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 refer-
ence 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 fail-
ure, and the history of engineering and technology. His fifteen
books on these subjects include To Engineer Is Human, The Pen-
cil, 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 Institu-
tion of Engineers of Ireland. He is an elected member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philo-
sophical 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 Span-
ning 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
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c Henry Petroski 2011

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permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2011

Printed in the United States of America

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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,
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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 con-
cepts 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 ency-
clopedia-like sense of the topic under discussion. In no case
is an entry meant to be definitive or exhaustive, and so ref-
erences to further information are provided freely. How-
ever, 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 arrange-
ment 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 some-
thing related to the softer side of engineering. To mini-
mize 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
viii Preface

to individual engineers and to specific engineering institu-

tions, organizations, projects, or landmarks.
Many of the entries in this volume may seem woe-
fully 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 produc-
tion 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 Soci-
ety for Engineering Education. A few other entries first
saw the light of day as short essays in the Wall Street Jour-
nal and other publications. But the overwhelming major-
ity 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 sym-
pathetic 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 daugh-
ter 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 themsel-
ves 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, unam-
biguous. 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 misun-
derstood. 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 con-
fusion over what “eng.” designates (engine, engineer, engi-
neering, 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 con-
text can be expected to make clear which one is intended.
1
2 acronyms

Unfortunately, the words engine, engineer, and engineer-

ing 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 abbrevi-
ation. While it may be specific, egr. is a clumsy abbrevia-
tion; 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 ab-
breviation for the engineering professional troubles me.
Medical doctors invariably identify themselves by append-
ing 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 engi-
neers’ names).

acronyms. Acronyms are not exactly the same as abbre-

viations, 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 3

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 charac-
ter 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 Administra-
tion although it is not, strictly speaking, a word in its own
right. Nevertheless, this abbreviation is commonly and offi-
cially pronounced as if it were a word, “nasa,” and, inexpli-
cably, sometimes (incorrectly) as if it were the city Nas-
sau, 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 sig-
naling that the letters were to be pronounced individu-
ally. 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 work-
ers refer to the NACA as “Nacca,” if they are not aware
of its history, culture, and traditions. (These and other
4 acronyms

anecdotes, in the context of the Langley Aeronautical Lab-

oratory – 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 organiza-
tion. Many of those who recall when NASA was estab-
lished 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 philos-
ophy of “faster, better, cheaper.”
Some so-called acronyms could never be confused with
words. When the Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor pro-
gram was a highly visible part of the Department of
Energy’s effort to develop a fuel self-sustaining nuclear
power program, engineers, managers, and environmental-
ists 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 com-
puter 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 5

stands for “COmmon Business-Oriented Language.” The

name of the scientific-oriented language FORTRAN
nicely characterizes its “FORmula TRANslation” quali-
ties. The example of BASIC, coined in 1964 to stand for
“Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code,” fur-
ther 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 fre-
quently acknowledged in books and written reports by the
insertion of a much-needed list of acronyms and abbrevia-
tions in the front matter or as an appendix. However, read-
ing such a report can be a two-handed exercise in flipping
back and forth between the text and the list. It is unfortu-
nate 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 engi-
neering reports parentheses filled with strings of capital let-
ters. 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 chap-
ter of a report – beginning on, say, page 51 – and finds
acronyms used there that may have been introduced any-
where 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
6 “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 orga-
nization such as the National Society of Professional Engi-
neers, there will be no parenthetical statement of the obvi-
ous: 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 inven-
tor of the steam hammer, wrote often of his learning to
draw and of its importance for the practice of engineer-
ing. 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 communi-
cate 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 atten-
tion to the importance of putting the quantitative engineer
ancient engineering 7

in touch with qualitative language and thought, emphasiz-

ing the importance of both sides of the brain to truly cre-
ative engineering. See James Nasmyth, Engineer: An Auto-
biography, 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 engi-
neering 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 Improve-
ment 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 profes-
sion that distinguished its practitioners not from the yet-
to-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 alpha-
bet, 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
8 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 civ-
ilization 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 architect-
engineer to Pharaoh Zoser. Imhotep flourished in Mem-
phis, Egypt around 2650 B.C. and is credited with building
the Step Pyramid of Sakkara, the oldest Egyptian exam-
ple of the genre, and thereby is said to be the inventor
of pyramids generally. These ancient engineering achieve-
ments continue to awe and inspire.
The works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322
B.C.) have, of course, had a seminal influence on West-
ern thinking. Of special interest to engineers should be the
“minor work” attributed to Aristotle that has been trans-
lated into English as “Mechanical Problems.” In it, ques-
tions of scale and structure are discussed in ways fully
meaningful to modern engineers, even though the argu-
ments used may appear to have been primitive mechani-
cally. 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 Uni-
versity 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 qual-
ity of existing buildings and judge proposed construction
projects. Vitruvius’s treatise was considered authoritative
well into the Renaissance. The standard English transla-
tion of De architectura was made by Morris Hicky Morgan
and was published posthumously in 1914 by Harvard
ancient engineering 9

University Press under the title The Ten Books on Archi-

tecture, 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 Archi-
tectural 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, cura-
tor 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 sup-
ply and its uses, including wasteful practices and misap-
propriation of water by the installation of unauthorized
pipes. The book provides great insight into Roman civil
engineering. Its manuscript was discovered by the Amer-
ican 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 Har-
vard 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 Water-
Supply of the City of Rome and published it privately, dis-
tributing 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 trans-
lation of Frontinus was later published in London by Long-
mans, Green (second edition, 1913), and was reprinted in
1973 by the New England Water Works Association.
10 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.: Dou-
bleday, 1963), a popular treatment of the subject; J. G.
Landels, Engineering in the Ancient World (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1978); and the opening chap-
ters 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 Shel-
ton 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 lit-
tle 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 scien-
tific principles and application of the scientific method. A
commonly cited counterexample to the notion that engi-
neering is nothing more than applied science is the inven-
tion 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 work-
ing 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”
architects vs. engineers 11

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 mechani-
cal principles behind large bridges and powerful machin-
ery, 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 sep-
arate American Institute of Architects was founded, sug-
gesting 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 loca-
tion 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 regis-
tration laws for architects and engineers. See, for exam-
ple, 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
12 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 com-
monly used during World War II to refer to those com-
panies 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 engineer-
architects (EA). Related designations include architects-
engineers-planners (AEP), engineers-architects-planners
(EAP), and related permutations, combinations, and vari-
ations of these and similar terms and the letters designating
them.
It is a common complaint among engineers that archi-
tects 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 con-
cept 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 Gra-
ham (1925–2010) and the structural engineer Fazlur Khan
(1929–1982), both of whom were members of the Chicago-
based 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,
arm waving 13

Yasmin Sabina Khan, herself an engineer, and published

by W. W. Norton in 2004.

arm waving. Engineers often find themselves in the posi-

tion 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 expres-
sion 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 devel-
oped material supposedly being explained is displayed.
The practice is sometimes also referred to as “wing flap-
ping.”

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 study-
ing art. His early works exploited his talent for creating
wire sculptures, some of which he animated in a perfor-
mance 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 ele-
mentary engineering science courses of statics, dynamics,
and strength of materials. See “Once an Engineer . . . ,”
American Scientist, July–August 2009, pp. 282–285. See
14 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 Tech-
nology. According to Randy Ploog, an art historian at
Pennsylvania State University, “one of the great myster-
ies of modern art” has been why Dawson began to pro-
duce abstract paintings in 1910, before acclaimed Euro-
pean 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 paint-
ings “were based on coordinates and curves suggested by
parabolas, hyperbolas and circles,” which are so familiar
to engineering students. Ploog, an expert on Dawson, pre-
pared an exhibition illustrating how the artist’s civil engi-
neering background contributed to his abstract works. The
show opened at Penn State in 2009 and subsequently trav-
eled 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,” includ-
ing Picasso and Matisse, and it was Burgess’s engineering
background that caused him to explain Cubism “by com-
paring 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 sta-
tions, skyscrapers, and bridges – works of art in their own
asphalt cookies 15

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 distin-
guished by its movable wing-like steel sunscreen known as
a briese soleil, and the glass-floored, cable-stayed, gnomon-
masted Sundial Bridge in Redding, California. Unfortu-
nately, 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. Construc-
tion on the Calatrava-designed Chicago Spire, a 2,000-
foot-tall helical condominium building on the city’s lake-
front, was foreclosed on in 2009 with only its foundation
having been completed.
Of course, there are countless engineers of all special-
ties 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 stu-

dents in grades 4 through 8 was created by Joanna
Ambroz, a civil engineering graduate student at the Uni-
versity 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,
16 asphalt cookies

just the way real aggregate and hot asphalt are mixed in a
drum mixer. When the asphalt thoroughly coats the aggre-
gate, 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 compact-
ing and smoothing a new road surface. As the demonstra-
tion mixture cools, it hardens into a cookie, in a way anal-
ogous to what happens to real asphalt. After about twenty
or thirty minutes, the students who participate in this activ-
ity can eat the cookies or take them home – along with sto-
ries 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 prac-
tice 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, esti-
mating the magnitude of a phenomenon, or communicat-
ing 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 notepa-
per 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 construc-
tion of the envelope, provided a clean and unimpeded sur-
face on which to draw, write, or calculate. Furthermore,
an envelope with a letter inside, especially the multipage
17
18 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 hold-
ing 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 back-
of-the-envelope calculations is provided in the book, Back
of the Envelope, by Frank Jankowski (Pittsburgh: Dor-
rance, 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-the-

envelope calculations, as does Jon Bentley in his essay
“The Back of the Envelope,” which appeared originally in
his column “Programming Pearls,” in the magazine Com-
munications of the Association for Computing Machinery.
The essay is reprinted in Bentley’s book Programming
Pearls (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1986).
back of the envelope 19

One reader who wrote in response to Bentley’s column

related the following story of a back-of-the-envelope cal-
culation:

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 min-
utes, 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 any-
thing!”
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 Sal-
vadori (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
20 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 for-
mula, 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 ref-

erred 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-the-
envelope problems, that is, those that can be solved liter-
ally on a scrap of paper, have also been termed Fermi prob-
lems or Fermi questions, with the answers called Fermi
estimates. See Clifford Swartz, Back-of-the-Envelope
back of the envelope 21

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, find-
ing 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 back-

of-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 pro-
cedures, 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 Scien-

tist, January–February 1991, pp. 15-17, which is reprinted
in Remaking the World (New York: Knopf, 1997). This
entry augments those essays.
22 backups and redundancy

Engineers also speak of an “envelope of experience,”

usage of which derives from the so-called imaginary enclo-
sure – 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 con-

servative individuals, and as such they like to see a lit-
tle 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 inci-
dents of jammed projectors, blown-out bulbs, and improp-
erly loaded carousels with slides that were upside-down,
sideways, backwards, or hopelessly out of order. To obvi-
ate 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 communi-
cate 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 atten-
dees 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 giv-
ing the keynote speech at a meeting. Everything started
out normally. My PowerPoint presentation, which was on
backups and redundancy 23

success and failure in design and relied heavily on the

images of bridges projected on the screen, worked per-
fectly 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 per-
son 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, hav-
ing 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 inadver-
tently 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 pre-
sentation, 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 good-
natured 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
24 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 con-
taining my presentation.
Unfortunately, the hotel did not have as much redun-
dancy in its power system. Its emergency generators
were not capable of both keeping the lights on and run-
ning the elevators reliably. We found ourselves having to
descend under our own power a dozen flights of redundant,
although obviously necessary and certainly welcome, fire-
stairs to get to dinner on time. (From “Speaking of Fail-
ure,” 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 dif-
ferent 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 indi-
viduals 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 engi-
neer’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:
badges of engineering societies 25

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 sales-
man, “Your pin has a picture of a clothes wringer on it!”

As a result of such experiences, the badge was rede-

signed and in 1894 a simpler one was adopted, on which
appeared only the words “American Society of Civil Engi-
neers” 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 consist-
ing of the italic letters ASCE with the horizontal bar of the

Original (left) and redesigned ASCE badge

26 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 atten-
dees 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 empha-
size such sartorial trappings. Still, these societies do fre-
quently 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 de-
signs. Many incorporate overt engineering symbolism. The
emblem of the American Society of Mechanical Engi-
neers is in the form of a four-leaf clover sometimes incor-
rectly said to be a shamrock. The crest of the Institu-
tion of Engineers, Malaysia, features a pencil and a slide
badges of engineering societies 27

rule. Like many modern corporations, engineering soci-

eties have come increasingly to give over the redesign of
their logos to image consultants, often to the great disap-
pointment 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 Engi-
neers and a new badge was born. The shape of the orig-
inal AIEE badge resembled a kite, giving a nod to Ben-
jamin 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 resis-
tance via Ohm’s Law. Above the meter were the letters
A.I.E.E. This was truly the badge of an engineering soci-
ety, 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 electric-
ity.” 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 “right-
hand 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 for-
mer 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
28 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 orga-
nization that sought a strong international presence. See
John D. Ryder and Donald G. Fink, Engineers & Elec-
trons: A Century of Electrical Progress (New York: IEEE
Press, 1984), pp. 44, 222–223.
bents and bridges 29

bents and bridges. The distinctive “bent” that Tau Beta

Pi, the honor society encompassing all fields of engineer-
ing, has used as its symbol since 1885 holds a special place
in bridge-building history. Bridges erec-
ted on long timbers were far more sta-
ble when the outermost supports were
angled so their bases were farther apart
than their tops, an advantage recog-
nized 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 side-
ways 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 bridge-
like 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 representa-
tion 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 soci-
ety Eta Kappa Nu is named The Bridge. (It should not
be confused with the magazine of the same name pub-
lished by the National Academy of Engineering.) Rather
30 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 cir-
cuit. 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 engineer-

ing 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 por-
traits 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,” Bul-
letin of Biography, January–April, 1946, pp. 206–210;
biographies of engineers 31

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 Engi-
neering Education,” The Journal of Engineering Edu-
cation, September 1941, pp. 82–92. Whether there is a
biography of a specific engineer can often be deter-
mined 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 Amer-
ican 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 autobi-
ography 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 profession-
alism that linked the engineer to a conservative, moral-
istic ideology,” according to Edwin T. Layton, Jr., in his
Revolt of the Engineers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1986). More recent engineer autobiogra-
phies and memoirs of note include that of Ben R. Rich,
32 biographies of engineers

Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lock-

heed (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994).
My bookshelf contains a variety of biographies of
civil and structural engineers that I have found interest-
ing 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 Ger-
many and Denmark, established a consulting engineering
firm that worked on such iconic structures as the Sydney
Opera House and Paris’s Beaubourg Centre. The world-
renowned 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: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 2006). In the days before digi-
tal computers, Cross’s moment distribution method (also
known as the Hardy Cross method) was widely used to
design buildings. He also devised other efficient approx-
imating 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 Tow-
ers (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952).
Bridge builders have been the subject of biographies
of themselves and their works. Perhaps the most cele-
brated 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 ear-
lier 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
biographies of engineers 33

(Reston, Va.: ASCE Press, 2009). A biography and crit-

ical 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, Ele-
gant 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 Bibliogra-
phy of the History of Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: Soci-
ety 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 engi-
neers can be found in shorter formats. Memoirs are offi-
cial notices or reports in addition to being autobiograph-
ical 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 Ameri-
can 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 Engi-
neering 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
34 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 engi-
neers 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 Shan-
non (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 com-
prising 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 Dictio-
nary 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 Dictio-
nary 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 nation-
alities 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 Institu-
tion of Civil Engineers published the first volume, covering
books by and about engineers 35

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 unelaborated-
on 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 engineer-
ing. 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 Pio-
neers 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 his-
torian son David P. Billington, Jr., appeared a decade later
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). Billington
has long been an innovator in engineering education.
36 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 engi-
neering and technical drawing and discussed the nature of
engineering design. The ideas in that article were incorpo-
rated, 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 nonver-
bal thinking to engineering design and education. Fergu-
son 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 Univer-
sity from 1910 to 1952, during which time he also served as
dean. He wrote about the history of that institution, engi-
neering 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
books by and about engineers 37

most visible and articulate apologist. The book, which cel-

ebrates 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 curricu-
lum, such as exists at Dartmouth College, his alma mater,
Florman had earlier published Engineering and the Lib-
eral 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 advo-
cate the cause of liberal education for engineers,” some-
thing for which Florman continued to be a spokesman,
and “to explore some of the ways in which engineer-
ing is related to the liberal arts, thereby providing natu-
ral bridges of interest and concern between the ‘two cul-
tures’.” 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 Tech-
nology Review. In addition to Engineering and the Lib-
eral 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, com-
prising a selection of “Humane Engineer” columns, The
Introspective Engineer (St. Martin’s Press, 1996). Flor-
man’s The Aftermath (St. Martin’s Press, 2001) is a fic-
tional 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
38 books by and about engineers

Life (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981) and The Atom

and the Fault: Experts, Earthquakes, and Nuclear Power
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), which relate real-
world 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 intellec-
tual 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 Ameri-
can Civil Engineers, 32 Profiles of Inspiration and Achieve-
ment (Reston, Va: ASCE Press, 2006) and a biography of
George W. G. Ferris, the namesake of the amusement-
park ride. Weingardt also writes regular columns on the
profession and leadership in the magazine Structural Engi-
neering 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
books by and about engineers 39

projects that have become touchstones for their subjects.

Among these are:
Engineers’ Dreams. This book by Willy Ley, first pub-
lished 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 low-
ering 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 Scien-
tist, 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 Pio-
neers (Washington, D.C.: 21st Century Science Associates,
1993).
The Great Bridge. This epic story of the Roebling fam-
ily 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 engi-
neers highlighted in the book was Tom West (1939–
2011), who was described as “the computer engineer
40 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 eas-
ily worked balsa wood (or basswood) and glue is an espe-
cially 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 great-
est load without breaking. Sometimes, the model bridges
are weighed before being loaded, and the bridge achiev-
ing 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 contest-
winning 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 com-
pete 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 com-
ponent, in that the students necessarily must apply what
bug 41

they have learned in the classroom, and more, to a realistic

project.

bug. This common term for an error encountered in run-

ning 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 fail-
ure – is certainly reached.

The term was also used in a famous passage on the engi-

neering profession written by Herbert Hoover and pub-
lished 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 com-
puter 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 Com-
puting 3 (July 1981): 285–286, enabled the operators to say
they were debugging the computer whenever the comman-
der entered the room and asked, “Are you making any
numbers?”
42 bug

The most persistent story about a moth being the first

computer “bug” was promulgated by the pioneering com-
puter scientist Grace Murray Hopper (1906–1992), who
participated in the invention of the business-oriented com-
puter 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 Inven-
tion & Technology, Fall 2010, pp. 48–50.
 C
calculators. The prototype of the now-ubiquitous and
inexpensive hand-held battery- or solar-powered elec-
tronic calculator was produced in 1966 by Texas Instru-
ments 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 trigono-
metric functions as well as the basic addition, subtrac-
tion, 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 con-
sidered 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
44 calculators

calculators could be bought for less than $10 and soon were
being given away in advertising promotions. The calcula-
tors 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 scien-
tific calculators, the sale of slide rules, which had already
been declining because of decreasing enrollment in engi-
neering 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 calcula-
tions and analysis much more quickly and accurately. Engi-
neering 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 calcu-
lator, it’s the company that benefits. Therefore, the com-
pany should pay.” Some companies did pay for calcula-
tors 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 engineer-
ing firm of Camp, Dresser & McKee gave advice for deal-
ing 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
Centennial of Engineering 45

advance as to who will get one, there may be hard feelings.

CDM makes clear that only an engineer – not a design-
draftsman – 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 cal-
culations.” 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 & Tech-
nology, 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, Febru-
ary 1975, pp. 39–43.

Centennial of Engineering. The one-hundredth anniver-

sary 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 Engineer-
ing, ca. 1953).
46 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 Califor-

nia and Iowa State cheers is the replacement of the abbre-
viation 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
cities and other places named for engineers 47

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 recog-
nized. 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 eventu-
ally 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 remem-
bered in the name of the town of Roebling, New Jersey,
located on the Delaware River near Philadelphia, which
48 cities and other places named for engineers

was built as a company town by the firm of John A. Roe-

bling’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 ship-
ping from the Gulf of Mexico. Crozet, Virginia is named
for Claudius Crozet (1790–1864), the French-born Ameri-
can 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 mak-
ing 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 explana-
tion has been that land developers persuaded Kirkwood
to route the railroad through what was to be the first pre-
planned 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 Kirk-
wood worked for the Erie Railroad when the nearby Star-
rucca 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 Cas-
cade Mountains is Stevens Pass, named after the first non-
native American credited with discovering it. John Frank
Stevens (1853–1943) was responsible for overseeing the
building of the Great Northern Railway. His railroad expe-
rience made him an excellent choice to serve as chief engi-
neer from 1906 to 1908 for the construction of the Panama
Canal, where one of the most challenging problems was
civil engineering 49

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 col-
lectively is Engineer Mountain. This 13,218-foot peak,
located about twenty-five miles north of Durango, Col-
orado, 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 appreci-
ated 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 respon-
sible 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 engineer-
ing 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.
50 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 knowl-

edge 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 human-
ity 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 defini-

tion 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’ biograph-
ical 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 impor-
tant 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 manage-
ment 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,
codes and standards 51

and in the navigation by artificial power for the purposes

of commerce. . . .

The allusion to Bacon is to the English lawyer, philoso-

pher, 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 juris-
diction. It is often said that the first “building code” was the
four-millennia-old Code of Hammurabi, which held Baby-
lonian 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 puni-
tive rather than prescriptive of load limits and other quan-
titative measures intended to obviate failure.
A standard is an agreed upon design practice, proce-
dure, 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. Stan-
dards incorporate the considered judgment of experienced
engineers, especially with regard to the design of struc-
tures, machines, and other artifacts on whose safety and
reliability the lay public depends. Standards of practice,
52 codes and standards

also called codes, are intended to define and disseminate

what a profession considers at the time of their promulga-
tion 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 cen-
tury, when steamboats were plagued by exploding boil-
ers, in large part because they were inferiorly manufac-
tured 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 steam-
boat trade. Finally, in 1852, a regulatory agency was cre-
ated, 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 unreg-
ulated, 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 proper-
ties 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 ratio-
nally concluded that boilers exploded when steam pres-
sure exceeded the ability of the boiler to contain it: a
cause that should be able to be controlled. The Polytech-
nic Club redoubled its efforts after the 1865 explosion of a
boiler on the Sultana, a Mississippi River steamboat carry-
ing Union soldiers freed after the Confederate surrender at
codes and standards 53

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 Inspec-
tion 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 inspec-
tions soon came to be accepted by municipal and state
authorities as certifying boilers as safe, thus greatly reduc-
ing the occurrence of explosions, at least where the inspec-
tions 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 comprehen-
sive boiler code. This was not forthcoming from govern-
ment groups, however, and it was not until the early twen-
tieth 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 Autho-
rized 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
54 codes and standards

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 Ameri-
can Society of Civil Engineers, the American Institute
of Mining Engineers, the American Society of Mechani-
cal Engineers, the American Institute of Electrical Engi-
neers, and the American Society for Testing Materials col-
lectively created the Joint Committee on Organization of
an American Engineers Standards Committee to coordi-
nate standards-writing efforts. The American Engineer-
ing Standards Committee was established in 1918, and
its membership soon included government and industrial
bodies involved and interested in the creation of stan-
dards. The AESC was reorganized in 1928 as the Ameri-
can Standards Association, which allowed for the partici-
pation of such groups as trade associations, and the ASA
became affiliated with the International Standards Associ-
ation. The ASA was reorganized in 1966 as the USA Stan-
dards Institute (USASI), which in 1970 was renamed the
American National Standards Institute (ANSI). It coor-
dinates 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, gov-
ernment 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 devel-
opment 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
codes and standards 55

organization’s most tangible product is the multi-volume

Annual Book of ASTM Standards.
The process whereby professional organizations estab-
lish codes and standards came under attack in what has
come to be known as the Hydrolevel Case. This legal dis-
pute involving the responsibility for code-writing commit-
tees was between the Hydrolevel Corporation, a manu-
facturer 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 let-
ter sought an interpretation of ASME’s Boiler and Pres-
sure 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 inter-
pretation 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 subcommit-
tee, 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 con-
spired 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
56 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 Elec-
trical Engineers. Many other societies soon followed suit,
seeing the adoption of codes of ethics as a means of fur-
thering 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 vari-
ation can be conveyed by quoting from a few of them.
The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Tech-
nology 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 fol-
lowing 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 profes-
sional duties.
2. Engineers shall perform services only in areas of their
competence.
codes of ethics 57

3. Engineers shall issue public statements only in an objec-

tive 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 engi-
neering profession.
7. Engineers shall continue their professional develop-
ment through their careers, and shall provide opportuni-
ties 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 Electri-
cal 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 impor-

tance of our technologies in affecting the quality of life
throughout the world, and in accepting a personal obliga-
tion to our profession, its members and the communities
we serve, do hereby commit ourselves to the highest ethi-
cal and professional conduct and agree:

1. to accept responsibility in making engineering deci-

sions 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 when-
ever 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;
58 computer

4. to reject bribery in all its forms;

5. to improve the understanding of technology, its appro-
priate application, and potential consequences;
6. to maintain and improve our technical competence and
to undertake technological tasks for others only if qual-
ified 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 profes-
sional 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 Sci-
ence 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 computa-
tional 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
computer 59

the last operation in a series could be passed back to the

computer responsible for the first operation. In this man-
ner, 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 pre-
dict 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, pres-
sure, 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 com-
puter to operate. The developers of the ENIAC, appar-
ently wishing to avoid anthropomorphic terms in describ-
ing 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 per-
sonal computer. Reliance on personal computers and com-
puters 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
60 concrete

“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 hard-
ens 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 mid-
nineteenth century, when iron bars and mesh were embed-
ded in it to improve strength and inhibit the develop-
ment of cracks. Large-scale applications of reinforced con-
crete increased in the early twentieth century. Because
concrete is often incorrectly called “cement” by lay per-
sons, 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 struc-
tures, 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 cable-
ways that spanned Black Canyon and operated twenty-
four 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 sys-
tem 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
concrete 61

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 mate-
rial 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 sympo-
sium 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 diver-
sion 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 perpetra-
tors 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.
62 concrete canoes

In 2008, when the new Yankee Stadium was under con-

struction in New York, a mischievous worker who hap-
pened 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 inci-
dent. A great deal of time and effort was spent jackham-
mering 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-and-
white uniform shirt bearing the name Ortiz and the num-
ber 34 was found and removed, presumably undoing the
curse.

concrete canoes. Boats made of wire-reinforced con-

crete 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 Uni-
versity of Illinois, in Urbana, who were given the assign-
ment 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 lay-
ers 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
Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat 63

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 chemi-
cal company BASF that manufactures construction chem-
icals such as admixtures that go into making lightweight
concrete. In addition to the canoe races proper, includ-
ing a 100-meter sprint and a 600-meter race involving
turns, each student team must prepare a descriptive dis-
play of its design and make oral presentations explain-
ing 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 coun-

cil was founded in 1969 as the Joint Committee on Tall
Buildings. The international and interdisciplinary (incor-
porating engineering, architectural, and planning interests)
organization was “established to study and report on all
aspects of the planning, design, construction, and opera-
tion 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 surround-
ings. Between 1978 and 1981 the Council published its five-
volume 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 rec-
ognized that, although a communications antenna atop
the Sears Tower reached higher than the spire of the
64 craft tradition

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 desig-
nated 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 Cen-
ter 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 devel-
oped out of the craft tradition, in which manual dexter-
ity with tools and an artistic sense were more commonly
employed in devising and making artifacts than an ana-
lytical 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
cut-and-try 65

methods of the mechanic, rather than by the rational analy-

sis of the scientist.” In engineering, the term is used in con-
trast to analytical approaches whereby designs are sized
and optimized by calculation. “Cut-and-try” is sometimes
confused with the close yet antonymic phrase “cut-and-
dried” (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 con-
struction, thus providing a predictably reliable structure.
 D
definitions of engineering. See economics and engineer-
ing; engineer; engineering.
design. Arguably, it is design that is the central activity
of engineering, with all other engineering pursuits follow-
ing 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 con-
tracts to be let for the design and the building phases
of large construction projects. In contrast, in the design-
build 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 effi-
cient and result in better quality design and construction.
Opponents argue that separate contracts better ensure the
benefits of competition. The proponents prevailed in late-
twentieth 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 com-
petition, or from anyone who cares to enter, resulting in
66
Dilbert 67

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 real-
ized. 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 encourag-
ing mediocrity and exploiting professionals. Competitions
have also been praised for encouraging innovation and
giving unknown designers a chance to show off their tal-
ents. Design competitions have long been more common
in Europe than in America, although they have been used
increasingly of late. See “Design Competition,” Ameri-
can 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 con-
test 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 cer-
tain 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 per-
haps 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
68 Dilbert

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 short-
sleeved 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, tele-
vision, 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 nor-
mally 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 condi-
tion, 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 nor-
mal 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 lis-
tening to adults talk about him. While his mother explains
disasters and near-disasters 69

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 hav-
ing “the knack” to do this and so be destined to be an engi-
neer. 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 seem-
ingly gratuitous characterization of engineers as being
socially inept. Little Dilbert in the doctor’s office demon-
strates 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 disas-
ters 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 loca-
tion 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 over-
pressurized and exploded, thus releasing the poisonous
70 disasters and near-disasters

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 subse-
quent investigation, conducted by a presidential commis-
sion, 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 per-
formance of the O-ring seals at the unusually low temper-
atures 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 cri-
tique 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 arti-
cle 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
disasters and near-disasters 71

columns located at the midpoints rather than at the cor-

ners of the structure, and this configuration in conjunction
with the bolted connections made it susceptible to fail-
ure by toppling over in certain quartering winds. When
the building’s structural engineer, William LeMessurier
(1926–2007), discovered the problem, he took it upon him-
self 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 inci-
dent, 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 mis-
sions 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 insulat-
ing foam from the external tank during launch. Because
the relatively lightweight foam did not seem to do signifi-
cant 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 engi-
neers 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 reen-
try on February 1, hot gases infiltrated through the dam-
aged 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,
72 disasters and near-disasters

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, around-
the-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 contrac-
tors 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 mil-
lion 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 investiga-
tive 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 organi-
zational issues within BP and between BP and the compa-
nies 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 dam-
aged 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 overheat-
ing, but when the tsunami struck it destroyed power lines
bringing external electrical power to the plant. This trig-
gered emergency diesel generators to begin operating, but
their fuel supply had been damaged by the tsunami and
disasters and near-disasters 73

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 earth-
quake and tsunami, were advised to evacuate. In attempts
to keep the nuclear fuel from further overheating, seawa-
ter was used to cool it, thereby rendering nuclear plant
components virtually unrecoverable because of the corro-
sion 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 sin-
gle long rod – intended to pass through the upper walk-
way 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
74 disasters and near-disasters

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, mis-
conduct and unprofessional conduct” by an administra-
tive law judge. As a result, the engineers lost their pro-
fessional 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 Univer-
sity 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 sup-
porters had come to call it, grew to major proportions,
encompassing thousands of vertically stacked logs reach-
ing as high as 110 feet. Although the university administra-
tion attempted to limit its size to half that height, Bonfire
was largely a student-run tradition with little official over-
sight. 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 investi-
gated by a special commission, which found multiple struc-
tural 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.
disasters and near-disasters 75

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, Pennsylva-
nia, suffered a loss-of-coolant accident and a partial melt-
down 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 syn-
onymous 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 ele-
vator 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 fac-
ing 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 cut-
ting, 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 Direc-
tor of Engineering and Chief Engineer of the Port Author-
ity, 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
76 disasters and near-disasters

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 artic-
ulate spokesman for leadership in the engineering pro-
fession throughout the emergency and in the weeks and
months that followed.
Fasullo had been instrumental in forming and lead-
ing the Partnership for Rebuilding Our Infrastructure.
This network of influential engineers became active in the
early 1990s in the New York metropolitan area, where in-
frastructure 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 formul-
ate a “Vision of Leadership” for the engineering profes-
sion. 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 Reconstruc-
tion 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, suf-
fered extensive structural damage when hijacked commer-
cial 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 furnish-
ings and paper. The heat of the fires elevated the tempera-
ture 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 bear-
ing down on the weakened columns. The collapse of the
drafting tables 77

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 fail-
ures 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 Manage-
ment Agency, World Trade Center Building Performance
Study: Data Collection, Preliminary Observations, and Rec-
ommendations (Washington, D.C.: FEMA, 2002).
For more on disasters, see David R. Chiles, Inviting Dis-
aster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology (New York:
Harper, 2002); Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Liv-
ing with High-Risk Technologies, with new afterword and
postscript (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1999); Neil Schlager, ed., When Technology Fails: Signifi-
cant Technological Disasters, Accidents, and Failures of the
Twentieth Century (Detroit: Gale Research, 1994).

drafting tables. Before the days of computer worksta-

tions, 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 nor-
mal 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
78 duty of an engineer

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 draft-
ing table sitting on his stool, his eye level was not as differ-
ent 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 archi-
tects 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 construct-
ing, 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
duty of an engineer 79

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 seri-
ally 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 econo-
mics 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 some-
one who can do for one dollar what anyone can do for
two.” The definition has become so familiar that it is fre-
quently cited, in various modified forms, without associa-
tion with Wellington. Thus, Nevil Shute used it as an epi-
graph for his posthumously published novel, Trustee from
80
economics and engineering 81

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 con-
cerns. 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 origi-
nal New York City subway system,
It is not the technical excellence of an engineering design
which alone determines its merit but rather the complete-
ness 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 Univer-
sity 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 Aeronau-
tics and Space Administration launched a number of
space exploration missions designed to be “faster, better,
cheaper.” There followed a number of embarrassing fail-
ures of these missions, prompting many critics to make the
82 education of engineers

observation that engineers could satisfy any two of the cri-

teria, but not all three simultaneously.
Economics also comes into play in a big way in engi-
neering 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 commu-
nity, 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 low-
est 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 engi-
neering 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 Employ-
ments attached to that Profession as the direction of Forti-
fied Places, etc. The Qualifications required of the Candi-
dates 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 engineer-

ing 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
egg-drop competition 83

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 stu-
dents 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 Engi-
neer: An Illustrated History of Engineering Education in the
United States and Canada (New York: Wiley, 1993). For a
British perspective, see George S. Emmerson, Engineer-
ing Education: A Social History (Newton Abbot, Devon.:
David & Charles, 1973).

egg-drop competition. This classic student design con-

test requires that an uncooked egg be dropped from a
good height, such as off the roof of a three-story engi-
neering building, onto a concrete sidewalk below and land
unbroken. Students are challenged to design an egg pack-
aging system that achieves this goal. Besides a surviv-
ing whole egg, among the criteria for judging a winner
are the weight of the container or device and its aero-
dynamic 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 spon-
sored by mechanical engineering groups such as student
chapters of the American Society of Mechanical Engi-
neers. The American Concrete Institute has sponsored
a competition to design a plain or reinforced concrete
84 “electronic engineer”

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 environmen-
tal 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 beauti-
ful example of a nature-inspired design of very appropriate
technology.
Another egg-based challenge is the egg-catapult compe-
tition, 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 under-
standably 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
“Elegy to an Engineer’s Sweetheart” 85

“American” was consistent with the aspiration to become

a truly international organization. However, the abbrevia-
tion 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 engi-
neer 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 singular-
ists 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.
86 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 quanti-
ties.
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 inscri-
beth 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 pro-
cess, engineering education must likewise be integrative.
engineer 87

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, mean-
ing 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 His-
tory 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 con-
struction 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 Jan-
uary 1875 to The Engineering News, which was described
as a “Journal of Practical Science and Public Improve-
ments.” 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
88 Engineering News-Record

‘Engineering News’” by Charles Whiting Baker, Engineer-

ing News-Record, April 5, 1917, pp. 6–10. See also Eugene
S. Ferguson, “Technical Journals and the History of Tech-
nology,” in Stephen H. Cutcliffe and Robert C. Post, eds.,
In Context: History and the History of Technology (Bethle-
hem, 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 Engi-
neer. 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 Engineer-
ing 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 Publish-
ing Company in 1902. See “Development of ‘Engineer-
ing 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 Whit-
ing Baker. He was succeeded as editor by E. J. Mehren in
1918. Engineering News-Record continued to be an excel-
lent 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 rele-
gated 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
Engineering News-Record 89

cover. According to the editors writing at the time: “This is

not an engineering magazine; it is the construction indus-
try’s weekly news magazine. It is a mix of business and
technical news and features, many of them exclusive fea-
tures such as our widely used cost indexes and rankings of
contractors or design firms.” The words Engineering News-
Record 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 win-
ner’s portrait appears on the cover of the magazine, which
also carries an extensive feature article on the individ-
ual. 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 per-
son 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 con-
sidered 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 pro-
vides 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
90 engineering science

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 à 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 Commu-
nities of Science and Technology in 19th-Century Amer-
ica,” 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: Aerody-
namic Calculation ‘Breaks the Sound Barrier’,” Technol-
ogy 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 solu-
tions to difficult problems, often in the face of alternative
choices and a need for approximation.”
In essence, design concerns itself with synthesis, where-
as science concerns itself with analysis. A distinction bet-
ween engineering design and engineering science has been
made much more strongly in engineering education, under
the watchful eye of the profession’s accreditation author-
ity, 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
“Engineer’s Creed” 91

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 bene-
fits 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 non-
professionals describing themselves as “engineers,” and
Engineering News-Record began to note the “titles of var-
ious aspiring individuals who, possessing none of the edu-
cational 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 pub-
lished 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 over-
sees 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 engi-
neers. There is concern that such practices do not encour-
age 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 cen-

tury, many older engineers who were educated around
mid-century recalled seeing hung prominently in engi-
neers’ offices, usually along with their framed certificate
92 “Engineer’s Creed”

of professional registration, a copy of the “Engineer’s

Creed.” In 1968, when I and other new engineering fac-
ulty 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 knowl-

edge 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 medi-
cal doctors’ Hippocratic Oath, that could be used in cer-
emonies or for recognizing individuals.” The NSPE repro-
duced 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 offi-
cers were installed. It was also recited at the NSPE Annual
Convention in conjunction with the installation of national
“Engineer’s Creed” 93

officers. As late as 2010, the creed was recited by incom-

ing 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 engi-
neers 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 pro-
moting more respect for engineers and, not incidentally,
higher fees. Even should such changes be made, older ver-
sions 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.
94 Engineers Week

I am an Engineer.
I serve Mankind
By Making Dreams come True.

Engineers Week. Although regularly scheduled celebra-

tions of engineering lasting from a day to a week date
back to the early twentieth century on some college cam-
puses, 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 profes-
sion were scheduled for the third full week in February,
which contains February 22, the birthday of George Wash-
ington, whose work as a surveyor at a critical time in the
development of the new nation qualifies him to be con-
sidered 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 enthu-
siastically 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.
Erector set 95

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 spon-
sored 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 magi-
cian and Olympic pole vaulter who earned an M.D. degree
from Yale University but never practiced medicine. Upon
graduation, he expanded the Mysto Manufacturing Com-
pany, 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 engi-
neers have lamented the fact that computer-based games
have deprived younger engineers of the opportunity to
96 Erector set

develop a sense of the real as opposed to the virtual artifact

and how it works. See “Work and Play,” American Scien-
tist, May–June 1999, pp. 208–212.
As many an older American engineer remembers play-
ing with Erector sets as a child, so many a British engi-
neer recalls the same of Meccano. This British construction
toy was invented around 1900 by Frank Hornby, an ama-
teur 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 Esperanto-
like 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), pub-
lished by the company, provided a continuous flow of new
model-building ideas. Older British engineers often rem-
inisce about playing with Meccano sets as children, and
many of them attribute the toy to providing an early attrac-
tion to engineering. See Bert Love and Jim Gamble, The
Meccano System, 1901–1979: And the Special Purpose Mec-
cano Sets (London: New Cavendish Books, 1985).
See also The Man Who Lives in Paradise: The Autobiog-
raphy 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. Heim-
burger, ed. (River Forest, Ill.: Heimburger House, 1983);
“Beyond Tin Cans: Construction Toys and Engineers,” in
the exhibition catalog Toying with Architecture: The Build-
ing 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 Amer-
ica,” American Heritage of Invention & Technology, Spring
1998, pp. 40–45.
Erie Canal 97

Lego sets are worthy successors to Meccano and Erec-

tor. 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 busi-
ness 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 suf-
ficient number of fasteners to complete an ambitious build-
ing 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 sur-
veyors 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 expe-
rienced 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.”

98 expert witness

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 per-
formed to determine the cause. Failures and the result-
ing failure analyses are often the subject of litigation and
court proceedings, which frequently involve forensic engi-
neers. According to the founding president of the National
Academy of Forensic Engineers, “forensic engineering is
the art and science of professional practice of those qual-
ified 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 pro-
fession of civil engineering. John Smeaton, the eighteenth-
century British engineer who designed bridges, canals, and
harbors, and was responsible for the famed Eddystone
Lighthouse, was often called upon to provide expert testi-
mony in court. Smeaton insisted on calling himself a “civil
engineer” to distinguish his work from that of the mili-
tary engineers who, prior to Smeaton’s times, were respon-
sible 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 pro-
fessional 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 – fre-
quently served as an expert witness. Once, while working
on a case involving a flood alleged to be caused by the pres-
ence of railroad tracks, he was asked during cross exam-
ination if another engineer of equal ability would come
expert witness 99

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 con-
nection 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 land-
mark court case involving the responsibility of the man-
ufacturer 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 admissi-
bility of such testimony. The U.S. Supreme Court finally
100 expert witness

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 (Washing-
ton, D.C.: Federal Judicial Center, 1994). A second edition
of the Reference Manual, including material on engineer-
ing, 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 pro-
vides assurance against such uncertainties as the design
load being exceeded in service, the statistical variation in
the strength of materials, and the occurrence of detrimen-
tal 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 tol-
erated, 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 cen-
tury railroad bridges. By extension to non-structural appli-
cations, employing a factor of safety implies being conser-
vative 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 impli-
cations of the term factor of safety.
Factors of safety in living organisms have been dis-
cussed in an article by the physiologist and biogeogra-
pher Jared Diamond. He considered the strength of bones,
101
102 factor of safety

lungs, kidneys, and other body parts and tabulated their

biological factors of safety alongside those of some con-
ventional 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 Factor of Safety

Cable of fast passenger elevator 11.9
Human pancreas 10
Cable of elevator in shallow mine 8
Cable of slow passenger elevator 7.6
Jawbone of biting monkey 7
Cat intestine absorbing arginine 7
Cable of slow freight elevator 6.7
Cable of crane 6
Wooden building 6
Wing bones of flying goose 6
Leg bones of running turkey 6
Cable of elevator in deep mine 5
Cable of powered dumbwaiter 4.8
Leg bones of galloping horse 4.8
Leg bones of running elephant 2.5–4
Leg bones of hopping kangaroo 3
Leg bones of running ostrich 2.5
Leg bones of jumping dog 2–3
Human kidney 2–3
Steel building or bridge 2
Human small intestine 2
Lungs of lazy big cow 2
Dragline of spider 1.5
Backbones of human lifting weights 1.0–1.7
Shell of squid 1.3–1.4
Lungs of fast small dog 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, how-
ever, where just the opposite meaning might be intended.
failure 103

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 explo-
sive structural failure shortly after taking off from Sin-
gapore 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 inci-
dent. The report, designated Aviation Occurrence Inves-
tigation 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 avoid-
ance 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 virtu-
ally 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 elec-
tronic 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
104 failure

to loads can be compared, or they can be qualitative state-

ments of how effectively a design fulfills a function. In the
latter category might fall the expectation that an instru-
ment 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 col-
lapse 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 suc-
cessful designs. Prolonged periods of success with one type
of design, however, often can lead to a sense of overcon-
fidence or complacency, which in turn can lead to a fail-
ure. This is the “paradox of design” named in the subti-
tle 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
failure 105

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 unprece-
dented 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 Fail-
ure (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 Techno-
logical Disasters, Accidents, and Failures of the Twenti-
eth Century (Detroit: Gale Research, 1994). An abridged
paperback edition was published under the title, Break-
down: 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 Success-
ful 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
106 “Faith of the Engineer”

(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 Uni-
versity Press, forthcoming).

“Faith of the Engineer.” This 1943 statement, pre-

pared by the Ethics Committee of the Engineers’ Coun-
cil for Professional Development – founded in 1932 by
seven prominent engineering societies that evolved into
the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technol-
ogy – 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 hon-
est 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 con-
ditioned 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 vital-
ized and turned to practical account the principles of sci-
ence and the revelations of technology. Except for this
heritage of accumulated experience, my efforts would be
famous engineers 107

feeble. I dedicate myself to the dissemination of engineer-

ing 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 com-
plete 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 recog-
nized, best remembered, and most highly revered engi-
neers in Britain, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859)
was responsible for such major projects as the Great West-
ern 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 Lon-
don 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 West-
ern, as an extension of the GWR. The ship could carry
enough fuel to run its steam engines continuously in sail-
ing across the Atlantic Ocean to America. Brunel’s Great
108 famous engineers

Eastern was a vessel large enough to carry a sufficient sup-

ply 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 tumul-
tuous relationship over credit for its design and finan-
cial arrangements. The vessel, measuring 692 feet long
and displacing 32,000 tons, was built to be launched side-
ways, 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 transat-
lantic 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 repro-
duced 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,” Amer-
ican Scientist, January–February 1992, pp. 15–19. For a
full biography of the engineer, see L. T. C. Rolt, Isam-
bard 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,” Technol-
ogy and Culture, October 1980, pp. 553–569; the review
famous engineers 109

Robert Howlett’s 1857 photograph of I. K. Brunel

by R. A. Buchanan of Emmerson’s “John Scott Rus-

sell: A Great Victorian Engineer and Naval Architect,”
ibid., October 1978, pp. 767–769; and the communication
by Buchanan, “The Great Eastern Controversy: A Com-
ment,” 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, Van-
nevar Bush (1890–1974) was an innovative American elec-
trical engineer who, after advancing to become dean of
engineering at MIT, went to Washington to administer
110 famous engineers

research funding, first as president of the Carnegie Insti-

tution, 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 Sci-
entific 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 foun-
dation, had an enormous influence on the debate relat-
ing 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
famous engineers 111

through its use became

very familiar with condi-
tions 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 Tehuan-
tepec, 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.
Theodore von Kármán. The aeronautical engineer
Theodore von Kármán (1881–1963) was born in Budapest,
Hungary. In 1930 he moved to the United States, where he
joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technol-
ogy 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
112 famous engineers

and space research that would grow out of GALCIT. The

institution’s wind tunnel played a significant role in air-
craft development during the 1930s and 1940s. Among von
Kármán’s 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
a fluid stream, which is now known as a Kármán vortex
street. It was this kind of experience that got von Kármán
appointed to the committee of engineers charged with
looking into the causes of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge
collapse.
Theodore von Kármán, who while often honored as a
scientist referred to himself as an engineer, is credited with
articulating the distinction between scientists and engi-
neers by characterizing scientists as studying what is and
engineers creating what never was. The engineer’s autobi-
ography, 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. Ketter-
ing was one of the founders of Dayton Engineering Lab-
oratories 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 auto-
mobiles. 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
famous engineers 113

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 con-
structed harbors, canals, bridges, and lighthouses, among
other things. He is perhaps best remembered for his Eddy-
stone Lighthouse, located in the English Channel fourteen
miles southeast of Plymouth. Because of his many engi-
neering 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 engi-
neer, and was instrumental in establishing the civil engi-
neering profession. A plaque commemorating Smeaton
was unveiled in the north aisle of London’s Westminster
Abbey in 1994. See Samuel Smiles, Lives of the Engi-
neers: Harbours – Lighthouses – Bridges. Smeaton and
Rennie, new and revised edition (London: John Murray,
1874).
The Smeatonians, more formally known as the Smeato-
nian 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 con-
versation 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, hydrauli-
cally, mathematically, philosophically, mechanically, natu-
rally 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.
114 famous engineers

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 profes-
sional 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 mono-
graphs on bridge building, Steinman wrote The Builders
famous engineers 115

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 engi-
neering at Cleveland State University, Bridges and Their
Builders (New York: G. P. Putman’s Sons, 1941), a popu-
lar 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 Rati-
gan (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 unconven-
tional person, famously refusing to comply with the pol-
icy 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 twen-
tieth 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,
116 famous engineers

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 lat-
ter decades of the twentieth century, this altered photo
could still be found reproduced and presented as authen-
tic.) 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 syn-
onymous 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 acquain-
tances. See “Images of an Engineer,” American Scientist,
July–August 1991, pp. 300–303 and also pp. 3-11 of Remak-
ing 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.: Dou-
bleday, Doran, 1930), John W. Hammond, Charles Proteus
famous engineers 117

Steinmetz (New York: Century, 1935), and, more recently,

Ronald R. Kline, Steinmetz: Engineer and Socialist (Balti-
more: 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 nine-
teenth century that he was asked to serve as the first pres-
ident 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 con-
stitutes Volume II of Samuel Smiles’s Lives of the Engi-
neers (London: John Murray, 1862), and the biography
Thomas Telford, by L. T. C. Rolt (London: Longmans,
Green, 1958).
Stephen P. Timoshenko. Stephen Prokofievitch Timo-
shenko (1878–1972) was born in Ukraine and studied rail-
way 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 aca-
demic position in 1922 to come to the United States to
accept an engineering job at the small Philadelphia Vibra-
tion Specialty Company, where one of his former students
worked. The position was not very challenging, however,
and Timoshenko soon moved to the Westinghouse Elec-
tric 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.
118 famous engineers

Having found American engineering textbooks to be

unsatisfactory, Timoshenko wrote numerous ones himself,
on subjects such as strength of materials, vibrations, elas-
ticity, 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 syn-
onymous 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 Tim-
oshenko Medal was established in 1957 by the Applied
Mechanics Division of the American Society of Mechan-
ical 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 enor-
mous 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 Auto-
biography 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
father-and-son engineers 119

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 build-
ing that occurred during
World War I. The treatise
became a necessary addi-
tion to the library shelves
in bridge engineering off-
ices 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 driv-
ing 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 Print-
ing Co., 1928).

father-and-son engineers. Among notable father-and-

son 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 for-
mer a French-born engineer who practiced in America
before settling in England and the latter considered by
120 father-and-son engineers

some to be among the most heroic of the Victorian engi-

neers; John Augustus Roebling (1806–1869) and Washing-
ton 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 aeronauti-
cal achievements included an automatic aircraft stabilizer.
Samuel Smiles wrote a joint biography of the Stephen-
sons, there are separate biographies of Marc Brunel and
Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and the bridge engineer David
B. Steinman wrote a biography of the Roeblings. Stein-
man’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, McCul-
lough 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, con-
structed 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 Newcastle-
upon-Tyne and who were instrumental in establishing the
railroad in Britain. For a history of the Stevenson family,
fight songs for engineers 121

see Bella Barhurst, The Lighthouse Stevensons: The Ex-

traordinary Story of the Building of the Scottish Light-
houses 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 twen-

tieth 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 for-
mats, including for baritone and piano with an optional
kazoo chorus.
Today, of course, “Rambling Wreck” is considered sex-
ist. 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
122 fight songs for engineers

alike. Some fight songs of other schools may be consid-

ered 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 insti-
tute – and the engineering profession – was predomi-
nantly 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.
financial engineering 123

financial engineering. This term first came to the atten-

tion of many members of the public during the world finan-
cial crisis that surfaced in 2008. Financial engineering is
responsible for the design of creative and exotic finan-
cial 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, pres-
ident 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 cre-
ative activities that FIRST sponsors are robotics com-
petitions for students from kindergarten through col-
lege. 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 com-
petitions. During the 2010/11 season of contests, partici-
pants numbered about 250,000 students, more than 65,000
adult mentors and supporters, and more than 33,000 vol-
unteers. 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).
124 founder societies

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
beginnings? Seal of the United
Engineering Foundation
The same question might be
asked of the Institute of Electri-
cal 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 Engi-
neering 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 Engineer-
ing 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
founder societies 125

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 22-
story 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 phys-
ical 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 sin-
gle voice to the engineering profession. Some observers
believe this has hindered engineers from achieving the sta-
tus of medical doctors and lawyers, each of which group
has its own unifying American professional association.
The seal of the United Engineering Foundation may con-
tinue to present the image of unity among the founder soci-
eties, 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
126 French tradition in engineering

which mining, mechanical, and electrical engineers could

comfortably gather. Thus, they formed societies of their
own.
With the continued proliferation of specialized engi-
neering societies taking place well into the twentieth cen-
tury, 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 Founda-
tion 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 Forti-

fications is an elite French engineering corps, also known
as the Corps du Génie, 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 Chaussées, a distin-
guished 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 École Polytechnique. The fore-
runner of this school, the École des Travaux Public, was
created by Napoleon in 1794 to prepare engineers to
go into public and private service. The École Polytech-
nique provided the engineers who served in the various
corps. In the nineteenth century, these engineers con-
trolled and regulated all the country’s technologies, rang-
ing from roads and bridges to mines, because graduates
of the École Polytechnique went on to attend the vari-
ous écoles d’application, such as the École des Ponts et
Chaussées and the École des Mines. The École Nationale
des Ponts et Chaussées, founded in 1747, is generally
French tradition in engineering 127

considered to be the first school of civil – as opposed to

military – engineering. Its founder, Jean-Rodolphe Per-
ronet (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
écoles d’arts et métiers are institutions of higher education
that emphasized the manual practice of different mechani-
cal arts. Traditionally, engineers who graduated from these
écoles worked not for the elite state corps but for private
industry.
The École Polytechnique served as a model for West
Point and other early engineering schools in America.
A brief historical introduction to the system of écoles
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. Par-
sons, 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 devel-
opment 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
G. I. Bill 129

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 estab-
lished 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 Renais-
sance Man of Old New York (New York: Parsons Brinker-
hoff, 2010), p. 70.
Indeed, both Parsons and Hoover were outstanding rep-
resentatives 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 Engi-
neering in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins,
1939). This work of history was published posthumously.

G.I. Bill. The Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944, fa-

miliarly known as the G.I. Bill of Rights, committed the
U.S. government to pay for the college or vocational edu-
cation 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 fol-
lowed 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 Ameri-
can 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
130 glass half full

result of such rapid growth, temporary classrooms and liv-

ing quarters were erected on open spaces at many cam-
puses. 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 bene-
fits of the G.I. Bill had ceased, and many an engineer-
ing student from those years recalls taking classes in dis-
tinctly 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. Some-
one 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 iden-
tified fourteen Grand Challenges for Engineering in four
broad areas – sustainability, health, vulnerability, and joy
of living. The challenges were to:
r Make solar energy economical
r Provide energy from nuclear fusion
r Develop carbon sequestration methods
r Manage the nitrogen cycle
r Provide access to clean water
r Restore and improve urban infrastructure
r Advance health informatics
r Engineer better medicines
r Reverse-engineer the brain
r Prevent nuclear terror
r Secure cyberspace
r Enhance virtual reality
Greatest Britons 131
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. Winston Churchill
2. Isambard Kingdom Brunel
3. Diana Spencer
4. Charles Darwin
5. William Shakespeare
6. Isaac Newton
7. Queen Elizabeth I
8. John Lennon
9. Horatio Nelson
10. Oliver Cromwell
The placement of the heroic Victorian engineer Isambard
Kingdom Brunel just behind wartime prime minister Win-
ston Churchill and before British royalty demonstrates
how appreciative of its engineers a nation can be.
Greatest Engineering Achievements of the 20th Cen-
tury. The occasion of the approach of the calendar year
2000, with its odometer-like popular appeal, led a num-
ber of engineering societies to develop lists of the great-
est achievements in their respective fields. The National
Academy of Engineering, in its desire to convey the impor-
tance 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 engineer-
ing achievements of the previous one hundred years. In all,
132 Greatest Engineering Achievements

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 lob-
bied 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 Washing-
ton’s Birthday.) The list, which was integrated into Arm-
strong’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” 133

15. Household Appliances

16. Health Technologies
17. Petroleum and Petrochemical Technologies
18. Laser and Fiber Optics
19. Nuclear Technologies
20. 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 watch-

ing 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 politi-
cians, 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 consumma-
tion.
134 “a great profession”

Hoover has also been quoted as saying that “it is the pur-
pose of engineering to increase the standards of life and liv-
ing for all people.” See J. K. Finch, “The Engineering Pro-
fession in Evolution,” Transactions of the American Soci-
ety 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 app-
lied to engineers who are advanced enough in age to have
hirsute ears. More importantly, but no less jocularly, hairy-
eared 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 invalu-
able 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 expe-
rienced 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 pre-
cedes 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
136 hard hat

were estimated to have half-lives of 5 years, and mechan-

ical engineers 7.5 years. Such short half-lives have pro-
vided 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 Cen-
tury (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 dou-
bling 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 work-
men. Hard hats are said to have originated during the con-
struction 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
hard hat 137

hardened provided a makeshift protective helmet. Hel-

mets of other kinds were also adapted to hard-hat use.
The first hard hats required on a major bridge con-
struction 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 con-
trast 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 wear-
ing 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 fre-
quent 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 hierar-
chy of people on a construction site, with engineers’ hats
being white and different types of workers wearing differ-
ent color hats. This practice is followed in many organiza-
tions, 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.
138 heroic engineers

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 exam-
ple, R. Angus Buchanan, Brunel: The Life and Times of
Isambard Kingdom Brunel (London: Hambledon Contin-
uum, 2001), especially Chapter 13. Elsewhere also, “there
were engineering heroes once upon a time, like Ketter-
ing, 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 some-
thing 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 col-
lected anything toward his proposed program; however,
calls for greater recognition of engineer heroes continue
to be heard.

highway numbering system. The American Associa-

tion 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, stan-
dardizing 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
historic engineering landmarks 139

diverse regions of the country stitched together by pri-

vately planned highways. In addition to the transcontinen-
tals, 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 offi-
cials 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 fur-
ther 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 north-
south routes (with numbers ending in 1 or 5 designating
principal routes).
Much later, with the passage of the Federal-Aid High-
way Act of 1956, it became necessary to establish a num-
bering plan and distinctive signage for the projected inter-
state 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 num-
bers to north-south routes, for interstate highways the low-
est even numbers are in the south and the lowest odd num-
bers 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 care-
ful choices of numbering. See “From Names to Num-
bers: The Origins of the U.S. Numbered Highway System,”
AASHTO Quarterly, Spring 1997, pp. 6–15.

historic engineering landmarks. Many engineering soci-

eties have active historic engineering landmark programs,
whereby unique and important structures, machines, sys-
tems, and events are documented and recognized for
140 historic engineering landmarks

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 usu-
ally marked with a plaque and may be, but are not neces-
sarily, given special consideration with regard to preserva-
tion 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 con-
tributed to the development of the profession and that of
at least a large region of the country. In 1966, the Boll-
man 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 num-
ber 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 Engi-
neers 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 note-
worthy mechanical engineers who were associated with the
invention, development, or production of these singular
technological achievements.”
history and engineering 141

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 His-
tory 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 “rec-
ognizes the profession’s scientific and technical heritage
and encourages the preservation of important achieve-
ments and artifacts by honoring the location of a develop-
ment of historical importance to chemistry, chemical engi-
neering, and the chemical process industries.”

history and engineering. It appears to be a common mis-

conception 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 engi-
neers 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 millen-
nia 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 there-
fore 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
142 history and engineering

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 fail-
ures of such bridges in the early nineteenth century. Roe-
bling 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 success-
ful 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 pro-
cess culminated in 1940 with the construction in Washing-
ton 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 stea-
dy, earning it the nickname Galloping Gertie. The bridge
history of technology 143

failed famously in November 1940 while being filmed in

a 42-mile-per-hour wind. The conclusion of the commit-
tee 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 ref-
erences, 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 practition-
ers, such as the prominent bridge engineer J. A. L. Wad-
dell (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 his-
tory 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 Engi-
neering Education – as the American Society for Engineer-
ing 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 fac-
ulty 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
144 history of technology

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 bene-
ficial programs.
It made sense to Kranzberg and a small band of histo-
rians teaching engineers that they should concentrate on
technology rather than science in their courses. Unfortu-
nately, 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 rep-
resentatives 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 sci-
ence.” (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 possi-
bilities such as Vulcan, Technics, and the pedestrian Jour-
nal 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
honor societies 145

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 1979 Louisiana Tech biomedical

Beta engineering
Alpha Nu 1979 American nuclear
Sigma Nuclear engineering
Society
Alpha Pi Mu 1959 Georgia Tech industrial
engineering
Chi Epsilon 1922 University of civil engineering
Illinois
Eta Kappa Nu 1904 University of electrical
Illinois engineering
Omega Chi 1931 University of chemical
Epsilon Illinois engineering
Pi Alpha 1980s Kansas State architectural
Epsilon University engineering
Pi Epsilon Tau 1947 University of petroleum
Oklahoma engineering
Pi Tau Sigma 1915 University of mechanical
Illinois/ engineering
University of
Wisconsin
146 hubris in engineering

Sigma Gamma 1953 Purdue aerospace

Tau University engineering
Tau Alpha Pi 1953 Southern engineering
Technical technologies
Institute

Typical qualifications for induction into an engineer-

ing 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 found-
ing 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 alpha-
bet, we know that Manhattan’s chapter was the fourteenth
established in that state. See, for example, “Technol-
ogy 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 suit-
able 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 real-
ize them. Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the heroic Victorian
hubris in engineering 147

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 Con-
corde airliner repeated a similar pattern, with the techno-
logically sweet aircraft seeing limited service because its
sonic boom made it unwelcome over the populous envi-
rons 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 grand-
est schemes ever imagined by engineers: damming the
Congo River to create the largest lake in Africa; drain-
ing 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 Tun-
nel opened in 1994, two centuries after the idea was first
148 hubris in engineering

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 peo-
ple, does now back up water on the Yangtze River for
almost 400 miles, making Chongqing accessible to ocean-
going 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 nontechni-
cal – 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 vul-
nerability 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 pro-
gram. 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 nat-
urally cause setbacks although usually not the abandon-
ment 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
hubris in engineering 149

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 fur-
ther into the universe than our predecessors. Just as sci-
entists advance their knowledge by standing on the shoul-
ders 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 Engineer-
ing,” 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 usu-
ally 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 pub-
lic the excitement that could be found in the legal pro-
fession. This kind of image-making prompted some engi-
neers 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 artic-
ulate advocates of the idea was Norman Augustine (born
in 1935), former chairman of the Martin-Marietta Corpo-
ration 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 televi-
sion industry or from professional underwriting or poten-
tial commercial sponsors.

150
imagineering 151

A successful television series based on engineers in dra-

matic engineering situations was produced in South Africa
in the mid-1990s and was made possible through the sup-
port 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 con-
struct, say, a mine shaft, tunnel, or well. On the appropri-
ate 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 estab-
lished 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 envi-
ronments people enjoy at places such as Disneyland and
Disney World.
industrial design. This field of endeavor came into exis-
tence formally in America in the late 1920s, when self-
confident 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
152 industry

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 activ-
ity tends now to be more closely associated with human
factors engineers. According to Machine Design (Novem-
ber 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 con-
ducted outside the campus environment as taking place
“out in industry.” The term “industry,” for academic engi-
neers 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 previ-
ously 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 Associa-
tion, 1973).
As part of its 1988 report on a three-year study of the
condition of America’s infrastructure, the National Coun-
cil on Public Works Improvement included a report card
on which such categories as aviation, highways, mass tran-
sit, and water resources were graded. At the time, the aver-
age 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).
insight in engineering 153

In the late 1990s, the American Society of Civil Engi-

neers 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 gov-
ernment passing stimulus legislation; however, in spite of
infrastructure improvement being stated as a motivating
factor, a relatively small portion of stimulus funds actu-
ally were used for that purpose. See American Society
of Civil Engineers, Report Card for America’s Infrastruc-
ture (Reston, Va.: ASCE, 2009). See also “Infrastructure,”
American Scientist, September–October 2009, pp. 370–374.
The infrastructure, with the term increasingly encom-
passing 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 avail-
able 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 judg-
ment. M. J. French devotes a whole chapter to the con-
cept 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 sin-
gle 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 labori-
ous stretches of mental spadework.”
The nature of insight has seldom, if ever, been more elo-
quently described than it was by the Victorian engineer
154 insight in engineering

and naval architect John Scott Russell (1808–1882), who,

in speaking to young students in the preface to his master-
ful 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 responsi-
bility, 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 before-
hand, 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 judg-

ment. The element of considered judgment, based on
precedent and past experience, is what distinguishes the
professional engineer from the technologist. See, for exam-
ple, John Donnicliff and Don U. Deere, eds., Judgment
intuition in engineering 155

in Geotechnical Engineering: The Professional Legacy

of Ralph B. Peck (Vancouver, B.C.: BiTech Publishers,
1991).
intuition in engineering. Closely related to insight is in-
tuition. 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 over-
whelmed by abstract and impersonal mathematical for-
mulas. 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 eval-
uating intuitively any dangerous thermal conditions and
support settlements, in choosing materials and construc-
tion 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 mathemati-
cal 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, intu-
itive, 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. . . .
156 inventions without necessity

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 in-
clude “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 con-
sumer 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 com-
petition 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. Whip-
ping 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 anx-
iety there is to have a can of Reddi-wip in the refrigerator;
however, that still does not make it a necessity.
inventions without necessity 157

Contrary to conventional wisdom, necessity is not the

mother of invention. Successful inventors do not necessar-
ily 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 frustra-
tion, 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 pop-
ular 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 dur-
ing his visits home. I even recall having had haircuts fin-
ished 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
158 inventions without necessity

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 sweep-
ing one. Everybody knew that these wipers were annoy-
ing 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 man-
ually. Robert Kearns (1927–2005) was an inventor who fig-
ured out a more convenient way to deal with the problem,
however, and he came up with the idea of the intermit-
tent 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 incor-
porated into new-model cars. He sued, and his first set-
tlement, 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 auto-
mobile 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
inventions without necessity 159

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 institu-
tion any patents that arise out of the inventing the engi-
neers are paid to do as part of their day-to-day job. Engi-
neering 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 Insti-
tute (now SRI International) working on augmenting
human intellect through computers. In 1963, he proposed a
“writing machine,” which we now recognize as a word pro-
cessor, and invented the computer mouse. He also devel-
oped 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 tech-
nological invention and innovation,” carries a stipend of
$500,000, which amounts to perhaps a fraction of a frac-
tion 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 eas-
ily be removed. He found little enthusiasm within 3M for
160 inventions without necessity

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 inven-
tion 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 mar-
keted 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 inven-
tors. 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 vari-
ations 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 inventor-
entrepreneur 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 manufactur-
ing partner who wants to exercise the right to license the
invention. The tens of thousands of dollars hopeful inven-
tors 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 invent-
ing, 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
invention vs. innovation 161

“bought Cadillacs two at a time and lived in Gloria Swan-

son’s furnished mansion in Hollywood,” but the free-enter-
prise 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 inven-
tor’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 consid-

ered 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 market-
place that alters the way people think about and use tech-
nology. 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 some-
thing 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 for-
mula 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.
162 inventors

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 im-
provement 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 sci-
entific research and others claiming it was engineering and
not science that provided a more direct route to innova-
tion.

inventors. In contrast to the popular view of the inventor

as an eccentric individualist who often works alone, engi-
neers tend to be viewed as conservative conformists who
work in groups. Both stereotypic views are gross general-
izations, of course, and the distinction between inventors
and engineers can often be difficult to discern.
Trained as an engineer, the inventor Jerome Lemel-
son (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 market-
ing. Rather, he aggressively sued manufacturers whom he
inventors 163

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 delib-
erately 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 Inde-
pendent 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 asso-
ciated with the National Council of Patent Law Associ-
ations and representatives of the U.S. Patent and Trade-
mark 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 Inven-
ture 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:
164 Iron Bridge

Interviews with 16 Notable American Inventors (Redmond,

Wash.: Microsoft Press, 1988). See also Jacob Rabinow,
Inventing for Fun and Profit (San Francisco: San Fran-
cisco Press, 1990), and “From Connections to Collections,”
American Scientist, September–October 1998, pp. 416–420.

Iron Bridge. Generally considered the world’s first sig-

nificant bridge to be made entirely of metal, this cast-
iron structure was erected in 1779 over the upper Sev-
ern 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 car-
ried 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

iron ring 165

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 mak-
ing 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 Indus-
trial 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 engi-
neer who was educated in Canada. Although the tradi-
tion of wearing an iron ring is still most often associated
with Canadian engineers, Scandinavian and other Euro-
pean engineers have had similar traditions, and stainless-
steel 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 rela-
tives of the recipient may be able to attend. The long-
secret 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 belong-
ing to the engineering profession. The following text
166 iron ring

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 con-
cerns my works before men as an Engineer, or in my deal-
ings 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 grati-
fication from any one with whom I may deal. And further,
I will early and warily strive my uttermost against profes-
sional 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 Fail-
ure (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, forth-
coming), 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 injun-
ear, 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 self-
characterizations of the engineer, which takes the form of a
question-answer interchange: “How can you tell an intro-
verted engineer? He looks at his shoes when he is talk-
ing 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 exe-
cutioner 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
168 jokes about engineers

Still another engineer joke follows the familiar formula

of contrasting approaches to solving a problem: A math-
ematician, a physicist, and an engineer were asked how
to put out a fire. The mathematician considered the situ-
ation and established that a minimum number of buckets-
ful of water were sufficient to put out the blaze. That a
solution existed satisfied him and he left assuming some-
one else would find the water. The physicist took numer-
ous 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 buck-
etsful 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 calcula-
tion, which was to include multiplying the resulting num-
ber 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 engi-
neer, 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 profes-
sion, so it should come as no surprise that engineering is
no exception, even if the joke characterizes the engineer
jokes about engineers 169

in a way opposite to the fire joke above: How many engi-

neers 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 replace-
ment. 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 engi-
neer, 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 pro-
fessor 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 profes-
sor 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 qual-
ity 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
170 joylessness of engineering

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 con-
trast 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 Our-
selves,” ASEE Prism, November 2000, p. 19.)
In the mid-1990s, Engineering Times began to pub-
lish jokes and humor relating to engineers and engineer-
ing 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
joylessness of engineering 171

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 profes-
sion:
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 mat-
ter; 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 oth-
ers 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 mem-
bership. (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 com-
mon 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 nine-
teenth 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
keys of honor societies 173

Keys and badges on a chain

who as president of Phi Beta Kappa communicated greet-

ings to the scientific research society Sigma Xi on the occa-
sion 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 bot-
tom 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 soci-
ety 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
174 keys of honor societies

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 mim-
icked 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 mean-
time, 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 correc-
tion 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 soci-
ety, is known as the transit, for originally its general out-
line 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
keys of honor societies 175

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 indi-
vidual 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 Scien-
tist, March–April, 1998, pp. 113–117.
 L
land-grant institutions. Many state colleges and univer-
sities, especially those agricultural and mechanical institu-
tions of earlier times (the A&Ms of today), were founded
and expanded with the support of the federal govern-
ment following the enactment of the Morrill Land Grant
Act. This legislation, introduced by Vermont Represen-
tative 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 del-
egation 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 pro-
mote “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 teach-
ing 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 cam-
pus remains centered around an enormous parade field.

176
land surveying 177

A second Morrill Act was passed in 1890, this one

requiring states to demonstrate that admission to a land-
grant college or university was not dependent on race.
Where a state could not show this to be the case, a sep-
arate school had to be established. This legislation led to
the founding of North Carolina Agricultural and Techni-
cal 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 insti-
tutions of higher learning is open to all, many of the stu-
dents 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 com-
monly thought of as an anti-technologist, not only prac-
ticed 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 nec-
essary 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
178 letters after an engineer’s name

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 pro-
fessional registration laws, land surveyors and engineers
came often to be licensed by the same state boards of reg-
istration, 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 engi-
neers did not necessarily practice without rigor or atten-
tion to detail. In Walden, Thoreau even specified the accu-
racy 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 mechan-
ical engineer, the younger Thoreau developed a hand-
operated mill that produced some of the purest refined
graphite available anywhere in the world at the time. Con-
sequently, 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), chap-
ter 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 notori-
ous for appending a string of letters to their names, and
letters after an engineer’s name 179

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 engi-
neers 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 mid-
nineteenth to the early-twentieth century.
C.Eng. This British abbreviation, which stands for Char-
tered Engineer, is analogous to the American P.E. To
obtain the C.Eng. designation, an individual must grad-
uate 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 Engineer-
ing Institutions. C.Eng. is the highest designation awarded
by the Engineering Council, which also oversees the lower
level qualifications of Incorporated Engineer and Techni-
cian, and serves as license to practice in the United King-
dom 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 orig-
inally differed from the Ph.D. in not requiring proficiency
in foreign languages; however, that distinction has all but
180 letters after an engineer’s name

disappeared with the relaxation of foreign language

requirements in American doctoral programs generally.
E.I.T. These letters have stood for Engineer-in-
Training, indicating that an individual has passed the Fun-
damentals of Engineering examination and will thus, after
a suitable period of experience in a responsible engineer-
ing position, be qualified to take the Principles and Prac-
tices 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
on résumés of young engineers seeking their first or second
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 Fel-
lowship 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 num-
ber 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
letters after an engineer’s name 181

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 earn-
ing the title Engineer-in-Training or Engineer Intern), to
acquire four years of engineering experience in progres-
sively 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 cen-
tury. The ban had its roots in the nineteenth-century ori-
gins 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 engineer-
ing 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 engi-
neer may use the P.Eng. designation after his or her name
upon being admitted to membership in one of the provin-
cial or territorial professional engineering organizations.
The equivalent designation in French-speaking Quebec is
182 letters and numerals

“ing.” (Ing. before a name is commonly used in Euro-

pean 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 effec-
tively barred any engineer from practicing as a prime pro-
fessional. In 1915, the Illinois Legislature passed a bill
establishing provisions for the licensing of structural engi-
neers, 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 regu-
lated 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 engi-
neers exam, and so Californians who call themselves Struc-
tural Engineers must thus also be registered as Profes-
sional 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 prob-
lems that had been plaguing Structural Engineers in Illi-
nois 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
letters and numerals 183

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 toler-
ated and the lower case letter l and the numeral 1 could no
longer be used interchangeably. However, many an engi-
neer, and others, who had learned typing before program-
ming, had long ago developed the bad habit of using the
letter for the numeral on their typewriters and so contin-
ued 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 lmn1@somecompany.com.
In their written work, many an older engineer devel-
oped 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 sym-
bols interchangeably in typewritten work, did not always
remember to do so in computer work. To reduce the intro-
duction 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 situ-
ation can lead to some confusion, for engineers commonly
mix numbers and Latin and Greek letters in their calcula-
tions, drawings, and reports.
184 liberal education

Z. A carelessly scribbled “zed,” as Europeans pro-

nounce 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 Bri-

tannica (15th edition), “by integrating the study of the
humanities, social sciences, mathematics, physical sciences,
and technology and by providing experience in analy-
sis, 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 cen-
tury, 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 lib-
eral arts curriculum, on the other hand, rarely requires
much exposure to science or mathematics, let alone engi-
neering 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
libraries 185

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 bricks-
and-mortar and books-on-shelves version of such a spe-
cialized branch library less essential to researchers and
working engineers alike. This led to the dissolution of col-
lections and the absorption of what engineering books
were retained into a university’s general collection. Nev-
ertheless, 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 build-
ing. 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 virtu-
ally impossible to read them except at a large library table.
186 libraries

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 gen-
erosity 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 Insti-
tute at MIT. Bern Dibner (1897–1988) was an inventor
and founder of the Burndy Engineering Company, a man-
ufacturer of electrical connector devices whose headquar-
ters was located just one block from the New York Pub-
lic 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 relo-
cated to MIT, where the Burndy Library was part of the
Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technol-
ogy. It was that collection that was donated by the Dibner
family in 2006 to the Huntington Library. See Bern Dib-
ner, Heralds of Science, revised edition (Norwalk, Conn.,
licensing of engineers 187

and Washington, D.C.: Burndy Library and Smithsonian

Institution, 1980); see also “From Connections to Col-
lections,” American Scientist, September–October 1998,
pp. 416–420.
For most of the twentieth century, an Engineering Soci-
eties Library was located in the New York City headquar-
ters building of the so-called founder engineering societies.
When the societies reached an agreement to sell the build-
ing 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, Engi-
neering 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 divi-

sive 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 Engi-
neering Profession (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1986), some viewed licensing as “a form of collec-
tivism little different from unionism.” The professional
societies, which saw themselves as the arbiters of who was
and who was not a professional engineer, opposed licens-
ing as being a threat to their membership and influence.
With the growth of state licensing of professional engi-
neers 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
188 licensing of engineers

National Council of State Boards of Engineering Exam-

iners (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 Coun-
cil of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES).
Among the principal functions of the NCEES is to pre-
pare 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 profes-
sional 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 licens-
ing of engineers reflect in part their being passed and con-
stituted over the course of decades. For a survey of state
“licensure board composition; board powers and oper-
ations; requirements for licensure; licensure by comity
and reciprocity; license renewal including continuing pro-
fessional competency requirements, exemptions, inves-
tigative 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 Engi-
neers, 1997).
The Mutual Recognition Document (MRD) is an agree-
ment that was entered into in the mid-1990s by Canada,
Mexico, and the United States. It enables experienced and
licensing of engineers 189

licensed engineers to obtain a temporary license for for-

eign 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. Stein-
man, who became its first president. Started largely in reac-
tion to the provincialism of the various specialized soci-
eties, the NSPE is “concerned with social, professional,
ethical, and economic considerations of engineering as a
profession.” The society also “monitors legislative and reg-
ulatory 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 Engineer-
ing 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 writ-
ing skills of engineers and jokes about engineers and engi-
neering 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 Engineer-
ing Times was the issue of whether to refer to profes-
sional 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 professional-
ism, because it implies a more decisive action. It has been
190 licensing of engineers

proposed that education alone might entitle one to the

title Professional Engineer, whereas the title Licensed Pro-
fessional 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 avail-
able 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 “Socio-
engineering” (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 forma-

tion with several acres of other young engineers, each Fri-
day afternoon we would ceremoniously greet the begin-
ning 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 Mon-
day 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
192 materials science

Marchant electromechanical calculator

G. Vincenti, “Engineering Theory in the Making: Aero-

dynamic Calculation ‘Breaks the Sound Barrier’,” Tech-
nology 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 sci-
ence, it is commonly practiced as a branch of engineer-
ing. This is especially the case when its practitioners have a
strong interest in the interrelationship between the micro-
scopic qualities of materials and their macroscopic behav-
ior. 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 indis-
pensable to engineering better and stronger materials that
are resistant to such deleterious phenomena as fatigue-
crack growth and fracture. Departments of materials sci-
ence are typically housed in schools of engineering, either
mechanical drawing 193

as stand-alone entities or in combination with mechanical

engineering, as in a Department of Mechanical Engineer-
ing 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: Har-
mony Books, 2003).

mechanical drawing. Once a required part of the engi-

neering 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 draw-
ings were made, engineering students were better prepared
to read and interpret drawings and blueprints prepared
by others. With the advent of digital computers, engi-
neering drawings came more and more to be generated
electronically and many engineering schools dropped me-
chanical 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 draft-
ing, 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 engi-
neers’ 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
194 mechanical drawing

T square and versatile drafting triangles

scales are increasingly less commonly seen, some contin-

ued 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 computer-
ized 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 combi-
nations and orientations
Engineer’s scale in use to produce perpendicular,
mechanical drawing 195

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 vari-
ety 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 engi-
neering students, when the profession was almost exclu-
sively 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 pur-
pose 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 instru-
ments that themselves were stored in silk- or velvet-lined
196 mechanical drawing

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 cir-
cles of sure radius. Compasses and dividers were the key
components of a mechanical drawing set, and these instru-
ments are sometimes now confused. A compass is used
to draw circles; a pair of dividers is used to transfer dis-
tances, 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 Pub-
lications, 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 draw-
ings 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 elimi-
nated 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 draw-
ing. 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 learn-
ing how to visualize and lay out complex mechanical parts
mechanical engineering 197

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 wood-
cased 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 mechan-
ical 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 individ-
ual and both were necessary for developing the railroads.
With the rise of specialization, civil engineers focused on
alignment, grades, roadbeds, and bridges, and mechani-
cal engineers on locomotives and rolling stock. The devel-
opment 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 increas-
ingly diverse membership. Hence, new and more special-
ized societies began to be established in the middle of the
nineteenth century.
In America, the American Society of Mechanical Engi-
neers 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 Devel-
opment of the American Society of Civil Engineers (New
York: ASCE, 1974); and Bruce Sinclair, A Centennial His-
tory of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers,
1880–1980 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980).
198 medical doctors and engineers

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 accom-
panying my reading the eye chart and his flipping the dif-
ferent combinations of corrective lenses into place. Over
the years, our discussions came to be more and more per-
sonal, 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 fascinat-
ing. He marveled at the subterranean engineering achieve-
ment 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 accus-
tomed, “Why did you write a whole book on pencils?” I
replied that I wrote the book to explore the nature of engi-
neering 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 sec-
ond doctor in the examining room, a resident learning
under the veteran specialist. This did not inhibit the con-
versation 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 book-
shelves, 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
medical doctors and engineers 199

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 engi-
neer. To my surprise, he then expressed the wish that he
himself had majored in engineering as an undergradu-
ate. 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 engi-
neering 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 unher-
alded 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
200 mind’s eye

society. See Witold Rybczynski, One Good Turn: A Natu-

ral 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 repeti-
tion, but it pales against the satisfaction that a doctor must
get in providing a means of correcting debilitating near-
sightedness 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 meth-
ods; however, in engineering at least the repetitiveness has
now been largely overtaken by the digital computer. Engi-
neers today are much more likely to have the role of man-
ager – 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 invari-
ably 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 repe-
tition. What counts in engineering school and in engineer-
ing practice is not the repetitiveness of exercises and cal-
culations 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
The Moles 201

concepts and designs. The nineteenth-century Scottish

engineer James Nasmyth (1808–1890), speaking of his
conception of a steam hammer, wrote in his 1883 auto-
biography:

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 visi-
ble. 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 imagi-
nation, and observe before-
hand 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 Mur-
ray, 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 peo-

ple engaged in heavy construction, epitomized by tunnel
work and symbolized by the burrowing animal from which
202 Monuments of the Millennium

the group takes its name. The Moles as a formal organiza-

tion 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, founda-
tion, 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 ball-
rooms in the city. In 2010, the number of active members
of The Moles was limited to 538, but emeritus and hon-
orary categories swelled the membership to around a thou-
sand. 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 produc-
tion afterwards.
On the West Coast, where dams seem to be more com-
mon 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 engi-
neers enhanced the quality of life.” As part of a Millen-
nium Challenge, the ASCE canvassed its membership
“to determine the 10 civil engineering achievements that
monuments to engineers 203

had the greatest positive impact on life in the 20th cen-

tury.” Within the broad categories that were identified,
exemplars came to be known as Monuments of the Mil-
lennium. The list follows:

Monuments of the Millennium

Airport Design and Kansai International Airport
Development
Dams Hoover Dam
Interstate Highway System The system overall
Long-Span Bridges Golden Gate Bridge
Rail Transportation Eurotunnel
Sanitary Landfills/Solid Sanitary waste disposal
Waste Disposal advances overall
Skyscrapers Empire State Building
Wastewater Treatment Chicago Wastewater System
Water Supply and California State Water Project
Distribution
Water Transportation Panama Canal

monuments to engineers. It is sometimes said, often

by engineers themselves, that their great works are monu-
ments enough to the engineers who build them. This view
is sometimes interpreted as rationalization within a profes-
sion 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 mon-
ument to George Westinghouse (1846–1914) was installed
in Schenley Park in Pittsburgh in 1930. Among other
notable monuments to American engineers is a classical
204 monuments to engineers

statue of a seated John A. Roebling (1806–1869) in Cad-

walader Park in Trenton, New Jersey, and a more ani-
mated 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 distin-
guished engineer of steel plants who was instrumental in
the establishment of the American Society of Mechani-
cal 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 iron-
clad 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 Arling-
ton Memorial Bridge. A monument to the nineteenth-
century 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 Institu-
tion on War, Revolution and Peace, which is located on
the campus of Stanford University, his alma mater, identi-
fies him not only as an engineer, but also as a humanitar-
ian, 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.
monuments to engineers 205

There are many monuments to engineers in Great

Britain, and several engineers are memorialized in West-
minster 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 anal-
ogy 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 monu-
ments in Britain are, in addition to Telford and Stephen-
son, 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 Institu-
tion 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 Pub-
lic 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
206 most-admired engineers

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. presi-
dents 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 refuel-
ing. 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 engi-
neering 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 com-
monly 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 set-
ting. See Bruce Sinclair, “Inventing a Genteel Tradition:
MIT Crosses the River,” in New Perspectives on Tech-
nology 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
movies about engineers and engineering 207

repair of a failed life-support system. The motion pic-

ture, 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 dupli-
cating 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 avail-
able 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 admin-
istrative 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 mis-
sion to destroy the strategic river crossing. (The psychol-
ogy 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
208 Murphy’s Law

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 con-
cept is said to have been named after a Capt. Ed Mur-
phy, 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 prin-
ciple in their advertisements, and references to Murphy’s
Law became commonplace. There have been numerous
compilations of Murphy’s Law and its variants, includ-
ing 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 engineer-
ing 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 dol-
lars he “would build a school where students of all back-
grounds could prepare for meaningful roles in a chang-
ing 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 Insti-
tute, 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 insti-
tution was founded in 1900 as a “first class techni-
cal school” by the steel industrialist Andrew Carnegie
(1835–1919). In 1967 it merged with the city’s Mel-
lon Institute of Industrial Research, founded in 1913 by
the banker-industrialist brothers Richard Beatty Mellon
209
210 named schools of engineering

(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 engi-
neering school is still known as the Carnegie Institute of
Technology.
Lawrence Scientific School. This was Harvard Uni-
versity’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 pur-
poses,” 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 Har-
vard; 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 Engi-
neering 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 com-
ponent of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Sci-
ence 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 profes-
sions of architecture, art and engineering.” The Cooper
Union was founded in 1859 by the inventor, manufac-
turer, and philanthropist Peter Cooper (1791–1883) to
educate immigrant and working-class people, both men
named schools of engineering 211

and women, of the city. The Great Hall, the historic audito-
rium in the basement of Cooper Union’s landmark Foun-
dation 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 engi-
neer, industrialist, and philanthropist. In 1987, the elec-
trical 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 pharmaceuti-
cal 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 depart-
ments of civil and electrical engineering were established
in 1927, and a department of mechanical engineering
followed in 1931. A Division of Engineering was created
212 named schools of engineering

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 depart-
ment 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 Brook-
lyn, 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 dif-
ferent professional circles.
Schaefer School of Engineering and Science. This is
the engineering school of the Stevens Institute of Tech-
nology. Located in Hoboken, New Jersey, the institution
was founded in 1871 specifically for the professional edu-
cation 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 engi-
neering 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 Audi-
torium 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
named schools of engineering 213

with supposedly little connection to engineering. However,

before he dropped out of high school Sinatra and his par-
ents had dreamt of the possibly of his studying at Stevens
to become an engineer, and he did swim underwater reg-
ularly 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 chem-
istry 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, estab-
lished in 1932, was absorbed into the institution’s Depart-
ment of Engineering and Applied Science in 1962. In
1980, the department structure was replaced by a Coun-
cil of Engineering. See R. H. Chittenden, Sheffield Sci-
entific School (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1928); W. Jack Cunningham, “Engineering at Yale: School,
Department, Council 1932–1982,” Transactions, Connecti-
cut Academy of Arts and Sciences 51 (December 1992):
1–232.
Sibley College of Engineering. Sibley is Cornell Univer-
sity’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
214 named schools of engineering

partnership with Samuel Morse (1791–1872) and Ezra Cor-

nell (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 pres-
ident of the Western Union Telegraph Company.
Speed Scientific School. The Speed School was estab-
lished at the University of Louisville in 1925 and is the uni-
versity’s college of engineering and applied sciences. The
school was endowed as a memorial to the Louisville busi-
nessman James Breckenridge Speed (1844–1912) by his
son and daughter. The Speed School is noted for its lead-
ership 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 superinten-
dent of West Point from 1817 to 1833, he developed it
into a world-class school of military engineering. Engineer-
ing 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 profes-
sional 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 engineer-
ing 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 support-
ers of this system of engineering education, believing that
named schools of engineering 215

it produces a better educated and more professionally ori-

ented 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 pro-
fessional unit. Others, such as Georgia Tech, use the term
“school” to designate an academic unit that is more com-
monly called a department. In some cases, engineering is
grouped with disciplines such as applied science or com-
puter science to signal that more than just traditional engi-
neering is encompassed. A far from complete list of addi-
tional named schools of engineering, which are sometimes
referred to without explicit reference to their home insti-
tution, follows:

Alfred University Kazuo Inamori School of

Engineering
Arizona State University Ira A. Fulton Schools of
Engineering
Binghamton University Thomas J. Watson School of
Engineering and Applied
Science
Clarkson University Wallace H. Coulter School of
Engineering
Cleveland State University Fenn College of Engineering
Columbia University Fu Foundation School of
Engineering and Applied
Science
Johns Hopkins University G. W. C. Whiting School of
Engineering
Mississippi State James Worth Bagley College of
University Engineering
Morgan State University Clarence M. Mitchell, Jr. School
of Engineering
Northwestern University Robert R. McCormick School
of Engineering and Applied
Science
216 named schools of engineering

Norwich University David Crawford School of

Engineering
Rice University George R. Brown School of
Engineering
Rochester Institute of Kate Gleason College of
Technology Engineering
St. Louis University Parks College of Engineering,
Aviation and Technology
Southern Methodist Bobby B. Lyle School of
University Engineering
Texas Tech University Edward E. Whitacre Jr. College
of Engineering
UCLA Henry Samueli School of
Engineering and Applied
Science
University of California, Henry Samueli School of
Irvine Engineering
University of California, Bourns College of Engineering
Riverside
University of California, Irwin and Joan Jacobs School of
San Diego Engineering
University of California, Jack Baskin School of
Santa Cruz Engineering
University of Maryland A. James Clark School of
Engineering
University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering
University of Rochester Edmund J. Hajim School of
Engineering and Applied
Sciences
University of Southern Andrew and Erna Viterbi
California School of Engineering
University of Texas at Cockrell School of Engineering
Austin
University of Texas at Erik Jonsson School of
Dallas Engineering and Computer
Science
Walla Walla University Edward F. Cross School of
Engineering
nature-based design 217

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 inven-
tor 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 con-
tain animals in a field is traced to the American inven-
tor 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 natu-
ral 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
218 naval architecture

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 con-
nections between design in nature and in engineering.
For an engineering textbook that stresses common princi-
ples of design that are behind made and naturally occur-
ring things, see M. J. French, Invention and Evolution:
Design in Nature and Engineering, 2nd ed. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994). In 1996, the mechan-
ical 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 eas-
ier 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 (Cam-
bridge: 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
neckties and engineers 219

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 assis-
tant 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 vet-
eran 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 univer-
sal, the classroom has become more informal not only in
dress but also in decorum. Unless they are having an on-
campus 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 con-
sume 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 seventy-
fifth 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 geol-
ogy 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, how-
ever, where there was a concentration of geologists and
220 nicknames of college sports teams

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 rea-
sonably 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 dur-
ing 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, Rose-
Hulman Institute of Technology, and Worcester Polytech-
nic 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 unfa-
miliar 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 plas-
tics. This was a striking acknowledgement of engineering
achievement by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Nobel Prizes 221

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 commit-
tees 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 eco-
nomics in 1969, many other fields left out of Nobel’s will
sought their own categories of prizes. The Nobel Founda-
tion 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 cir-
cuit, without which the computer would not be the minia-
turized 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
222 novels about engineers and engineering

components that have made small laser technology prac-

tical in so many of the communications devices that we use
daily, including CD players, bar-code readers, and fiber-
optics – all engineered devices of the first order. A dis-
senting view about Kilby receiving the Nobel prize is con-
tained in Arjun N. Saxena, Invention of Integrated Circuits:
Untold Important Facts (Singapore: World Scientific Pub-
lishing 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 recog-
nition 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 Sci-
ence 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 Mechan-
ical 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
novels about engineers and engineering 223

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 surviv-
ing 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 Sur-
vival (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 Pio-
neers!, appeared. Alexander’s Bridge is a highly fictional-
ized 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 engi-
neer traveling on a Chinese junk up the Yangtze River
to seek a location for a dam. Along the way, the engi-
neer 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 pro-
vide insights into design and technological change and as
an interesting cultural perspective on the later twentieth-
century’s Three Gorges Dam megaproject.
Robert Byrne, the author of a wide variety of popu-
lar books, studied sanitary engineering at Iowa State Uni-
versity. 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.
224 numbers of engineers

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 south-
ern 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 Insti-
tution of Civil Engineers: Engineering History and Her-
itage, 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 jaun-
diced 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.: World-
wide Library, 2000), which involves a fatal ceiling col-
lapse. 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
numbers of engineers 225

distinct group, there were about 2,000. The following table

gives a sense of the growth of the entire profession:

Year Engineers (est.)

1816 30
1850 2,000
1880 7,000
1900 45,000
1920 136,000
1930 226,000
1940 260,000
1950 500,000
1960 800,000
1980 1,000,000
1990 1,200,000
2000 2,100,000
2008 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 Cana-
dian 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, forthcom-
ing), 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.

226
Outstanding Engineering Achievements 227

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.
As an Engineer, I , pledge to practice
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 per-
formance of duty and in fidelity to my profession, I shall
give the utmost.

After some years, and in deference to heightened sensi-

tivities, 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. Other-
wise, in 2009, the obligation remained essentially as origi-
nally 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 achieve-
ments” 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 Outstanding Engineers (ca. 1930)

3. microprocessor
4. computer-aided design and manufacturing
5. CAT scan
6. advanced composite materials
7. jumbo jet
8. lasers
9. fiber-optic communications
10. 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 Edu-
cation 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 great-
est engineers of all time.” In all, seventy-eight engineers
were identified as the greatest of all time, and seventy-
one names were mentioned in the category of the previous
twenty-five years. The top results of the survey, as pub-
lished 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.)
Outstanding Engineers (ca. 1930) 229

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 Bucha-

nan Eads was misstated as William, and John A. Roebl-
ing 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 techno-
logical achievement that is recognized, rather than techni-
cal 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 for-
gotten 35 years later (see Virginia Fairweather, “The For-
gotten Engineer: John Stevens and the Panama Canal,”
Civil Engineering, February 1975, pp. 54–57.) The lists,
230 Outstanding Engineers (ca. 1930)

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 iden-
tical 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 News-
Record 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 News-
Record, August 30, 1999.
 P
patent system. The American patent system has its foun-
dation 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 lim-
ited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right
to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”
During much of the nineteenth century, physical mod-
els of inventions were submitted with patent applications.
A fire in the Patent Office destroyed all such models sub-
mitted prior to 1836, and more were lost in a second fire,
in 1877. Those that have survived are scattered in collec-
tions ranging from that of the Smithsonian Institution to
those of private collectors. As engineer-turned-historian-
of-technology Eugene Ferguson pointed out, patent mod-
els 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 exponen-
tially, and by the end of the twentieth century the num-
ber exceeded 6,000,000. The 7,000,000 mark was reached
231
232 patron saint of engineers

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. (Berke-
ley, 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 engi-
neer, 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 pro-
fessional 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 jour-
nal 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 uni-
versity presses, also use a peer review system to evaluate
manuscripts. The peer review process, which usually func-
tions 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 mecha-
nism for maintaining the status quo. Research grant pro-
posals 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.
pencil 233

pencil. As the fountain pen is to the medical doctor, so

the pencil is to the engineer (and is also to the archi-
tect and artist, who, like the engineer, have tradition-
ally 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 draft-
ing pencils in a series of full-page magazine advertise-
ments. 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 mem-
bers 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 design-

ing 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 Cir-
cumstance (New York: Knopf, 1990).
“the perfect is the enemy of the good.” This famil-
iar 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
234 “the perfect is the enemy of the good”

best design possible – the perfect design. What “perfect”

means depends on many factors, including aesthetics, con-
structability 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 “per-
fect” 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 François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), who wrote
under the pen name Voltaire. It appeared in his Dictio-
nnaire Philosophique, which was first published in 1764.
Voltaire essentially repeated the dictum in his 1772 poem
“La Bégueule” (“The Prude”), where he attributes the
observation to a “wise Italian,” although this may have
been to achieve the rhyme:
Dans ses écrits un sage Italien
Dit que le mieux est l’ennemi du bien

The French, le mieux est l’ennemi du bien, has been trans-

lated 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 impli-
cations of Voltaire’s words and their relevance for engi-
neering and design are effectively the same: While a better
design can always be achieved, it is not always wise, pru-
dent, or necessary to seek one.
“the perfect is the enemy of the good” 235

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 web-
site making tool known as HTML, which stands for hyper-
text markup language. The language’s focus simply on text
made it relatively easy to learn and use. In time, how-
ever, its shortcomings with regard to incorporating images
and other media onto web sites became clear. Neverthe-
less, 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 contem-
porary 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 steel-
wire 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 fol-
lowing century, hundreds upon hundreds of patents were
granted for paper clips that were arguably improvements
236 personality of the engineer

on the Gem. However, none of these displaced the classic

form. In fact, the more inventors tried to achieve perfec-
tion, 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 develop-
ment 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 Uni-
versity Press, 1996).

personality of the engineer. There is a general sense

among engineers and nonengineers alike that the person-
ality 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 stick-
ers 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 personal-
ity. But that is not all there is to it.
Among the more quotable passages about the per-
sonality 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.
personality of the engineer 237

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 instru-
ment, 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 desir-
able 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 them-
selves. 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 rail-
road, 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 isola-
tion and primitive conditions in remote engineering camps,
with husbands totally absorbed by their work,” according
to the historian Bruce Sinclair, who wrote about the engi-
neering ethos in the early twentieth century in “Inventing a
Genteel Tradition: MIT Crosses the River,” which appears
in New Perspectives on Technology and American Cul-
ture (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1986),
pp. 1–18.
238 philosophy and engineering

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 Influ-
ence 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 engineer-
ing are seldom uttered in the same sentence; however,
like every other human endeavor, engineering is a legit-
imate 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, Engi-
neers is in my view a philosophy of engineering expounded
through historical progression, case histories, and struc-
tural anecdotes. See also Steen Hyldgaard Christensen
et al., eds., Philosophy in Engineering (Copenhagen: Aca-
demica, 2007), which is “intended for courses in philosophy
of science for engineers at the bachelor’s level in engineer-
ing 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 expo-
sure times then required. Half a century later, the con-
struction 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
photographs and paintings 239

the technology to print photographs in newspapers and

magazines.
Although he drew and painted, rather than pho-
tographed engineering subjects, Joseph Pennell (1857–
1926) should be mentioned here. Pennell was a Phila-
delphia-trained American artist who is best remembered
for his drawings of engineering construction projects, often
showing incomplete bridges and buildings behind scaffold-
ing. 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 Engi-
neers. 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 engi-
neering structures ranging from towers to dams. See
240 pocket protectors

the exhibit catalog, Twentieth Century Engineering (New

York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964). For a collec-
tion 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 pre-
maturely 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
poetry by engineers 241

“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 sec-
tion 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 accom-

plished 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 Bridge-
builder (1959). His mastery of poetic form was demon-
strated 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.
242 poetry by engineers

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 His-
tory. 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 doc-
umentary, and film. It was alluded to in the movie China-
town, 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, Pat-
terns and Structure: Selected Writings 1972–2008 (Baden,
Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 2010).
politics and engineering 243

politics and engineering. The paucity of engineers run-

ning for or holding elected political office often has been
lamented, especially as legislation and public policy have
become increasingly involved with technical issues. How-
ever, 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 Her-
bert 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 Isam-
bard Kingdom Brunel taken on the morning of Novem-
ber 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 ori-
entation, perpendicular to the water’s edge.
244 portraits of engineers

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 Gen-
eral Electric publicity department to show the great engi-
neer 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 (1798-
1866), 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 paint-
ing is often reproduced in books on nineteenth-century
postage stamps commemorating engineers 245

inventors and engineers. See “Men and Women of Pro-

gress,” 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 five-
pound 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 eco-
nomic and industrial development of Sweden, especially
in the field of mining. For guides to portraits and pic-
tures of engineers, see Eugene S. Ferguson’s Bibliogra-
phy of the History of Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: Soci-
ety for the History of Technology and MIT Press, 1968),
pp. 87–89.

postage stamps commemorating engineers and engi-

neering. There have been a great number of postage
stamps commemorating engineers, the engineering profes-
sion, 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,
1983) and Theodore von Kármán (29-cent, 1992), the
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
246 postage stamps commemorating engineers

Hoover Dam (3-cent, 1935, when it was called Boulder

Dam; $16.50 express mail, 2008); the centenary of the tele-
graph (3-cent, 1944); the completion of the first transconti-
nental 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 electron-
ics (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 commemo-
rating 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 one-
hundredth 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

Postage stamp commemorating engineering

postage stamps commemorating engineers 247

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 enve-
lope.
Canadian stamps have also commemorated the cen-
tennial of the Engineering Institute of Canada (36-cent,
1987) and the sesquicentennial of the birth of Sir Sand-
ford 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 respon-
sible 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).
248 postage stamps commemorating engineers

Canada’s first stamp, designed by an engineer

Canadian engineering’s iron ring tradition was com-

memorated on a 46-cent stamp issued in April 2000. Half
of an iron ring appears on each of two identical side-
by-side stamps, so the image of a full iron ring can be
affixed to an envelope bearing 92-cents postage. The word-
ing 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’ingénieur”). 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 engi-
neer who lives in Michigan. He organized a study group
of the American Topical Association, a philatelic organi-
zation 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,
practical jokes and pranks 249

“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 score-
board 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 col-
lege 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
250 prefixes for engineers’ names

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 engi-
neers “show pride in their profession” by putting the ab-
breviation “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 min-
imum educational and professional experience require-
ments of the European Federation of National Engi-
neering 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. Her-
naut, “European Engineers: Unity of Diversity,” Journal
of Engineering Education 83 (January 1994): 35–40.
Ingeniero. This title of distinction is used in Spanish-
speaking 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
prestige of professionals 251

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 Inge-
nieur and the abbreviation Ir. In these countries, the des-
ignation 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 engi-
neer, can be used only by those who are professional engi-
neers 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 inżynier, which is abbre-
viated inż. Thus in formal usage the surname of a Polish
engineer who also holds a Ph.D. degree would be preceded
by Dr. Inż.

prestige of professionals. In one of his regular columns

on the engineering profession, structural engineer Richard
G. Weingardt described the way the prestige of engineer-
ing had moved up and down in Harris Poll surveys. Hav-
ing 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 sci-
entists 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
252 printing vs. cursive writing

prestige of firefighters and nurses, with the former even

being perceived in one poll as more prestigious than sci-
entists 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. Wein-
gardt 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 Engi-
neering and Design, September 2010, p. 42.
Among the reasons why engineers are lacking in pub-
lic visibility may be the fact that they are often identified
as scientists in reports of their achievements – but iden-
tified as engineers when failures occur. In the late sum-
mer 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 success-
fully used to haul each of the miners the half-mile up to
safety. One newspaper headline attributed the achieve-
ment 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
printing vs. cursive writing 253

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 unifor-
mity 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, hand-
lettering 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 pro-
duced 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 letter-
ing 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

254 prizes for engineering achievement

and the numerals, all underscored by a groove running the

length of the template. The scriber was operated by plac-
ing 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 streak-
ing took some practice; however, once one got the hang of
it virtually perfect printing could be produced. Each tem-
plate corresponded to a different size and style – includ-
ing italic faces – of letters and numerals, which enabled an
adept engineering student or draftsman to produce prop-
erly 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 com-
petitions 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 engi-
neering challenges and contests with substantial monetary
prizes are being promoted as means of encouraging the
development of desirable new technologies, such as light-
weight batteries, efficient solar cells, and innovative space-
craft. 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 com-
petitions often want to open them up to all comers in the
hopes of tapping new sources of innovation and nontradi-
tional, 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 self-
educated English clockmaker John Harrison (1693–1776),
prizes for engineering achievement 255

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 cen-
tury, 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 technol-
ogy. Even if the prize money does not equal the winner’s
research and development expenditure, a government-
sponsored competition can have the further allure of mas-
sive purchasing contracts going to the proven technology
leader.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, when gasoline
was approaching five dollars a gallon in California, can-
didate 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 tax-
payers 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 competi-
tion 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 devel-
opment of autonomous robotic vehicles that could deliver
256 professional engineer

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 kilo-
meters in altitude, was won in 2004 by Burt Rutan’s Space-
ShipOne. An improved version figures in Virgin Galactic’s
business plan for $200,000 rides into space. Google spon-
sors 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 develop-
ment 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 Engi-

neer Intern is one who has passed the Fundamentals of
Engineering Examination. Designated FE and adminis-
tered by the National Council of Examiners for Engineer-
ing 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, elec-
tric circuits, engineering economics, fluid mechanics, math-
ematics, materials science, mechanics of materials, statics,
and thermodynamics, all of which are generally covered in
professional engineer 257

the first three years of an engineering curriculum. An indi-

vidual who passes the Fundamentals of Engineering exam-
ination and who graduates from a school whose curricu-
lum has been accredited by the Accreditation Board for
Engineering and Technology is classified as an Engineer-
in-Training, designated E.I.T., or, increasingly, an Engi-
neer 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 draw-
ings or plans indicates that that engineer was in respon-
sible 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 registra-
tion and Canada does not (obtaining a Canadian engineer-
ing 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
258 proof test

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 peo-
ple 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 rea-
son 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

psychology and engineering design 259

Elephants being herded onto a bridge

In some eastern-European countries it has been cus-

tomary for the design engineer to stand, sometimes accom-
panied 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 physi-
cal 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 non-
technical 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 struc-
ture can have a pronounced effect on the public that
260 psychology and engineering design

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 Califor-
nia. At the time, there were two competing approaches to
dam design. One, promoted by the engineer John S. East-
wood (1857–1924), employed multiple buttressed concrete
arches, which being relatively thin provided an economi-
cal 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 engi-
neering reason.” See Donald C. Jackson, Building the Ulti-
mate 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 predeces-
sors. 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 replace-
ment was designed to look much less slender, and other
suspension bridges designed and built in the wake of the
public lectures and demonstrations 261

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, Mis-
souri, 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 pur-
pose 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 pro-

jects have always fascinated the public, and that is why the
barriers around construction sites often have observation

Lecture and demonstration of structural principles

262 public lectures and demonstrations

ports for “sidewalk superintendents.” The phenomenon is

nothing new. Before the Great Exhibition occupied the
Crystal Palace, lay persons were welcomed to on-site pub-
lic lectures and demonstrations that explained the struc-
tural principles of the revolutionary building and some
contemporary engineering projects of the mid-nineteenth
century. Later in the century, when the enormous can-
tilever bridge across the Firth of Forth was under construc-
tion near Edinburgh, the engineer Benjamin Baker (1840–
1907) lectured to lay audiences on the structural princi-
ples 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 construc-
tion 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 sec-
ond 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, demon-
strates 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

263
264 Quebec Bridge

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 engi-
neers 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. Histori-
cally, 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 tick-
ing, has also been annoyingly associated with engineers
who have no connection to trains. Next to cartoon depic-
tions of engineers in hard hats are those caricaturing them
in the railroader’s cap. I was conflicted at my univer-
sity’s commencement ceremony one year when the gradu-
ates receiving engineering degrees were handed blue-and-
white 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 commence-
ment “tradition” lasted only a year or two before being
forgotten.

265
266 re-engineering

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 seek-
ing to rethink how their organizations worked in the con-
text of modern technology and evolving business prac-
tices. The result of re-engineering was often a restructuring
and downsizing of operations, with consequent layoffs. Re-
engineering 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 scien-
tific 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 electri-
cal engineer Vannevar Bush (1890–1974), who was its first
director. The term research, development, and demon-
stration (RDD) is used to describe research and develop-
ment 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 engi-
neer has advocated the concept of Research for Devel-
opment (R4D), in which the engineering objective serves
to motivate and prioritize any relevant scientific research.
See Simon Ostrach, “Microgravity and the Human Explo-
ration 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
reverse engineering 267

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 break-
ing down of a process to determine how it was designed,
usually for the purpose of copying it or designing some-
thing 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 profes-
sion 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 Ameri-
can 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,” Tech-
nology and Culture, October 1971, pp. 562–580, a semi-
nal article that articulates both distinctions and similarities
between science and engineering.
Another informative book is David F. Noble’s Amer-
ica by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corpo-
rate Capitalism (New York: Knopf, 1977). This book has
as its primary thesis “that the history of modern technol-
ogy in America is of a piece with that of the rise of cor-
porate capitalism.” According to Noble, “the role of the
engineers in the creation of modern corporate industry
must be taken into account before any satisfactory expla-
nation can be attempted” of the belief that “the survival
of capitalist social relations, despite the most dramatic
268 revolutionaries in engineering

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 move-
ment to reform the American Society of Mechanical Engi-
neers 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 pro-
fession itself should be more generally sensitive to the pub-
lic 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 sci-
ence 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
Robert’s Rules of Order 269

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 tele-
graph 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 engi-
neer Henry Martyn Robert (1837–1923) and first pub-
lished 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 cur-
tailed. Robert had a full
career in the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers, includ-
ing 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 Engi-
neering (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 Mechan-
ical 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 celebra-
tions 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 engi-
neering 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 en-
shrined on campus as the “blarney stone.” Coincidentally,
270
St. Patrick 271

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 pre-
served 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 engi-
neering 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 connec-
tion 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
272 St. Patrick

or E-Week), during which, among other activities, engi-

neering students mounted public exhibits and demonstra-
tions in their laboratories. The celebration often culmi-
nated with a banquet or dance. For further details see
Mary Frances Pope, “The Apocryphal Saint of the Engi-
neer,” 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, for-
merly known as the Missouri School of Mines and Metal-
lurgy, and now named the Missouri University of Science
and Technology, or Missouri S&T for short. Upon gain-
ing 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 repro-
duced below. Its spelling and wording at the same time sug-
gest the self-deprecating nature of engineering humor and
give a sense of the organization’s seriousness and inten-
tions.
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 his-
tory. 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 estab-
lished 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 activi-
ties of the group included helping freshmen with their engi-
neering work through lectures on slide rule usage and help
St. Patrick 273

sessions for courses. In the 1980s, one prominent activ-

ity in preparation for St. Patrick’s Day consisted of paint-
ing 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, show-
ing 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

274 St. Patrick

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 soci-
ety quiz bowl. The highlights of the week are a knighting
ceremony and the formal St. Pat’s Ball. The knighting cer-
emony, 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 grad-
uating 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 engineer-
ing organizations, and their academic achievement.
At Rolla, a week of games and follies has tradi-
tionally 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. How-
ever, 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 sur-
vived 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
Missouri University of
UMR Magazine, Winter 2007,
Science & Technology pp. 6–21.
scale effect 275

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 differ-
ent 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 solu-
tion, and it soon was tested. As an enemy siege machine
of unprecedented proportions approached the city, its cit-
izens 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 citi-
zens 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 method-
ical approach to studying the strength of materials. He
introduced his subject by noting that Renaissance engi-
neers 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
276 schools of engineering

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 propor-
tions, as observed by Galileo.
In the nineteenth century, the scale effect played a
role in the development of early steamships. Some scien-
tists claimed that a steamship could never be made large
enough to carry enough coal to fire its boilers for the dura-
tion 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 incontro-
vertible 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 Liter-
ary, Scientific, and Military Academy, located in his home-
town 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.
schools of engineering 277

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 estab-
lished by its namesake, landowner Stephen van Rensse-
laer (1764–1839), who wanted it “to qualify teachers for
instructing the sons and daughters of farmers and mechan-
ics, by lectures or otherwise, in the application of experi-
mental chemistry, philosophy, and natural history, to agri-
culture, domestic economy, the arts and manufactures.”
In 1835, under the new name of Rensselaer Institute, the
institution was authorized to give instruction in “engi-
neering 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 Polytech-
nic Institute was the foremost civilian school of engineer-
ing in the country. See Samuel Rezneck, Education for a
Technological Society: A Sesquicentennial History of Rens-
selaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, N.Y.: RPI, 1968). See
also Thomas Phelan, D. Michael Ross, and Carl A. West-
erdahl, Rensselaer: Where Imagination Achieves the Impos-
sible (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 Poly-
technic Institute, and Throop College of Technology, after
its founder Amos G. Throop (1811–1894), a Chicago busi-
nessman and politician who relocated to California. The
278 schools of engineering

forerunner to Caltech has been described as a “prepara-

tory 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 profes-
sion, 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 Materi-
als, was a pioneer in its field.) His plan was realized in
1861 with the founding of the Boston Institute of Tech-
nology. 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 Tra-
dition: MIT Crosses the River,” in New Perspectives on
Technology and Culture (Philadelphia: American Philo-
sophical Society, 1986), pp. 1–18. For two late-twentieth
century views of MIT see Pepper White, The Idea Fac-
tory: Learning to Think at MIT (New York: Dutton, 1991),
and Fred Hapgood, Up the Infinite Corridor: MIT and the
science fairs 279

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 dif-
fered 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 “Tech-
nology 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 participa-
tion. The acknowledgement of engineering at such fairs
has generally ranged from absent to invisible, even though
some student projects can be more engineering than sci-
ence. In recognition of the neglect of engineering, some
local, state, and regional fairs have been promoted as sci-
ence 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 suc-
cinct definitions of engineering is one attributed to Her-
bert 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 sci-
ence, and economics, winning a Nobel Prize in 1978 in the
last of these. Simon’s observations about engineering are
280 scientists vs. engineers

contained in his book, The Sciences of the Artificial (Cam-

bridge, 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 con-
cept 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 respon-
sible for the concept of “satisficing,” by which the value
of “good enough” solutions to design problems is recog-
nized. 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. Distinc-
tions that are drawn are sometimes clouded by the fact that
scientists can do engineering, as so many physicists did dur-
ing 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
aerospace engineer and scientist Theodore von Kármán
(1881–1963): “Scientists seek to understand what is;
scientists vs. engineers 281

engineers seek to create what has not yet been.” Simi-

lar sentiments have been expressed in aphorisms galore,
among them: “Scientists understand the world, but engi-
neers make it work”; “Scientists investigate what is; engi-
neers create what never has been”; “Scientists seek to
know; engineers to do”; “Scientists make it known; engi-
neers make it useful.” Another variation on the same
theme, adopted by the Engineers Joint Council, reads:
“Engineers plan, design, produce, maintain, and oper-
ate. Scientists make it known. Engineers make it useful.”
Couched in science/engineering terms, the von Kármán
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 engi-
neering) 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 phys-
ical 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 evi-
dent, for example, in the Mars Pathfinder Mission of 1997.
282 scientists vs. engineers

When the Pathfinder landed and celebration erupted in the

control room, the participants were identified by commen-
tators as space scientists, whereas in fact they were virtu-
ally all engineers. When some communications problems
later erupted, television viewers were told that the engi-
neers 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 Hori-
zon 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 Secre-
tary 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 engi-
neer to cap the leaking well. In the end, it was not sci-
entific knowledge and achievement that ended the gush-
ing 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 two-
thirds of the rather long story on their report as submitted,
which did not support a ban. It was only after the consul-
tants 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 scien-
tists. 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
Seabees 283

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 suc-
cess 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 trans-
verse tunnel that connected the two diverging ones. See
Frontinus, The Water Supply of the City of Rome, trans-
lated 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 well-
known 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
284 Seven Modern Civil Engineering Wonders

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 num-
bers 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 Her-
itage 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 pro-
mote the identification by local sections of the society
of outstanding civil engineering works in their geograph-
ical 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
Seven Wonders of the World 285

nation’s seven most spectacular civil engineering achieve-

ments 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 chal-
lenge and represented a greater achievement, was dis-
placed 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), some-
thing 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 achieve-
ments 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 fol-
lowing lists are taken from Richard G. Weingardt, Jr.,
286 Shakespeare on engineers

“Colorado’s Seven Engineering Wonders,” Rocky Moun-

tain Construction, July 30, 1997, pp. 84–86.

Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

1. Hanging Gardens of Babylon

2. Pyramid of Khufu at Giza
3. Temple of Artemis (Diana) at Ephesus
4. Phidias’s Statue of Zeus at Olympia
5. The Colossus of Rhodes
6. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus
7. The Pharos (Lighthouse) at Alexandria

Seven Wonders of the Medieval World

1. Colosseum of Rome
2. Great Wall of China
3. Catacombs of Alexandria
4. Leaning Tower of Pisa
5. St. Sophia [Hagia Sophia] Mosque at Istanbul
6. Porcelain Tower at Nanking
7. Stonehenge, Salisbury, England

Seven Wonders of the Modern World

1. Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco

2. Empire State Building, New York City
3. Panama Canal, Panama
4. English Channel Tunnel, England/France
5. CN Tower, Toronto
6. Itaipu Dam, Brazil/Paraguay
7. 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
Shakespeare on engineers 287

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 bar-
rier 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 Shake-
speare’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 unin-
tended consequences of a design.
The word “enginer” also appears, with the psychologi-
cal meaning of “one who contrives devices, or schemes,” in
Troilus and Cressida (Act II, Scene 3, line 7), when Ther-
sites 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 fash-
ions 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 frustra-
tion and “Does tire the ingener.” Fortunately, engineers
engaged in calculations (rather than calculated language)
288 significant figures

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 accu-
racy. 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 numer-
ical quantities are combined, as in addition or multiplica-
tion, 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, show-
ing no more digits (implying no more accuracy) that the
least accurate multiplicand, 0.39. The advent of the digi-
tal 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 aero-
space 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 car-
toonist 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 origi-
nal location was in a circus tent next to a malodorous plas-
tics 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.
slang and euphemisms of engineers 289

Nowadays, the term Skunk Works can refer to any priv-

ileged 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 differen-
tial 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 engineer-
ing or electrical engineer, E.E., is commonly pronounced
“double E.” Abbreviations for other branches of engi-
neering, 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 long-
established 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 estab-
lished 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 com-
monly referred to as the IEE, which is pronounced “I-
double-E”; the American-based Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers, which bills itself as “the world’s
largest professional association for the advancement of
290 slang and euphemisms of engineers

technology,” is abbreviated IEEE, which is universally

pronounced “I-triple-E.”
engine house. This was once a not-uncommon nick-
name for the engineering building on a college or univer-
sity 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 col-
lege 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 col-
leagues 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 sep-
arate 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 Hand-
book 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
slide rule 291

slang see Pepper White, The Idea Factory (New York: Dut-
ton, 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 vari-
ety of slide rules, including circular and cylindrical ones
and many models with specialized scales, became available
to students and practicing engineers alike. A large seven-
foot-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-
dent named Victor Mayer Amédée Mannheim (1831–
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 18-
inch long by 4-inch diameter cylindrical slide rule dates
from the early 1880s, when Thacher patented it, and was
292 slide rule

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 manufac-
turer of slide rules in the United States. Until the intro-
duction and widespread adoption of the electronic pocket
calculator in the 1970s, K&E was known to most engi-
neers as the maker of excellent slide rules, many with spe-
cialized 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 engi-
neering 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 stu-
dent 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
slide rule 293

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 cen-
tury. In the early 1970s, with the introduction of electronic
calculators, at first often called electronic slide rules, man-
ual slide rules quickly became obsolete. By 1975, slide rules
were virtually extinct; however, many older engineers con-
tinued 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 elec-
tronic 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 Sci-
ence 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
294 slide rule

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 collect-
ing slide rules and dedicated to preserving the history of
the device.
The slide rule was once such an iconic image of engi-
neering that it was often employed whenever or wherever
someone wished to evoke the profession. Glenn L. Mar-
tin Hall, one of the engineering buildings on the campus

University of Maryland’s “slide rule building”

software engineering 295

of the University of Maryland, is known as the “slide-rule”

because the proportions of the long, low structure resem-
ble those of a slip stick, even down to its projecting por-
tions 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, pro-
duction, and testing of computer software has come to be
designated software engineering, but as the digital com-
puter 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 pro-
grams 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, pro-
fessional engineers did not believe that “software engi-
neers” should call themselves engineers at all. Within a
decade or so, most of these concerns seemed to have less-
ened, 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 coun-
try of his birth. He is associated with engineering through
296 “Sons of Martha”

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 build-
ing 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 tena-
cious, . . . the most admirable of men, carrying to the far
corners of the earth the banner of the most worthy of civi-
lizations.”
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 neces-
sary 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.
Sputnik 297

Some engineers have read Kipling’s poem as condemning

engineers to being second-class citizens relative to man-
agers, 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 writ-
ings, 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 east-
ern Canada, in Manitoba, and in the northern United
States by Harry Falconer McLean (1883–1961), a Cana-
dian 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, Rud-
yard 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 sub-
way 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.
298 “stealth profession”

The event took the United States by surprise, and led to an

intensification of the U.S. space effort, including the deter-
mination 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 paper-
back 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 invisi-
ble 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 Anony-
mous Profession,” American Scientist, July–August 1992,
pp. 318–321.
STEM. This is the acronym for Science, Technology, Engi-
neering, and Mathematics. Collectively, these fields of
study are considered “core technological underpinnings of
an advanced society” and the key to a nation’s achiev-
ing 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 aca-
demic work but also to providing a technologically literate
work force. Because engineering has traditionally been all
but absent from elementary-school curricula, and scarcely
“A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown” 299

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 writ-
ten 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, Califor-
nia 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 ini-
tial – Seim had none – E for Engineer, and the title, “The
Structural Analysis of Strapless Evening Gowns” (Califor-
nia 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 vari-
ables affecting this distribution and the determination of
the coefficient of distribution.” There is, naturally, not a
300 “A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown”

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 some-
what more extensively developed than the one on lipstick,
and certainly more graphically illustrated, appears to have
been widely circulated and copied, especially among con-
temporary student-engineering magazine staffs. Also, the
essay gave its title to and was reprinted in the anthol-
ogy 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 acknowl-
edges permission to reprint not from the California Engi-
neer but from a publication named The Indicator, suggest-
ing, 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 engi-
neers 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,
structures named for their engineers 301

when they were still overwhelmingly, if not as they were at

some schools exclusively, male.

structures named for their engineers. Among signi-

ficant 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 793-
foot cantilever center span over Coos Bay on the Ore-
gon 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 engi-
neer who died in 1962 at the age of thirty-four.
Among dams named for engineers is the O’Shaugh-
nessy 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
302 surveying camp

the name of an engineer was the Mulholland Dam, named

in honor of William Mulholland (1855–1935), chief engi-
neer of the Los Angeles water supply system. The struc-
ture was renamed the Hollywood Dam after the 1928 fail-
ure 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 Nether-
lands, 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 suc-
ceeded 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 traf-
fic in 1927. In 1953, a bronze bust of Holland was dedi-
cated 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 engi-

neering students were required to take a course in survey-
ing, 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
symbols of engineering 303

with surveying instruments. Evenings were spent calculat-

ing 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 sel-
dom 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 med-

ical 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 Asso-
ciation to the World Health Organization.
The legal profession is symbolized on many a court-
house façade 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.
304 symbols of engineering

The official seal of the Amer-

ican Society of Mechanical En-
gineers, adopted when the soci-
ety was incorporated, shows
the Earth being moved by a
lever operated by a disembod-
ied 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 gener-
ally 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. Engineer-
ing 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 con-
stitute a metaphor for what all engineers were capable
of doing – leveraging the laws of nature for the bene-
fit of mankind. They might not only move the Earth but
also move information all around it and remove undesir-
able 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.
symbols of engineering 305

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 major-
specific. 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 rep-
resenting 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 Ascle-
pius. The National Society of Professional Engineers,
whose members span more than one discipline, incorpo-
rates 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 engi-
neering, 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 repre-
sent 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 econ-
omy and aesthetics, by plate girders rather than a more
conventional deep truss. This meant that the deck’s resis-
tance 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 Gallop-
ing Gertie. After about four months, torsional oscillations
began when there was the dislocation of a cable at mid-
span. 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
Tacoma Narrows Bridge 307

Aftermath of Tacoma Narrows Bridge failure

the University of Washington’s Department of Civil Engi-

neering 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 asso-
ciated with a complex interaction between the wind and
the structure. This is a phenomenon by which the struc-
ture 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 struc-
ture even more. The elasticity or springiness of the struc-
ture resisted the twisting and, when it reached its greatest
angle, caused it to twist back in the other direction. The
308 Taylorism

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 Scien-
tist, 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, forthcom-
ing), chapter 9. See also Richard S. Hobbs, Catastrophe to
Triumph: Bridges of the Tacoma Narrows (Pullman: Wash-
ington 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 Ameri-

can 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 sci-
entific management came to be known as Taylorism. Fred-
erick Taylor was elected president of the American Soci-
ety 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
technical writing 309

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 Hop-
kins University Press, 1971). See also the biographies by
Frank B. Copley, Frederick W. Taylor: Father of Scien-
tific 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 experi-
ence 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 Engineer-
ing. 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 curricu-

lum 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 specif-
ically at engineering students in their third or fourth year,
310 technological literacy

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 twen-
tieth 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 con-
tains, 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 col-
leagues into what they seem to prefer to present as disem-
bodied statements, perhaps thinking that this gives them
more objectivity.

technological literacy. The following working defini-

tion of technological literacy has been proposed by Nan
A. Byers:

The ability to understand, intelligently discuss and appro-

priately use concepts, procedures and terminology funda-
mental 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.
technology 311
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 meaning-
fully participate in the evaluation and improvement
of existing technologies and the creation of new tech-
nologies.

From Nan A. Byers, “Technical Literacy Classes: The

State of the Art,” Journal of Engineering Education, Jan-
uary 1998, pp. 53–61.
technology. Technology is a much more general term
than engineering. Technology refers to the sum of prac-
tical knowledge, machines and devices, and codified pro-
cesses, whereas engineering implies a methodical approach
to solving problems and thus contributes to the develop-
ment 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 sci-
ences to the useful arts, “To embody, as far as possi-
ble, the various topics which belong to such an under-
taking, 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 appoint-
ment to the next. As we entered the stately administra-
tion building where my first scheduled meeting was to
312 technophobia

take place, my escort asked if I preferred to take the

stairs, which were straight ahead and numerous, or the ele-
vator 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 environ-
ment, but I explained that I had gotten in late the previous
night and had a long day ahead of me. The spirit was will-
ing, 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 engi-
neering 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? Per-
haps 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 univer-
sity. 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 hes-
itation, that he preferred to stay out of that building alto-
gether. Who knows what those civil engineers could do tin-
kering around with the entire structure?
ties of societies 313

I decided that my guide was just pulling my leg and try-

ing to be entertaining; however, the experience did make
me wonder about the kinds of things that can be irra-
tionally associated with engineers, engineering, and tech-
nology 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 irra-
tional 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 con-
cluded 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 profes-

sional societies have official neckties that their members
may purchase and wear to identify themselves as belong-
ing 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
314 ties of societies

people to purchase and wear articles of clothing and jew-

elry 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 com-
mon 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 Lec-
ture 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 Engi-
neers on nearby Birdcage Walk and purchase one of their
ties with no questions asked. The tie of the Royal Engi-
neers, on which appears a royal crest, has been readily
available in America through a popular mail-order haber-
dasher.
At the 2000 annual meeting of the Institution of Engi-
neers 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 qual-
ified 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 soci-
ety membership tends to be expressed more by wearing a
lapel pin that for basic membership levels is discreet. How-
ever, some pins marking their wearers as past presidents,
time and engineers 315

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 Construc-
tion 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 allot-
ted; however, it soon became clear to all workshop atten-
dees that time limits were being exceeded by scientists and
lawyers alike.
The first speakers were epidemiologists and toxicolo-
gists, and these scientists came armed with PowerPoint
316 time and engineers

presentations. Unfortunately, difficulties with the projec-

tion 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 with-
out 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 deliber-
ately 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 lim-
iting 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 con-
cisely 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
topping-out ceremony 317

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, sci-
entists, 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 “Tak-
ing 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
318 “The Two Cultures”

fall out of some mathematical equations expressing princi-

ples of physics governing the behavior of all bridges. This
is, in fact, far from the truth, and the design of an engineer-
ing structure, machine, or system begins typically not with
mathematical formulas or scientific principles but with the
conception and subsequent sketch of an idea, either liter-
ally 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 manip-
ulate 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 devel-
oped. 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 non-
technical segments of educated people. The phrase con-
notes a difficulty of communication between humanistic –
especially literary – and scientific – especially physical-
scientist – groups and, by extension, engineers. The term
was made popular by Charles Percy Snow (1905–1980), the
English novelist, scientist, and diplomat whose Rede Lec-
ture, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,”
“The Two Cultures” 319

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 dis-
ciplines. The phrase, and one might hope the intellectual
split it connotes, became less and less familiar to succeed-
ing generations of students and their professors. When in
1984 an article appearing in the Chronicle of Higher Edu-
cation 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 grad-
uate of Paris’s Ecole Polytechnique, and the French sys-
tem 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
U.S. presidents who were engineers 321

engineering projects, and the Corps of Engineers became

an important force in developing the young nation’s infra-
structure. See The Centennial History of the U.S. Military
Academy (Washington, D.C., 1904).
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been instrumen-
tal in shaping America’s waterways and harbors. See, for
example, Todd Shallat, Structures in the Stream: Water, Sci-
ence, 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 Washing-

ton (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 iden-
tified 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 exam-
ple, 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 activ-
ities, including international peace efforts and Habitat
for Humanity projects, in which he helped build houses
for poor people. Jimmy Carter also published a num-
ber of books, including a volume of his poetry, Always a
322 U.S. presidents who were engineers

Reckoning: And Other Poems

(New York: Times Books, 1995).
Herbert Hoover. The thirty-
first 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, engineer-
stands 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 Lay-
ton, 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 Uni-
versity Press, 1971).
“unknown unknown” 323

Hoover was also a serious and dedicated scholar, and

as a labor of love with his wife, Lou Henry Hoover, trans-
lated 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. Her-
bert 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 recog-
nize 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 begin-
ning 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 direc-
tion of a Board of Award, comprised of representatives
of the founder societies: the American Institute of Min-
ing, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers; the Ameri-
can 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 some-
times speak of the “unknown unknown,” or the “unk-
unk.” 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, catas-
trophic failure. The terminology stems from the designa-
tion of parameters that can affect a design as variables or
unknowns whose values are to be specified.
324 useless things

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 attrac-
tion. 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 cul-
ture, 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 mood-
altering 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 cock-
tail 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
useless things 325

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 seven-
ties retro films and television shows, the lava lamp expe-
rienced 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. Neverthe-
less, 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 nov-
elties 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 set-
ting, by both the sullen and the gregarious, by the tech-
nologically 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 cul-
tures” 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 pendu-
lum assemblies, and the like. Children’s toy stores offered
even more: tops, balls, Hula-Hoops, kites, jacks, marbles,
326 useless things

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 pres-
ence 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 ballis-
tics 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 unpre-
dictable behavior that, instead of being threatening, reas-
sures 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 build-
ing 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 pos-
sess 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.

327
 W
women in engineering. Because engineering in America
was, until the 1970s, almost exclusively a male profession,
the now-conspicuous and perhaps distracting male pro-
noun 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 Ameri-
can 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 Cor-
nell 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 fail-
ing 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 engineer-
ing graduate of the University of Colorado who advanced
to Associate Member in the society in 1927. See Engineer-
ing News-Record, March 17, 1927, p. 463.

328
women in engineering 329

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 Eliz-
abeth 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 mem-
bership 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 Kather-
ine 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
330 women in engineering

mid-1990s, approximately 17 percent of engineering stu-

dents 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 weav-
ing straw with silk or other kinds of thread, thereby mak-
ing 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, Chang-
ing Our World: True Stories of Women Engineers (Reston,
Va.: ASCE Press, 2006). Several women are also pro-
filed 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).
World’s Fairs and their structures 331

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 pro-
mote later ones. The first world’s fair, the Great Exhibi-
tion 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 struc-
tures, 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 iron-
and-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 pro-
posal by Joseph Paxton (1803–1865) was embraced and

Blotter sketch of design for Crystal Palace

332 World’s Fairs and their structures

accepted. His 1850-foot-long building, whose rapid erec-

tion was a model of construction management, was signifi-
cant 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 exten-
sive 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 exhi-
bition 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 stand-
ing 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.
World’s Fairs and their structures 333

Eiffel Tower. This innovative wrought-iron structure,

erected for the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889, was
conceived as a monument to commemorate the centen-
nial of the French Revolution. It originated with two engi-
neers, 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 imag-
inings 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 gen-
uine 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 max-
imum elevation) steel pleasure wheel with a capacity
of 2,160 people was conceived by the engineer George
334 World’s Fairs and their structures

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 Ameri-
can 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 – mov-
ing 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 Nan-
chang, which then was surpassed in 2008 by the 541-foot-
tall Singapore Flyer. China sought to regain the world title
with the 682-foot-high Beijing Great Wheel, whose com-
pletion 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
worry by engineers 335

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 oppor-
tunity for nations and corporations to show off their tech-
nological 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 struc-

ture 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 pre-
vents 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
336 writing by engineers

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 col-
lege, in many cases their experience as engineering stu-
dents 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 Tech-
nology 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 engi-
neering physics major at Cornell before leaving to join the
navy. He returned to Cornell after the service, but he pur-
sued 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 engi-
neers, while never writing outside the technical sphere,
took great pride in turning out reports, papers, and mono-
graphs 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
writing by engineers 337

as Writers: Growth of a Literature (New York: Van Nos-

trand, 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 commu-
nication so important that he added a section on engi-
neering reports to the third edition of his book, Engineer-
ing Mathematics, which was based on a series of lectures
he had delivered at Union College. In his book, Stein-
metz recognized three classes of reports: (1) the scientific
record of investigations, a generally lengthy and techni-
cally detailed document, “read by very few” and meant
“essentially for record and file”; (2) the general engineer-
ing 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, pur-
pose and solution.” See Charles P. Steinmetz, Engineer-
ing 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 organiza-
tions 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 writ-
ing 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
338 writing by engineers

place of the engineer in the community” and “manage-

ment topics.” The essays “are intended primarily as a test
of the candidate’s knowledge of and ability to communi-
cate 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,
the phrase “x marks the spot” is a cliché. However, the
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 sur-
rounded by other engineers, often working on the same or
a closely related project. There is little need to draw a dis-
tinction between technical and social talk – the latter tak-
ing 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
340 x

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 “higher-
order 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 per-
ception, 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 Amer-
ican Medical Association and the American Bar Associ-
ation, there is no single group that effectively represents
engineers.
Many a layperson is, however, quite aware of engineer-
ing and the benefits it brings to daily life. Roads, bridges,
buildings, automobiles, airplanes, clean water, electric
power, appliances, computers, cell phones, and a virtu-
ally endless list of modern conveniences are known to be
the works of engineers. That those engineers distinguish

341
342 Year of Engineering Success (YES)

themselves as civil, mechanical, aeronautical, environmen-

tal, 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, espe-
cially when there are cutbacks in the aerospace industry.
If engineering organizations desire more public recog-
nition 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 visibil-
ity. The AAES does not extend membership to individ-
uals, 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 force-
ful publicists and lobbyists, the engineering profession
might find itself making headway toward the recogni-
tion its societies seek. The societies themselves, however,
would have to take a back seat to the AEA, encour-
aging 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 qual-
ity. 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 nar-
rative. Pirsig, a biochemist by education who became disil-
lusioned with science and eventually came to be identified
as a philosopher, has been quoted as believing that “tradi-
tional 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 responsi-
bility, 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

American Civil Engineer,  C 1974 ASCE).
Original badge of AIEE, 1892 (from Engineers & Electrons,  C 1984
IEEE).
Redesigned AIEE badge, 1897 (from Engineers & Electrons,  C 1984
IEEE).
Institute of Radio Engineers badge (from Engineers & Electrons, 
C 1984
IEEE).
IEEE badge, dating from 1963 (from Engineers & Electrons,  C 1984
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 collec-
tion).
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 collec-
tion).
keys: Keys and badges on a chain (from author’s collection).

344
List of Illustrations and Credits 345

Marchant calculator: Marchant electromechanical calculator (from

author’s collection).
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 Nas-
myth, 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 collec-
tion).
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 (cour-
tesy 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
346
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
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, François-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 Génie, 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
École des Mines, 126
École des Ponts et Chaussees, 127
École des Travaux Public, 126
École Nationale des Ponts et
Chaussees, 126
École Polytechnique, 126, 127
Écoles d’Arts et Métiers, 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
Kármán, Theodore von, 111, 245,
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
Amédée, 291
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