absolute material form Page from James Nasmyth’s and action.” See James scheme book Nasmyth, Engineer: An Autobiography, Samuel Smiles, ed. (London: John Murray, 1885); see also Eugene S. Ferguson, Engineering and the Mind’s Eye (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992). The Moles. The Moles is an association consisting of people engaged in heavy construction, epitomized by tunnel work and symbolized by the burrowing animal from which
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the group takes its name. The Moles as a formal organization grew out of a 1936 reunion of men who two decades earlier had worked on tunnels and other projects in New Jersey’s Newark Bay area. The success of the initial effort led to an organizational meeting in nearby New York City the following year, at which the group’s name and membership guidelines were formally adopted. Among those who were invited to join were engineers, contractors, and suppliers to the heavy construction industry. Initially focused in the areas of tunnel, subway, sewer, foundation, marine, and other subaqueous construction work, the broadened membership now includes the areas of bridge, highway, and dam building. The first annual Moles dinner was held in 1938 in New York, and seven decades later the black-tie dinners had grown so large as to tax the capacity of the largest ballrooms in the city. In 2010, the number of active members of The Moles was limited to 538, but emeritus and honorary categories swelled the membership to around a thousand. With the large number of professional guests being invited to the networking event of the annual dinner, there was no room at the event for spouses. In lieu of attending the dinner, they were encouraged to dine as a group at a nearby restaurant and attend a Broadway-theater production afterwards. On the West Coast, where dams seem to be more common than tunnels, the counterpart of The Moles is the social and honorary organization appropriately known as The Beavers, which was established in 1955. Monuments of the Millennium. In anticipation of the dawning of the new millennium, the American Society of Civil Engineers sought to demonstrate “how civil engineers enhanced the quality of life.” As part of a Millennium Challenge, the ASCE canvassed its membership “to determine the 10 civil engineering achievements that
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had the greatest positive impact on life in the 20th century.” Within the broad categories that were identified, exemplars came to be known as Monuments of the Millennium. The list follows: Monuments of the Millennium Airport Design and Development Dams Interstate Highway System Long-Span Bridges Rail Transportation Sanitary Landfills/Solid Waste Disposal Skyscrapers Wastewater Treatment Water Supply and Distribution Water Transportation
Kansai International Airport Hoover Dam The system overall Golden Gate Bridge Eurotunnel Sanitary waste disposal advances overall Empire State Building Chicago Wastewater System California State Water Project Panama Canal
monuments to engineers. It is sometimes said, often by engineers themselves, that their great works are monuments enough to the engineers who build them. This view is sometimes interpreted as rationalization within a profession whose members are all too often forgotten when great engineering works are dedicated at ceremonies dominated by self- and mutually-congratulatory politicians. There are, however, some prominent and notable statues and other monuments to engineers, including a statue of Joseph B. Strauss (1870–1938), the chief engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge, near its San Francisco approach, and a bust of Othmar H. Ammann (1879–1965) in the Pier Luigi Nervi-designed bus terminal at the New York approach to Ammann’s George Washington Bridge. A sprawling monument to George Westinghouse (1846–1914) was installed in Schenley Park in Pittsburgh in 1930. Among other notable monuments to American engineers is a classical
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statue of a seated John A. Roebling (1806–1869) in Cadwalader Park in Trenton, New Jersey, and a more animated bronze statue of Roebling at the base of the John A. Roebling Memorial Bridge in Covington, Kentucky, with the bridge in the background itself being also a monument to the engineer. New York City’s Washington Square Park contains a bust of Alexander Lyman Holley (1832–1882), a distinguished engineer of steel plants who was instrumental in the establishment of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. In Washington, D.C., there is a little-visited but grand monument to John Ericsson (1803–1889), who developed improved ship propellers and designed the ironclad USS Monitor. The stone structure is located on the bank of the Potomac River, in the small traffic circle just south of the Lincoln Memorial and beside the Arlington Memorial Bridge. A monument to the nineteenthcentury railroad engineer Theodore Dehone Judah (1826– 1863) was unveiled in Sacramento, California, in February 1931. A stained glass window commemorating Robert E. Lee (1807–1870) in the National Cathedral in Washington identifies him as an engineer, among his other activities. A simple circular cylindrical monument to Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) outside the entrance to the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, which is located on the campus of Stanford University, his alma mater, identifies him not only as an engineer, but also as a humanitarian, statesman, public servant, and author. The structural engineer responsible for the Sears Tower, Fazlur Kahn (1929–1982), is the subject of a sculpture commissioned by the Structural Engineers Association of Illinois that recognizes his contributions to the Chicago skyline. This sculpture, which is mounted on a wall in the Skydeck area of the Willis (formerly the Sears) Tower, has been passed annually by 1.5 million visitors to the building’s 103rd-floor observatory.
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There are many monuments to engineers in Great Britain, and several engineers are memorialized in Westminster Abbey. There, Thomas Telford (1757–1834) and Robert Stephenson (1803–1859) are buried beside each other in the central part of the nave. This area may thus justifiably be referred to as “engineers’ corner,” by analogy with the famous “poets’ corner” that is located in the abbey’s south transept. Westminster Abbey also holds a memorial stone to the civil engineer John Smeaton (1724– 1792) and a monument to James Watt (1736–1819), who invented a greatly improved steam engine. Among the most popular engineer-subjects of monuments in Britain are, in addition to Telford and Stephenson, the latter’s father, George Stephenson (1781–1848), a statue of whom once stood in front of London’s Euston Station and now stands in the National Railway Museum in York, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859), a likeness of whom sits in Paddington Station looking out at his work. Among engineers with monuments on or near the Victoria Embankment in London are Brunel; Michael Faraday (1791–1867), the inventor of the electric motor, whose statue stands before the building of the Institution of Electrical Engineers; and Joseph Bazalgette (1819– 1891), the engineer who was responsible for the sanitary sewer system that reclaimed the Thames from being awash in waste. See “The Anonymous Profession,” American Scientist, July–August 1992, pp. 318–321, and “The Public Profession,” American Scientist, November–December 1994, pp. 518–521. The book, The Early Years of Modern Civil Engineering, by Richard Sheldon Kirby and Philip Gustave Laurson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1932) has an appendix of biographical outlines that identifies the location of many monuments to engineers. The article by E. C. Smith, “Memorials to Engineers and Men of Science,” which appeared in the Transactions of the Newcomen Society XXVIII (1951), pp. 137–139, describes
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stained glass windows, commemorative stones, and other memorials to engineers in London’s Westminster Abbey. most-admired engineers. In 1994, the magazine Design News asked its readers, “Who is the engineer you admire most in America?” The answers ranged from U.S. presidents to NASA engineers. The top vote getter was Burt Rutan (born in 1943), who designed the Voyager aircraft that in 1986 had flown around the world without refueling. Also coming out on top were Lee Iacocca (born in 1924), who was then heading the Chrysler Corporation; Paul McCready (1925–2007), whose Gossamer Condor was the first heavier-than-air craft to fly for a sustained period under human power alone, thus winning the Kremer Prize in 1977; and Bill Gates (born in 1955) of the ubiquitous Microsoft. Of these four, only Rutan and Iacocca had engineering degrees; it was technological achievement and not academic credentials that was recognized. Not surprisingly, any list of great or outstanding engineers tends to depend greatly on when the list is compiled. See also outstanding engineers (ca. 1930). movies about engineers and engineering. There are more movies about engineers and engineering than is commonly acknowledged. Indeed, it has been estimated that during the 1920s there were of the order of fifty feature films with an engineer in the male lead. In keeping with the popularity of westerns and the image of the engineer working outdoors, most of these films had a frontier setting. See Bruce Sinclair, “Inventing a Genteel Tradition: MIT Crosses the River,” in New Perspectives on Technology and Culture (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1986), pp. 2–3. Among more recent engineer films, the most famous is perhaps the 1995 movie, Apollo 13, in which engineers at mission control in Texas and aboard the orbiting space capsule conceive of and effect a life-saving emergency
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repair of a failed life-support system. The motion picture, based on the true story of the troubled and abortive Apollo 13 mission to the Moon, contains the memorable scene in which boxes of assorted parts and supplies duplicating those carried in the space vehicle are emptied onto a table and engineers are asked to design a way for the astronauts to save their own lives by using only these available objects to fix a broken carbon-dioxide filter system. Although the Apollo 13 astronauts did not get to land on the Moon, they did return safely to Earth, and the 1970 mission was described as “a successful failure” because the emergency engineering design worked. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) is a movie set in Burma during World War II. Allied prisoners of war are ordered by their Japanese captors to build a bridge over the river so a railroad can cross it to carry Japanese troops and supplies along the route in the southeast Asian theater. The top-ranking British officer clashes with the Japanese camp commander, who is also an engineer, over whether officers should work side-by-side with enlisted men. He ultimately concedes to use officers only in administrative roles, and the British commander is put in charge. His British and professional pride does not allow him to oversee an inferior piece of engineering, however, and he makes changes in the location and design of the bridge, which finally gets built. In the meantime, an Allied team of commandos makes its way through the jungle on a mission to destroy the strategic river crossing. (The psychology of the British commander who wants his men to build a better structure than the Japanese are capable of, even if it serves the enemy, is reminiscent of that depicted in the joke about a malfunctioning guillotine and the condemned engineer who cannot hold his tongue when he looks up and sees the problem with the technology.) Other notable engineering-related films include: Cheaper by the Dozen, about the husband-and-wife
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engineers and efficiency experts Frank Bunker Gilbreth (1868–1924) and Lillian Moller Gilbreth (1878–1972); The China Syndrome, about a whistleblowing nuclear engineer; Chinatown, about self-made engineer William Mulholland (1855–1935) and the Los Angeles water supply; and No Highway in the Sky, about an engineer who discovers that metal fatigue endangers an airplane and takes matters into his own hands to prevent disaster. See Michael Valenti, “Engineers on the Silverscreen,” Mechanical Engineering, August 1991, pp. 30–37. Murphy’s Law. This principle is often expressed by a statement such as, “whatever can go wrong, will.” The concept is said to have been named after a Capt. Ed Murphy, an aircraft development engineer working on crash research at an experimental test track in 1949. One day, when Capt. Murphy apparently became frustrated with a technician whose repeated wiring errors were causing a transducer to malfunction, the engineer is reported to have remarked, “If there is any way to do it wrong, he will.” An observer, George E. Nichols, claims to have given the name Murphy’s Law to the statement and to variations of it. At a press conference a couple of weeks later, the director of the experimental program, Col. J. P. Stapp, attributed the program’s safety record to a firm belief in Murphy’s Law. Soon manufacturers began to cite the principle in their advertisements, and references to Murphy’s Law became commonplace. There have been numerous compilations of Murphy’s Law and its variants, including in Arthur Block’s Murphy’s Law, and Other Reasons Why Things Go Wrong! (Los Angeles: Prince/Stern/Sloan, 1977), in which the above story appears. One commonly cited exemplar of Murphy’s Law is the observation that “if a slice of toast falls off a table, it will land on the floor butter-side down.”
N named schools of engineering. A number of engineering schools are named after their benefactors or are known by different names from their present parent institutions, often because of their origins or because they have been subsequently endowed. Among the schools of engineering in these categories are the following: Armour Institute of Technology. In 1940, this Chicago institution merged with the Lewis Institute to become the Illinois Institute of Technology. According to IIT’s history, the Armour Institute had its origins in an 1890 sermon preached by the minister Frank Wakely Gunsaulus (1856– 1921), in which he declared that if he had a million dollars he “would build a school where students of all backgrounds could prepare for meaningful roles in a changing industrial society.” The sermon inspired the owner of America’s largest meatpacking company, businessman Philip Danforth Armour, Sr. (1832–1901), to found the namesake institute, which opened in 1893. The Lewis Institute, a liberal arts, science, and engineering college, dated from 1895. It had been founded by Allen Cleveland Lewis (1821–1877), a Chicago real estate investor. Carnegie Institute of Technology. This Pittsburgh institution was founded in 1900 as a “first class technical school” by the steel industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919). In 1967 it merged with the city’s Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, founded in 1913 by the banker-industrialist brothers Richard Beatty Mellon 209
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(1858–1933) and Andrew William Mellon (1855–1937), to form Carnegie-Mellon University, which has since dropped the hyphen in its name. Carnegie Mellon’s engineering school is still known as the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Lawrence Scientific School. This was Harvard University’s engineering school, the result of an endowment established in 1847 by Abbott Lawrence (1792–1855), who was successful in the textiles industry. He wished the school to be for young men “who intend to enter upon an active life as engineers or chemists or, in general as men of science applying their attainments to practical purposes,” and he wished this to be the case “forever.” That stipulation presented Harvard with a continuing dilemma: how to accommodate engineering students on a campus renowned for offering a classical education. One way out of the dilemma seemed to be to incorporate the nearby upstart Massachusetts Institute of Technology into Harvard; however, in spite of ongoing efforts, that was never to be. Rather, in 1905, the Lawrence Scientific School was succeeded by the Graduate School of Engineering. Then, in 1948, that school merged with the Department of Engineering Sciences and Applied Physics, which had been within Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, forming the new Division of Applied Sciences. The division became Harvard’s full-fledged School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in 2007. Nerken School of Engineering. This is the largest component of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the New York City institution that is “the only private, full-scholarship college in the United States dedicated exclusively to preparing students for the professions of architecture, art and engineering.” The Cooper Union was founded in 1859 by the inventor, manufacturer, and philanthropist Peter Cooper (1791–1883) to educate immigrant and working-class people, both men
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and women, of the city. The Great Hall, the historic auditorium in the basement of Cooper Union’s landmark Foundation Building, has been the scene of free public lectures on science and government, including speeches by such presidential hopefuls as Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. Albert Nerken (1912–1992), for whom Cooper Union’s engineering school is now named, was a student at the institution during the Depression. His obituary in the New York Times identified him as a chemical engineer, industrialist, and philanthropist. In 1987, the electrical engineer Eleanor Baum (born in 1939) was named dean of the Nerken School. Prior to that, in 1984, she had been appointed dean of engineering at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, thereby becoming the first woman to be the dean of a U.S. engineering school. Pratt School of Engineering. This became the name of the Duke University School of Engineering in 1999, when Edmund T. Pratt, Jr. (1927–2002) endowed it. Edmund Pratt was a 1947 electrical engineering graduate of Duke, which he attended on military assignment. He served for twenty years as chairman and CEO of the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, Inc., and for over a decade as a trustee of Duke. Engineering at Duke traces its roots back to the time when the institution was called Normal College, which in 1851 offered engineering as part of a classical course. In 1859, Normal was succeeded by Trinity College, which in turn became Duke University in 1924, when it was endowed by James Buchanan Duke (1856–1925), who made his fortune first in tobacco and later in electric power. In his will, Duke spelled out that the institution should include instruction in engineering as well as in the professions of divinity, law, and medicine. Separate departments of civil and electrical engineering were established in 1927, and a department of mechanical engineering followed in 1931. A Division of Engineering was created
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in 1937, and a College of Engineering in 1939. Shortly after the college’s first doctoral programs were offered, it became a School of Engineering, in 1966. The first department of biomedical engineering in a U.S. university was established at Duke in 1971. Duke’s Pratt School is not to be confused with the Pratt Institute, whose main campus is located in Brooklyn, New York. The institute’s namesake, Charles Pratt (1830–1891), was involved with the fledgling oil industry and his companies eventually became part of Standard Oil. He founded the Pratt Institute in 1886 and served as its first president. The institute is known for its programs in art and design; its engineering program was ended in 1993. A reference to an institution named Pratt can clearly evoke different images in different parts of the country and in different professional circles. Schaefer School of Engineering and Science. This is the engineering school of the Stevens Institute of Technology. Located in Hoboken, New Jersey, the institution was founded in 1871 specifically for the professional education of mechanical engineers. It started with a bequest of land and money from Edwin Augustus Stevens (1795– 1868), an engineer and inventor who participated in engineering projects with his father, John Stevens (1749–1838) and brother, Robert Livingston Stevens (1787–1856). The American Society of Mechanical Engineers was founded in 1880 at a meeting held in what is now the DeBaun Auditorium of Stevens Institute. In 1935 the institute was the site of the first engineering accreditation visit by the newly formed Engineers’ Council for Professional Development. The School of Engineering and Science was endowed by Charles V. Schaefer Jr. (1914–1999), a Stevens alumnus and successful New Jersey businessman. The institute became the object of some controversy in 1985 when it awarded an honorary doctor of engineering degree to the singer Frank Sinatra, a native of Hoboken
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with supposedly little connection to engineering. However, before he dropped out of high school Sinatra and his parents had dreamt of the possibly of his studying at Stevens to become an engineer, and he did swim underwater regularly in the institute’s indoor pool to develop his lung power for singing. See James Kaplan, Frank: The Voice (New York: Doubleday, 2010). Sheffield Scientific School. This component of Yale University traces its roots to 1846, when applied chemistry professorships were first recognized. A civil engineering course was offered in 1852, and the programs in chemistry and engineering came to be taught in an informal Yale Scientific School. After Joseph Earl Sheffield (1793– 1882), who was a builder of canals and railroads, made substantial gifts to the institution, its name was changed to the Sheffield Scientific School in 1861. In 1863, Yale granted America’s first engineering doctorate, to Josiah Willard Gibbs, who developed into one the school’s most distinguished graduates. The Sheffield School ceased to offer graduate courses in 1919, however in 1945 they were resumed when the school was transformed into the Division of the Sciences within Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The School of Engineering at Yale, established in 1932, was absorbed into the institution’s Department of Engineering and Applied Science in 1962. In 1980, the department structure was replaced by a Council of Engineering. See R. H. Chittenden, Sheffield Scientific School (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1928); W. Jack Cunningham, “Engineering at Yale: School, Department, Council 1932–1982,” Transactions, Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 51 (December 1992): 1–232. Sibley College of Engineering. Sibley is Cornell University’s engineering school. It was founded in 1870 as the Sibley College of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanic Arts. Its benefactor was Hiram Sibley (1807–1888), who in
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partnership with Samuel Morse (1791–1872) and Ezra Cornell (1807–1874) established the first practical telegraph service, which opened in 1844 between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Sibley went on to become the first president of the Western Union Telegraph Company. Speed Scientific School. The Speed School was established at the University of Louisville in 1925 and is the university’s college of engineering and applied sciences. The school was endowed as a memorial to the Louisville businessman James Breckenridge Speed (1844–1912) by his son and daughter. The Speed School is noted for its leadership in cooperative engineering education. Thayer School of Engineering. After graduating from Dartmouth College in 1807, Sylvanus Thayer (1785–1872) attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, from which he graduated in 1808. While serving as superintendent of West Point from 1817 to 1833, he developed it into a world-class school of military engineering. Engineering at Dartmouth College was offered in the institution’s Chandler Scientific School as early as 1851. In 1867, the Thayer School of Architecture and Civil Engineering was endowed at Dartmouth. In time, the name was shortened to the Thayer School of Engineering. After the Thayer School was established as a professional school, the curriculum became one in which students studied general subjects in Dartmouth College for three years, succeeded by two years of professional training in the Thayer School, thus following a path closer to that of medical and legal education than to a traditional engineering curriculum. In the late twentieth century, Dartmouth students desiring an engineering degree spent a fifth year in the Thayer School after earning a four-year liberal arts degree in Dartmouth College. Some engineers, notably Dartmouth alumnus Samuel Florman, are strong supporters of this system of engineering education, believing that
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it produces a better educated and more professionally oriented engineer. There are many other named schools of engineering, although not all are called exactly that. Some universities use the term “college” rather than “school” for the professional unit. Others, such as Georgia Tech, use the term “school” to designate an academic unit that is more commonly called a department. In some cases, engineering is grouped with disciplines such as applied science or computer science to signal that more than just traditional engineering is encompassed. A far from complete list of additional named schools of engineering, which are sometimes referred to without explicit reference to their home institution, follows: Alfred University Arizona State University Binghamton University
Clarkson University Cleveland State University Columbia University
Johns Hopkins University Mississippi State University Morgan State University Northwestern University
Kazuo Inamori School of Engineering Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science Wallace H. Coulter School of Engineering Fenn College of Engineering Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science G. W. C. Whiting School of Engineering James Worth Bagley College of Engineering Clarence M. Mitchell, Jr. School of Engineering Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science
216 Norwich University Rice University Rochester Institute of Technology St. Louis University Southern Methodist University Texas Tech University UCLA
University of California, Irvine University of California, Riverside University of California, San Diego University of California, Santa Cruz University of Maryland University of Pittsburgh University of Rochester
University of Southern California University of Texas at Austin University of Texas at Dallas Walla Walla University
named schools of engineering David Crawford School of Engineering George R. Brown School of Engineering Kate Gleason College of Engineering Parks College of Engineering, Aviation and Technology Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering Edward E. Whitacre Jr. College of Engineering Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science Henry Samueli School of Engineering Bourns College of Engineering Irwin and Joan Jacobs School of Engineering Jack Baskin School of Engineering A. James Clark School of Engineering Swanson School of Engineering Edmund J. Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Andrew and Erna Viterbi School of Engineering Cockrell School of Engineering Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science Edward F. Cross School of Engineering
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nature-based design. It is commonly held that some of the cleverer of engineering designs have been inspired by nature. One commonly given example is that of Velcro, the idea that came to the Swiss electrical engineer and inventor George de Mestral (1907–1990) while he was removing some cockleburs from his trousers and from the fur of his dog after a walk in the woods. Another example is that of barbed wire. Although the invention itself is believed to have originated in France, the idea of using it to contain animals in a field is traced to the American inventor Michael Kelly. In his 1868 U.S. patent (No. 84,062, “Improvement in Metallic Fences”) he explicitly claimed that his invention related to the construction of a “thorny fence,” thus providing a mechanical substitute for a thorny hedge, a natural fencing method that was very effective to contain livestock but took years to grow. Indeed, Kelly preferred to call a barbed-wire fence a “thorny fence,” and the company that manufactured it was called the Thorn Wire Hedge Company. Writers can be found on both sides of the fence, however, when it comes to crediting nature with design inspiration. Delta Willis, in her book The Sand Dollar and the Slide Rule: Drawing Blueprints from Nature (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995), takes the point of view that “successful engineering and research . . . mirror the natural world,” whereas the biologist Steven Vogel argues that surprisingly few engineering ideas can be documented to have come from natural models. He makes his case in the book Cats’ Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People (New York: Norton, 1998). Human designers, he notes, prefer right angles, but nature prefers curves. One seeming exception is the wheel, so widespread in artifacts, but it is almost nonexistent in nature. And mechanical hinges work on a sliding principle, whereas natural hinges, such as the ears of animals, turn through a bending process. He accepts that nature inspired Velcro
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and barbed wire yet disputes the commonly held natural origins of the Eddystone Lighthouse in the oak tree, the tunneling shield in the shipworm, and the Crystal Palace in a giant water lily. Engineers have been more amenable to seeing connections between design in nature and in engineering. For an engineering textbook that stresses common principles of design that are behind made and naturally occurring things, see M. J. French, Invention and Evolution: Design in Nature and Engineering, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). In 1996, the mechanical engineer and thermodynamicist Adrian Bejan (born in 1948) first articulated his Constructal Law, which has been stated as, “For a finite-size system to persist in time (to live), it must evolve in such a way that it provides easier access to the imposed currents that flow through it.” Bejan sees this law as explaining the form of everything from trees, river deltas, and lungs to urban traffic patterns and heat flow in packages of electronics. See Adrian Bejan, Shape and Structure, from Engineering to Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). naval architecture. Although designated “architecture,” this is in fact a branch of engineering that deals with the design of ships, especially with the configuration of their hulls and their power plants. That naval architecture is indeed engineering was made clear by John Scott Russell (1808–1882), who wrote in the preface to his 1865 treatise The Modern System of Naval Architecture: A naval architect should be able to design, draw, calculate, lay down, cut out, set up, fasten, fit, finish, equip, launch, and send to sea a ship, out of his own head. He should be able to tell beforehand at what speed she will go, what freight she will carry, what qualities she will show in a sea, – before it, athwart it, against it, – on a wind, close hauled, going free, – what she will stow, and carry, and earn, and
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expend. On his word you should be able to rely, that what he says, that his ship will infallibly do.
neckties and engineers. When I was in graduate school in the mid-1960s, I supported myself as a teaching assistant in an engineering department. Whenever anyone in the department – graduate student or professor – taught a course for the first time, he (and we were all males then) was expected to attend weekly meetings led by veteran professors who oversaw the development of lesson plans, exams, lecture style, blackboard techniques, and classroom manner. These sessions collectively were known as “Charm School.” Not only was attendance mandatory but so was our wearing a jacket and tie. We were taught that the classroom was a place of formality and authority, and we were expected to dress accordingly. In the ensuing half century, I have watched a good number of engineering faculty members shed their jackets, loosen their ties, and put them aside. While this trend has been far from universal, the classroom has become more informal not only in dress but also in decorum. Unless they are having an oncampus interview or pledging a fraternity, male students certainly do not wear ties and male and female students alike dress as casually as many of their instructors. They also feel free to bring fast-food lunches to class and consume them with impunity. The informality of the classroom has also become reflected in the workplace. At a meeting held in Las Vegas in the fall of 2010 to commemorate the seventyfifth anniversary of the dedication of nearby Hoover Dam, engineers and scientists made presentations on all aspects of that great project, with the topics ranging from geology and hydrology to engineering design and construction. The opening speakers, who were largely engineers, by and large wore a jacket and tie. Further into the program, however, where there was a concentration of geologists and
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hydrologists, fewer speakers wore a jacket and hardly any wore a tie. The pattern, suitably corrected for the age of the speaker, became so obvious that speakers began to open with a joke about whether or not they were wearing a tie, and about whether that meant they were an engineer or a scientist. Generally speaking, this meeting provided a fair representation of how engineers and scientists are likely to dress now, with the presence or absence of a necktie in more formal settings, like the classroom, remaining a reasonably good indicator of which is which. In my own case, after decades of wearing a tie in the classroom, I shed it in 2001 upon returning to campus after a sabbatical leave during which I had grown accustomed to a more casual style. To the best of my knowledge, not a single student took it as an affront. See also “Losing the Tie,” ASEE Prism, October 2002, p. 16. nicknames of college sports teams. Although dozens of college teams may be called Bulldogs, Eagles, or Cougars, only a handful of institutions of higher learning field sports teams that are nicknamed “Engineers.” Those that do are Lehigh University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, RoseHulman Institute of Technology, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Not surprisingly, each of these schools – four of which are termed institutes rather than universities – is better known for its excellence in engineering education than for its prowess on the playing field. Nobel Prizes. In the year 2000, the announcements of the Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry had a distinctly unfamiliar ring to them. Instead of honoring the usual abstruse theoretical constructs whose relevance is lost on many a layperson, the science prizes recognized some familiar things and stuff of everyday life – computers and plastics. This was a striking acknowledgement of engineering achievement by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
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Some scientists might have suggested that Alfred Nobel (1833–1896), the chemical engineer who endowed his prizes with the fortune he realized from his invention of dynamite, was turning over in his grave. However, nothing could have been further from the truth. In fact, Nobel in his will specified that the prizes should go to achievements that “shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind,” a hallmark of engineering. The predilection of early Nobel Prize selection committees to favor scientific over engineering accomplishment was a sore point with many observers. It was not until the ninth prize in physics (awarded in 1909) recognized the achievement of the Italian Guglielmo Marconi (1874– 1937) and the German Karl Ferdinand Braun (1850–1918) for their “development of wireless telegraphy,” which we know now as radio, that engineering accomplishment was explicitly acknowledged. And this was in the age of the new airplane and the young automobile, which perhaps should also have been strong contenders for Nobels. With the establishment of a “new Nobel prize” in economics in 1969, many other fields left out of Nobel’s will sought their own categories of prizes. The Nobel Foundation did not wish to dilute further the impact of the select awards, however. When efforts to endow a distinct Nobel Prize in engineering were rebuffed by the foundation, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering established its own distinguished award, the Draper Prize. The first Draper Prize was awarded in 1989 to electrical engineer Jack Kilby (1923–2005) and the physicist Robert Noyce (1927–1990), for their independent development of the integrated circuit, without which the computer would not be the miniaturized portable device it is today. A decade later, engineer Kilby, whose invention was accompanied by advances in the physics of how electrons move in silicon, shared the Nobel Prize in physics with two scientists. They independently developed electronic
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components that have made small laser technology practical in so many of the communications devices that we use daily, including CD players, bar-code readers, and fiberoptics – all engineered devices of the first order. A dissenting view about Kilby receiving the Nobel prize is contained in Arjun N. Saxena, Invention of Integrated Circuits: Untold Important Facts (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co., 2009). The millennial year’s chemistry prize went to three researchers who were responsible for creating an electricity-conducting plastic that had already been applied in the photography industry and promised to make brighter and more energy efficient cell-phone and computer displays than were then common in consumer electronics devices – more engineering. The timely recognition of achievements that have resulted from work in both science and engineering was a most appropriate way for the Nobel Foundation to mark the one-hundredth anniversary year of its prizes. And it was an especially fitting reminder that the greatest benefits to mankind can occur when science and engineering work in partnership. See “Engineering and the Nobel Prizes,” Issues in Science and Technology, Fall 1987, pp. 57–61, an expanded version of which is contained in Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering (New York: Knopf, 1997); see also “The Draper Prize,” American Scientist, March–April 1994, pp. 114–117. novels about engineers and engineering. According to a letter to the editor in the June 1946 issue of Mechanical Engineering, “Someday engineering will provide the background for the great American novel. When that day comes the public will begin to understand the engineer.” While the great American novel may not yet have been written, engineers and engineering have played major roles in many works of literature. For a critical discussion of
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engineering in literature, see Samuel C. Florman’s 1968 book, Engineering and the Liberal Arts. Florman himself later published a novel of his own about how some surviving engineers, who happened to be traveling together on a ship on the other side of the Earth when a comet impacted it, went about rebuilding the world virtually from scratch after the catastrophe. See The Aftermath: A Novel of Survival (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001). Among other novels whose protagonists are engineers is Alexander’s Bridge. This first novel by Willa Cather was published in 1912, the year before her masterpiece, O Pioneers!, appeared. Alexander’s Bridge is a highly fictionalized account of the failure of the Quebec Bridge, which collapsed while under construction in 1907. The 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, also has an engineer hero. That same year saw the publication of John Hersey’s novel, A Single Pebble, which opens with the statement, “I became an engineer.” The story is about a young engineer traveling on a Chinese junk up the Yangtze River to seek a location for a dam. Along the way, the engineer expresses surprise that there could be a new way to negotiate dangerous rapids in a boat whose form had not changed for centuries. The novel can be read to provide insights into design and technological change and as an interesting cultural perspective on the later twentiethcentury’s Three Gorges Dam megaproject. Robert Byrne, the author of a wide variety of popular books, studied sanitary engineering at Iowa State University. His books include several novels that deal with engineering subjects, often among some rather racy other activities. The books include Always a Catholic (1981), about Byrne’s youth, including his years as an engineering student at Iowa State, and The Tunnel (1977), The Dam (1981), and Skyscraper (1984), about their title structures and the disasters that threaten them.
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Some other works of engineering fiction include The Interceptor, by Richard Herschlag, who for years worked for the City of New York as an environmental engineer. His 1998 thriller involves the sewer system of the city. The 2003 historical novel Pompeii, by Robert Harris, deals with water supply. Its protagonist is a heroic Roman engineer in charge of the aqueduct serving Pompeii and other southern Italian cities when nearby Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D. For a critique of this book that emphasizes the sameness of the way that ancient and modern engineers relate to society, see W. P. S. Dias, “Pompeii by Robert Harris: An Engineering Reading,” Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers: Engineering History and Heritage, November 2010, pp. 255–260. Structural engineer David Wayne Hillery is the author of the science-fiction novel The First Degree (Pittsburgh: Dorrance, 2010), in which an engineer who is a student of Taekwondo gets involved with space and time travel, alien life forms, deadly weapons, and other adventures. Another engineer’s novel, which takes a decidedly jaundiced view of the profession, especially as it is practiced in the defense industry, is A Shortage of Engineers, by Robert Grossbach (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001). Murder mysteries are the specialty of engineer Aileen Schumacher, who owns a consulting engineering firm. Her books include Engineered for Murder (Aurora, Colo.: Write Way Pub, 1997) and Framework for Death (Buffalo, N.Y.: Worldwide Library, 2000), which involves a fatal ceiling collapse. For further engineering mysteries, see “Engineering a Mystery,” ASCE News, February 1999, p. 6. numbers of engineers. It has been estimated that in America in 1816 there were about thirty engineers, or those who could be called engineers. By 1850, when the census acknowledged that civil engineers constituted a
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distinct group, there were about 2,000. The following table gives a sense of the growth of the entire profession: Year 1816 1850 1880 1900 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1980 1990 2000 2008
Engineers (est.) 30 2,000 7,000 45,000 136,000 226,000 260,000 500,000 800,000 1,000,000 1,200,000 2,100,000 2,500,000
Of the last number, approximately 15 percent were women and 30 percent were licensed professional engineers.
O Order of the Engineer. As early as the 1950s, some Ohio engineers began to look into extending the Canadian Iron Ring Ceremony into the United States; however, it was not until 1970 that the first American ring ceremony was held at Cleveland State University. Local chapters of the Order of the Engineer, known as Links, began to form, first around Ohio, but then increasingly throughout the country. The movement has continued to spread, but the practice of American engineers wearing a stainless steel pinkie ring has not grown to nearly the extent that Canadian engineers wear their iron (now also mostly stainless steel) rings. See Homer T. Borton, “The Order of the Engineer,” The Bent of Tau Beta Pi, Spring 1978, pp. 35– 37; “The Iron Ring,” American Scientist, May–June 1995, pp. 229–232; To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, forthcoming), chapter 8. The pledge taken by engineers at the time of their induction into the American Order of the Engineer is known as the “Obligation of an Engineer.” It was modeled after that of the Canadian iron ring tradition and appeared on early membership certificates as follows: Obligation of an Engineer I am an Engineer. In my profession I take deep pride. To it I owe solemn obligations.
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Since the Stone Age, human progress has been spurred by the engineering genius. Engineers have made usable Nature’s vast resources of material and energy for Mankind’s benefit. Engineers have vitalized and turned to practical use the principles of science and the means of technology. Were it not for this heritage of accumulated experience, my efforts would be feeble. , pledge to practice As an Engineer, I integrity and fair dealing, tolerance and respect; and to uphold devotion to the standards and the dignity of my profession, conscious always that my skill carries with it the obligation to serve humanity by making the best use of Earth’s precious wealth. As an Engineer, in humility and with the need for Divine Guidance, I shall participate in none but honest enterprises. When needed, my skill and knowledge shall be given without reservation for the public good. In the performance of duty and in fidelity to my profession, I shall give the utmost.
After some years, and in deference to heightened sensitivities, the reference to “Mankind’s benefit” was changed to “Humanity’s benefit,” and the phrase “in humility and with the need for Divine Guidance” was deleted. Otherwise, in 2009, the obligation remained essentially as originally recited. See also iron ring. Outstanding Engineering Achievements, 1964–1989. To help celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1989, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering selected what it considered to be “the 10 outstanding engineering achievements” that had come to public attention since the academy’s founding in 1964. The achievements were: Outstanding Engineering Achievements, 1964–1989 1. Moon landing 2. application satellites
228 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Outstanding Engineers (ca. 1930) microprocessor computer-aided design and manufacturing CAT scan advanced composite materials jumbo jet lasers fiber-optic communications genetically engineered products
Such lists are naturally controversial and very much influenced by when and by whom they are compiled. See and compare the Academy’s selection of the Greatest Engineering Achievements of the 20th Century. Outstanding Engineers (ca. 1930). Around 1930, the American Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education asked deans at American engineering schools to identify “the outstanding engineers of the past twenty-five years; also those who might fairly be considered the greatest engineers of all time.” In all, seventy-eight engineers were identified as the greatest of all time, and seventyone names were mentioned in the category of the previous twenty-five years. The top results of the survey, as published in the Journal of Engineering Education XXI (1930– 31), p. 256, were as follows: Greatest Engineers of All Time James Watt (1736–1819) Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) Thos. A. Edison (1847–1931) William [sic] B. Eads (1820–1887) Ferdinand de Lesseps (1805–1894) Chas. P. Steinmetz (1865–1923) George Westinghouse (1846–1914) John Ericsson (1803–1889) Archimedes (ca. 287–212 B.C.)
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Lord Kelvin (1824–1907) John L. [sic] Roebling (1806–1869) George W. Goethals (1858–1928) John F. Stevens (1853–1943) Outstanding Engineers of the Past Twenty-Five Years [ca. 1930] Herbert C. Hoover (1874–1964) Chas. P. Steinmetz (1865–1923) Thomas A. Edison (1847–1931) John F. Stevens (1853–1943) John Hays Hammond (1885–1936) George W. Goethals (1858–1928) George Westinghouse (1846–1914) Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937) Henry Ford (1863–1947) Ralph Modjeski (1861–1940) Benjamin G. Lamme (1864–1924) Michael Pupin (1858–1935) John R. Freeman (1855–1932) Clemens Herschel (1842–1930) Gustav Lindenthal (1850–1935) Curiously, in the first list the first name of James Buchanan Eads was misstated as William, and John A. Roebling was given the wrong middle initial. In spite of these inexplicable mistakes, the lists naturally reflect the time at which the survey was taken, and it appears to be technological achievement that is recognized, rather than technical ability. Ferdinand de Lesseps, for example, who was the entrepreneur and organizational genius behind the Suez and Panama canals, was no engineer. And John F. Stevens, who appeared on both 1930 lists was virtually forgotten 35 years later (see Virginia Fairweather, “The Forgotten Engineer: John Stevens and the Panama Canal,” Civil Engineering, February 1975, pp. 54–57.) The lists,
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as reported in Engineering News-Record (May 8, 1930, p. 775), were compiled by Charles T. Humphrey, head of the Villanova School of Technology, and were almost identical to those above, except that Herbert Hoover was listed as tenth in the twenty-five-year list, rather than first. To celebrate its 125th anniversary, Engineering NewsRecord looked back over its own history and the editors identified “125 people for their outstanding contributions to the construction industry since 1874,” the year that the Eads Bridge opened. Appropriately, the chief engineer of that bridge is among those recognized by ENR, but there is no other overlap among the lists. See Engineering NewsRecord, August 30, 1999.
P patent system. The American patent system has its foundation in the U.S. Constitution. According to Article I, Section 8, the Congress has the power “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” During much of the nineteenth century, physical models of inventions were submitted with patent applications. A fire in the Patent Office destroyed all such models submitted prior to 1836, and more were lost in a second fire, in 1877. Those that have survived are scattered in collections ranging from that of the Smithsonian Institution to those of private collectors. As engineer-turned-historianof-technology Eugene Ferguson pointed out, patent models are useful for dating the state of the art of such things as screws and other fasteners. Patent models were no longer required after about 1880, except to accompany patent applications for perpetual-motion machines. See American Enterprise: Nineteenth-Century Patent Models (New York: Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1984). Almost ten thousand U.S. patents were issued before the present serial numbering system was initiated with U.S. Patent No. 1, which was issued on July 13, 1836. By the end of the nineteenth century, the number of U.S. Patents exceeded 600,000. Patents continued to grow exponentially, and by the end of the twentieth century the number exceeded 6,000,000. The 7,000,000 mark was reached 231
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in 2006, and patent number 8,000,000 was expected to be granted in 2011. For an introduction to the American patent process, see David Pressman, Patent It Yourself, 13th ed. (Berkeley, Calif.: Nolo Press, 2008). For historical background on British patents, see Christine MacLeod, Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System, 1660– 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). patron saint of engineers. See St. Patrick. peer review. Peer review is an independent evaluation of a design, piece of scholarship, proposal, or project. In the construction industry, a peer review of a structural design is carried out by an engineer other than the design engineer, and there can be separate design and management peer reviews. In the strictest sense, the peer reviewer is an independent consulting engineer or firm with no professional connection to the designer. The process of peer review has traditionally been more common in Europe than in the United States. In publishing, a technical or scholarly journal is said to be peer reviewed when manuscripts submitted to the journal are sent out by the editor to experts in the field for their comments and critical opinions regarding the suitability of the work for publication. Book publishers, especially university presses, also use a peer review system to evaluate manuscripts. The peer review process, which usually functions anonymously, is generally defended for its impartial upholding of standards and rigor in a field of scholarship or research; however, it has also been criticized as a mechanism for maintaining the status quo. Research grant proposals to foundations and government agencies are also often subjected to peer review, and critics argue that this prejudices the system against supporting truly innovative work.
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pencil. As the fountain pen is to the medical doctor, so the pencil is to the engineer (and is also to the architect and artist, who, like the engineer, have traditionally favored high-quality drawing- as opposed to common writing-pencils). The pencil is symbolic of the tentative nature of a conceptual design, which often takes its first form as a pencil sketch. In the 1930s, the American Lead Pencil Company advertised its top-of-the-line Venus drafting pencils in a series of full-page magazine advertisements. The pencils then cost ten cents apiece (when writing pencils could be had for half that). A typical advertisement was headed, “The Golden Gate Bridge was started with a pencil.” Among the ad’s considerable amount of copy about the bridge and its chief engineer Joseph B. Strauss (1870–1938), the pencil’s role in designing the structure was described: . . . For two years Mr. Strauss, his consultants and the members of his staff worked – primarily with pencils and paper. Preliminary sketches were constantly being revised and improved. . . . rough plans gave way to finished plans. After many months of careful detailed work, in which pencils gave true expression to creative ideas, contracts for actual construction were let and work in the field begun.
According to Charles A. Ellis (1876–1949), the designing engineer for the Golden Gate Bridge, when it was time to begin working on the structure, “Mr. Strauss gave me some pencils and a pad of paper and told me to go to work.” See also The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (New York: Knopf, 1990). “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” This familiar dictum is frequently invoked when a satisfactory – that is, a good – engineering or any design is unnecessarily revised and tweaked and iterated with the stated purpose of improving it to make it a better and better design. The ultimate goal is often stated to be the achievement of the
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best design possible – the perfect design. What “perfect” means depends on many factors, including aesthetics, constructability or manufacturability, economics, durability, and usability. Because no design can ever be expected to be truly perfect in even one, let alone all categories, the iterative process is effectively endless. The elusive “perfect” design can keep “good” designs from being accepted for what they are – simply good, workable designs. The principle was applied during NASA’s Apollo program and was carried over to the agency’s development of the space shuttle. It was imperative to discourage design changes once thoughtful decisions were made, lest the program get mired in unnecessary modifications and their implications for the entire complex system. The philosophy followed at NASA was encapsulated in the dictum, “better is the enemy of good.” The comparison among good, better, best, and perfect appears to be traceable to the writings of versatile French thinker Franc¸ois-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), who wrote under the pen name Voltaire. It appeared in his Dictionnaire Philosophique, which was first published in 1764. Voltaire essentially repeated the dictum in his 1772 poem ´ “La Begueule” (“The Prude”), where he attributes the observation to a “wise Italian,” although this may have been to achieve the rhyme: Dans ses e´ crits un sage Italien Dit que le mieux est l’ennemi du bien
The French, le mieux est l’ennemi du bien, has been translated in various ways. In addition to “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” it has been rendered as “the best is the enemy of the good” and even as “the better is the enemy of the good.” Regardless of the English phrasing, the implications of Voltaire’s words and their relevance for engineering and design are effectively the same: While a better design can always be achieved, it is not always wise, prudent, or necessary to seek one.
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Consider the invention of the World Wide Web, which is attributed to the British engineer and computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee (born in 1955), who developed the website making tool known as HTML, which stands for hypertext markup language. The language’s focus simply on text made it relatively easy to learn and use. In time, however, its shortcomings with regard to incorporating images and other media onto web sites became clear. Nevertheless, HTML is credited with the rapid growth of web sites, from the 130 in 1993 to more than 23,000 within less than two years. Although far from the perfect tool for creating web sites, HTML’s ease of use earned it widespread early adoption and established it as the language of choice. For more on this, see Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation, expanded and revised edition (Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly Media, 2007), pp. 123–126. When Larry Page (born in 1973) and his exact contemporary Sergey Brin were working on the search engine that became Google, they were not alone. Others elsewhere were seeking the same objective, and the race was on to be the first to develop a good – not a perfect – product. Thus, according to one account, “time mattered more than money” and “innovation mattered more than perfection.” Among the characteristics of the Google model was thus “innovate first, perfect later.” See David Edwards, The Lab: Creativity and Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 21–22. Another interesting example of this process is the steelwire paper clip. The familiar loop-within-a-loop design, created by making three 180-degree bends in a four-inch length of wire, is formally known as the Gem. It dates from the late nineteenth century, and the name was that of the British company that initially manufactured the clip but did not patent it. The Gem was (and remains) a very good design, but it is not perfect. Over the course of the following century, hundreds upon hundreds of patents were granted for paper clips that were arguably improvements
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on the Gem. However, none of these displaced the classic form. In fact, the more inventors tried to achieve perfection, the less likely they seemed to be able to produce a viable competitor of the Gem. In the case of the paper clip, the supposedly better has been repeatedly vanquished by the good. For a discussion of the invention and development of the paper clip, see “The Evolution of Artifacts,” American Scientist, September–October 1992, pp. 416–420, and chapter 2 of Invention by Design: How Engineers Get from Thought to Thing (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). personality of the engineer. There is a general sense among engineers and nonengineers alike that the personality of the engineer is different from that of other people. One woman once characterized to me the personality of her engineer father by describing his way of organizing the packing of his five children’s vacation luggage in the family car’s trunk. Each child was assigned distinctive color stickers to place on his or her pieces of luggage. There was a master diagram of how each piece was to be packed in the trunk, indicating the order in which the pieces were to be put in and taken out. Attention to control, detail, and order like this are believed to be part of the engineer’s personality. But that is not all there is to it. Among the more quotable passages about the personality of the engineer is the following about Russian engineers, which appears in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Volume I (New York: Harper & Row, 1974): An engineer? I had grown up among engineers, and I could remember the engineers of the twenties very well indeed: their open, shining intellects, their free and gentle humor, their agility and breadth of thought, the ease with which they shifted from one engineering field to another, and for that matter, from technology to social concerns and art.
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Then, too, they personified good manners and delicacy of taste; well-bred speech that flowed evenly and was free of uncultured words; one of them might play a musical instrument, another dabble in painting; and their faces always bore a spiritual imprint.
In an early-twentieth century short story by Elizabeth Foote titled “A Girl of the Engineers” (Atlantic Monthly, December 1905, p. 381), the narrator is the daughter and sister of engineers. Having grown up among them, she feels that she knows not only their traits but also those desirable in women who marry engineers. According to the girl, there are two kinds of engineers, those who want to work in cities and those who do not. Of the latter, she says, Those are the men I know; they have been trained to stand alone, to talk little, never to complain, to bear dullness and monotony, some of them are dull and monotonous themselves. But they aren’t petty; and in every one of them there is a strange need that drives them out into the deserts; a craving for movement and freedom and fresh new air that nothing can kill. And oh, but I’m glad it is so.
These men were, of course, the engineers who surveyed the frontier, seeking the best route for the canal, the railroad, the telegraph, the highway, the best location for the dam. They were the builders of bridges and hydroelectric power plants. They were the builders of America. Women who married such men were able to “put up with isolation and primitive conditions in remote engineering camps, with husbands totally absorbed by their work,” according to the historian Bruce Sinclair, who wrote about the engineering ethos in the early twentieth century in “Inventing a Genteel Tradition: MIT Crosses the River,” which appears in New Perspectives on Technology and American Culture (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1986), pp. 1–18.
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For a view on how personality in a broader sense can affect an engineer’s work, see Anton Tedesko and David P. Billington, “The Engineer’s Personality and the Influence It Has on His Work – A Historical Perspective,” Concrete International, December 1982, pp. 20–26. See also jokes about engineers. philosophy and engineering. Philosophy and engineering are seldom uttered in the same sentence; however, like every other human endeavor, engineering is a legitimate subject of philosophical thought. Although there might be said to be a paucity of readable books on the philosophy of engineering (and of technology generally), I have found a couple to be engaging. Among these is Barry Allen’s Artifice and Design: Art and Technology in Human Experience (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008) and Matthew Wells’s Engineers: A History of Engineering and Structural Design (London: Routledge, 2010). Although identified as a history in the subtitle, Engineers is in my view a philosophy of engineering expounded through historical progression, case histories, and structural anecdotes. See also Steen Hyldgaard Christensen et al., eds., Philosophy in Engineering (Copenhagen: Academica, 2007), which is “intended for courses in philosophy of science for engineers at the bachelor’s level in engineering studies.” photographs and paintings of engineering projects. Among the earliest photographs of an engineering project are those of the construction of the Britannia Bridge, which took place in the late 1840s over the Menai Strait in northwest Wales. Photography was new at the time, and static structures made excellent subjects for the long exposure times then required. Half a century later, the construction of the Panama Canal was a much-photographed project, not only because of its international significance but also because it coincided with the advancement of
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the technology to print photographs in newspapers and magazines. Although he drew and painted, rather than photographed engineering subjects, Joseph Pennell (1857– 1926) should be mentioned here. Pennell was a Philadelphia-trained American artist who is best remembered for his drawings of engineering construction projects, often showing incomplete bridges and buildings behind scaffolding. The focus of much of Pennell’s mature effort was the “Wonder of Work” series, which was exemplified in his drawings of the Panama Canal when it was nearing completion. Pennell has often been quoted as saying that “great engineering is great art.” He once wrote, in the shape of a boat, to the editor of the magazine Century about his passion to capture the process of building rather than the finished product: What I want Is To Go To Panama NOW and do the picturesque side of a great engineering feat before it is finished– and ruined from my point of view.
An exhibit of Pennell’s work was curated by the water resources engineer Augustine J. Fredrich for the 1993 national convention of the American Society of Civil Engineers. See also Joseph Pennell, Joseph Pennell’s Pictures of the Panama Canal (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1912). “Twentieth Century Engineering” was an exhibition mounted by New York City’s Museum of Modern Art in 1964. It consisted of artistic photographs of engineering structures ranging from towers to dams. See
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the exhibit catalog, Twentieth Century Engineering (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964). For a collection of photographs of engineering projects, see Ralph Greenhill, Engineer’s Witness (Boston: David R. Godine, 1985). pocket protectors. These plastic pocket inserts worn by many an older engineer were most often made of white plastic and were frequently the subject of caricature and ridicule. However, the plastic pocket protector was a very practical device for holding the number and different kinds of pens and pencils that many engineers preferred to have with them to mark up drawings in different ways and to make sketches and calculations of various types. The pocket protector enabled a whole complement of such writing instruments, perhaps along with a six-inch ruler and a small slide rule, to be removed from one shirt’s pocket in the evening and inserted into a fresh one’s the next morning with great efficiency. It was also the case, of course, that pocket protectors did keep shirt pockets – especially those of the short-sleeved white ones that many an engineer working in an office did wear with a tie but no jacket – from becoming soiled with broken pencil points and leaking pens and from being distorted or worn out prematurely by the concentrated weight of those implements pulling on the fabric. poem about the Army Engineers. “Engineers Poem” is about the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In one form, its final stanza reads: And when the going’s really rough And bombs burst in their ears, A whole division is apt to pray, “God, send the Engineers!”
The British Corps of Royal Engineers, whose members are known as “sappers,” has been celebrated in a poem titled
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“Muddy Old Engineers,” who are described as “the first to arrive and the last to leave” the battlefield. To the best of my knowledge, the author of each poem is anonymous. poetry by engineers. A perhaps surprising number of accomplished engineers have written and published poetry. Joseph Strauss (1870–1938), chief engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge, was class poet at the University of Cincinnati, from which he graduated in 1892. Upon the completion of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937, his poem commemorating the event was published in a special section of the San Francisco News celebrating the structure’s opening. The beginning lines of the poem read At last the mighty task is done; Resplendent in the western sun
David Steinman (1886–1960), an even more accomplished bridge engineer, turned to poetry later in his life and published at least two volumes of his verse: I Built a Bridge, and Other Poems (1955) and Songs of a Bridgebuilder (1959). His mastery of poetic form was demonstrated in his adaption of the trochaic tetrameter that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow used in his epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha. Steinman’s poem, “The Bridge at Mackinac,” which celebrated the record-setting structure that he designed, began, In the land of Hiawatha, Where the white man gazed with awe At a paradise divided By the straits of Mackinac –
The bridge builder cleverly employed the rhyme scheme to virtually force the reader to pronounce the name of the straits – and hence of Steinman’s bridge – correctly, in spite of how it is spelled.
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It is not only successful bridges that have inspired poetry. The California consulting engineer Charles H. Lawrence, who specialized in the fields of hydraulics, water resources, and sanitary engineering, wrote a book-length poem telling the tragic story of the St. Francis Dam, whose failure in 1928 claimed the lives of hundreds of people. The privately printed book comprising the poem is titled The Death of the Dam: A Chapter in Southern California History. The first stanza reads: “We’ll build the dam across that draw,” Bold Bill Mulholland said. “Then will the skeptics stand in awe, Of concrete shape and massive size Two hundred feet her crest will rise Above the river bed!
According to Lawrence, he deliberately told the dam’s story in verse “in order to be relatively brief as well as unique.” The story of the failure of St. Francis Dam has been told in many formats, including prose, television documentary, and film. It was alluded to in the movie Chinatown, which is about the self-taught engineer and water superintendent William Mulholland (1855–1935) and the Los Angeles water supply. The structural engineer Guy Nordenson (born in 1955) at one time thought he wanted to become a poet, and he enrolled in MIT thinking he would study literature there. At MIT, he founded Rune, a journal of arts and letters, but ended up graduating in civil engineering, falling one course shy of meeting the requirements for a second major in the humanities. He went on to earn a master’s degree in structural engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and had an exciting career in that field, which he recounts in what he calls a “short memoir” in his book, Patterns and Structure: Selected Writings 1972–2008 (Baden, ¨ Switzerland: Lars Muller Publishers, 2010).
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politics and engineering. The paucity of engineers running for or holding elected political office often has been lamented, especially as legislation and public policy have become increasingly involved with technical issues. However, in the 111th U.S. Congress (2009–2010) there were at least eleven members of the House and two of the Senate with engineering degrees. The thirty-first president of the United States was, of course, the engineer Herbert Hoover (1874–1964). Many political observers do not regard his administration very favorably; neither do they regard that of the thirty-ninth president, Jimmy Carter (born in 1924), who because of his education and service in the nuclear navy is often identified as an engineer. For a view of how one political writer has viewed engineers in office, see William Pfaff’s op-ed piece, “Mr. Carter’s Slide Rule,” New York Times, June 22, 1979. For an engineer’s view of the political environment in Washington, see “The Political Pleasures of Engineering: An Interview with John Sununu,” Technology Review, August/September 1992, pp. 22–28. Mechanical engineer Sununu (born in 1939) was the former New Hampshire governor who directed George H. W. Bush’s presidential campaign and who served as White House Chief of Staff under President Bush. portraits of engineers. Perhaps the most famous portrait of an engineer is Robert Howlett’s photograph of Isambard Kingdom Brunel taken on the morning of November 3, 1857, the day of the initial launching attempt of his Great Eastern steamship. Contrary to common assumption and assertion, the large iron chains that form the backdrop behind Brunel are not the anchor chains of the great ship but one of the sets of checking chains that were used as a precautionary measure against the ship sliding too fast down the ways. It had been built parallel to the riverbank because it was too long to launch in the conventional orientation, perpendicular to the water’s edge.
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The National Portrait Gallery in London holds many portraits of engineers, although at any given time only a small number of them are on public display, mostly in the section of the gallery relating to the Industrial Revolution. Postcards of many of these portraits are available in the gallery’s gift shop, and the Robert Howlett photograph of Brunel before the chains is among the most popular. Its stock has been known to be exhausted. A notorious photo of a much photographed engineer is that of Charles Steinmetz (1865–1923) standing beside Albert Einstein (1879–1955). This image proved to be an extraction of the figures of Steinmetz and Einstein from a larger group photo in an overzealous attempt by the General Electric publicity department to show the great engineer and scientist meeting one-on-one. See “Images of an Engineer,” American Scientist, July–August 1991, pp. 300– 303, which is reprinted in Remaking the World (New York: Knopf, 1997), pp. 3–11; see also The Essential Engineer (New York: Knopf, 2010), pp. 94–97. The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., also holds portraits of engineers, including a version of the group portrait of engineer-inventors, Men of Progress. This 1862 painting by Christian Schussele (1824–1879) depicts nineteen American inventors gathered in the Great Hall of the U.S. Patent Office, although in fact they sat individually for their portraits. Among the subjects are Cyrus McCormick (1809–1884), Charles Goodyear (1800– 1860), Peter Cooper (1791–1883), and Jordan Mott (17981866), inventor of a stove that could burn anthracite coal and commissioner of the painting. Another version of Schussele’s work has hung in the president’s office of the Cooper Union in New York City, an institution founded by Peter Cooper. An engraving of Men of Progress was once distributed by Scientific American and was displayed in thousands of American homes. The famous painting is often reproduced in books on nineteenth-century
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inventors and engineers. See “Men and Women of Progress,” American Scientist, May–June 1994, pp. 216–219. Portraits of engineers have also appeared on paper money. A Bank of England twenty-pound note that was introduced in 1991 had a portrait of Michael Faraday (1791–1867), who built the first electric motor; a fivepound note bore the likeness of George Stephenson (1781– 1848), along with a picture of his steam locomotive, “The Rocket.” Paper money of other countries has also borne portraits of engineers: Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) appeared on Yugoslavia’s 500-dinar note. The Swedish 500-kronor bill contained the likeness of Christopher Polhem (1661–1751), who contributed much to the economic and industrial development of Sweden, especially in the field of mining. For guides to portraits and pictures of engineers, see Eugene S. Ferguson’s Bibliography of the History of Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: Society for the History of Technology and MIT Press, 1968), pp. 87–89. postage stamps commemorating engineers and engineering. There have been a great number of postage stamps commemorating engineers, the engineering profession, and engineering achievements. When it was updated in the late 1990s, a list of engineers on stamps of all nations contained 1,400 entries. Among the engineers who have been commemorated on U.S. postage stamps are Charles Steinmetz (20-cent, ´ an ´ (29-cent, 1992), the 1983) and Theodore von Karm aerospace engineer who unfortunately was identified on the face of the stamp as an “aerospace scientist.” Many inventor/engineers have appeared on stamps, including Thomas Edison (3-cent, 1947), Henry Ford (12-cent, 1968), and the Wright brothers (6-cent air mail, 1949). Engineering and technological achievements have been more frequently commemorated on stamps, including
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Hoover Dam (3-cent, 1935, when it was called Boulder Dam; $16.50 express mail, 2008); the centenary of the telegraph (3-cent, 1944); the completion of the first transcontinental railroad (3-cent, 1944); the Atlantic cable centenary (4-cent, 1958); Project Mercury, commemorating the first U.S. man in space (4-cent, 1962); and progress in electronics (8-cent, 1973). Bridges, too, have frequently been commemorated on stamps, including the Eads Bridge (two-dollar, 1898); the Mackinac Bridge (3-cent, 1957; $4.90 priority-mail, 2010); and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (5-cent, 1964). The 1957 and 1964 stamps were issued to commemorate the opening of the respective bridges. The opening of the George Washington Bridge in 1931 was not the occasion for a stamp because so many different stamps commemorating the upcoming bicentennial of George Washington’s birth were already planned. However, both the George Washington Bridge and a covered bridge were pictured on the 1952 U.S. 3-cent stamp commemorating the Centennial of Engineering in America that coincided with the onehundredth anniversary of the founding of the American Society of Civil Engineers. The official first-day cover for use with the stamp carried a representation of the hands
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of an engineer (David Steinman) working on bridge plans, as well as a sketch of the Brooklyn Bridge. There were several other engineering-themed first-day covers for this stamp. Significant bridges have also appeared on Canadian postage stamps, including the Quebec Bridge twice, first on a 12-cent stamp issued in 1929 and again as one of a set of four 45-cent bridge stamps issued in 1996. The opening of 8-kilometer long Confederation Bridge, which provided the first fixed link between the mainland and Prince Edward Island, was commemorated in 1997 with a 45-cent stamp. In keeping with the length of this longest bridge across ice-forming waters, two versions of the stamp were issued, one showing the New Brunswick side of the bridge and one showing the Prince Edward Island side. Both stamps were contained on the same sheet, which also included a narrower non-postage bearing center section showing the remainder of the span. Thus, a profile of the entire Confederation Bridge could be affixed to an envelope. Canadian stamps have also commemorated the centennial of the Engineering Institute of Canada (36-cent, 1987) and the sesquicentennial of the birth of Sir Sandford Fleming (12-cent, 1977), the Scottish-born Canadian who was chief engineer of the Inter-Colonial Railway, which linked Central Canada with the Maritime Provinces. It was Fleming who devised a system for standard time that became accepted internationally. He was also responsible for the design of the first Canadian postage stamp (an 1851 3-pence), depicting a beaver building a dam, the motif of which later became incorporated into the logo of the Canadian Geotechnical Society. A historical marker on the present building at 110 Yonge Street in downtown Toronto commemorates Fleming’s philatelic achievement. See Hugh Maclean, Man of Steel: The Story of Sir Sandford Fleming (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1969).
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Canada’s first stamp, designed by an engineer
Canadian engineering’s iron ring tradition was commemorated on a 46-cent stamp issued in April 2000. Half of an iron ring appears on each of two identical sideby-side stamps, so the image of a full iron ring can be affixed to an envelope bearing 92-cents postage. The wording on the stamps is bilingual, of course, and each bears in English the phrase, “The Calling of an Engineer” (in French, “L’engagement de l’ing´enieur”). Each sheet of 16 stamps contains the inscription “Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer” and the quotation “Upon honour and Cold Iron, God helping me, by these things I propose to abide.” Many engineers and engineering achievements have also appeared on the postage stamps of other countries. Among other engineers most widely commemorated on stamps are Guglielmo Marconi, Werner von Braun, and Ferdinand von Zeppelin. In the late 1990s a new effort to get more engineers and engineering themes on stamps was spearheaded by Michael J. Vinarcik, a professional engineer who lives in Michigan. He organized a study group of the American Topical Association, a philatelic organization devoted to stamp collecting in specific topic areas, such as engineers or engineering. Full-color illustrations of some stamps commemorating engineers and engineering were contained in Hal Bowser,
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“Everything about Technology that Can Fit on a Postage Stamp,” American Heritage of Invention & Technology, Spring 1986, p. 18–23. Bridge stamps issued by countries throughout the world were featured in Civil Engineering for July 1933. The stamps were illustrated on a special page printed in color and were described on p. 409 of the issue. practical jokes and pranks. Practical jokes have become hallmarks of technical schools such as Caltech and MIT. At the 1984 Rose Bowl, played between UCLA and the University of Illinois, Caltech senior Ted Williams and a friend established a radio link with the scoreboard and during the football game changed the names of the teams to read Caltech and MIT. On another occasion, students from MIT rigged a trap door to pop open at midfield at an opportune time during a Harvard-Yale football game, allowing a large balloon to inflate and display the letters MIT. For more college pranks, perpetrated by engineers and others, see Neil Steinberg, If at All Possible, Involve a Cow: The Book of College Pranks (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992). prefixes for engineers’ names. It is not uncommon in non-English speaking countries for engineers to be addressed as “Engineer” (in the local language, of course), much the same way American physicians are invariably addressed as “Doctor.” In Portugal, for example, engineers are properly addressed as Senhor Engenheiro, and in Italy the honorific is Ingegnere. The idea to use Engineer as a prefix (abbreviated Engr.) to American names, much as Mr., Mrs., Ms., and Dr. are used, and much as Europeans and Latin Americans use such abbreviations as Ing., originated in the 1930s and was promoted then by David Steinman (1886–1960), founder of the National Society of Professional Engineers, as a means of gaining respect for the professional engineer. His argument for the practice of using the pre-nominal
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title was reiterated by Steinman in a letter to the editor of Engineering News-Record in response to an editorial in that periodical that took exception to the proposal when it was adopted by the NSPE. To illustrate the usage he advocated, the letter was signed Engr. D. B. Steinman. See Engineering News-Record, February 13, 1936, pp. 256–257. It has been suggested more recently that British engineers “show pride in their profession” by putting the abbreviation “Eng.” before their names in a manner similar to that done in Europe and Latin America, where among the pre-nominal titles for engineers are the following: European Engineer. Those engineers who meet minimum educational and professional experience requirements of the European Federation of National Engineering Associations, which derives its acronym FEANI from its name in French (Federation Europeenne d’Associations Nationales d’Ingenieurs), can be registered as and call themselves European Ingenieur (European Engineer) in the language of their country. Regardless of the language, however, the designation is abbreviated Eur. Ing. The abbreviation and FEANI itself were created in 1951 to make engineers more mobile in the European community. For more information on FEANI and for a list of such European titles and designations, see K. Hernaut, “European Engineers: Unity of Diversity,” Journal of Engineering Education 83 (January 1994): 35–40. Ingeniero. This title of distinction is used in Spanishspeaking countries for degreed engineers and others who earn it. It is abbreviated Ing., and is used the way the title Dr. is used in the U.S. Thus, in Spain an engineer checking into a hotel might be referred to as Ing. Rodriguez, much as a medical doctor in America would be referred to as Dr. Rodgers. Ingenieur. This is a title of distinction used in Germany for those who earn a degree in engineering. Thus, one might refer to Herr Ing. Schmidt or Frau Ing. Schmidt the
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way one refers to Dr. Smith in America. If Ing. Schmidt were an engineer who is also a professor and a doctor (Ph.D.), he would be addressed as Herr Prof. Dr. Ing. Schmidt. In Europe generally, professionals with the title Ingenieur tend to rank higher than doctors and lawyers in “respectability” polls. Ir. is an abbreviation used by the Dutch for the word ingenieur. In Belgium and the Netherlands, engineers who have completed a university engineering curriculum roughly equivalent to the American Master of Science degree are entitled to use the legally protected title Ingenieur and the abbreviation Ir. In these countries, the designation Ing. is reserved for someone who has completed a generally shorter curriculum in a non-university technical institute and is known as an industrieel ingenieur. In Canada, the title ingenieur,which is French for engineer, can be used only by those who are professional engineers in a French-speaking province. Hence, an engineer practicing in Quebec might show the title “ing.” on his or her business card, as Claire Germain, ing. The Polish word for engineer is in˙zynier, which is abbreviated in˙z. Thus in formal usage the surname of a Polish engineer who also holds a Ph.D. degree would be preceded by Dr. In˙z. prestige of professionals. In one of his regular columns on the engineering profession, structural engineer Richard G. Weingardt described the way the prestige of engineering had moved up and down in Harris Poll surveys. Having tracked the results since 1977, Weingardt observed that in the period from then to 2010, at least in the public’s mind, the prestige of engineers dropped four places – from fifth to ninth. During that same period, doctors and scientists maintained their position at or near the top of the list. Weingardt believes that the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, had a hand in raising the
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prestige of firefighters and nurses, with the former even being perceived in one poll as more prestigious than scientists and the latter as right up there with doctors. Other professionals who exceeded engineers in prestige included military and police officers, teachers, and the clergy. Weingardt believes that engineers should have a higher standing in prestige polls, but he attributes their failure to achieve it to be due to their being “back-room people” who lack public visibility and have the image of being too narrowly focused on technical issues. See Richard G. Weingardt, “Prestige: Getting the Best Clotheslines,” Structural Engineering and Design, September 2010, p. 42. Among the reasons why engineers are lacking in public visibility may be the fact that they are often identified as scientists in reports of their achievements – but identified as engineers when failures occur. In the late summer and early fall of 2010, the world followed the fate of thirty-three miners trapped in a collapsed mine in Chile. After seventy days underground, they were finally rescued through a shaft driven in record time with the help of an innovative drill bit, a model of engineering design. While the shaft was being drilled, a one-man capsule was being designed and built by other engineers, and it was successfully used to haul each of the miners the half-mile up to safety. One newspaper headline attributed the achievement to “science,” even though the body of the story quoted a participant in the rescue as crediting engineering. See Matt Moffett, Anthony Esposito, and Carolina Pica, “Chile’s Rescue Formula: ‘75% Science, 25% Miracle’,” Wall Street Journal, October 14, 2010. printing vs. cursive writing. Many engineers became accustomed to printing rather than writing in cursive. This practice, which often extends to personal letters and even to greeting cards, may have had its origins in the fact that before computers, engineering students were required
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to take courses in mechanical drawing, in which they learned to label their drawings in block letters, sometimes even using lettering guides because neatness and uniformity were so stressed. The practice of printing continued through the other courses in the engineering curriculum, and printing became as natural and as quick to execute as script writing. With the advent of computer-based drafting, engineering students were no longer expected to develop a facility in hand-lettering drawings, and so the practice of engineers printing everything they write may become a dying art. When engineering drawings were still done manually and executed in India ink made from lampblack, handlettering was generally not considered sufficiently uniform for the final touches. In this case, any words or numbers needed to annotate or complete a drawing were often produced by employing a Leroy lettering set. The heart of the set was a scriber, which consisted of a three-armed metal frame from whose bottom projected a number of pins and to whose top was affixed a handhold through which motion was imparted to the entire device. A typical lettering set contained several different templates, each of which looked like a ruler incised with the letters of the alphabet
Scriber and template from a Leroy lettering set
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and the numerals, all underscored by a groove running the length of the template. The scriber was operated by placing the so-called tail pin in the linear groove and setting the tracer pin in the desired letter or numeral. By moving that pin within the outline of the chosen character, it would be reproduced on the drawing by the pen held in the third leg of the tool. Using a Leroy without smudging or streaking took some practice; however, once one got the hang of it virtually perfect printing could be produced. Each template corresponded to a different size and style – including italic faces – of letters and numerals, which enabled an adept engineering student or draftsman to produce properly proportioned and neatly aligned words and numbers with alacrity. prizes for engineering achievement. Challenges and contests are familiar to engineering students, many of whom have engaged in such activities as egg-drop competitions and concrete canoe races. The prize is seldom more than a trophy and bragging rights, but the lessons learned can be invaluable. Increasingly, real-world engineering challenges and contests with substantial monetary prizes are being promoted as means of encouraging the development of desirable new technologies, such as lightweight batteries, efficient solar cells, and innovative spacecraft. The entrants and competitors might just as likely be teams from large corporations and small business ventures as from universities and colleges. The sponsors of the competitions often want to open them up to all comers in the hopes of tapping new sources of innovation and nontraditional, out-of-the-box thinking. The idea of a technology prize is not new, of course. In the eighteenth century, the British government offered £20,000 for a method for determining longitude at sea. An amount of £14,315 was eventually awarded to the selfeducated English clockmaker John Harrison (1693–1776),
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who worked for almost three decades on his marine chronometer. The story is famously told in Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York: Penguin, 1996). The “scientific problem” was, of course, really an engineering one. In the early twentieth century, the $25,000 Orteig Prize motivated early aviators to attempt a non-stop flight between New York and Paris, the feat that Charles Lindbergh accomplished in 1927. It is not only the challenge that attracts competitors. The winning individual or team can have an enormous advantage in the marketplace opened up by a new technology. Even if the prize money does not equal the winner’s research and development expenditure, a governmentsponsored competition can have the further allure of massive purchasing contracts going to the proven technology leader. During the 2008 presidential campaign, when gasoline was approaching five dollars a gallon in California, candidate John McCain proposed a $300 million prize for a battery pack that would enable cars equipped with it to outperform existing hybrid and electric vehicles. McCain reminded potential voters that the prize would cost taxpayers only one dollar per capita and could produce a giant step in the direction of energy independence. The proposal may have been suggested by an idea for an at that time unfunded Superbattery Prize valued at $1 billion or the earlier announcement of a Pentagon-sponsored competition known as the Wearable Power Prize. It promoted a new technology like a fuel cell that would lighten the load (by as much as twenty pounds) of batteries that soldiers had to carry into the field to run their night-vision goggles, radios, computers, and other electronic equipment. Since 2004, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been sponsoring competitions to encourage the development of autonomous robotic vehicles that could deliver
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supplies in a war zone. The $1 million first prize has attracted many competitors to the Mojave Desert test course. There has also been a growing number of “alphabet” prizes. The $10-million Ansari X Prize, for a privately financed spacecraft that twice in a two-week period could give three adult passengers a ride reaching a hundred kilometers in altitude, was won in 2004 by Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne. An improved version figures in Virgin Galactic’s business plan for $200,000 rides into space. Google sponsors the $20 million Lunar X Prize, which goes to the first entrant to get a rover to range at least 500 meters about the Moon’s surface and send images back to Earth. In 2010, the Department of Energy’s $10-million L Prize for an efficient light bulb already had a promising entrant, which was undergoing testing to see if it would last the required 25,000 hours. Such prizes, which have been described as a new form of philanthropy, certainly encourage research and development programs that can yield new technologies extremely beneficial to military forces, space businesses, and the planet alike. See The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems (New York: Knopf, 2010), chapter 14. professional engineer. An Engineer-in-Training or Engineer Intern is one who has passed the Fundamentals of Engineering Examination. Designated FE and administered by the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying, this eight-hour written examination is the first step in the professional registration and licensing process. The examination is designed to test the applicant’s understanding of the subjects of chemistry, dynamics, electric circuits, engineering economics, fluid mechanics, mathematics, materials science, mechanics of materials, statics, and thermodynamics, all of which are generally covered in
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the first three years of an engineering curriculum. An individual who passes the Fundamentals of Engineering examination and who graduates from a school whose curriculum has been accredited by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology is classified as an Engineerin-Training, designated E.I.T., or, increasingly, an Engineer Intern, E.I. The Professional Engineering (PE) examination, also known as “Principles and Practices of Engineering,” may be taken by engineers-in-training who have accumulated at least four years of experience in qualified engineering work. The PE exam is designed to determine competence in a specific engineering discipline. An engineer is awarded a professional engineer license in the state in which the exam is passed. Licensed engineers are assigned a unique registration number, which must appear on a seal that is obtained as part of the professional registration process. Although some states have allowed rubber stamps to be used, most engineers have their seal cut into an embossing die, and many engineers use such a seal also to mark the books in their personal library. An engineer’s seal applied to drawings or plans indicates that that engineer was in responsible charge of the project and has prepared or reviewed the design presented and has approved it as conforming to accepted practice. Drawings so imprinted are said to be “sealed.” With regard to professional licensing, comity refers to the process whereby an engineer licensed in one state obtains a license to practice in another state. Comity between different countries is more complicated. Because the United States requires an examination for registration and Canada does not (obtaining a Canadian engineering degree being considered sufficient proof of ability), it is generally easier for an American licensed engineer to transfer that qualification to Canada than for a Canadian
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engineer to transfer registration to the United States. See also licensing of engineers. proof test. Historically, after a bridge was completed but before it was opened to general traffic, its strength was first tested by a load heavier than any to be expected during its lifetime. This was termed a “proof test” and was usually required as part of the construction contract. Nineteenth-century railroad bridges were proof tested by driving onto them strings of the heaviest locomotives and tenders that could be assembled, and the deflection of the bridge under the proof load was carefully monitored by engineers and inspectors. For road bridges, crowds of people or laden wagons and later trucks were driven onto the bridge, and, especially if a circus was in town, elephants were herded across the structure to be tested. The animals were believed to have a second sense about the safety of a bridge, and if they hesitated in crossing it there was reason to be concerned for its soundness. Buildings of novel design were proof tested by stacking sand bags on their floors or roof.
Locomotives used to proof test a bridge
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Elephants being herded onto a bridge
In some eastern-European countries it has been customary for the design engineer to stand, sometimes accompanied by his family, under a bridge being proof tested to demonstrate confidence in the design. With the advent of digital computers, some engineers have argued that physical proof tests, which they believed could in fact overload and thereby damage an optimally designed structure, were unnecessary and could be replaced with simulated “proof tests” conducted on computer models. See “Making Sure,” American Scientist, March–April 1992, pp. 121–124. psychology and engineering design. The design of structures, especially, can be greatly influenced by nontechnical factors, including those relating to aesthetics and psychology. This has been especially true in the case of large bridges and dams, where the appearance of the structure can have a pronounced effect on the public that
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is expected to feel safe crossing it or living downstream of it. In the early part of the twentieth century, a number of large dams were being designed and built in California. At the time, there were two competing approaches to dam design. One, promoted by the engineer John S. Eastwood (1857–1924), employed multiple buttressed concrete arches, which being relatively thin provided an economical use of materials but resulted in a more fragile-looking structure than the more conventional thick-based dam that relied on its sheer bulk to hold the water back and stay in place. Among the leading proponents of heavier-looking designs was John R. Freeman (1855–1932), who justified a ponderous design for an earthen and rockfill dam near Oakland, California, in the following way: “I have included the depositing of an immense amount of [rock] on top of the downstream slope of the proposed dam, more for its psychological effect on the public than for any sound engineering reason.” See Donald C. Jackson, Building the Ultimate Dam: John S. Eastwood and the Control of Water in the West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), especially note 55 on p. 286 and chapter 6. Psychological design features have been used in many bridges, especially when they were to replace an earlier one that had collapsed. Thus, the redesigned Tay and Quebec bridges, the originals of which failed in 1879 and 1907 respectively, were much heavier-looking and more stable-appearing structures than their ill-fated predecessors. The famous Firth of Forth Bridge, completed in 1890 near Edinburgh, Scotland, has been criticized for being overly strong, but it also was designed in the wake of the Tay Bridge disaster, which occurred only about sixty miles north on the same rail line. Similarly, after the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed in 1940, the deck of its replacement was designed to look much less slender, and other suspension bridges designed and built in the wake of the
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infamous failure also employed deep trusses to give the psychological impression of stiffness against the wind. In 1981, the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, was the scene of the worst structural disaster then to date. One hundred and fourteen people were killed and many more injured when a pair of architecturally striking elevated walkways that spanned the otherwise open atrium collapsed without warning. The walkways had been built to ease the movement of hotel guests and convention-goers back and forth across the lobby floor, and that same purpose prompted the redesign and reconstruction of a new elevated walkway after the collapse. That new walkway, however, was structurally very different from the ones that had failed. It was supported not from slender steel rods hanging from the roof but by massive concrete columns rising up from the lobby floor. The psychological message to hotel patrons was blunt: This new walkway will not fall on you! public lectures and demonstrations. Engineering projects have always fascinated the public, and that is why the barriers around construction sites often have observation
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ports for “sidewalk superintendents.” The phenomenon is nothing new. Before the Great Exhibition occupied the Crystal Palace, lay persons were welcomed to on-site public lectures and demonstrations that explained the structural principles of the revolutionary building and some contemporary engineering projects of the mid-nineteenth century. Later in the century, when the enormous cantilever bridge across the Firth of Forth was under construction near Edinburgh, the engineer Benjamin Baker (1840– 1907) lectured to lay audiences on the structural principles involved, complete with a demonstration by means of an anthropomorphic model of one of the bridge’s spans. Today, the bridge’s visitor center has a pair of chairs and related paraphernalia with which people can recreate that model.
Q Quebec Bridge. This steel cantilever bridge across the St. Lawrence River at Quebec collapsed during construction in 1907. After an inquiry by a royal commission, which found that the bridge was inadequately designed and its construction improperly supervised, the structure was redesigned and construction begun anew. A second accident befell the bridge in 1916, when because of the failure of a casting, the central suspended span that was being hoisted into place fell into the water and was destroyed. The Quebec Bridge was finally completed in 1917 and now stands as a symbol of Canadian resolve. It also serves as the entranceway to Canada for ships coming up the St. Lawrence River. The structure, which at 1,800 feet between piers has remained for almost a century the longest spanning cantilever bridge in the world, demonstrates the chilling effect on technology that a failure can have. The bridge was the subject of Willa Cather’s first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, which was published in 1912; has appeared on Canadian commemorative postage stamps; and is said to have provided inspiration for the country’s iron-ring tradition. Although the belief persists that the wreckage of the original structure was the source of the
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Workers posing with component of redesigned Quebec Bridge
iron for the first rings adopted by Canadian engineers as a symbol of their professionalism, this is belied by the fact that the material of the failed bridge was not iron but steel.
R railroads and engineers. It is a pet peeve of many engineers that their profession is confused with the occupation of railroad engine operator. They consider it a stale joke at best, after they identify themselves to be an engineer, to have someone ask if they drive a locomotive. Historically, the word engineer designated someone who designed engines before it did someone who drove or operated them; however, to some laypeople the latter definition is the one that comes first to mind. The locomotive engineer’s cap, made out of the tightly woven and strong cotton upholstery fabric known as ticking, has also been annoyingly associated with engineers who have no connection to trains. Next to cartoon depictions of engineers in hard hats are those caricaturing them in the railroader’s cap. I was conflicted at my university’s commencement ceremony one year when the graduates receiving engineering degrees were handed blue-andwhite striped caps as they marched to their seats. The idea was that at the end of the ceremony they would doff their mortarboards and put on the caps. The well-intended but ill-advised act of camaraderie nevertheless bothered some other engineering faculty members, who had also fought the misdirected stereotype of engineers as train drivers. Fortunately, the attempt to establish a commencement “tradition” lasted only a year or two before being forgotten. 265
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re-engineering. In addition to its engineering meaning of improving a technical or industrial process, in the 1990s re-engineering became a buzzword of management seeking to rethink how their organizations worked in the context of modern technology and evolving business practices. The result of re-engineering was often a restructuring and downsizing of operations, with consequent layoffs. Reengineering has been likened to taking a company apart brick-by-brick and putting it back together again with the bricks rearranged, and often with a lot of redundant and surplus bricks left over to be discarded. research and development (R&D). This term, which has come to be used for all manner of organized scientific and engineering activity, became common with the establishment of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development in 1941. OSRD was the idea of the electrical engineer Vannevar Bush (1890–1974), who was its first director. The term research, development, and demonstration (RDD) is used to describe research and development efforts that continue on to demonstrate the technical and economic feasibility of a concept. Other obvious, and sometimes not-so-obvious, extensions of the terminology are also occasionally encountered. It has been proposed that not research (commonly equated with science) but development (engineering) objectives should guide research programs, in which case we should speak of D&R. A distinguished aerospace engineer has advocated the concept of Research for Development (R4D), in which the engineering objective serves to motivate and prioritize any relevant scientific research. See Simon Ostrach, “Microgravity and the Human Exploration of Space Technology Challenges,” Technology in Society, August–November 2008, pp. 411–414. See also “Development and Research,” American Scientist, May– June 1997, pp. 210–213, and The Essential Engineer: Why
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Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems (New York: Knopf, 2010), chapters 7 and 8. reverse engineering. The term reverse engineering designates the disassembling of a product or the breaking down of a process to determine how it was designed, usually for the purpose of copying it or designing something to compete with it. Reverse engineering can also be used in the redesign or improvement of existing products for which design documentation is not readily available or does not exist at all. revolutionaries in engineering. Historically, there have been movements among engineers to make the profession more socially responsible and prominent. Among the books that tell the story of such movements is The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession by the historian of technology Edwin T. Layton, Jr. First published in 1971 and issued by Johns Hopkins University Press in a new edition in 1986, The Revolt of the Engineers is a history of the development of the profession of engineering in America. Layton is also the author of “Mirror-Image Twins: The Communities of Science and Technology in 19th-Century America,” Technology and Culture, October 1971, pp. 562–580, a seminal article that articulates both distinctions and similarities between science and engineering. Another informative book is David F. Noble’s America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Knopf, 1977). This book has as its primary thesis “that the history of modern technology in America is of a piece with that of the rise of corporate capitalism.” According to Noble, “the role of the engineers in the creation of modern corporate industry must be taken into account before any satisfactory explanation can be attempted” of the belief that “the survival of capitalist social relations, despite the most dramatic
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advances in productive forces, has to do with the nature of modern engineering, the source of those technological advances.” Among the names closely associated with revolutionary movements in American engineering are Morris Cooke and Thorstein Veblen. Morris Llewellyn Cooke (1872– 1960) was a leader of the early twentieth-century movement to reform the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the engineering profession. Cooke felt the ASME was then controlled not by engineers but by the utility industry and that professional societies and the profession itself should be more generally sensitive to the public interest. He attempted to broaden ASME’s sense of social responsibility and democratize the organization. For one perspective on Cooke’s activity, see Bruce Sinclair, A Centennial History of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980). The economist Thorstein Bunde Veblen (1857–1929) was a trenchant social critic who was the author of, among many other works, The Engineers and the Price System (New York: Viking, 1940). According to Edwin Layton, Veblen “assumed that an irrepressible conflict between science and business would thrust the engineer into the role of social revolutionary.” Veblen founded the technocracy movement, which advocated that engineers play a larger role in managing society. A mid-1930s editorial from the New York Times (as quoted in Engineering News-Record, January 23, 1936, p. 137), prompted by a power outage that plunged a good part of upper Manhattan into darkness, gives a flavor of the spirit of those times and their ambivalence toward the idea of technocracy: How utterly dependent we are on the engineers! They and the scientists hold us in the hollow of their hand. How many
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of them are there? A hundred thousand, a million – who knows? They constitute a new ruling class. Destroy them and the country would be laid low. Disease would decimate us, transportation would be impossible, telephone and telegraph would be silent, starvation would stalk in the cities, factories would stand idle. Technocracy? The term is in bad odor. But there are technocrats for all that – knights not of the sword but of energy. When the lights go out we become aware of our rulers.
Robert’s Rules of Order. This famous and often-invoked guide to parliamentary procedure was written by the engineer Henry Martyn Robert (1837–1923) and first published in 1876. The idea for the handbook arose out of a frustrating experience when Robert was asked to preside at an unruly church meeting. He completed the guide in his spare time, laboring on it especially during winter months when engineering work was curtailed. Robert had a full career in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, including work on the jetties and Brigadier General Henry seawall at the Texas port of Martyn Robert Galveston, and he retired at the rank of brigadier general. See “Henry Martyn Robert,” American Scientist, March–April 1996, pp. 106–109, which is reprinted in Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering (New York: Knopf, 1997).
S St. Patrick. Among the tongue-in-cheek stories that have developed to explain why St. Patrick is considered the patron saint of engineers is one that claims that Irish records had long been misinterpreted. According to this theory, St. Patrick did not drive snakes out of Ireland but rather “drove stakes into Ireland” and therefore must have been a surveyor or engineer. According to another story, he had the “honor of being the first engineer, either because of his discovery of the ‘blarney’ stone or because of his reputed development of the first ‘worm drive’.” Some engineers have even claimed that the four-leaf clover design of the emblem of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers was in fact chosen because it resembled a shamrock, which is, of course, the symbol of Ireland. The connection of St. Patrick to engineering celebrations is believed to have originated at the University of Missouri, in Columbia. According to a brochure that I picked up during a visit to that campus in 2003, it was a hundred years earlier, during the excavation for an engineering annex building, that a stone inscribed in an ancient language was unearthed. Other sources relate that the stone rolled into a crowd of engineering students. None of them could decipher the Gaelic inscription on the stone, until some unknown engineer came forth, announced that the inscription said “St. Patrick was an engineer,” and then faded back into the crowd. The stone came to be enshrined on campus as the “blarney stone.” Coincidentally, 270
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according to still another tale, engineering students had been discussing the need for a school holiday between New Year’s and graduation, and they determined that it would be appropriate if it fell about midway through the semester, on St. Patrick’s Day. It became traditional for engineers to cut classes and parade around campus making a lot of noise to celebrate the patron saint of engineering. The origins of the tradition were memorialized in verse, in a poem entitled “Erin Go Bragh,” which appeared in the February 1935 issue of the Technograph, the University of Illinois student engineering magazine that dates from 1885. The opening lines of the poem read, ’Twas in Missouri in nineteen three On St. Patrick’s anniversary That the Engineers miraculously found A mystic stone beneath the ground. A legend on its face it bore That puzzled scholars by the score.
It has also been claimed that the tradition began at the University of Minnesota, where the stone came to be preserved by a secret society known as the Plumb Bob, whose pious members were expected to maintain a grade point average of 3.1416 – something not quite as easy as pi. However, according to that university’s own web site, St. Patrick’s Day was not associated with celebrations of engineering on its campus until 1914. Nevertheless, the St. Patrick movement spread among engineering schools, and in 1919 representatives of eleven of them met at Missouri and a national Guard of St. Patrick was founded. Some other schools objected to the connection with St. Patrick, and so with the hopes of continued growth of the organization, its name was changed to the Association of College Engineers, out of which is believed to have grown such annual campus events as Engineers’ Day or Engineers’ Week (known affectionately as E-Day
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or E-Week), during which, among other activities, engineering students mounted public exhibits and demonstrations in their laboratories. The celebration often culminated with a banquet or dance. For further details see Mary Frances Pope, “The Apocryphal Saint of the Engineer,” The Kentucky Engineer, February 1948, pp. 5–6, 30. Among the schools having a chapter of the Guard of St. Patrick was the University of Missouri at Rolla, formerly known as the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy, and now named the Missouri University of Science and Technology, or Missouri S&T for short. Upon gaining admission to knighthood in the Guard of St. Patrick in 1933, one of its engineering students – who would later be my father-in-law – was presented with the certificate reproduced below. Its spelling and wording at the same time suggest the self-deprecating nature of engineering humor and give a sense of the organization’s seriousness and intentions. An Order of St. Patrick once functioned at many an engineering school; however, the often secretive honorary leadership group no longer appears to have a national organization coordinating activities or preserving its history. The purpose of the Order of St. Patrick generally came to be to recognize senior engineering students and popular faculty for their leadership and to bring together leaders of the diverse engineering societies, which tend to be discipline oriented. Induction ceremonies for the Order of St. Patrick naturally took place on or near St. Patrick’s Day. At my institution, an Order of St. Patrick was established in 1945. It soon began sponsoring the annual St. Pat’s Ball, a formal dance that is remembered as being a social highlight for the entire campus. The service activities of the group included helping freshmen with their engineering work through lectures on slide rule usage and help
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sessions for courses. In the 1980s, one prominent activity in preparation for St. Patrick’s Day consisted of painting green shamrocks on the walkway (and any rocks or lampposts beside it) leading to the engineering school. The induction ceremony consisted of hooded and robed senior members of the order, the Knights of St. Patrick, showing up at the doors of classrooms and summoning the new members, who had previously been tapped, to proceed to the front of the engineering building. There, often before confused passersby, the inductees were instructed to hold one of their shoes over their head while standing on one leg and reciting a pledge to the little-known society. Sadly, for years now the Order of St. Patrick has been inactive
Knight of St. Patrick certificate, issued at Rolla in 1933
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at Duke and at many of the other schools where it once flourished. Missouri universities at Columbia and Rolla are notable exceptions. At Mizzou, the associated week-long activities range from an egg catapult competition to an honor society quiz bowl. The highlights of the week are a knighting ceremony and the formal St. Pat’s Ball. The knighting ceremony, during which those seniors dubbed Knights of St. Patrick kneel and kiss the blarney stone, takes place at a location known as the Engineers’ Shamrock. All graduating seniors are eligible to apply for knighthood, with the level of knighthood they receive being determined by their involvement in E-Week, their leadership in engineering organizations, and their academic achievement. At Rolla, a week of games and follies has traditionally included students painting the main downtown street green in preparation for the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade. The Grand Ball, held in St. Pat’s Ballroom, was in the past presided over by the year’s honorary St. Patrick and the Queen of Love and Beauty. However, traditions evolve, and more recently the queen and her court have included the Princess of Peace and Happiness, the Countess of Chastity and Virtue, the Duchess of Desire and Ecstasy, and the Lady of Honor and Devotion. St. Patrick has survived it all at Rolla, and a statue of the patron saint commands a prominent place on campus and provides a focal point for many activities. See “A Century of St. Pats” and related articles, St. Patrick statue at UMR Magazine, Winter 2007, Missouri University of pp. 6–21. Science & Technology
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scale effect. The observation that working models of machines and structures cannot be scaled up indefinitely was made by Vitruvius in his first-century-B.C. treatise The Ten Books on Architecture. According to Vitruvius, the city of Rhodes had been successfully defended by a resident engineer who came up with ad hoc schemes each time the city was attacked anew. However, when a different engineer exhibited a model of a crane-like device that, he claimed, when scaled up to the appropriate size would be capable of defending the city against all future attacks, the older engineer was dismissed. Rhodians felt secure with this one-device-fits-all solution, and it soon was tested. As an enemy siege machine of unprecedented proportions approached the city, its citizens called for the implementation of the new defense. At this point the new engineer admitted that his machine could not be scaled up to such a size, and the city would have to succumb to its attackers. In desperation, the citizens implored the former engineer to help, and he devised a scheme whereby all the liquid waste generated inside the city’s walls would be directed into the path of the behemoth, which became bogged down under its own great weight. Subsequently, the siege machine was brought inside the walls and erected as a monument to the older engineer’s ingenuity and also as a reminder of how not everything that works on a small scale also works on a large scale. The scale effect was expounded upon by Galileo in his 1638 seminal work, translated into English as Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, which provided a methodical approach to studying the strength of materials. He introduced his subject by noting that Renaissance engineers were baffled by the fact that there appeared to be a limit to how much successful designs of ships, obelisks, and the like could be scaled up geometrically before they failed. That there is a scale effect regarding how much
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structures can be increased geometrically in size is a result of the fact that as the size of a structure increases, its weight increases as the cube of a characteristic dimension, whereas its strength to resist the stresses induced by that weight increases only as the square. It is this scale effect that also limits the size of animals and plants and explains why different size living things possess different proportions, as observed by Galileo. In the nineteenth century, the scale effect played a role in the development of early steamships. Some scientists claimed that a steamship could never be made large enough to carry enough coal to fire its boilers for the duration of a transatlantic voyage. Some engineers believed otherwise, observing that as the volume – and thereby the coal-carrying capacity – of a ship increased, the power needed to drive it did not increase proportionally. Indeed, as a ship’s volume grew as the cube of its size, the resistance it encountered to moving through the water increased only as the square. The achievement of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Western steamship in making a transatlantic crossing wholly under steam in 1838 provided an incontrovertible counterexample to the scientific hypothesis. schools of engineering. Alden Partridge (1785–1854) was an 1806 West Point graduate who stayed on at the Military Academy to teach. In 1813 he became the first American to hold the title of Professor of Engineering. Partridge served as acting superintendent of West Point until Sylvanus Thayer (1785–1872) was appointed in 1817. In 1819, Partridge established the first civilian school of engineering in the United States. The American Literary, Scientific, and Military Academy, located in his hometown of Norwich, Vermont, was modeled after West Point. Courses in civil engineering were offered as early as 1821. The institution became Norwich University in 1834, and it conferred its first civil engineering degrees in 1837.
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Contemporaneously, engineering education in America was advanced significantly by the establishment in Troy, New York, of the predecessor of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. This historically important engineering school was founded in 1824 as the Rensselaer School. It was established by its namesake, landowner Stephen van Rensselaer (1764–1839), who wanted it “to qualify teachers for instructing the sons and daughters of farmers and mechanics, by lectures or otherwise, in the application of experimental chemistry, philosophy, and natural history, to agriculture, domestic economy, the arts and manufactures.” In 1835, under the new name of Rensselaer Institute, the institution was authorized to give instruction in “engineering and technology,” and the first “civil engineering” degrees (actually the degree was designated C.E., standing for “Civil Engineer”) in Britain or America were granted to a class of four. By the mid-1800s, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was the foremost civilian school of engineering in the country. See Samuel Rezneck, Education for a Technological Society: A Sesquicentennial History of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, N.Y.: RPI, 1968). See also Thomas Phelan, D. Michael Ross, and Carl A. Westerdahl, Rensselaer: Where Imagination Achieves the Impossible (Troy, N.Y.: RPI, 1995). Perhaps the archetypal engineering schools in America today are Caltech and MIT, each of which has its unique history. The California Institute of Technology is almost universally referred to by its shorter and catchier name, Caltech, rather than the abbreviation CIT, which has also stood for Carnegie Institute of Technology, located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Caltech, located in Pasadena, California, took its present name in 1921. Before that, it was known variously as Throop University, Throop Polytechnic Institute, and Throop College of Technology, after its founder Amos G. Throop (1811–1894), a Chicago businessman and politician who relocated to California. The
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forerunner to Caltech has been described as a “preparatory and vocational school” and a “local manual training school.” The institution began offering degrees in civil, electrical, and mechanical engineering in 1908, just after George Ellery Hale (1868–1938), the founder of the Mount Wilson Solar Observatory, joined Throop’s board of trustees. It was Hale who had a vision for Throop to develop into a major research university. According to Hale, “We must not forget that the greatest engineer is not the man who is trained merely to understand machines and apply formulas, but is the man who, while knowing these things, has not failed to develop . . . the highest qualities of his imagination.” The quote, mutatis mutandis to reflect that engineering has evolved into a gender-neutral profession, is still relevant today. See Robert Kargon, “Inventing Caltech,” American Heritage of Invention & Technology, Spring 1986, pp. 24–30. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has its roots in an 1846 plan for a Boston “polytechnic school” put forth by William Barton Rogers (1804–1882), a geologist with a special interest in strength of materials. (Rogers’s 1838 book, An Elementary Treatise on the Strength of Materials, was a pioneer in its field.) His plan was realized in 1861 with the founding of the Boston Institute of Technology. The institute moved from Boston’s Copley Square to its present campus in Cambridge in 1916. For the view of someone who was associated with the institution for over sixty years, see Samuel C. Prescott, When M.I.T. Was “Boston Tech,” 1861–1916 (Cambridge, Mass.: Technology Press, 1954). On the unsuccessful hostile takeover of MIT by Harvard, see Bruce Sinclair, “Inventing a Genteel Tradition: MIT Crosses the River,” in New Perspectives on Technology and Culture (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1986), pp. 1–18. For two late-twentieth century views of MIT see Pepper White, The Idea Factory: Learning to Think at MIT (New York: Dutton, 1991), and Fred Hapgood, Up the Infinite Corridor: MIT and the
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Technical Imagination (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993). Technology Review, the alumni magazine of MIT, is also a magazine for general readers. Its two editions once differed only in that the former contained a central insert of alumni news and other information about MIT. Prior to the January 1997 issue, the magazine’s cover read “Technology Review, edited at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology”; beginning with that issue, the cover read “M.I.T.’s Technology Review.” The change appears to have been made to make the magazine’s MIT association more explicit and prominent and thus to trade upon it. See also named schools of engineering. science fairs. Science fairs have long been popular ways of promoting science education and encouraging students to undertake research projects. National competitions with such highly visible corporate sponsors as Westinghouse and Intel have garnered wide anticipation and participation. The acknowledgement of engineering at such fairs has generally ranged from absent to invisible, even though some student projects can be more engineering than science. In recognition of the neglect of engineering, some local, state, and regional fairs have been promoted as science and engineering fairs; however, they have not always projected a full inclusion of engineering. One year, Alaska sponsored a Science and Engineering Fair, but a poster announcing it included the slogan, “Take a Quantum Leap, Do Science!” That was hardly a way of being inclusive. “science of the artificial.” Among the memorably succinct definitions of engineering is one attributed to Herbert Simon (1916–2001), who described engineering as a “science of the artificial.” Educated and trained in political science, Simon made seminal contributions to such fields as artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, computer science, and economics, winning a Nobel Prize in 1978 in the last of these. Simon’s observations about engineering are
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contained in his book, The Sciences of the Artificial (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969), in which he noted that “a science of the artificial” was “closely akin to a science of engineering,” but he was careful to distinguish that concept from what has been called “engineering science.” See also economics and engineering; engineering science. Simon recognized design as the distinguishing feature of the sciences of the artificial, noting that “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artifacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state.” Simon is also responsible for the concept of “satisficing,” by which the value of “good enough” solutions to design problems is recognized. He coined the term “satisfice” as a combination of the words satisfy and suffice, implying at the same time the idea of satisfying constraints and being sufficient, but not necessarily optimal, as a solution to a design problem. See also “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” scientists vs. engineers. A distinction between scientists and engineers is not always easily or clearly made. Distinctions that are drawn are sometimes clouded by the fact that scientists can do engineering, as so many physicists did during the Manhattan Project, and engineers can do science, as they do when they conduct experiments to collect data that is essential to proceeding with their designs or seek to understand principles behind inventions that obviously work but for reasons that are not fully transparent. There have been many attempts to clarify distinctions between scientists and engineers, and perhaps the most widely (and variously) quoted is that attributed to the ´ an ´ aerospace engineer and scientist Theodore von Karm (1881–1963): “Scientists seek to understand what is;
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engineers seek to create what has not yet been.” Similar sentiments have been expressed in aphorisms galore, among them: “Scientists understand the world, but engineers make it work”; “Scientists investigate what is; engineers create what never has been”; “Scientists seek to know; engineers to do”; “Scientists make it known; engineers make it useful.” Another variation on the same theme, adopted by the Engineers Joint Council, reads: “Engineers plan, design, produce, maintain, and operate. Scientists make it known. Engineers make it useful.” ´ an ´ Couched in science/engineering terms, the von Karm aphorism can be expressed as: “Science makes things known; engineering makes things work.” Gordon S. Brown (1907–1996), who served as dean of engineering at MIT, said of engineers primarily engaged in research that, “they may work as scientists, but their knack of seeing the useful rather than searching for the unknown characterizes them as engineers.” Another approach to making the distinction between scientists and engineers (and between science and engineering) is to emphasize not what they do but why they do it. According to one observer, “An engineer is a person who will learn an obscure physical law in order to build a complicated piece of technological apparatus. A scientist is a person who will learn how to build a complicated piece of technological apparatus in order to learn an obscure physical law.” It is a common lament among engineers that all too often in the news media successful technological endeavors and achievements are attributed to science and scientists, whereas technological problems and failures are blamed on engineering and engineers. Thus, landing astronauts on the Moon was hailed as a scientific achievement, but when a test rocket exploded on the launch pad it was described as an engineering failure. This false dichotomy was evident, for example, in the Mars Pathfinder Mission of 1997.
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When the Pathfinder landed and celebration erupted in the control room, the participants were identified by commentators as space scientists, whereas in fact they were virtually all engineers. When some communications problems later erupted, television viewers were told that the engineers were working on them. See “Making Headlines,” American Scientist, May–June 2000, pp. 206–209; see also The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems (New York: Knopf, 2010). In the wake of the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and the subsequent months-long oil well leak in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, there were many instances of action and reporting in which the roles of engineers and scientists were confused, thus giving the lay public misleading caricatures of both. At one point, the Secretary of Energy, a Nobel-prize winning physicist, was sent to the oil-spill command center in Houston with orders from the White House to direct what clearly should have been an engineering effort under the direction of an engineer to cap the leaking well. In the end, it was not scientific knowledge and achievement that ended the gushing but engineering experience and technological savvy. In one newspaper report describing the political decision in the wake of the accident to impose a moratorium on all deep-water drilling, consulting engineers were repeatedly referred to as scientists throughout the entire first twothirds of the rather long story on their report as submitted, which did not support a ban. It was only after the consultants were identified as having been recommended by the National Academy of Engineering that they were correctly described as engineers – but only for a few paragraphs before the reporter lapsed back into calling them scientists. See Kara Rowland, “Anger Overflows on Drilling Halt Report,” Washington Times, November 10, 2010. Blaming the engineer is not a modern phenomenon. In his first-century A.D. treatise on the water supply system
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of Rome, the water commissioner Frontinus described an incident that he experienced at the site of the excavation for a tunnel to carry water to the Algerian seaport of Saldae: “There I found everybody sad and despondent; they had given up all hopes that the two opposite sections of the tunnel would meet, because each section had already been excavated beyond the middle of the mountain, and the junction had not yet been effected. As always happens in these cases, the fault was attributed to the engineer, as though he had not taken all precautions to insure the success of the work.” According to Frontinus, in the absence of the engineer “the contractor and his assistant had made blunder after blunder, in each section of the tunnel they had diverged from the straight line, each towards his right and had I waited a little longer before coming, Saldae would have possessed two tunnels instead of one.” The situation was corrected by doing a further survey and digging a transverse tunnel that connected the two diverging ones. See Frontinus, The Water Supply of the City of Rome, translated by Clemens Herschel (Boston: New England Water Works Association, 1973), pp. 151–152. Seabees. After Pearl Harbor, mobile U.S. forces known as Naval Construction Battalions, or C.B.s, were formed. Shortly thereafter, the term Seabee came to be used as “an elaboration and celebration of the initials.” With a reputation for carrying out arduous missions, one wellknown motto of the Seabees became: “Can Do!” Another familiar motto is, “With willing hearts and skillful hands, the difficult we do immediately – the impossible takes a bit longer.” Mottos, in fact, abound. A tongue-in-cheek one, echoing the Marine Corp’s “Semper Fidelis” (“Always faithful”), which is commonly shortened to “Semper Fi,” is “Semper Gumby,” rendered into standard English as “Always flexible.” The group’s Latin motto, said to be the
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official one, is “Construimus, Batuimus,” which is variously translated as, “We build, we fight,” and “We build up, we beat down,” perhaps referring to the temporary nature of so much of the battalion’s construction work. The first base of the Seabees, at Quonset Point, Rhode Island, gave its name to the Quonset huts that sprang up on many of the Pacific Islands on which Americans fought during World War II. Such Quonset huts were later used as classrooms and housing for the unexpectedly large numbers of veterans who took advantage of the G.I. Bill to obtain a college education. For more on Quonset huts see Michael Lamm, “The Instant Building,” American Heritage of Invention & Technology, Winter 1998, pp. 68–70. Seven Modern Civil Engineering Wonders of the United States. In the wake of the 1952 Centennial of Engineering celebration, the American Society of Civil Engineers undertook as a public-relations effort to promote the identification by local sections of the society of outstanding civil engineering works in their geographical area. There was so much interest in the idea that the ASCE sought subsequently to designate the nation’s civil engineering wonders. The seven modern wonders were announced in 1955 to be, in alphabetical order: Seven Modern Wonders of the U.S. (1955)
Chicago’s Sewage Works Colorado River Aqueduct Empire State Building Grand Coulee Dam Hoover Dam Panama Canal San Francisco – Oakland Bay Bridge There was extensive media coverage of the 1955 list, not only in magazines and newspapers but also on radio and television. In 1994, the ASCE updated its list of “the
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nation’s seven most spectacular civil engineering achievements of the 20th century”: Seven Modern Wonders of the U.S. (1994)
Golden Gate Bridge Hoover Dam Interstate highway system Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida Panama Canal Trans-Alaska Pipeline World Trade Center Interestingly, the San Francisco – Oakland Bay Bridge, which arguably presented the greater engineering challenge and represented a greater achievement, was displaced by the Golden Gate Bridge in the revised list. This may be explained by the fact that the technological details of the former project – which opened in November 1936, just six months before the latter – were more widely known and acknowledged in 1955 than they were in 1994, by which time the Golden Gate Bridge had become not only a San Francisco icon but a national one as well. It may also have been the case that the chief engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge, Joseph B. Strauss (1870–1938), was not as well respected among his contemporaries as was his Bay Bridge counterpart, Charles H. Purcell (1883–1951), something that might have been forgotten over the decades. On how Strauss mistreated the design engineer Charles A. Ellis (1876–1952), see John van der Zee, The Gate: The True Story of the Design and Construction of the Golden Gate Bridge (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986). Seven Wonders of the World. Lists of great achievements have long intrigued engineers and nonengineers alike. The wonders of the ancient world are familiar to many, but more recent constructions are less so. The following lists are taken from Richard G. Weingardt, Jr.,
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“Colorado’s Seven Engineering Wonders,” Rocky Mountain Construction, July 30, 1997, pp. 84–86. Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Hanging Gardens of Babylon Pyramid of Khufu at Giza Temple of Artemis (Diana) at Ephesus Phidias’s Statue of Zeus at Olympia The Colossus of Rhodes The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus The Pharos (Lighthouse) at Alexandria
Seven Wonders of the Medieval World
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Colosseum of Rome Great Wall of China Catacombs of Alexandria Leaning Tower of Pisa St. Sophia [Hagia Sophia] Mosque at Istanbul Porcelain Tower at Nanking Stonehenge, Salisbury, England
Seven Wonders of the Modern World
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco Empire State Building, New York City Panama Canal, Panama English Channel Tunnel, England/France CN Tower, Toronto Itaipu Dam, Brazil/Paraguay North Sea Protection Works, Netherlands
Shakespeare on engineers. There are three occurrences of the word “engineer,” or rather variants of the word, in Shakespeare’s works. The occurrence most familiar to
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engineers and the one most relevant to this guide comes in Hamlet (Act III, Scene 4, lines 207–8), where we read the following reference to an engineer, that is, “one who has to do with engines,” as in siege engines: For ‘tis the sport to have the enginer Hoist with his own petar.
A petar or petard was a military machine consisting of a bell-shaped device in which a charge of powder was placed. The opening of the bell was placed against a gate or barrier and, when the charge was ignited by a lighted fuse, the blast was directed toward the obstacle. Clearly, if the device did not work properly, or if it backfired, there was the danger of it lifting–or hoisting–anyone nearby off his feet. The word petar has its origins in the Old French, petart, which meant a slight explosion or a breaking of wind, thus adding a further level of meaning in Shakespeare’s usage. Clearly, the idea of something backfiring on its perpetrator can be good sport, but it is the essence of good engineering to anticipate and obviate such unintended consequences of a design. The word “enginer” also appears, with the psychological meaning of “one who contrives devices, or schemes,” in Troilus and Cressida (Act II, Scene 3, line 7), when Thersites says of Achilles, whom he thinks to be a braggart and fraud and of whom he is contemptuous, “Then there’s Achilles, a rare enginer.” Today, it is the rare engineer who is a braggart or fraud. The only other use of the word in Shakespeare’s works, this time with the meaning of “one who invents and fashions systems of–for example–language,” occurs in Othello (Act II, Scene 1, line 65), where it is noted that any attempt to praise the “divine Desdemona” is met with frustration and “Does tire the ingener.” Fortunately, engineers engaged in calculations (rather than calculated language)
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tend to be tireless in their pursuit of practical solutions to practical problems. significant figures. Engineers are accustomed to the fact that measuring devices and instruments have limited accuracy. Hence, any scale or dial reading or digital display can only be considered accurate to the limited number of digits that can accurately be read or displayed. These are designated significant figures. When two or more numerical quantities are combined, as in addition or multiplication, the answer can only be expected to be accurate to the extent of the least accurate quantity. Thus, 0.39 times 1.672 should be reported not as 0.65208 but as 0.65, showing no more digits (implying no more accuracy) that the least accurate multiplicand, 0.39. The advent of the digital computer and electronic calculator, with their ability to display the results of calculations to long strings of decimal places, led to a lack of attention paid to significant figures in calculations. Skunk Works. This was the name for the top-secret aerospace operation that was started during World War II at the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. By the 1960s the term had come to mean any “secret experimental division, laboratory or project for producing innovative designs or products in the computer or aerospace field.” The name derives from the L’il Abner comic strip, into which cartoonist Al Capp introduced the making of “kickapoo joy juice” with old shoes and dead skunks in an outdoor still called “the skonk works” at about the same time (1943) that engineer Clarence Leonard “Kelly” Johnson (1910– 1990) set up his secret team at Lockheed. The team’s original location was in a circus tent next to a malodorous plastics factory, and members of the team began to call their location the “Skonk Works.” The spelling was changed in 1960 when the publisher of the comic strip complained.
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Nowadays, the term Skunk Works can refer to any privileged group in an organization that has wide latitude to carry out special projects. See Ben R. Rich, Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994). slang and euphemisms of engineers. Engineers, like all groups, have had their jargon and slang. Among slang expressions once heard or likely to be still heard, especially around an engineering campus, are: “diffy cue.” This slang expression for ordinary differential equations, an advanced mathematics course taken by engineering students, is spelled in many variant forms. The pronunciation probably derives from saying the individual letters of the second word of a conventional abbreviation for the course, Diff. Eq. “Double E.” The abbreviation for electrical engineering or electrical engineer, E.E., is commonly pronounced “double E.” Abbreviations for other branches of engineering, such as M.E. for mechanical engineering, are what one would expect, except where confusion might arise. Thus C.E. stands for civil engineering, and had longestablished usage as the abbreviation for the term that once referred to all nonmilitary engineering. The relatively young field of chemical engineering is abbreviated not C.E. but Chem.E. or Ch.E., the latter often being pronounced “C-H-E.” Where neither of two branches has a long established prior claim to a simpler abbreviation, both tend to have extended abbreviations, as Aero.E. and Arch.E. for aeronautical engineering and architectural engineering, respectively. The British Institution of Electrical Engineers is commonly referred to as the IEE, which is pronounced “Idouble-E”; the American-based Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which bills itself as “the world’s largest professional association for the advancement of
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technology,” is abbreviated IEEE, which is universally pronounced “I-triple-E.” engine house. This was once a not-uncommon nickname for the engineering building on a college or university campus. It may have had its origins in the fact that many an early engineering building on a campus actually did house a variety of engines that the students studied and on which they experimented. Much of my time in college was spent in an engine house – a converted garage in which classrooms were adjacent to an open laboratory area full of instrumented machines, pumps, and engines of many kinds. fermentation seminar. This euphemism for relaxing on a Friday afternoon with a few beers among friends and colleagues has been popular among environmental engineers, who are familiar with the fermentation process not only in treating sewage but also in making wine and brewing beer. gearhead. Slang for an engineering student, the term “gearhead” has obvious pejorative connotations as to how engineers think. toolie. MIT slang in the 1980s included the verb “tool,” which meant to study very hard, something “tools” were wont to do. Sometimes these terms were intensified as “power tool” and diminutized as “toolie.” Among students at some institutions of higher learning, a “toolie” may be an engineer or scientist, as opposed to a liberal arts major, who may be an “artsy craftsie.” (The slang at Carnegie Mellon University in the late 1980s was reported to separate students into the now politically-incorrect categories of “veggies” and “fruits.”) Toolies attend “tool schools,” of course. For a light-hearted look at toolies and their schools, see Stephen Clark, Toolies: The Official Handbook of Engineers and Applied Scientists, or Fun, Wealth, and Artsy-Craftsies: What They Are and How to Avoid Them (Norfolk, Va.: Donning, ca. 1988). For more MIT
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slang see Pepper White, The Idea Factory (New York: Dutton, 1991), p. 289. slide rule. The slide rule, often called a “slip stick” by engineering students, when they still used the device, was developed in the 1620s by William Oughtred (1574– 1660), an English mathematician and minister. The device exploited John Napier’s idea of logarithms, which dates from 1614, and hence the nickname “Napier’s bones” for the calculating instrument. The principle of the operation of the slide rule is based on the fact that multiplication and division of two numbers may be performed by adding or subtracting the logarithms of the numbers. (Contrary to uninformed opinion, two numbers themselves cannot be added or subtracted on a slide rule.) In time, a wide variety of slide rules, including circular and cylindrical ones and many models with specialized scales, became available to students and practicing engineers alike. A large sevenfoot-long working slide rule was commonly found hung above the front blackboard in engineering classrooms. It was used to introduce students to the operation of the device. What came to be a standard layout of the scales on a slide rule was devised around 1850 by a French stu´ ee ´ Mannheim (1831– dent named Victor Mayer Amed 1906), whose name came to designate the style. Mannheim slide rules had scales on only one face, whereas duplex slide rules had scales on front and back. The Thacher slide rule was a cylindrical model invented by Edward Thacher (1839–1922), “an American civil engineer who was a leading proponent of the slide rule in the United States during the introductory period, 1880–1900.” It came to be manufactured by the Keuffel & Esser Co., which offered it as “Thacher’s Calculating Instrument.” The 18inch long by 4-inch diameter cylindrical slide rule dates from the early 1880s, when Thacher patented it, and was
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commercially available until the middle of the twentieth century. See Wayne E. Feely, “Thacher Cylindrical Slide Rules,” The Chronicle of the Early American Industries Association, December 1997, pp. 125–127. The Hoboken, New Jersey, company of Keuffel & Esser (K&E) was for many years a leading manufacturer and importer of drawing materials, surveying instruments, and measuring tapes and was the first commercial manufacturer of slide rules in the United States. Until the introduction and widespread adoption of the electronic pocket calculator in the 1970s, K&E was known to most engineers as the maker of excellent slide rules, many with specialized scales for use in particular fields of engineering. Perhaps the company’s most widely known and popular model was the versatile Log Log Duplex Decitrig. During the 1950s and 1960s, it was a familiar companion of engineering students, often being carried in a tan, bordering on orange-colored, leather case hanging from its owner’s belt. My K&E slide rule (Model No. 4081) had scales engraved on both sides and had trigonometric scales graduated in degrees and decimals of a degree, and hence the term decitrig. Priced at about twenty dollars in 1960, such a slide rule represented a major capital investment for many a student working his way through college. The Versalog, manufactured by the Frederick Post Company, was perhaps the second most popular slide rule among engineering students of that time. It was made of bamboo, which “was chosen because of its ability to resist contraction and expansion under varying climatic conditions” and thus to reduce sticking of its moving part. According to an instruction manual, “bamboo has natural oils, imperceptible to the touch, constantly lubricating the bearing surfaces and allowing a smoothness of action not found in any other wood or metal,” a clear allusion to competing slide rules made by K&E, which employed celluloid-faced mahogany, and Pickett, which used
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aluminum for the body of its rules. While the Versalog, with its 23 scales and dark brown carrying case, was never as popular as the K&E Log Log Duplex Decitrig model, it did have its loyal users, as did those rules made by the Eugene Dietzgen firm, which was long familiar to engineers as a prominent manufacturer of slide rules and graph paper, and whose slide rules resembled those of K&E; and by Pickett, some of whose aluminum slide rules were further distinguished by having their scales engraved on an “eye-saving” yellow background. Slide rules, especially those with ten-inch long scales in hard leather cases that hung from their owner’s belt, came to be so associated with the engineering student that they became one with his image and no engineer could be caricatured without his slide rule. Smaller slide rules, usually about six inches in length, were commonly carried in a jacket or shirt pocket, often among pens and pencils in a plastic pocket protector. Other marks of engineers were the miniature working slide rules that were popular as tie clips in the 1950s. Some older engineers could still be seen wearing such paraphernalia in the late twentieth century. In the early 1970s, with the introduction of electronic calculators, at first often called electronic slide rules, manual slide rules quickly became obsolete. By 1975, slide rules were virtually extinct; however, many older engineers continued to keep one in their desk drawer. Eventually the slide rule became an obscure artifact, whose operation was unknown to younger engineers who grew up with electronic calculators. Slide rules appear on the logos of engineering societies such as the British Institution of Mechanical Engineers and the Institution of Engineers, Malaysia. Cartoon images of Joe Miner, the mascot of the Missouri University of Science and Technology, show him outfitted with a pickaxe and pistol and carrying a large slide rule over his shoulder. The engineer-writer Nevil Shute titled his own biography
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Joe Miner, mascot of Missouri S&T, with slide rule
Slide-Rule: The Autobiography of an Engineer (New York: Morrow, 1954). The Oughtred Society, which dates from 1991, is an organization of individuals interested in collecting slide rules and dedicated to preserving the history of the device. The slide rule was once such an iconic image of engineering that it was often employed whenever or wherever someone wished to evoke the profession. Glenn L. Martin Hall, one of the engineering buildings on the campus
University of Maryland’s “slide rule building”
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of the University of Maryland, is known as the “slide-rule” because the proportions of the long, low structure resemble those of a slip stick, even down to its projecting portions suggesting cursors. The building was made possible by a gift to the university by the aviation pioneer Glenn Martin (1886–1955), who was the founder of the aircraft company that bore his name and that had its headquarters in nearby Baltimore. It has been said that Martin wanted the image of the slide rule to influence the architecture of the engineering and science buildings complex that his gift funded. If that is true, then the architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill certainly complied with his wishes in designing the mid-twentieth century structure the way it did. software engineering. The design, development, production, and testing of computer software has come to be designated software engineering, but as the digital computer celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1996, there was considerable discussion, even among those engaged in the practice, as to whether it was in fact true engineering. Among the concerns were the nature of educational programs preparing students to practice and the professional stature of “software engineers.” In particular, there was concern that computer science curricula – within which software engineering was typically studied – did not expose students to engineering design. For this same reason, professional engineers did not believe that “software engineers” should call themselves engineers at all. Within a decade or so, most of these concerns seemed to have lessened, and the term “software engineering” was being used freely by computer scientists and engineers alike. “Sons of Martha.” “The Sons of Martha” is a poem by Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), the Indian-born English writer who set much of his poetry and fiction in the country of his birth. He is associated with engineering through
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his works, such as his short story, “The Bridge Builders,” which is contained in his collection, The Day’s Work (London: Macmillan, 1898). The story tells of the building of a bridge across the Ganges River in India by a British civil engineer named Findlayson and describes how the structure is threatened by torrential rains. According to Samuel Florman, Findlayson and other engineers that Kipling wrote about, are “intelligent, dedicated, and tenacious, . . . the most admirable of men, carrying to the far corners of the earth the banner of the most worthy of civilizations.” Kipling’s poem, “The Sons of Martha,” first published in 1907, has been read as referring to engineers. It is rooted in the Gospel text of Luke (10:38–42), in which Jesus, visiting Martha’s house, approved of her sister Mary sitting and listening to him teach, rather than helping Martha. In his poem, Kipling identified engineers with Martha and her children, who continued to do the practical chores necessary to keep things functioning. The opening lines of the poem read: The Sons of Mary seldom bother, for they have inherited that good part. But the Sons of Martha favour their Mother of the careful soul and the troubled heart. And because she lost her temper once, and because she was rude to the Lord her Guest, Her Sons must wait upon Mary’s Sons, world without end, reprieve, or rest. It is their care in all the ages to take the buffet and cushion the shock. It is their care that the gear engages; it is their care that the switches lock. It is their care that the wheels run truly; it is their care to embark and entrain, Tally, transport, and deliver duly the Sons of Mary by land and main.
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Some engineers have read Kipling’s poem as condemning engineers to being second-class citizens relative to managers, but in the early part of the century others took the poem to be the defining text of the profession. Kipling had, because of “The Sons of Martha” and his other writings, become the literary hero of engineers, and so it was natural that he would be asked to draft the “Obligation” that Canadian engineers recite when they receive their iron rings. Sons of Martha is also the title of a collection of civil engineering readings in modern literature, including the entire Kipling poem. The anthology, edited by Augustine J. Fredrich, was published in 1989 by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Sons of Martha cairns are stone masonry and concrete monuments that were erected in scattered places in eastern Canada, in Manitoba, and in the northern United States by Harry Falconer McLean (1883–1961), a Canadian engineer-contractor who lamented the fact that fatal injuries could not be prevented on dangerous construction sites. The four faces of each cairn are fitted with plaques, each of which carries two verses of “The Sons of Martha.” Above the opening lines of the poem is the inscription, “In Loving Memory of those who worked and died here – The Sons of Martha,” but neither the poem’s author, Rudyard Kipling, nor the cairn’s erector is identified. At least nine cairns are believed to have been erected in Canada and three in the United States; however, not all of them have been located. Of those whose location is known, one is in Hawk Lake, Ontario, and one in Washburn, North Dakota. Cairns are also believed to have been associated with a McLean job connected with the New York City subway and another connected with the Croton Aqueduct, yet the exact location of these is not known. Sputnik. The first man-made object to orbit the earth was Sputnik, launched by the Soviet Union in October 1957.
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The event took the United States by surprise, and led to an intensification of the U.S. space effort, including the determination to be the first country to put men on the Moon and bring them back to Earth. The artificial satellite Sputnik also led to an increased interest in science and engineering education, including the passage of the National Defense Education Act (1958). Many an American high school graduate of the late 1950s attributed his studying engineering in college to the launch of Sputnik. See, for example, Homer H. Hickam, Jr., Rocket Boys: A Memoir (New York: Delacorte Press, 1998), which was made into the movie October Sky. (The movie’s title was adopted as the title of the book in paperback reprint editions.) See also Paperboy: Confessions of a Future Engineer (New York: Knopf, 2002). “stealth profession.” This term has been applied to the engineering profession by those who believe that engineers tend to keep a low profile and are, in effect, almost invisible to the public. The terms “anonymous profession” and “invisible profession” have also been used. See Robert B. Johnson, “A Stealth Profession,” Engineers, October 1997, pp. 14–15. See also “The Invisible Engineer,” Civil Engineering, November 1990, pp. 46–49; and “The Anonymous Profession,” American Scientist, July–August 1992, pp. 318–321. STEM. This is the acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Collectively, these fields of study are considered “core technological underpinnings of an advanced society” and the key to a nation’s achieving innovation and economic growth. How STEM subjects are treated in school curricula is thus seen as critical to preparing young students not only for advanced academic work but also to providing a technologically literate work force. Because engineering has traditionally been all but absent from elementary-school curricula, and scarcely
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found explicitly discussed even in high schools, engineers have quipped that the E in STEM is silent. “A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown.” This classic piece of engineering satiric humor was written in 1951 by Charles Seim, who at the time was a senior civil engineering student at the University of California at Berkeley. Seim was also then assistant editor of the engineering school’s monthly student magazine, California Engineer, and he responded to his editor’s wish for “a humorous essay based on a short article he had read in the Arkansas Engineer.” The editor further wanted the essay to be in the style of the technical papers and textbooks engineering students were accustomed to reading. Seim (rhymes with “time”) produced the now-famous stress analysis essay in his spare time, and his editor published it under the name Charles E. Seim, adding the middle initial – Seim had none – E for Engineer, and the title, “The Structural Analysis of Strapless Evening Gowns” (California Engineer, December 1951, pp. 16–17), with “apologies to Arkansas Engineer” noted. While Seim’s essay is highly original, neither the Arkansas or California editor appears to have had a totally fresh or unique idea, for another article in the same genre had appeared some years earlier. This was University of Cincinnati electrical engineering student Charles A. Barger’s “A Study of the Coefficient of Distribution of Lipstick,” which appeared in The Bridge of Eta Kappa Nu (November 1943, pp. 15–16). How Barger’s article begins gives a flavor of the student engineer’s sense of humor: “When two surfaces, one of which is coated with a layer of lipstick meet, a certain distribution of the lipstick takes place; the second surface which was originally clean retains a portion of the material. This paper is a study of the variables affecting this distribution and the determination of the coefficient of distribution.” There is, naturally, not a
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little discussion in Barger’s paper about prior experiments and future tests, as there is in Seim’s. Seim predictably ends with the observation that, in light of the paucity of data available to the engineer about the properties of the female breasts upon which strapless evening gowns act like structural loads, “trial and error, and shrewd guesses will have to be used by the engineer in the design of strapless evening gowns until thorough investigations can be made.” Such was the engineering humor of the time. The strapless evening gown essay, which was somewhat more extensively developed than the one on lipstick, and certainly more graphically illustrated, appears to have been widely circulated and copied, especially among contemporary student-engineering magazine staffs. Also, the essay gave its title to and was reprinted in the anthology of “scientific humor” titled A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown: And Other Essays for a Scientific Age, which was edited by Robert A. Baker and published by Prentice-Hall in 1963. (Six years later, Anchor Books released a paperback edition.) According to Seim, he was never asked permission for the reprinting, an assertion that is corroborated by the fact that the anthology repeatedly and consistently misspells his name “Siem,” and acknowledges permission to reprint not from the California Engineer but from a publication named The Indicator, suggesting, again incorrectly, that that magazine’s November 1956 issue was the place of first publication. Nevertheless, the anthology received wide recognition, being reviewed in the New York Times and Life. That magazine, which further promulgated the misspelling of Seim’s name, described the spoof as “an erudite 1956 treatise.” The clever parody, which presented exactly what its title promised – complete with force-vector diagrams that engineers refer to as “free-body diagrams,” an especially apt description in this case – continued to be passed around among engineering students at least as late as the 1960s,
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when they were still overwhelmingly, if not as they were at some schools exclusively, male. structures named for their engineers. Among significant bridges ultimately named for the engineers who designed and built them are the Eads Bridge across the Mississippi River at St. Louis and the John A. Roebling Memorial Bridge across the Ohio River at Cincinnati. Lesser-known examples include the Conde B. McCullough Memorial Bridge, a concrete and steel structure with a 793foot cantilever center span over Coos Bay on the Oregon Coast Highway, and the Cappelen Memorial Bridge, whose center span is a 435-foot concrete arch, the longest then built when completed in 1923, across the Mississippi River at Minneapolis. Conde B. McCullough (1887–1946) was the Oregon state bridge engineer and Frederick W. Cappelen (1857–1921) was city engineer of Minneapolis. Numerous other bridges, including many that are more modest, more remote, and less well known, bear the name of an engineer associated with their construction. One is the steel bridge connecting the Maine island of Arrowsic to Woolwich, which is on the mainland. It carries state Route 127 over the Sasanoa River and is locally known as the Arrowsic Bridge; however, its official name is the Max L. Wilder Memorial Bridge. Wilder was the state bridge engineer who died in 1962 at the age of thirty-four. Among dams named for engineers is the O’Shaughnessy across the Hetch Hetchy Valley, which impounds water to supply San Francisco. This dam is named for the San Francisco city engineer Michael M. O’Shaughnessy (1864–1934) who was instrumental in developing the city’s water supply system. The former Mission Dam, in British Columbia, was renamed in 1965 in honor of Karl Terzaghi (1883–1963), the acknowledged founder of the engineering science of soil mechanics, who worked on the dam in his last years of professional practice. Another dam known by
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the name of an engineer was the Mulholland Dam, named in honor of William Mulholland (1855–1935), chief engineer of the Los Angeles water supply system. The structure was renamed the Hollywood Dam after the 1928 failure of the St. Francis Dam, which was similar in design to the Mulholland. The Holland Tunnel beneath the Hudson River between New York and New Jersey may be incorrectly thought by some to have been named after the Netherlands, in reference to the Dutch founders of Manhattan’s first European settlement, New Amsterdam. In fact, this first subaqueous structure to carry motor traffic is named after Clifford M. Holland (1883–1924), its chief engineer who died just two days before the converging halves of one of the tunnel’s two tubes were joined. He was succeeded as chief engineer by Milton H. Freeman (1871– 1925), who died the following year. (Both deaths were ultimately blamed on overwork on the ambitious project.) Freeman in turn was succeeded by Ole Singstad (1882– 1969), who completed the tunnel, which opened to traffic in 1927. In 1953, a bronze bust of Holland was dedicated at the tunnel’s New York entrance plaza, which had been named Freeman Square. In 1970, tunnel tolls began to be collected only from traffic traveling eastward, and the following year the New York toll booths were removed. Today, the bust of Holland stands beside the tunnel’s toll plaza in Jersey City. See Robert W. Jackson, Highway Under the Hudson: A History of the Holland Tunnel (New York: New York University Press, 2011). surveying camp. As late as the 1960s, virtually all engineering students were required to take a course in surveying, which was often conducted for a couple of weeks at a summer camp. Students at surveying camp would typically attend lectures in the morning, taking notes on such topics as the theory of surveying and the nature of measurement errors, and would spend their afternoons doing field work
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with surveying instruments. Evenings were spent calculating and drawing. Surveying camps were frequently located near popular summer vacation spots, which made them more attractive. The camp for Manhattan College students was located in New York’s Catskill Mountains, across the lake from a camp for girls, which was often talked about yet seldom realized as the target of excursions in canoes. MIT’s Camp Tech was located at East Machias, Maine, located almost at the Canadian border. On their return to their home campus in the fall, civil engineering students – who were required to take advanced surveying courses – would often continue with more field work. Teams of them could often be seen moving about campus with surveying instruments. symbols of engineering. Throughout the world, the medical profession is most commonly associated with the rod of Asclepius – a snake entwined about a staff. This symbol stems from Greek mythology, in which Asclepius was the god of medicine and healing, and is incorporated into the logo of groups ranging from the American Medical Association to the World Health Organization. The legal profession is symbolized on many a courthouse fac¸ade by a representation of blindfolded Justice holding a pair of scales – and sometimes a sword in her other hand – an image that also has roots in Greek culture. Lady Justice is said to represent Themis, the goddess of justice and law; however, whatever its ancient origins, the symbol is universally associated with the legal profession today. There is no equally universal and deeply rooted symbol of the engineering profession. The image of Archimedes using a lever to move the Earth has ancient origins, but unfortunately it is not nearly as commonly associated with engineering as the rod and scales are with medicine and law.
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The official seal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, adopted when the society was incorporated, shows the Earth being moved by a lever operated by a disembodied hand – presumably that of Archimedes. The modernized seal of ASME International also ASME seal containing incorporates Archimedes’ lever; symbol of engineering however, such seals are generally used only on official documents. The society’s more visible letterhead is topped by a literal logo comprising a stylized ASME with the earth rising behind the letters, seemingly eclipsed by them. The globe is at best a rather indirect evocation of the lever – and of engineering. The medical and legal professions obviously have their specialties, although they grow out of common curricula with which their practitioners can all identify. Engineering education used to have as many as two common years before its several specialized curricula took over. Until that occurred, all engineering students, regardless of field, took engineering mechanics, in which they might calculate as a homework exercise the forces on the lever of Archimedes and thus quantify his task. The lever of Archimedes had considerable potential for grounding all engineering students in a single symbol of their profession. Even when they drifted apart to study electrical or chemical engineering, the lever could still constitute a metaphor for what all engineers were capable of doing – leveraging the laws of nature for the benefit of mankind. They might not only move the Earth but also move information all around it and remove undesirable greenhouse gases from it. Indeed, working together in modern interdisciplinary teams, engineers can realize things of which Archimedes and his contemporaries could hardly have dreamed.
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Engineering schools have moved away from a common core curriculum. First-year engineering students may have physics, chemistry, math, and writing courses in common; however, their first engineering courses tend to be majorspecific. The power of Archimedes’ lever – as calculated in a common introductory mechanics course – as a unifying, albeit metaphorical, tool has been lost, and the engineering profession is denied a universal symbol with the weight, tradition, and distinction of those of the legal and medical professions. The Biomedical Engineering Society incorporates into its logo not a symbol of engineering but of medicine – the rod of Asclepius. The logo of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers consists of a pair of arrows representing the right-hand rule of electromagnetism on a diamond-shaped shield symbolizing Benjamin Franklin’s kite. A quick look at the logo evokes the rod of Asclepius. The National Society of Professional Engineers, whose members span more than one discipline, incorporates into its logo the integral sign of mathematics rather than any obvious symbol of engineering. And the National Academy of Engineering, which encompasses all of engineering, has as its principal symbol a bridge – a viaduct – symbolizing a “linking of engineering and society” rather than separate engineering fields. While these disparate symbols have defensible rationales, collectively they represent a missed opportunity to unite engineering under one deeply rooted and universal symbol. (From “Symbolizing Engineering,” ASEE Prism, April 2008, p. 26.)
T Tacoma Narrows Bridge. This bridge, constructed across the stretch of Puget Sound known as the Narrows, between Tacoma, Washington, and the Olympic Peninsula, was torn apart in the wind on November 7, 1940, only four months after it was opened. Designed to accommodate just two lanes of traffic in a then sparsely populated area, the bridge deck was narrow as well as shallow, being supported, for reasons of economy and aesthetics, by plate girders rather than a more conventional deep truss. This meant that the deck’s resistance to bending and twisting was uncommonly low. When the wind blew in a certain way, the roadway undulated up and down, thus earning the bridge the nickname Galloping Gertie. After about four months, torsional oscillations began when there was the dislocation of a cable at midspan. The amplitude of the oscillations was magnified by a phenomenon known as wind-structure interaction, and eventually the aerodynamic forces on the deck were of such a magnitude that its center span broke up and fell into the water. Because the Tacoma Narrows Bridge had demonstrated unexpectedly large motions from the outset, it had already been the subject of study. When the rhythmic twisting began, cameras were set up and thus the failure of the bridge that occurred only hours later was captured on film. This footage, along with other made under the direction of Frederick Burt Farquharson (1895–1970), a professor in 306
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the University of Washington’s Department of Civil Engineering who had been studying the behavior of the bridge, soon became a classic. It was shown frequently to high school physics students and to engineering classes, and the collapse of the bridge is one of the most well-known images of an engineering failure. In fact, until the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the failure of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was perhaps the most infamous structural failure of all time. The cause of the failure is often incorrectly attributed to simple resonance, the phenomenon by which a wine glass shatters when a singer hits a resonant high note. Actually, the bridge failure was due to aerodynamic instability associated with a complex interaction between the wind and the structure. This is a phenomenon by which the structure of the bridge deck responded to the wind by twisting and thereby presenting a greater face to the wind, which in turn augmented the effect of the wind to twist the structure even more. The elasticity or springiness of the structure resisted the twisting and, when it reached its greatest angle, caused it to twist back in the other direction. The
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repeated action resulted in the observed oscillation of the bridge deck. The structural interaction with the wind was accompanied by the shedding of vortices of air (much the same way a boat moving through the water leaves eddies in its wake), which introduced further repetitive forces that finally caused the collapse. Following the failure of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, suspension bridge deck designs began to be tested in wind tunnels before being constructed. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge was rebuilt and reopened in 1950, with a wider four-lane roadway and with a conventional stiffening truss beneath its deck. See “Still Twisting,” American Scientist, September–October 1991, pp. 398 – 401; “Tacoma Narrows Bridges,” American Scientist, March–April 2009, pp. 103–107; To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, forthcoming), chapter 9. See also Richard S. Hobbs, Catastrophe to Triumph: Bridges of the Tacoma Narrows (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2006); Richard Scott, In the Wake of Tacoma: Suspension Bridges and the Quest for Aerodynamic Stability (Reston, Va.: ASCE Press, 2001). Taylorism. In the later nineteenth century, the American mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856– 1915) conducted time and motion studies and developed his ideas of scientific management to systematize shop practices and reduce manufacturing costs. The efficiency expert movement that grew out of the Taylor system of scientific management came to be known as Taylorism. Frederick Taylor was elected president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1906 but failed to apply his scientific management techniques successfully to the society. According to the historian Edwin Layton, Taylorites, as the followers of Frederick W. Taylor were known, “pioneered a larger social role that they thought would
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ultimately make engineers leaders of society, increase their powers, and enhance the deference accorded them.” Layton also noted that, “Taylor’s virtuosity in dealing with mechanical matters made him one of the greatest American engineers of all time.” See Edwin T. Layton, The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971). See also the biographies by Frank B. Copley, Frederick W. Taylor: Father of Scientific Management, 2 vols. (New York: Harper, 1923); and by Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (New York: Viking, 1997). The ideas of Frederick Taylor were extended to the building trades by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. Frank Bunker Gilbreth (1868–1924) and Lillian Moller Gilbreth (1878–1972) were industrial engineers who were part of the scientific management movement. When her husband died suddenly, Lillian Gilbreth continued and extended his work, lecturing around the world. She applied her experience to, among other things, improving kitchen appliances; among her patents were those for an electric food mixer, shelves in refrigerator doors, and foot-pedal activated lids for trash cans. In 1966, she became the first woman elected to membership in the National Academy of Engineering. The 1950 motion picture Cheaper by the Dozen was based on the family life of the Gilbreths, who had twelve children. technical writing. A typical American college curriculum requires all students, regardless of their major, to take a course in English composition, and often in their first year. Engineers disagree on whether engineering students should be required to take such a general writing course. Some argue for a technical writing course directed specifically at engineering students in their third or fourth year,
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after they have acquired a technical vocabulary that they can use in their homework writing assignments. Such an approach was especially popular in the middle of the twentieth century. See, for example, W. O. Sypherd, Alvin M. Fountain, and Sharon Brown, The Engineer’s Manual of English, revised edition (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1943), which was intended to serve as “a textbook in English composition for college students in engineering” and contains, among other things, writing specimens for letters and reports. Its bibliography lists, among other books on general technical writing, the titles English for Engineers and Handbook of English in Engineering Usage. A list of abbreviations gives the short form of engineer to be “engr.” The index has no entry for “acronyms,” and there is no guidance about their use, strongly suggesting that they were not yet in widespread use in 1943. Engineers are often ridiculed for using the passive voice in their writing. They seem to prefer writing something like “an observation was made” rather than attribute the action to a flesh-and-bones observer. They tend to avoid using the first person and interjecting themselves or their colleagues into what they seem to prefer to present as disembodied statements, perhaps thinking that this gives them more objectivity. technological literacy. The following working definition of technological literacy has been proposed by Nan A. Byers: The ability to understand, intelligently discuss and appropriately use concepts, procedures and terminology fundamental to the work of (and typically taken for granted by) professional engineers, scientists and technicians; and being able to apply this ability to:
r critically analyze how technology, culture and the environment interact and influence one another.
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r accurately explain (in non-technical terms) scientific and mathematical principles which form the bases of important technologies. r describe and, when appropriate, use the design and research methods of engineers and technologists. r continue learning about technologies, and meaningfully participate in the evaluation and improvement of existing technologies and the creation of new technologies.
From Nan A. Byers, “Technical Literacy Classes: The State of the Art,” Journal of Engineering Education, January 1998, pp. 53–61. technology. Technology is a much more general term than engineering. Technology refers to the sum of practical knowledge, machines and devices, and codified processes, whereas engineering implies a methodical approach to solving problems and thus contributes to the development of such technology. The word technology was not commonly used until the late 1820s. Around that time, the physician and botanist Jacob Bigelow (1786–1879) wrote in a course of lectures on the application of sciences to the useful arts, “To embody, as far as possible, the various topics which belong to such an undertaking, I have adopted the general name of Technology, a word sufficiently expressive, which is found in some of the older dictionaries, and is beginning to be revived in the literature of practical men at the present day.” See American Journal of Education, July–August 1829, p. 318. technophobia. I once visited an educational institution entirely new to me. Naturally, my itinerary consisted of a lot of names and locations that were unfamiliar, and so a helpful and necessary guide took me from one appointment to the next. As we entered the stately administration building where my first scheduled meeting was to
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take place, my escort asked if I preferred to take the stairs, which were straight ahead and numerous, or the elevator up to my next appointment. Without hesitation, I expressed my wish, and we went out of our way to catch the elevator. As we walked to the back corner of the building, we made small talk acknowledging that we both knew taking the stairs was more healthful for us and for the environment, but I explained that I had gotten in late the previous night and had a long day ahead of me. The spirit was willing, but the arthritic joints were not. As we were riding the elevator, my escort told me that he was glad we were not in the mechanical engineering building, because he did not feel comfortable taking its elevator. He explained that he could never know for sure what those mechanical engineering students and professors might have done to it in the name of an experiment. By way of further explanation, he told me that he never drank from a water fountain in the chemical engineering building, because he did not know what chemicals might have been added to the water. I could see how there might be concern about what could find its way into a laboratory drain, but how could that reach the water fountain? Perhaps my guide feared that someone might experiment with piping connections. Rather than risk seeming to be an ungrateful visitor by challenging his fears, I asked my guide whether he would use a computer in the computer science department, which was also part of the college of engineering at this university. His response was that he was afraid to check his email on such a computer. Growing more curious about this expanding list of phobias, I asked what he would avoid in the civil engineering building. He answered, without hesitation, that he preferred to stay out of that building altogether. Who knows what those civil engineers could do tinkering around with the entire structure?
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I decided that my guide was just pulling my leg and trying to be entertaining; however, the experience did make me wonder about the kinds of things that can be irrationally associated with engineers, engineering, and technology generally. My desk dictionary defines technophobia as a “fear or dislike of advanced technology or complex devices and esp. computers” and dates this sense of the word to 1965. Because this was long before the advent of the personal computer, the word must have been coined in response to the products of computers rather than to their direct use. In other words, the phobia had its origins in the unfamiliarity of the thing rather than in the thing itself. Phobias tend to be irrational, and technophobia is no exception. Ironically, technophobia represents an irrational fear of the products of some of humankind’s most rational thinking. Had I thought of this, I might have asked my escort what he avoided in the building that housed his department, expecting him to reply, “Nothing.” As it turned out, he worked for the administration, and I concluded that his store of technological horror stories came from listening to faculty members who had been pulling his leg. (From “Avoiding Technology,” ASEE Prism, October 2010, p. 25.) ties of societies. Like schools and clubs, many professional societies have official neckties that their members may purchase and wear to identify themselves as belonging to the society. Since women have become significantly involved in engineering, professional societies have also begun to offer society scarves. Although strictly speaking only members of an organization should wear its official insignia, many a society’s ties, scarves, and jewelry have been readily available to members and nonmembers alike, often as a source of revenue. Thus, especially since the latter twentieth century when it became fashionable for
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people to purchase and wear articles of clothing and jewelry advertising everything from universities to beer to restaurants, it can no longer be assumed that someone wearing a society tie belongs to the society it designates. The practice of wearing society ties is much more common and is taken much more seriously in the British Isles and old commonwealth countries than in America, and the availability of articles of clothing and jewelry bearing the society’s insignia is sometimes more restricted. Around 1990, my inquiry about purchasing one of the ties of the Institution of Structural Engineers at their headquarters on Upper Belgrave Street in London was met with the question of whether I was a member. It was only after I explained that I was there to give the Easter Holiday Lecture that I was presented with a tie. At the same time, I could walk into the Institution of Civil Engineers on Great George Street or into the Institution of Mechanical Engineers on nearby Birdcage Walk and purchase one of their ties with no questions asked. The tie of the Royal Engineers, on which appears a royal crest, has been readily available in America through a popular mail-order haberdasher. At the 2000 annual meeting of the Institution of Engineers of Ireland, an organization that now brands itself simply as Engineers Ireland, the society tie was very much in evidence, being worn by virtually every officer of the institution, most of those receiving honors at the meeting, and many of the members in the audience. Because I was made a fellow of the institution that day, I was also qualified to wear its tie. Engineers living and working in the British Isles are very proud of their affiliations with their professional societies, and so they wear the appropriate tie on appropriate occasions. In America, professional society membership tends to be expressed more by wearing a lapel pin that for basic membership levels is discreet. However, some pins marking their wearers as past presidents,
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board members, or otherwise distinguished members can be quite large and almost ostentatious. time and engineers. Some years ago I had to meet an engineer-turned-lawyer in London, at the Inns of Court. I was to be his guest at a meeting of the Society of Construction Law, to be held at Middle Temple Bar, and he was going to give me a tour of the Inns beforehand. He had left me very specific directions to the gate at which we were to meet at six o’clock, and I gave myself plenty of cushion to get there on time via the Underground and a few blocks’ walk. As I approached the gate at the appointed time, I saw my host approach it from the other side. We waved to each other and shook hands as the clock struck six. His first words to me were that he knew I would be on time, because I was an engineer. Engineers and scientists respected time, he believed. Barristers and solicitors, he complained, were never on time for their appointments, and they never ended their speeches on time. In the years since that London meeting, I have been on the lookout for situations in which I could test my colleague’s hypothesis. My opportunity at last arose at a Workshop on Scientific Evidence at the National Academy of Sciences Building in Washington. The day-long program consisted of several panels, with the moderators, panelists, and commentators being lawyers, scientists, and engineers. A very full program, with about twenty speakers, made it clearly of the utmost importance that each speaker stay within the allotted time if everyone was to be heard. I was not privy to the amount of time the panelists were allotted; however, it soon became clear to all workshop attendees that time limits were being exceeded by scientists and lawyers alike. The first speakers were epidemiologists and toxicologists, and these scientists came armed with PowerPoint
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presentations. Unfortunately, difficulties with the projection equipment caused considerable distraction and delay, and the program began to fall behind schedule. Although the last of the first series of panelists, a lawyer, spoke without visual aids, he too appeared to take longer than his allotted time. When a speaker began to exceed the time limit with no conclusion in sight, the moderator rose from his seat to the left of the projection screen, walked slowly behind it to the lectern to the right, slipped a note to the speaker, and then walked slowly back to his seat. If the speaker continued for another few minutes, as many did, the moderator repeated his measured trek across the stage and remained standing behind the offender. In some cases, even this was to little avail. The pattern was repeated in subsequent panels, and the audience began to be amused, if not distracted, by the moderator-speaker dynamics. Moderators walked deliberately to and stood silently behind speakers whose reaction ranged from totally ignoring them to spending more time explaining why they were taking extra time. The workshop managed to keep on schedule in a gross sense only by limiting questions from the audience, curtailing breaks, and shortening lunch. As for testing my London colleague’s hypothesis, I would have to say that the workshop proved overall to be a counterexample. To me, it appeared that scientists and lawyers equally spoke beyond their allotted time. The one engineer on the panel did appear to speak the most concisely and did watch the time, but he was a singular data point. Yet my experience has been that engineers, too, can be disrespectful of time, especially that of others. Among complaints I have heard from engineering students is that some of their professors are always late showing up for class and then go on lecturing well beyond the end
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of class, causing the students to be late for their next class. Another way in which time can be disrespected is by delaying the start of a class, lecture, or workshop to wait for latecomers. This only capitulates to those who are late and penalizes those who were on time. When a seminar is advertised to begin at a certain hour, it should begin then so the speaker can take the full allotted time without requiring those who have kindly come to listen to spend more time than expected. European custom seems to be that programs do not start until fifteen or so minutes after the posted time, so everyone in the know can come late to be on time. Whatever the custom, however, lawyers, scientists, and engineers alike should be mindful of taking time that is not theirs, whether in meeting a colleague, a class, or an audience at a workshop. (Adapted from “Taking Time,” ASEE Prism, March 2001, p. 13.) topping-out ceremony. Topping out takes place when the structural skeleton of a bridge or building is completed. Among ironworkers, the placement of the topmost piece of steel signals that the structure has reached its ultimate height, and so there is cause for celebration. It is customary among ironworkers to attach an evergreen tree or a flag, or both, to the final beam before it is hoisted into place. The practice is said by some to have roots in seventh-century Scandinavia, where it became an established custom to hoist an evergreen tree to the top of a timber building to signal the beginning of a completion party. See “Why a Christmas Tree?” Modern Steel Construction, October 1995, p. 39. For a more extensive look at the tradition, see William Collins, “Our Queerest Building Custom,” Pencil Points, March 1931, pp. 179–182. trial and error. One piece of conventional wisdom holds that engineering is nothing but applied science, in which, for example, the dimensions of a particular bridge design
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fall out of some mathematical equations expressing principles of physics governing the behavior of all bridges. This is, in fact, far from the truth, and the design of an engineering structure, machine, or system begins typically not with mathematical formulas or scientific principles but with the conception and subsequent sketch of an idea, either literally or figuratively. It is only when an idea is articulated in drawings or words that the tools of mathematics and the principles of science can be called upon to answer specific questions that turn the conceptual design into a detailed one. More often than not, the resulting design implies such complexity of detail that it is not readily translated into neat mathematical equations or formulas nor can its parts be compartmentalized into simple scientific principles. Judgment and educated guesswork are needed to manipulate and rearrange the components of the design, models, or prototypes which can then be analyzed and tested to see if they conform to the requirements of the initial problem. If they do not, after noting how far off the target the results are, the design can be modified by further judgment and educated guesswork, and then another round of analysis or testing can be performed. This is the iterative method of trial and error from which ancient engineering developed. In modern design, this method can be automated on but not fully replaced by a digital computer. “The Two Cultures.” The term “two cultures” refers to the gulf that often exists between technical and nontechnical segments of educated people. The phrase connotes a difficulty of communication between humanistic – especially literary – and scientific – especially physicalscientist – groups and, by extension, engineers. The term was made popular by Charles Percy Snow (1905–1980), the English novelist, scientist, and diplomat whose Rede Lecture, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,”
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was delivered in 1959 at Cambridge University. See C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures: And A Second Look (New York: Mentor Books, 1963). During the 1960s and 1970s, the term “two cultures” seemed to be universally known among students of all disciplines. The phrase, and one might hope the intellectual split it connotes, became less and less familiar to succeeding generations of students and their professors. When in 1984 an article appearing in the Chronicle of Higher Education mentioned in passing “the two cultures,” a young faculty member wrote to the author asking for a reference.
U U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. A Corps of Engineers in the Continental Army was established by the Second Continental Congress in 1775 and came to be organized, trained, and led by French-trained military engineers. With the coming of peace in 1783, the Corps was dissolved with respect to the Army. Coastal fortifications continued to be necessary for defense, however, and there was a clear need for a permanent corps of engineers and for a means of training engineers for it. In 1794, Congress authorized the creation of a Corps of Artillerists and Engineers, which was garrisoned atop cliffs overlooking a strategic stretch of the Hudson River at West Point, New York, located about 50 miles north of New York City. From this group the Corps of Engineers was created in 1802, the same year that the U.S. Military Academy was established at West Point. The location came to be used as the name for the institution itself. Considered the first engineering school in America, West Point did not have a focused system of instruction or examination until 1817, when Colonel Sylvanus Thayer (1785–1872) was appointed superintendent. He enlisted the help of Claudius Crozet (1790–1864), an 1809 graduate of Paris’s Ecole Polytechnique, and the French system of educating engineers became a model for the U.S. Military Academy. Because the engineers and cadets of the Academy were at the service of the President, they were available for assignment to civilian as well as military 320
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engineering projects, and the Corps of Engineers became an important force in developing the young nation’s infrastructure. See The Centennial History of the U.S. Military Academy (Washington, D.C., 1904). The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been instrumental in shaping America’s waterways and harbors. See, for example, Todd Shallat, Structures in the Stream: Water, Science, and the Rise of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994). For another view, see Arthur E. Morgan, Dams and Other Disasters: A Century of the Army Corps of Engineers in Civil Works (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1971). U.S. presidents who were engineers. George Washington (1732–1799) is often said to have been an engineer, in that he practiced land surveying, a closely allied profession. There have been other U.S. presidents whose connection to engineering has been more or less direct: Jimmy Carter. James Earl Carter (born in 1924), the thirty-ninth president of the United States, is often identified as an engineer because after he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946, he entered the navy’s nuclear submarine program, where he studied nuclear physics at Union College and served as an aide to Admiral Hyman Rickover. Carter left the navy in 1953, when his father died, to take over the family peanut-farming business in Georgia. Some critics of Carter’s presidential style attributed it to his association with engineering. (See, for example, William Pfaff, “Mr. Carter’s Slide Rule,” in the New York Times, June 22, 1979, op-ed page.) After he left the White House, Carter engaged in a number of activities, including international peace efforts and Habitat for Humanity projects, in which he helped build houses for poor people. Jimmy Carter also published a number of books, including a volume of his poetry, Always a
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Reckoning: And Other Poems (New York: Times Books, 1995). Herbert Hoover. The thirtyfirst president of the United States, who studied geology in college, pursued a career as a mining engineer, practicing worldwide. The management and organizational skills that Herbert Clark Hoover (1874– 1964) demonstrated as an engineer prepared him well to lead humanitarian relief efforts necessitated by World War I. The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stan- Portrait of Herbert ford University, his alma mater, Hoover, engineerstands as a monument, both president literally and figuratively, to the “engineer, humanitarian, statesman, public servant, author.” These are the words inscribed around what might be described as a pedestal without a statue that stands beside the landmark tower of the institution. It is a model of dignified, understated reverence. According to the historian of technology Edwin Layton, Hoover’s involvement in the Belgian relief effort, in the wartime cabinet of President Woodrow Wilson, and in postwar reconstruction of Europe “exemplified the larger role that engineers had long been predicting for their profession.” Morris L. Cooke (1872–1960), the early twentieth-century activist-engineer and strong proponent of scientific management, called Hoover “the engineering method personified.” See Edwin T. Layton, The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971).
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Hoover was also a serious and dedicated scholar, and as a labor of love with his wife, Lou Henry Hoover, translated from Latin into English the classic treatise on mining written in the sixteenth century by the German physician George Bauer (1494–1555). Written under the pseudonym, Georgius Agricola, the Latin version of Bauer’s name, De re metallica was published posthumously in 1556. The translation of the Hoovers was published in 1912. Herbert Hoover also wrote of his own life in his three-volume Memoirs (New York: Macmillan, 1951–52). The Hoover Medal was established in 1929 “to recognize great, unselfish, non-technical services by engineers to humanity.” It was inspired “by the devotion and ability of Herbert Hoover and a group of engineering associates who sought to solve the problems of the nation from the beginning of World War I to the reestablishment of the injured nations.” The name of the medal and its first recipient, then President of the United States Herbert Hoover, were chosen in 1930. The medal is awarded under the direction of a Board of Award, comprised of representatives of the founder societies: the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers; the American Society of Civil Engineers; the American Society of Mechanical Engineers; the American Institute of Chemical Engineers; and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. “unknown unknown.” When designing new systems that go beyond the envelope of experience, engineers sometimes speak of the “unknown unknown,” or the “unkunk.” Although not known, it might be critical to the design, and engineers’ ignorance of this unknown might result in unexpected behavior and, in the worst case, catastrophic failure. The terminology stems from the designation of parameters that can affect a design as variables or unknowns whose values are to be specified.
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useless things. Obituaries of the inventor Edward Craven Walker (1918–2000) carried portraits of both him and his creation: the lava lamp. This lamp, an icon of the late 1960s and 1970s, is virtually indescribable in words alone, and a still picture provides only a hint of its attraction. Even a streaming video cannot capture the essence of a lava lamp. In this regard, the unusual artifact is not unlike many other very popular, yet seemingly useless things. “If you buy my lamp, you won’t need drugs,” said Walker, who was a naturist and successful producer of nudist films. However, countless hippies are believed to have smoked pot and dropped acid in the eerie colors of and shadows cast by the earliest lava lamps. Indeed, the lamp is one of the defining images of the psychedelic culture, with its brightly colored goo morphing in slow motion and seeming to defy gravity by releasing garish globs that floated gently upward only to fall back down again inside a softly angled, glass-enclosed, liquid-filled space. Never practical as a reading lamp, the accessory’s popularity was based on its novelty and possible mood-setting or moodaltering effects. Mr. Walker’s invention of the lava lamp began in a Hampshire pub, where in the late 1950s he saw a “blob light,” in which a mixture of oil and water in a glass cocktail shaker was heated by a light bulb, throwing amorphous shadows upon the ceiling. A local inventor had developed the novelty light from his concept for an egg timer. Walker bought the patent rights from the inventor’s widow and then experimented for years with different ingredients to perfect a viscous and coherent mass that would take on more pleasing, plastic shapes. The first lava lamps bore names such as Astro, and their forms were influenced by the space age into which they were launched. By the late 1970s, consumers lost interest in the lamps, however, and annual production dropped from a million per year to hundreds per month. Walker sold
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his firm to one of Britain’s fastest growing ones, Mathmos, named for the evil bubbling force in the movie Barbarella. At the end of the century, after appearing in seventies retro films and television shows, the lava lamp experienced a resurgence of popularity. Even Tim Haggerty, CEO of the Chicago firm that manufactured the lamp, admitted it was “not an essential item in anyone’s life.” Still, shortly before its inventor’s death, the British Design Council named the lava lamp a design classic. Nevertheless, to some, it remains the epitome of kitsch, a triumph of technology over taste. The exact ingredients of the lava lamp remained a trade secret; however, its basic operation clearly exploited the effect of a bulb’s heat on the nearly equal densities of paraffin wax and water. Scientists and engineers love novelties like lava lamps because they animate the laws of nature. Equations and theories are embodied in something concrete that can be enjoyed in solitude or in a social setting, by both the sullen and the gregarious, by the technologically literate and illiterate alike. Like a well-made poem, novel, or movie, a clever device can be appreciated on many levels by various people. Those who understand what makes it work can marvel at the cause; those who are mystified by its operation can marvel at the effect. The common object can serve as a text for the explication not only of nature’s laws but also of people’s aesthetics and thus provide a bridge across the once-dreaded “two cultures” gap, whose articulation dates from the same era as the lava lamp itself. Indeed, the lava lamp was more in the category of adult toy than home appliance. At the time of Edward Walker’s death, specialty shops and catalogs were full of half-serious toys for adults: fiber-optic bouquets, balancing tightrope walkers, kaleidoscopes, wave machines, steel-ball pendulum assemblies, and the like. Children’s toy stores offered even more: tops, balls, Hula-Hoops, kites, jacks, marbles,
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Slinkys, and Silly Putty. Lava lamps and all such things can be appreciated for the way they themselves play with heat and light and wind and energy and momentum and gravity, and how they tease fun out of Newton’s laws and chemistry and the mechanics of materials. They connect us with the forces of the universe and remind us that we are part of workings larger than ourselves. That is not to say that we cannot simply enjoy toys and novelty items for what they are. Few who sat in the presence of a lava lamp were likely to have known who or how he developed it, let alone to have cared about or reflected on whether he was practicing naturism when he did so. Few children or even adults are likely to think about ballistics when they throw a ball, or to think about lift and drag when they fly a kite. The ways of inventors, like the laws of nature, are the hidden causes of our made things and their designed behavior; however, we buy and use these things for more overt, less rational, reasons. Those of us who buy and watch something like a lava lamp do so for the color of its gunk (the more garish the better), for the boldness of its style, and for the way it goes with the flow. It distracts us from weightier thoughts. Our minds are drawn into the closed universe of the primordial ooze. We watch its evolving shapes, its predictably unpredictable behavior that, instead of being threatening, reassures us that all is right with the world, at least within the confines of the lamp’s elongated globe and the reach of its glow. (Adapted from “The Uses of Useless Things,” Wall Street Journal, September 5, 2000, p. A34.)
V Vitruvius. This Roman architect and engineer, whose full name was Marcus Virtuvius Pollio, flourished in the first century B.C. His Ten Books on Architecture, written as a report to the emperor on the state of the art of building design and construction, is believed to be the oldest book on architecture and engineering that has survived. The classic work is often referred to by its author’s name rather than by its title. Early in his First Book, which in modern terminology would be called the opening chapter, Vitruvius lays out the qualities desirable in an engineer: One wishing to become an engineer or architect must possess not only natural gifts, but also keenness to learn, for neither genius without knowledge, nor knowledge without genius suffices for the complete artist. He must be ready with a pen, skilled in drawing, trained in geometry, not ignorant of optics, acquainted with arithmetic, learned in history, diligent in listening to philosophers, understand music, have some knowledge of medicine and of law, and must have studied the stars and the courses of the heavenly bodies.
See Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, translated by Morris Hicky Morgan (New York: Dover Publications, 1960); see also “Rereading Vitruvius,” American Scientist, November–December 2010, pp. 457–461.
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W women in engineering. Because engineering in America was, until the 1970s, almost exclusively a male profession, the now-conspicuous and perhaps distracting male pronoun is appropriately used in many of the references to those prior times and in many of the older quotations that appear in this book. That is not to say that women were completely excluded from the engineering profession. In 1876, Elizabeth Bragg Cumming (1859–1929) became the first woman in America to earn a degree in engineering when she received a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. The first woman to become a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers was Nora Stanton Blatch Barney (1883–1971), who was admitted to the grade of Junior in 1906. In the previous year, she had become the first woman to receive a civil engineering degree from Cornell University, which she did cum laude. When in 1916 Nora Blatch applied to the ASCE for advancement to the next membership grade, her application was denied, and she was subsequently dropped from membership for failing to advance to Associate Member in the required time. The first woman to reach corporate member status in the ASCE was Elsie Eaves (1898–1983), a 1920 civil engineering graduate of the University of Colorado who advanced to Associate Member in the society in 1927. See Engineering News-Record, March 17, 1927, p. 463. 328
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The first woman to join the American Society of Mechanical Engineers was Catherine Anselm Gleason (1865–1933), who was known as Kate Gleason. She was born into a family involved in the machine tool business and began to work for her father’s company at age twelve. Kate Gleason was the first woman to be admitted to study mechanical engineering at Cornell, in 1884; however, she could not complete her education there because of her obligations at the Gleason Works, which specialized in gear-cutting machinery. She continued her education part time at the Rochester Mechanics Institute, which evolved into the Rochester Institute of Technology, whose College of Engineering is now named after Kate Gleason. After parting with the family business in 1913, she continued working in the industry for a while; however, her career eventually diversified as she became involved in banking and business enterprises. Among these enterprises was a company that mass produced affordable houses made of concrete. She was a friend of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and was active in the women’s rights movement. In 1914, Kate Gleason became the first woman to be elected to full membership in ASME, and in 1919 she became the first of her gender to be admitted to membership in the American Concrete Institute. See Janis F. Gleason, The Life and Letters of Kate Gleason (Rochester, N.Y.: RIT Press, 2010). Women were not admitted to the honor society Tau Beta Pi until 1969. Prior to that, female engineers were awarded a Women’s Badge by the association, and the first woman to receive such a badge, in 1924, was Katherine Cleveland, who was the top engineering student in her class at the University of Kentucky. See “Report on Women in Tau Beta Pi,” The Bent of Tau Beta Pi, July 1969, p. 54. The enrollment of women in engineering programs increased dramatically beginning in the 1970s. By the
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mid-1990s, approximately 17 percent of engineering students were women. In 1993, 7.3 percent of engineers in the United States were women. (This compared with 35.5 percent of scientists who were women.) By the turn of the century, there were 221,000 women engineers, which accounted for 10.6 percent of all engineers in the United States. If women came relatively late to the formal profession of engineering, they did not to invention. As early as 1809, a U.S. patent was issued to a woman inventor, Mary Dixon Kies (1752–1837). She had invented a method of weaving straw with silk or other kinds of thread, thereby making it possible to produce straw hats of uncommon variety and attractiveness. In 1888, the Commissioner of Patents issued Women Inventors to Whom Patents Have Been Granted by the United States Government, 1790 to July 1, 1888 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office), with supplements to the compilation being issued in 1892 and 1895. In 2006, the patent lawyer and agent Frank H. Schaller of Arlington, Virginia, self-published the booklet African American Women Inventors, 1884–2003. For more on women inventors, see Anne L. Macdonald, Feminine Ingenuity: Women and Invention in America (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992). The American Society of Civil Engineers has published a number of books on women in the profession. Two have been edited by Margaret E. Layne: Women in Engineering: Pioneers and Trailblazers (Reston, Va.: ASCE Press, 2009) and Women in Engineering: Professional Life (Reston, Va.: ASCE Press, 2009). See also Sybil E. Hatch, Changing Our World: True Stories of Women Engineers (Reston, Va.: ASCE Press, 2006). Several women are also profiled in Richard G. Weingardt, Engineering Legends: Great American Civil Engineers (Reston, Va.: ASCE Press, 2005) and in Ioan James, Remarkable Engineers: From Riquet to Shannon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
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World’s Fairs and their structures. Engineering played a central role in the development of buildings to house early world’s fairs and in the design of structures to promote later ones. The first world’s fair, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, was held in London in 1851, and subsequent ones have presented the opportunity for engineers to design signature structures, many of which have outlasted their fairs and become touchstones and landmarks. Among these have been the Trylon and Perisphere, symbols of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and the Space Needle, erected for the 1962 World’s Fair held in Seattle. Some structures have entered the language of engineering, architecture, and culture: Crystal Palace. This enormous building designed and built to house the first World’s Fair, known officially as the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851, held that year in London, was an ironand-glass structure that came to be known as the Crystal Palace. After no entry in an open design competition for a building fully satisfied the judging committee, a late proposal by Joseph Paxton (1803–1865) was embraced and
Blotter sketch of design for Crystal Palace
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accepted. His 1850-foot-long building, whose rapid erection was a model of construction management, was significant for its expansive interior space, for its modular design, and for its employment of curtain walls, now common features of skyscrapers. By prior agreement, the building was disassembled and removed from Hyde Park after the close of the exhibition. Its components were reused in a redesigned and enlarged Crystal Palace erected as a center of recreation on extensive grounds in Sydenham, a London suburb. The original Crystal Palace had a ridged but largely flat roof, relieved only by a vaulted central transept, which was added to the original design to preserve some trees in Hyde Park. The Sydenham Crystal Palace, which is often confused with the original structure, was distinguished from the first in having a more pronounced and extensive vaulted roof line and two additional vaulted transepts, as well as an arched roof covering its nave. Two tall water towers flanked the Sydenham Crystal Palace, and the South Tower housed the Crystal Palace Engineering School. The main Sydenham structure was destroyed by fire in 1936, with only the towers remaining. They were felled in 1940 lest they serve as landmarks for enemy bombers looking for London. Other crystal palaces included one erected for the exhibition held in New York City in 1853, on what later became the site of Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library. It was at this exhibition that Elisha Graves Otis (1811–1861) conducted his famous demonstration of his invention of a safety device for elevators. With Otis standing in an elevated car, his assistant dramatically cut the supporting rope. The elevator and Otis fell suddenly, but just as suddenly were stopped in the elevator hoist frame by a ratchet device. Otis’s invention was critical in the development of skyscrapers. See “The Amazing Crystal Palace,” Technology Review, July 1983, pp. 18–28.
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Eiffel Tower. This innovative wrought-iron structure, erected for the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889, was conceived as a monument to commemorate the centennial of the French Revolution. It originated with two engineers, Maurice Koechlin (1856–1946) and Emile Nouguier (1840–1898), who worked for the bridge building firm of Gustave Eiffel (1832–1923). At first, Eiffel did not care for the concept; however, he embraced it when Stephen Sauvestre (1847–1919), an architect with the firm, suggested some modifications and added some aesthetic details. When the tower plans were made public, there was considerable opposition to the 300-meter tower from the artistic and literary community, which characterized the structure as the product of the “baroque, mercantile imaginings of a machine builder.” Eiffel answered the critics by defending the tower as “beautiful in its own right” and continued, Can one think that because we are engineers, beauty does not preoccupy us or that we do not try to build beautiful, as well as solid and long lasting structures? Aren’t the genuine functions of strength always in keeping with unwritten conditions of harmony? . . . Besides, there is an attraction, a special charm in the colossal to which ordinary theories of art do not apply.
Matthew Wells, a British architect and engineer who might also be described as a philosopher of engineering, has reflected on the relationship of art to engineering and has observed that engineering “is largely ignored by art because it is already a monument to itself.” See Engineers: A History of Engineering and Structural Design (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 4. Ferris Wheel. This 250-foot-diameter (264-foot maximum elevation) steel pleasure wheel with a capacity of 2,160 people was conceived by the engineer George
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Washington Gale Ferris, Jr. (1859–1896) for the World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893. It was designed in response to a challenge for a fitting American engineering achievement to rival the Eiffel Tower that had been erected for the exposition held in Paris in 1889. The tower may have been taller, but the wheel moved! The visibility and public acceptance of the great wheel led to its name, and thus that of its engineer, being given to all subsequent structures of a similar but generally less grand kind. An international Congress of Engineering was held in conjunction with the 1893 Columbian Exposition, and another took place at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, held in St. Louis in 1904. The engineering marvel of the Ferris Wheel dominated the skyline at both expositions, the original Chicago wheel having been re-erected in St. Louis, where it was demolished after the fair because of the expense of – and consequent lack of interest in – moving it to another location. An enormous, 443-foot-high Ferris wheel-like structure was erected in London for the Millennium celebration in that city. The success of the 800-rider London Eye helped revitalize interest in gigantic observation wheels, each seeming to want to outdo the last. The London Eye was surpassed in 2006 by the 525-foot-tall Star of Nanchang, which then was surpassed in 2008 by the 541-foottall Singapore Flyer. China sought to regain the world title with the 682-foot-high Beijing Great Wheel, whose completion was supposed to be timed to coincide with the opening of the 2008 Summer Olympics. Unfortunately, it was delayed for what were described as design issues, and in 2010 financial issues had halted construction. The bleak financial climate also put great wheel projects in Berlin and Dubai on hold. See Norman Anderson, Ferris Wheels: An Illustrated History (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling
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Green State University Popular Press, 1992); see also “The Ferris Wheel,” American Scientist, May–June 1993, pp. 216–221. For a biography of Ferris, see Richard G. Weingardt, Circles in the Sky: The Life and Times of George Ferris (Reston, Va.: ASCE Press, 2009). Landmark structures have also been associated with many other world’s fairs, which have provided the opportunity for nations and corporations to show off their technological achievements and prowess. worry by engineers. Herbert Hoover wrote about how worrying about their designs keeps engineers awake at night. The Englishman James E. Gordon (1913–1998), who practiced as an aircraft design engineer before turning to teaching and thoughtful writing, described the beneficial aspects of worry: When you have got as far as a working drawing, if the structure you propose to have made is an important one, the next thing to do, and a very right and proper thing, is to worry about it like blazes. When I was concerned with the introduction of plastic components into aircraft I used to lie awake night after night worrying about them, and I attribute the fact that none of these components ever gave trouble almost entirely to the beneficent effects of worry. It is confidence that causes accidents and worry which prevents them. So go over your sums not once or twice but again and again and again.
See J. E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down (New York: Da Capo Press, 1978), pp. 375–376. writers who studied engineering. There have been engineers who have become adept at writing, either through the necessity of communicating their work by means of well-wrought professional reports or through a desire to pursue writing as an avocation. There have also
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been those who have aborted or abandoned an engineering career to become full-time writers. Although many such writers had their interests drawn to literary pursuits in college, in many cases their experience as engineering students also influenced their later writing. Among familiar fiction writers who were educated as engineers is Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007), who majored in chemistry at Cornell and also served on the editorial staff of the school’s daily newspaper. Vonnegut enlisted in the army before graduating and was ordered to study mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee. Norman Mailer (1923–2007) began his studies at Harvard University as an aeronautical engineering student but soon was attracted to writing. Thomas Pynchon (born in 1937) was an engineering physics major at Cornell before leaving to join the navy. He returned to Cornell after the service, but he pursued a degree in English. There are no doubt many other fiction and nonfiction writers who also studied engineering in college. writing by engineers. Engineers have been much more adept at writing than is commonly acknowledged. Herbert Hoover and his wife, Lou Henry Hoover, translated from the original Latin into English Agricola’s classic text on mining, De re metallica, and Hoover wrote a three-volume set of memoirs. David B. Steinman, the bridge engineer, wrote a biography, The Builders of the Bridge: The Story of John Roebling and His Son (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945) and published volumes of poetry. Many other engineers, while never writing outside the technical sphere, took great pride in turning out reports, papers, and monographs that were well written. See “Engineers as Writers,” American Scientist, September–October 1993, pp. 419–423. See also Walter J. Miller and Leo E. A. Saidla, Engineers
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as Writers: Growth of a Literature (New York: Van Nostrand, 1953). The electrical engineer Charles Proteus Steinmetz believed that “engineering investigations evidently are of no value, unless they can be communicated to those to whom they are of interest.” He thought written communication so important that he added a section on engineering reports to the third edition of his book, Engineering Mathematics, which was based on a series of lectures he had delivered at Union College. In his book, Steinmetz recognized three classes of reports: (1) the scientific record of investigations, a generally lengthy and technically detailed document, “read by very few” and meant “essentially for record and file”; (2) the general engineering report, a shorter document, a summary of results “in as plain language as possible,” intended for administrative engineers “interested only in results”; and (3) the general report, “materially shorter,” addressed to nonengineers, the “administrative heads of the organization,” omitting all details, and merely dealing with “the general problem, purpose and solution.” See Charles P. Steinmetz, Engineering Mathematics: A Series of Lectures Delivered at Union College, 3rd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1917). See also “Engineers as Writers,” American Scientist, September– October 1993, pp. 419–423. The seriousness with which some engineering organizations take writing competence is illustrated by the essays required by the British Institution of Civil Engineers. As part of the professional interview for gaining membership in the institution, applicants have to write what are known as the ICE Essays. The three hours allowed for the writing includes time allocated for Section A, which consists of a topic or topics selected by the examiners, and Section B, which consists of answering a question or questions chosen from a previously available list including, for example, “the
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place of the engineer in the community” and “management topics.” The essays “are intended primarily as a test of the candidate’s knowledge of and ability to communicate in good English,” including communicating thoughts in a logical and concise manner. See B. Madge et al., The ICE Essays: A Guide to Preparation and Writing (London: Thomas Telford, 1981).
X x. This common designation for an algebraic unknown is often used by engineers to indicate an indefinite quantity, as in “drink x glasses of water to quench your thirst.” While few nonengineers would miss the meaning of such usage, they would also not overlook the curiosity of it. It is not that the use of the letter as a word is unknown. Indeed, ´ However, the the phrase “x marks the spot” is a cliche. allusion to a spot on a treasure map is a far cry from using an algebraic variable for something mundane. Engineers bring their jobs home with them, and their language gets dragged along. Why this is so is no doubt due to a variety of factors, not the least significant of which is the fact that engineers usually do their jobs totally surrounded by other engineers, often working on the same or a closely related project. There is little need to draw a distinction between technical and social talk – the latter taking place over the water cooler, the lunch table, or, in the old days, the drafting board – because the audience is the same. Doctors and lawyers are also prone to lapse into using professional jargon before their patients and clients, but the blank stare or the outright questioning of what is meant usually brings the conversation back into the vernacular. Many engineers seldom have to deal as professionals with the layperson, and so they do not find themselves being checked when they use a technical term in a nontechnical context. Talking in a social vein on the weekend is seldom 339
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a matter of life, death, or taxes, and so the blank stare of the neighbor who works as a salesman can be interpreted by the engineer as the result of a long week on the road and not a reaction to the engineer’s choice of language. Using letters as words, either individually or in the strings known as acronyms, is but one of the engineer’s verbal traits. Engineers are also likely to sprinkle their conversation with terms such as “system” and “model,” which although sounding like ordinary language carry so much technical implication as to put them in a dictionary other than Webster’s. Engineers are also prone to view everything from emotions to artifacts “as a function of” something else, as if a mathematical relationship could be established between thoughts and feelings. Engineers also speak of indefinite quantities being “of the order of” something else, of certain qualities as being “higherorder effects,” and of an “unnecessary level of detail.” The meaning of such phrases may or may not translate well in the context of clothes or furniture shopping. Nonengineers who spend a lot of time around engineers gradually grow deaf to such locutions. The words of the engineer pass through the air like a fine spring drizzle. The moisture is there, but it need not be paid any attention.
Y Year of Engineering Success (YES). The calendar year 1997 was designated the YES by its British organizers. It was to be a twelve-month celebration of engineering achievement designed to bring public recognition to the profession. Even British engineers, when asked years later if they knew what the acronym stood for, were likely to answer, “NO.” Bringing public attention to the profession seems to be a constant goal of engineering champions and their organizations, and the syndrome is no less common in America than it is in Britain. There is the oft-stated perception, especially among engineering society leaders and those who aspire to those positions, that their profession does not get proper public credit for its work. In fact, it is often the organization itself that is unrecognized. Unlike the medical and legal professions, which have their very visible and politically savvy umbrella groups of the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association, there is no single group that effectively represents engineers. Many a layperson is, however, quite aware of engineering and the benefits it brings to daily life. Roads, bridges, buildings, automobiles, airplanes, clean water, electric power, appliances, computers, cell phones, and a virtually endless list of modern conveniences are known to be the works of engineers. That those engineers distinguish 341
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Year of Engineering Success (YES)
themselves as civil, mechanical, aeronautical, environmental, electrical, computer, or more esoteric types is of little significance or consequence in the larger scheme of things. Indeed, beyond the distinction of engineering specialties on a diploma or job title, there is little need to worry about what an engineer is called. Many a mechanical engineer ends up analyzing civil engineering structures and many an aeronautical engineer works on computer software, especially when there are cutbacks in the aerospace industry. If engineering organizations desire more public recognition for themselves, and thereby for the profession, they might look to more cooperation among themselves. The establishment of an American Association of Engineering Societies did not lead to an organization with high visibility. The AAES does not extend membership to individuals, and its very name signals that it is an organization of societies not of professionals. If there were a strong “American Engineering Association,” which allowed for membership by individual engineers and which was staffed by highly articulate spokespersons and talented and forceful publicists and lobbyists, the engineering profession might find itself making headway toward the recognition its societies seek. The societies themselves, however, would have to take a back seat to the AEA, encouraging their own members to say “YES” to a competing organization.
Z Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Subtitled An Inquiry into Values, this book was written by Robert M. Pirsig (born in 1928) and first published in 1974. It has been widely assigned in engineering design courses for its insights into the nature of design and the idea of quality. A tenth-anniversary edition of the book, published by William Morrow and Company in 1984, included a new introduction by the author in which he reflected on the astounding success of a book that had been turned down by 121 other publishers and also on the tragic death of his son, who played a prominent role in the book’s narrative. Pirsig, a biochemist by education who became disillusioned with science and eventually came to be identified as a philosopher, has been quoted as believing that “traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go.” That responsibility, at least in the material world, rests more squarely on enlightened and responsible engineering infused with the values of its softer side.
343
List of Illustrations and Credits
badges of societies: Original and redesigned ASCE badge (from The C 1974 ASCE). American Civil Engineer, C 1984 Original badge of AIEE, 1892 (from Engineers & Electrons, IEEE). C 1984 Redesigned AIEE badge, 1897 (from Engineers & Electrons, IEEE). C 1984 Institute of Radio Engineers badge (from Engineers & Electrons, IEEE). C 1984 IEEE badge, dating from 1963 (from Engineers & Electrons, IEEE). bents and bridges: Tau Beta Pi key, known as “the bent” (registered trademark of Tau Beta Pi, used with permission). drafting tables: Rows of drafting tables in an engineering office (from author’s collection). egg-drop: Sycamore samara that inspired a contest entry (from author’s collection). famous engineers: Robert Howlett’s 1857 photograph of I. K. Brunel (from author’s collection). Scientific American portrait of James B. Eads (from author’s collection). David Steinman in a publicity pose (from author’s collection). Charles Steinmetz working in his canoe (courtesy of General Electric). J. A. L. Waddell wearing some of his awards (from author’s collection). founder societies: Seal of the United Engineering Foundation (courtesy of UEF). Iron Bridge: Iron Bridge, which dates from 1779 (from author’s collection). keys: Keys and badges on a chain (from author’s collection).
344
List of Illustrations and Credits Marchant calculator: Marchant author’s collection).
electromechanical
345 calculator
(from
mechanical drawing: T square and versatile drafting triangles (from author’s collection). Engineer’s scale in use (from first-day cover). mind’s eye: Page from James Nasmyth’s scheme book (from James Nasmyth, Engineer). postage stamps: Postage stamp commemorating engineering (from author’s collection). Canada’s first stamp, designed by an engineer (from author’s collection). printing vs. cursive: Scriber and template from a Leroy lettering set (from author’s collection). proof test: Locomotives used to proof test a bridge (from author’s collection). Elephants being herded onto a bridge (from author’s collection). public lectures: Lecture and demonstration of structural principles (from author’s collection). Quebec Bridge: Workers posing with component of redesigned Quebec Bridge (from author’s collection). Robert’s Rules: Brigadier General Henry Martyn Robert (from author’s collection). St. Patrick: Certificate designating Robert John Groom a Knight of St. Patrick, 1933 (courtesy of Catherine Groom Petroski). St. Patrick statue at Missouri University of Science & Technology (courtesy of Missouri S&T). slide rule: Joe Miner, mascot of Missouri S&T, with slide rule (courtesy of Missouri S&T). University of Maryland’s “slide rule building” (courtesy of University Archives). symbols: ASME seal containing symbol of engineering (from author’s collection). Tacoma Narrows: Aftermath of Tacoma Narrows Bridge failure (from author’s collection). U.S. Presidents: Portrait of Herbert Hoover, engineer-president (from author’s collection). World’s Fairs: Blotter sketch of design for Crystal Palace (from author’s collection).
Index of Proper Names
Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, 56, 181, 257 A. C. Gilbert Co., 95, 238 Adams, Scott, 68 Agricola, Georgius, 129, 336 Airbus A380, 103 Alfred University, 215 Alpha Eta Mu Beta, 145 Alpha Nu Sigma, 145 Alpha Pi Mu, 145 Ambroz, Joanna, 15, 16 American Academy of Environmental Engineers, 179 American Academy of Mechanics, 177 American Association of Engineering Societies, 342 American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, 138 American Bar Association, 341 American Chemical Society, 141 American Concrete Institute, 83 American Institute of Electrical Engineers, 27, 54, 56, 84, 124 American Institute of Mining Engineers, 33, 54, 124
American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers, 323 American Institute of Steel Construction, 40 American Lead Pencil Co., 233 American Literary, Scientific and Military Academy, 83, 276 American Medical Association, 341 American National Standards Institute, 54 American Nuclear Society, 145 American Society for Engineering Education, 143 American Society for Testing and Materials, 54 American Society for Testing Materials, 54 American Society of Civil Engineers, 11, 24, 25, 40, 45, 50, 54, 63, 93, 124, 125, 153, 181, 202, 246, 284, 323, 328, 330 Code of Ethics, 57 Historic Civil Engineering Landmark Program, 140 History and Heritage Committee, 140 Official Register, 50 Transactions, 33
346
Index American Society of Civil Engineers and Architects, 11 American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 26, 33, 52, 53, 54, 55, 83, 124, 204, 212, 268, 270, 304, 308, 323, 329 Applied Mechanics Division, 118 Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code, 52, 55 History and Heritage Committee, 140 Transactions, 33 American Standards Association, 54 American Topical Association, 248 Ammann, Othmar H., 203 Anders, William A., 174 Ansari X Prize, 256 Anthony, Susan B., 329 Apollo program, 234 Apollo 8 (Moon mission), 174 Apollo 13 (film), 206 Archimedes, 228, 303, 304, 305 Aristotle, 8 Arizona State University, 215 Arkansas Engineer (student magazine), 299 Armour, Philip Danforth, 209 Armour Institute, 14, 209 Armstrong, Neil, 132 Arouet, Franc¸ois-Marie, 234 Arrowsic Bridge, 301 Arup, Ove, 32 Asclepius, 303, 305 Association of College Engineers, 270, 272 Augustine, Norman, 150, 191 Australian Transport Safety Bureau, 103 Award of Excellence (ENR), 89
347 Bacon, Francis, 51 Bagley College (Mississippi State), 215 Baker, Benjamin, 262 Baker, Charles Whiting, 88 Barger, Charles A., 299 Barney, Nora Stanton Blatch, 328 BASF (chemical corp.), 46 Baskin School (Cal, Santa Cruz), 217 Bauer, George. See Agricola Baum, Eleanor, 211 Bazalgette, Joseph, 205 Beaubourg Centre (Paris), 32 Beavers, The, 202 Beijing Great Wheel, 334 Bejan, Adrian, 218 Bell Rock (lighthouse), 120 Bentley, Jon, 18, 19, 20 Bent of Tau Beta Pi, The (magazine), 29, 46, 85, 174 Berkun, Scott, 161 Berners-Lee, Tim, 235 Bhopal, India, 69 Bigelow, Jacob, 311 Billington, David P., 35 Binghamton University, 215 Blatch, Nora, 328 Boisjoly, Roger, 70 Bollman Truss Bridge (Savage, Md.), 140 Bordogna, Joseph, 86 Boston Institute of Technology, 278. See-also Massachusetts Institute of Technology Boston Red Sox, 62 Bourns College (Riverside), 217 Braun, Karl Ferdinand, 221 Braun, Werner von, 248 Bridge, The (Eta Kappa Nu), 19 “Bridge Builders, The” (Kipling), 296 Bridge Engineering (Waddell), 118
348 Bridge on the River Kwai, The (film), 207 Brin, Sergey, 235 Britannia Bridge, 238 British Design Council, 325 Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, 142 Brooklyn Bridge, 39, 120, 247 Brown, Gordon S., 281 Brown School (Rice), 215 Brunel, Isambard Kingdom, 107, 108, 119, 131, 147, 205, 243, 276 Brunel, Marc Isambard, 107, 119 Buchanan, James, 176 Burgess, Gelett, 14 Burj Khalifa (super-tall building), 64 Burndy Engineering Co., 177, 186 Burndy Library, 177, 178, 186 Bush, Vannevar, 109, 266 Byers, Nan A., 310 Byrne, Robert, 223 Caesar Augustus, 8 Calatrava, Santiago, 14 Calder, Alexander, 13 California Engineer (student magazine), 299 California Institute of Technology, 111, 249, 277 Caltech. See California Institute of Technology Camp, Dresser & McKee (firm), 44 Canadian Geotechnical Society, 248 Cape Cod Canal, 128 Capp, Al, 288 Cappelen, Frederick W., 301 Cappelen Memorial Bridge, 301 Carnegie, Andrew, 209 Carnegie Institute of Technology, 209, 277, 336 Carnegie Institution, 110
Index Carnegie Mellon University, 290 Carter, Jimmy, 243, 321 Case Institute of Technology, 143 Catacombs of Alexandria, 286 Cather, Willa, 223, 263 Centennial of Engineering, 45, 246, 284 Central Park (New York), 49 Challenger (space shuttle), 70, 148 Channel Tunnel, 148, 286 Chartered Engineer, 179 Cheaper by the Dozen (film), 207, 309 Chicago Spire (project), 15 Chi Epsilon, 145, 174 Chinatown (film), 242 Chronicle of Higher Education, The, 319 Churchill, Winston, 131 Citicorp Tower (skyscraper), 70 Civil Engineer (college degree), 179, 277 Clark School (Maryland), 217 Clarkson University, 215 Clayton Corp., 156 Cleveland, Katherine, 329 Cleveland State University, 104, 210, 226 CN Tower (Toronto), 286 Coalbrookdale, England, 164 COBOL (computer language), 42 Coca Cola, 161 Cockrell School (Texas, Austin), 217 Colorado River Aqueduct, 284 Colosseum (Rome), 286 Colossus of Rhodes, 286 Columbia (space shuttle), 71, 148 Columbia University, 36, 81, 215 Concord, Mass., 178 Concorde (supersonic airliner), 147, 148
Index Conde B. McCullough Memorial Bridge, 301 Confederation Bridge, 247 Congo River, 147 Cooke, Morris Llewellyn, 268, 322 Cooper, Peter, 211, 244 Cooper Union, 210, 244 Great Hall, 211 Cornell, Ezra, 214 Cornell University, 213, 329, 336 Corps des Fortifications, 126, 127 Corps des Ponts et Chaussees, 126 ´ Corps du Genie, 126, 127 Coulter School (Clarkson), 215 Council of Engineering Institutions, 179 Council of State Boards of Engineering Examiners, 188 Cowan, Ruth Schwartz, 144 Crawford School (Norwich), 215 Cromwell, Oliver, 131 Cross, Hardy, 32 Cross School (Walla Walla), 217 Crowe, Frank, 61 Crozet, Claudius, 48, 320 Crystal Palace (London, 1851), 218, 262, 331 Crystal Palace (New York, 1853), 332 Crystal Palace (Sydenham), 332 Crystal Palace Engineering School, 332 Cumming, Elizabeth Bragg, 328 Darby, Abraham, 164 Darby, Abraham III, 164 Dartmouth College, 37, 214 Darwin, Charles, 131 Daubert v. Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals, 99 Davis, Marvin B., 135 Dawson, Manierre, 14 Dayton Engineering Laboratories Co. (Delco), 112
349 De architectura, 8. See-also Vitruvius Deepwater Horizon (oil rig), 71, 282 Deer Isle Bridge, 142 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, 255 Delaware and Hudson Canal, 47 Demmler, Albert W. Jr., 174 Denver International Airport, 89 De re metallica (Agricola), 129, 323, 336 Design News (magazine), 206 Diamond, Jared, 101 Dibner, Bern, 177, 186 Dibner Institute (MIT), 177, 178, 186 Dietzgen, Eugene, 293 Disney, Walter Elias, 151 Draper Prize (NAE), 221 Dreyfuss, Henry, 151 Duke, James Buchanan, 211 Duke University, 84, 211, 273 Library, 185 School of Engineering, 211, 212 Eads, James Buchanan, 48, 82, 110, 228, 229 Eads Bridge, 111, 230, 246, 301 Eastwood, John S., 260 Eaves, Elsie, 328 Eckert, J. Presper, 59 ´ Ecole des Mines, 126 ´ Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees, 127 ´ Ecole des Travaux Public, 126 ´ Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees, 126 ´ Ecole Polytechnique, 126, 127 ´ ´ Ecoles d’Arts et Metiers, 127 Eddystone Lighthouse, 98, 113, 218 Edison, Thomas, 41, 116, 159, 162, 228, 229, 245 Eiffel, Gustave, 333
350 Eiffel Tower, 332, 334 Einstein, Albert, 116, 244 Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), 59 Ellis, Charles A., 233, 285 Embankment (Thames, London), 205 Empire State Building, 203, 204, 205, 284, 286 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 184 Engelbart, Douglas, 159 Engineer and Surveyor (magazine), 87 Engineer, Architect and Surveyor (magazine), 87 Engineering and Building Record, The (magazine), 88 Engineering and the Liberal Arts (Florman), 37 Engineering and the Mind’s Eye (Ferguson), 36 Engineering Council, 179 Engineering Institute of Canada, 247 Engineering Intern, 180 Engineering Legends (Weingardt), 38 Engineering Mathematics (Steinmetz), 337 Engineering News and Contract Journal (magazine), 87 Engineering News (magazine), 87, 88 Engineering News-Record (magazine), 87, 91, 137, 230, 250 Engineering Record (magazine), 88 Engineering Societies Library, 187 Engineering Times (newspaper), 170, 189 Engineer Intern, 181, 256, 257
Index Engineer-in-Training, 180, 181, 256, 257 Engineer Mountain (Colo.), 49 Engineers Country Club, 49 Engineers’ Council for Professional Development, 106, 212 Ethics Committee, 106 Engineers’ Dreams (Ley), 38, 147 Engineers Ireland, 314 Engineers Joint Council, 281 “Engineer’s Yell,” 47 ENR. See Engineering News-Record (magazine) Ericsson, John, 204, 228 Erie Canal, 47, 82, 97 Eta Kappa Nu, 19, 145 European Federation of National Engineering Associations (FEANI), 250 European Meccano Co., 95 Eurotunnel, 203, 204, 205. See-also Channel Tunnel Evans, Ginger S., 89 Existential Pleasures of Engineering, The (Florman), 36 Fairbanks, Douglas, 116 Faraday, Michael, 205, 245 Farquharson, Frederick Burt, 306 Fasullo, Eugene J., 75 Federal-Aid Highway Act (1956), 139 Federation Europeenne d’Associations Nationales d’Ingenieurs, 250 Fellowship of Engineers, 180 Fenn College (Cleveland State), 210 Ferguson, Eugene S., 33, 36, 231 Fermi, Enrico, 20 Ferris, George Washington Gale Jr., 38, 334
Index Ferris Wheel, 333 Finch, James Kip, 36, 81 Findlayson (fictional engineer), 296 Fleming, Sandford, 170, 171, 247–248 Florman, Samuel C., 36, 214, 223, 296 Foote, Elizabeth, 237 Ford, Henry, 229 Forth Bridge, 260, 262 Franklin, Benjamin, 7, 8, 9, 28, 305 Franklin Institute, 52 Frederick Post Co., 292 Fredrich, Augustine J., 239, 297 Freeman, John R., 229, 260 Freeman, Milton H., 302 French, M. J., 153, 154, 218 Freund, C. J., 138 Friden (electromechanical calculator), 191 Frontinus, 9, 98, 141, 283 Frost, George H., 87 Fry, Arthur, 159 Fu Foundation School (Columbia), 215 Fukushima (nuclear accident), 67 Fulton, Robert, 7 Fulton Schools (Arizona State), 215 Fundamentals of Engineering (exam), 180, 181, 256, 257 Galileo, 90, 141, 146, 275 Gates, Bill, 206 Gem Ltd. (manufacturer), 160 Gem (paper clip), 235–236 General Electric Co., 116, 162, 244 General Motors (automaker), 112 General Motors Institute, 104 George Washington Bridge, 203, 246
351 Georgia Institute of Technology, 121, 145 “Gettysburg Address” (Lincoln), 17 Gibbs, Josiah Willard, 213 Gilbert, Alfred Carlton, 95, 96 Gilbreth, Frank Bunker, 207, 309 Gilbreth, Lillian Moller, 208, 309 Gillette, King, 157 Gleason, Catherine Anselm, 329 Gleason College. See Kate Gleason College Glenn L. Martin Hall (Maryland), 295 Goethals, George Washington, 138, 229 Golden Gate Bridge, 137, 203, 204, 205, 233, 241, 285, 286 Goodyear, Charles, 244 Google, 235, 256 Gordon, James E., 21, 335 Graham, Billy, 138 Graham, Bruce, 12 Grand Challenges (NAE), 130 Grand Coulee Dam, 284 Great Bridge, The (McCullough), 39 Great Eastern (steamship), 107, 147, 243 Great Wall of China, 286 Great Western (steamship), 107, 147, 276 Great Western Railway, 107, 147 Grossbach, Robert, 224 Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory (Caltech), 111 Gulf of Mexico, 71, 111, 282 Gunsaulus, Frank Wakely, 209 Haggerty, Tim, 325 Hagia Sophia, 286 Hajim School (Rochester), 217 Hale, George Ellery, 278 Hall, Herbert F., 187
352 Hall, Linda, 187 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 287 Hammond, John Hays, 229 Hammurabi, Code of, 51 Hanging Gardens of Babylon, 286 Hardesty & Hanover (firm), 119 Harris, Robert, 224 Harrison, John, 254 Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Co., 53, 55 Harvard University, 9, 42, 109, 210, 249, 278, 336 Lawrence Scientific School, 9 School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, 210 Henry Hudson Bridge, 114 Herschel, Clemens, 9, 98, 229 Herschlag, Richard, 224 Hersey, John, 223 Hewlett-Packard Co., 43 Hill, John H., 87 Hillery, David Wayne, 224 Hippocratic Oath, 92 History of Science Society, 144 Holland, Clifford M., 302 Holland Tunnel, 302 Holley, Alexander Lyman, 204 Hollywood Dam, 302 Hoover, Herbert C., 128, 129, 133, 204, 229, 230, 243, 322, 323, 335, 336, 337, 338 Hoover, Lou Henry, 129, 323, 336, 337, 338 Hoover Dam, 60, 136, 202, 219, 245, 284, 285 Hoover Institution, 204, 322 Hoover Medal, 323 Hope, Bob, 138 Hopper, Grace Murray, 42 Howlett, Robert, 108, 243, 244 Humphrey, Charles T., 230 Huntington Library, 177, 178, 186 Burndy Library, 177, 178, 186
Index Hyatt Regency Hotel (Kansas City), 73, 261 Hydrolevel Case, 55 Hydrolevel Corp., 55 Iacocca, Lee, 206 ICE Essays, 337 Illinois Institute of Technology, 14, 209 Imhotep, 8 Inamori School (Alfred), 215 Innovators, The (Billington), 35 Inns of Court (London), 315, 316 Middle Temple Bar, 315 Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, 85 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 28, 57, 85, 124, 177, 289, 305, 323 History Center, 141 Institute of Electrical Engineers, 85 Institute of Radio Engineers, 27, 84, 124 Institution of Civil Engineers, 50, 64, 117, 180, 314, 337 Institution of Electrical Engineers, 85, 205, 289 Institution of Engineers of Ireland, 314 Institution of Mechanical Engineers, 64, 314 Institution of Structural Engineers, 314 Interlibrary Loan, 185 International Standards Association, 54 International Telephone & Telegraph Co., 55 Inventure Place (museum), 163 Iowa State College, 46 Iowa State University, 223 Itaipu Dam, 286
Index Ives, Charles, 121 Jacobs School (Cal, San Diego), 217 Jankowski, Frank, 18 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 111 Joe Miner (mascot), 274 John A. Roebling Memorial Bridge, 204, 301 John A. Roebling’s Sons (firm), 48 John Hancock Center, 12 Johns Hopkins University, 215 Johnson, Clarence Leonard “Kelly”, 288 Joint Committee on Tall Buildings, 63 Joint Engineering Council, 94 Jonsson School (Texas, Dallas), 217 Judah, Theodore Dehone, 204 Kamen, Dean, 123 Kandinsky, Vasily, 14 Kansai International Airport, 202 Kansas State University, 146 ´ an, ´ Theodore von, 111, 245, Karm 281 Kate Gleason College (RIT), 210, 329 Kearns, Robert, 158 Kelly, Michael, 217 Kelvin, Lord, 228 Kennedy Space Center, 285 Kent, William, 134 Kesler, Clyde E., 62 Kettering, Charles Franklin, 112, 138 Kettering University, 112 Keuffel & Esser Co., 44, 291, 292 Khan, Fazlur, 12, 204 Khufu Pyramid (Giza), 286 Kidder, Tracy, 39 Kies, Mary Dixon, 330
353 Kilby, Jack S., 43, 221 Kipling, Rudyard, 165, 295, 297 Kirkwood, James Pugh, 48 Kirkwood, Mo., 48 Kirkwood, N.Y., 48 Klimer, Anne, 95 “Knack, The” (Dilbert), 68 Koechlin, Maurice, 333 Kranzberg, Melvin, 143, 144 Kristiansen, Ole Kirk, 97 Kumho Tire v. Carmichael, 99 L.A. Engineer (proposed television series), 150 L.A. Law (television series), 150 Lamme, Benjamin G., 229 Langley Research Center (NASA), 3 Lapin, Aaron S., 156, 157, 158, 159, 160 Lawrence, Abbott, 210 Lawrence, Charles H., 242 Lawrence Scientific School (Harvard), 9, 210 Layton, Edwin T. Jr., 31, 187, 188, 189, 190, 267, 268, 308, 322 Leaning Tower of Pisa, 286 Lee, Robert E., 204 Lego (building blocks), 97, 123 LEGO Group, 97 Lehigh University, 145, 220 Lemelson, Dorothy, 163 Lemelson, Jerome, 162, 163 Lemelson Center, Jerome and Dorothy, 163 Lemelson Foundation, 163 Lemelson-MIT Prize, 159, 163 LeMessurier, William, 71 Lennon, John, 131 Lesseps, Ferdinand de, 228, 229 Lewis, Allen Cleveland, 209 Lewis Institute, 14, 209
354 Ley, Willy, 39, 147 Lighthouse at Alexandria, 286 L’il Abner (comic strip), 288 Lincoln, Abraham, 17, 211 Linda Hall Library, 187 Lindbergh, Charles, 255 Lindenthal, Gustav, 229 Lives of the Engineers (Smiles), 30, 31, 32, 33, 34 Lockheed Aircraft Corp., 288 London Eye (Ferris wheel), 334 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 241 Loscher, Peter, 123 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (1904), 334 Louisiana Tech University, 145 Lowey, Raymond, 151 Lunar X Prize, 256 Lyle School (SMU), 215 Machine Design (magazine), 152 Mackinac Bridge, 114, 246 Mailer, Norman, 336 Maillart, Robert, 33, 35 Manhattan College, 146, 303 Manhattan Project, 280 Mannheim, Victor Mayer ´ ee, ´ 291 Amed Marconi, Guglielmo, 138, 221, 229, 248 Mark II (computer), 41, 42 Mars Pathfinder Mission (NASA), 282 Martin, Glenn, 295 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 47, 66, 109, 122, 177, 178, 179, 186, 210, 220, 242, 249, 277, 278, 290, 303 Master Builders (firm), 63 Matisse, Henri, 14 Mauchly, John W., 59 Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, 286
Index Max L. Wilder Memorial Bridge, 301 May, Mike, 45 McCain, John, 255 McCormick, Cyrus, 244 McCormick School (Northwestern), 215 McCready, Paul, 206 McCullough, Conde B., 33, 301 McCullough, David, 32, 39, 120 McDonnell & Miller (ITT subsidiary), 55 McGraw, James H., 87, 88 McGraw-Hill Publishing Co., 88 McGraw Publishing Co., 88 McLean, Harry Falconer, 297 Meccano (construction toy), 95 Meccano Engineer (magazine), 96 Meccano Magazine, 96 Mechanical Engineer (college degree), 180 Mechanical Engineering (magazine), 222, 223 Mechanics Made Easy (construction toy), 96 Mediterranean Sea, 147 Meehan, Richard, 37 Mehren, E. J., 88 Mellon, Andrew William, 209 Mellon, Richard Beatty, 209 Mellon Institute, 209 Menai Strait (Wales), 238 Men of Progress (Schussele), 244 Merryman, Jerry D., 43 Mestral, George de, 217 Meyer, Henry C., 88 Milwaukee Art Museum, 15 Mission Dam (B.C.), 301 Mississippi River, 110 Mississippi State University, 215 Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy, 270, 272 Missouri University of Science and Technology, 270, 272, 274
Index MIT. See Massachusetts Institute of Technology Mitchell School (Morgan State), 215 Modern System of Naval Architecture, The (Russell), 154, 185, 218 Modjeski, Ralph, 229 Moore School of Electrical Engineering (Penn), 59 Morgan State University, 215 Morrill, Justin, 176 Morrill Land Grant Act (1862), 176 Morrill Land Grant Act (1890), 177 Morse, Samuel, 214 Moses, Joel, 66 Mott, Jordan, 244 Mulholland, William, 208, 242, 302 Mulholland Dam, 302 Murphy, Capt. Ed, 208 Museum of Modern Art (N.Y.C.), 239 Mutual Recognition Document, 188 Mysto Manufacturing Co., 95, 96 Nanking Porcelain Tower, 286 Napier, John, 291 Nasmyth, James, 6, 31, 201 National Academy of Engineering, 19, 26, 130, 131, 181, 221, 227, 282, 305, 309 Memorial Tributes, 33 National Academy of Forensic Engineers, 98 National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, 3, 110 National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 3, 81, 234 National Cash Register Co., 112 National Cathedral (Washington, D.C.), 204
355 National Council of Engineering Examiners, 188 National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying, 188, 256 National Council of Patent Law Associations, 163 National Council of State Boards of Engineering Examiners, 187 National Council on Public Works Improvement, 152 National Defense Education Act (1958), 298 National Defense Research Council, 110 National Engineers Week, 94 National Inventors Hall of Fame, 163 National Museum of American History, 163 National Portrait Gallery (London), 108, 244 National Portrait Gallery (Washington, D.C.), 244 National Railway Museum (York), 195 National Society of Professional Engineers, 6, 92, 114, 189, 305 Naval Research Laboratory, 41 Naval Surface Weapons Center, 41 Naval Museum, 41 Nelson, Horatio, 131 Nerken, Albert, 211 Nerken School of Engineering (Cooper Union), 210 Nervi, Pier Luigi, 155, 203 New Liberal Arts Program (Sloan), 184 Newton, Isaac, 131 New York Public Library, 68, 186, 332
356 Niagara Gorge Suspension Bridge, 142 Nichols, George E., 208 Nobel, Alfred, 221 Nobel Foundation, 221, 222 Noble, David F., 267 Nordenson, Guy, 242 Normal College (Duke), 211 North Carolina A&T State University, 177 North Sea Protection Works, 286 Northwestern University, 215 Norwich University, 83, 215, 276 Nouguier, Emile, 333 Noyce, Robert, 221 “Obligation of an Engineer,” 226 Office of Scientific Research and Development, 110, 266 Ogburn, William F., 144 Omega Chi Epsilon, 145 Orteig Prize, 255 Othello (Shakespeare), 287 Otis, Elisha Graves, 332 Oughtred, William, 291, 292, 293, 294 Oughtred Society, 294 O’Shaughnessy, Michael M., 301 O’Shaughnessy Dam, 301 Page, Larry, 235 Panama Canal, 39, 48, 78, 138, 203, 204, 205, 229, 238, 239, 284, 285, 286 Commission, 128 Parks College (St. Louis), 210 Parsons, William Barclay, 49, 81, 128 Partnership for Rebuilding Our Infrastructure, 76 Partridge, Alden, 83, 276, 277, 278 Paxton, Joseph, 332 Pennell, Joseph, 239 Pennsylvania State University, 14
Index Perronet, Jean-Rodolphe, 127 Petronas Towers, 63 Phi Beta Kappa, 24, 145, 172, 173 Pi Alpha Epsilon, 146 Picasso, Pablo, 14 Pickett (slide rule maker), 292 Pi Epsilon Tau, 146 Pirsig, Robert M., 343 Pi Tau Sigma, 146 Ploog, Randy, 14 Plumber and Sanitary Engineer, The (magazine), 88 Pocketronic (calculator), 43 Polhem, Christopher, 245 Polytechnic Club (Hartford, Conn.), 52, 53 Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, 75 Port Eads, La., 48, 111 Port Jervis, N.Y., 47 Portland cement, 60, 61 Post-it notes, 159 PowerPoint (presentation software), 22, 315 Pratt, Charles, 212 Pratt, Edmund T. Jr., 211 Pratt Institute, 211, 212 Pratt School of Engineering (Duke), 211 Prince Edward Island, 247 Princeton University, 186 Principles and Practices of Engineering (exam), 180, 181, 257 Pritchard, Thomas F., 164 Professional Engineer, 179, 180, 181, 182, 190 Professional Engineering Exam, 257 “Programming Pearls” (Bentley), 18 Pupin, Michael, 31, 229 Purcell, Charles H., 285 Purdue University, 47, 63, 146
Index Pynchon, Thomas, 336 Pyramids, 8 Quebec Bridge, 185, 223, 247, 260, 263 Queen Elizabeth I, 131 Quonset huts, 130, 284 Ramsey, Norman F., 173 Rand, Ayn, 223 Rapid Transit Commission (New York City), 128 Redding, Calif., 15 Reddi-wip, 156, 160 Rennie, John, 119, 120 Rensselaer, Stephen van, 277 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 220, 276 Rice University, 215 Richardson, Lewis Fry, 59 Rickover, Adm. Hyman, 321 “Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer” (Kipling), 165, 248 Robert, Henry Martyn, 269 Rochester Institute of Technology, 210, 329 Rochester Mechanics Institute, 329 Roebling, John A., 32, 47, 115, 119, 142, 143, 204, 229 Roebling, Washington A., 115, 120 Roebling family, 32, 39 Roebling, N.J., 48 Rogers, William Barton, 278 Roosevelt, Theodore, 211 Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, 220 Rosenberg, Nathan, 38 Royal Engineers, 314 Royal Society of Engineers, 180 Russell, John Scott, 108, 153, 185, 218 Rutan, Burt, 206, 256
357 Salvadori, Giuseppina, 155 Salvadori, Mario, 19, 155 Samueli School (Cal, Irvine), 217 Samueli School (UCLA), 217 San Francisco – Oakland Bay Bridge, 284 Sanitary Engineer and Construction Record, The (magazine), 88 Sanitary Engineer, The (magazine), 88 Sauvestre, Stephen, 333 Schaefer, Charles V. Jr., 212 Schaefer School (Stevens), 214 Schaller, Frank H., 330 Schumacher, Aileen, 224 Schussele, Christian, 244 Science – the Endless Frontier (Bush), 110 Scientific American (magazine), 244 Sears Tower, 12, 63, 204. See-also Willis Tower Seim, Charles, 299, 300 Seim, Charles E., 299 Serviceman’s Readjustment Act (1944), 129 Severn River (U.K.), 164 Shakespeare, William, 131, 286, 287 Sheffield, Joseph Earl, 213 Sheffield Scientific School (Yale), 212 Shute, Nevil, 80, 294 Sibley, Hiram, 214 Sibley College (Cornell), 213 Siemens AG, 123 Sigma Gamma Tau, 146 Sigma Xi (research society), 173 Simon, Herbert, 279–280 Sinatra, Frank, 212 Sinclair, Bruce, 237 Singapore Flyer (Ferris wheel), 334
358 Singstad, Ole, 302 Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (firm), 12, 295 Sloan Foundation, Alfred P., 184 Smeaton, John, 49, 98, 113, 205 Smeatonian Society, 113 Smeatonian Society of Civil Engineers, 113 Smiles, Samuel, 30, 31, 120 Smithsonian Institution, 163, 178 Snow, Charles Percy, 318 Society for the History of Technology, 144 Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, 143, 228, 229, 230. See-also American Society for Engineering Education Society of Civil Engineers, 113 Society of Construction Law, 315 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 236 Soul of a New Machine, The (Kidder), 39 Southern Methodist University, 215 Southern Technical Institute, 146 Speed, James Breckenridge, 214 Speed Scientific School (Louisville), 214 Spencer, Diana, 131 Sperry, Elmer A., 120 Sperry, Lawrence B., 120 Stanford Research Institute, 159 Stanford University, 129, 204, 322 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 329 Stanton, Nora, 328 Stapp, Col. J. P., 208 Star of Nanchang (Ferris wheel), 334 Starrucca Viaduct, 48 Stauffer, D. McN., 87 Steinman, David B., 32, 113, 120, 145, 189, 241, 247, 249, 336
Index Steinmetz, Charles Proteus, 115, 138, 228, 229, 244, 245, 337 Stephenson, George, 30, 119, 120, 205, 245 Stephenson, Robert, 30, 64, 119, 120, 205 Stevens, Edwin Augustus, 212 Stevens, John, 21, 212 Stevens, John F., 48, 78, 79, 229 Stevens, Robert Livingston, 212 Stevens Institute of Technology, 13, 212 Alumni Association, 134 Stevenson, Robert, 120 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 120 Stevenson, Thomas, 120 Stevens Pass (Wash.), 48 St. Francis Dam, 242, 302 St. Johns Bridge (Portland, Ore.), 114 St. Louis, Mo., 48, 111, 334 St. Louis University, 210 Stonehenge, 286 Strauss, Joseph B., 203, 233, 241, 242, 285 Structural Engineer, 182 Structural Engineers Association of California, 182 Structural Engineers Association of Illinois, 182, 204 Success Through Failure (Petroski), 104 Sultana (riverboat), 52 Sundial Bridge, 15 Sununu, John, 243 Superbattery Prize, 255 Swanson, Gloria, 160 Swanson School (Pitt), 217 Sydney Opera House, 12, 32 Tacoma Narrows Bridge, 112, 142, 260, 306 Taipei 101 (super-tall building), 64
Index Tasse, James H. Van, 43 Tau Alpha Pi, 146 Tau Beta Pi, 29, 145, 146, 174, 329 Tay Bridge, 260 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 308, 309 Taylorites, 308 Technology and Culture (journal), 144 Technology Review (MIT magazine), 279 Telford, Thomas, 30, 117, 205 Temple of Artemis (Ephesus), 286 Terzaghi, Karl, 301 Tesla, Nikola, 245 Texas A&M University, 70, 176 Texas Engineering Practice Act, 74 Texas Instruments, 43, 44 Texas Tech University, 215 Thacher, Edward, 291 Thayer, Sylvanus, 214, 276, 320 Thayer School (Dartmouth), 214 Thomson, Elihu, 162 Thomson-Houston Electric Co., 162 Thoreau, Henry David, 177 Thousand Islands Bridge, 142 Three Gorges Dam, 148, 223 Three Mile Island (nuclear plant), 74 Throop, Amos G., 277 Throop Polytechnic Institute, 277 Timoshenko, Stephen Prokofievitch, 117 Trans-Alaska Pipeline, 285 Tredgold, Thomas, 50 Trinity College (Duke), 211 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare), 287 Trump World Tower (New York), 125
359 Union Carbide (plant), 69 Union College, 321, 337 United Engineering Center, 125 United Engineering Foundation, 124, 125, 126, 127 United Engineering Society, 124 United Nations, 125 University of California, 46 University of California, Berkeley, 242, 299, 328 University of California, Irvine, 217 University of California, Los Angeles, 217, 249 University of California, Riverside, 217 University of California, San Diego, 217 University of California, Santa Cruz, 217 University of Cincinnati, 241, 299 University of Colorado, 328 University of Illinois, 62, 145, 249, 271 University of Kentucky, 329 University of Louisville, 214 University of Maryland, 217, 295 University of Michigan, 117 University of Minnesota, 272 University of Missouri, Columbia, 270, 274 University of Missouri, Rolla, 270, 271 University of Notre Dame, 94 University of Oklahoma, 146 University of Pennsylvania, 59 University of Pittsburgh, 217 University of Rochester, 217 University of Southern California, 217 University of Tennessee, 336 University of Texas at Austin, 74, 92, 217
360 University of Texas at Dallas, 217 University of Toronto, 165 University of Washington, 306 Department of Civil Engineering, 307 University of Wisconsin, 129, 146 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 49, 111, 122, 240, 269, 320 U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, 138 U.S. Military Academy (West Point), 48, 127, 214, 276, 277, 278, 320 U.S. Naval Academy (Annapolis), 321 U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, 163 U.S. Supreme Court, 99 Veblen, Thorstein Bunde, 268 Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, 246 Vibration Specialty Co., 117 Villanova School of Technology, 230 Vinarcik, Michael J., 248 Vincenti, Walter G., 38, 90, 192 Vinci, Leonardo da, 186, 228 Virginia Tech, 176 Viterbi School (USC), 217 Vitruvius, 8, 141, 274, 275, 327 Vogel, Steven, 217 Voltaire, 234 Vonnegut, Kurt, 336 Waddell, J. A. L., 118, 143 Waddell & Harrington (firm), 119 Walden Pond, 178 Walker, Edward Craven, 324, 325, 326 Walla Walla University, 217 Warhol, Andy, 156 Washington, George, 82, 94, 132, 177, 246, 321
Index Washington Square Park (New York), 204 Watson, Sara Ruth, 104, 115 Watson School (Binghamton), 215 Watt, James, 205, 228 Wearable Power Prize, 255 Weingardt, Richard G., 34, 38, 251 Wellington, Arthur M., 80, 87 Wells, Matthew, 333 West, Tom, 21 Westinghouse, George, 138, 228, 229 Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Co., 117 Westminster Abbey, 113, 205 Wheatstone, Charles, 19 Whitacre College (Texas Tech), 217 Whiting School (Hopkins), 215 Wilder, Max L., 301 Willis, Delta, 217 Willis Tower, 204. See-also Sears Tower Wilson, Woodrow, 322 Wingate, Charles F., 88 Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 220 World’s Columbian Exposition (1893), 334 Congress of Engineering, 334 World Trade Center (New York), 15, 75, 285, 307 Yale University, 95, 121, 213, 249 School of Engineering, 213 Yangtze River, 148, 223 Yankee Stadium, 62 Yellow Pages (phone directory), 151 Zeppelin, Ferdinand von, 248 Zeus Statue at Olympia, 286
