Introduction

Simply look around you, wherever you happen to be sitting right now, and chances are that you’re surrounded by engineered objects. If you are sitting in a normal office chair, engineers played a big role in its creation. Engineers helped in the design and manufacture of the fabric on the chair, the foam underneath the fabric, the framework that holds the foam and fabric together, the pieces of plastic that make up the armrests, the mechanisms that allow the chair to go up and down and tilt forward and backward, the base of the chair, and the wheels that let it roll around.

You may be sitting in a room where the paint on the wall is engineered, as is the wallboard underneath the paint. The gypsum in the wallboard may come from a power plant, where one engineer designed a scrubber to extract sulfur from the smokestack by turning that sulfur into gypsum, and then another engineer designed the factory that took the gypsum and turned it into wallboard. In your room, chances are that the air you are breathing has been cleaned by an engineered filter attached to an engineered HVAC system, which is controlled by an engineered thermostat so that the temperature is always right. The engineered fan in the HVAC unit gets its power from the engineered power grid, which connects back to the engineered power plant that may have produced the gypsum.

Sitting nearby you may have a number of electronic devices, all created by a wide variety of engineers. For example, you may have a smart phone or tablet on the table, a nice HDTV on the wall, and a digital clock that sets itself using a radio station in Colorado. Electrical engineers, software engineers, industrial engineers, and mechanical engineers make those kinds of things possible.

Stepping outside, you see a road populated with dozens of complex automobiles, perhaps with a remarkably safe passenger jet flying overhead at 550 mph (885 kph). Under the road are sewer pipes, water mains, storm water drains, telephone and cable TV wires, and gas pipelines. All these are engineered, too.

And then there are the radio waves. Completely invisible to you, you are surrounded by thousands of different radio signals, all made possible by engineers. Every AM radio station, FM radio station, and television station in your area is flowing past you right now in the form of radio waves on different frequencies. Every cell phone in your area is in constant communication with its local tower. A smart phone typically has multiple radios for voice calls, along with a separate radio system for Wi-Fi and another for Bluetooth. Every other Wi-Fi hotspot and Bluetooth device in the nearby area is bathing you in radio waves, as is every tablet, laptop, and desktop computer using Wi-Fi. Then there are hundreds of satellites overhead transmitting GPS signals, satellite TV signals, Iridium phone signals, weather satellite signals, and so on. Plus there are many more radios out there: fire and police radios, water meter radios, temperature and rainwater sensor radios, remote controls for the garage door opener and the key fob that unlocks the car door. It just boggles the mind if you think about it. Not one bit of this would be possible without engineers who bring it all to life, along with a regulatory structure that keeps all of the radio signals from interfering with each other.

Engineers are an amazing group of people who make our modern world possible. In the United States there are about two million engineers practicing their craft, for the most part invisibly and without much fanfare. But if we didn’t have these engineers, we would be back in the Stone Age.

Here we are, about to embark on a fascinating journey together into the world of engineering. It might be helpful to answer the question: what, exactly, is engineering? A good starting point would be the Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, which defines engineering in this way: “the art or science of making practical application of the knowledge of pure sciences, as physics or chemistry, as in the construction of engines, bridges, buildings, mines, ships, and chemical plants.”

Here is another definition, from Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary: “the application of science and mathematics by which the properties of matter and the sources of energy in nature are made useful to people.”

Another good way to understand engineering is to think about all the engineering disciplines that you find in industry, or that you find being taught at a large engineering university. For example, if we look at the College of Engineering at a big school like North Carolina State University, we find these departments:

Biological and Agricultural Engineering (BAE)

Biomedical Engineering (BME)

Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE)

Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering (CCEE)

Computer Science (CSC)

Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE)

Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE)

Forest Biomaterials (FB)

Integrated Manufacturing Systems Engineering Institute (IMSEI)

Materials Science and Engineering (MSE)

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE)

Nuclear Engineering (NE)

Operations Research (OR)

Textile Engineering, Chemistry and Science (TECS)

There are also some specialized areas. For example, petroleum engineers deal with oil drilling and refining. Nanoengineers work in the emerging area of nanotechnology. And so on.

As you read these definitions and the list of disciplines, you start to form a mental image of what engineers do for society. Civil engineers who design bridges, for example, have been trained to understand the mathematics, software tools, best practices, and regulations having to do with the design and construction of safe, reliable, long-lasting bridges. We see their work all around us. The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco is considered to be an engineering masterpiece, as is the Millau Viaduct in France. Occasionally engineers get it completely wrong, however, as was the case with the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. From these mistakes, engineers learn valuable lessons that they codify and apply to all future bridge projects. Engineering is a profession where the members constantly communicate with and learn from each other so that technology advances.

Some engineered objects can be extremely simple. For example, the cast aluminum wheel of an automobile is a single piece that has been engineered to handle the load of a car along with all the forces from cornering, hard braking, and potholes. Others can be quite complex, like the car itself, or an airplane, made up of thousands of different parts that all work together reliably. There are also engineered systems, like the antilock braking system, or the airbag system, made up of different pieces that connect together to accomplish a task or solve a problem.

Then there are larger engineered systems that we refer to as architectures. Computer engineers frequently use the term “computer architecture” to denote the many parts and their relationships to each other. Or think about the Apollo moon missions. Millions of people and millions of components came together to create an architecture for the mission, with many related parts: the Saturn V rocket, the Command and Service Module, the Lunar Excursion Module, the space suits, the moon rover, and everything else. If any of those parts did not work properly, the whole mission could fail and the lives of the astronauts would hang in the balance, as was seen in Apollo 13. Similarly, the power grid has an architecture that includes power plants, transmission networks, and distribution networks. The cell phone system has its own architecture consisting of towers, handsets, and a complex signaling protocol that ties them together.

Another key role played by engineers is the reduction of costs through mass production, along with the act of engineering out unneeded materials, time, and processes. A great example of this is the clothing we wear. It used to be that people did every bit of the work to produce clothing. People planted cotton, hoed the plants, harvested the bolls, and then picked the seeds out of the fibers, all by hand. Then they cleaned the cotton, dyed it, carded it, spun it, wove it on a hand loom, and sewed the cloth together with a needle and thread. Clothing was expensive because each article represented hundreds of hours of manual labor. Today engineers have mechanized nearly every part of the process, along with making a wide variety of synthetic fibers available, to the point where clothing is very affordable. The same has happened with every type of product, so that we can now all afford to carry around small computers called smart phones, with high-definition (HD) screens and powerful cameras connected to a worldwide network filled with millions of servers that offer the answers to nearly any question a person might have. None of this would have ever happened without engineers.

What is the difference between a scientist and an engineer? Scientists are charged with understanding how the universe works. They do research and answer fundamental questions about nature. For example, a scientist may discover that curved glass bends light, and then come up with mathematical equations to characterize the bending. From that scientific discovery we get a lens. A scientist or inventor might then put lenses together to create an optical device like a microscope or telescope. But eventually it is time to take the next step. If you want to create a million telescopes at an affordable price, or you want to create a giant telescope weighing many tons and you need it to automatically rotate very smoothly to track a star as the earth rotates, this is when the engineers take over.

Scientists discovered that the right amount of carbon in iron creates steel. Engineers use the steel to build bridges, skyscrapers, cars, supertankers. When steel is too heavy or too weak, engineers have many other materials they can use: aluminum, titanium, carbon fiber, Kevlar, plastics, and so on.

You will often hear someone exclaim, “this is beautifully engineered” or “that’s a really well-engineered piece of equipment!” Examples are myriad, including the SR-71, the Ariel Atom, or the Parthenon. But it could be something far simpler, like the shifting mechanism in a car’s transmission or even a perfectly weighted and silky-smooth control knob. The exclamation happens when engineers achieve a high level of elegance in their designs, or an impressive level of reuse and parsimony, or a kind of refinement that takes the user’s breath away on first encounter, or a perfect match between form and function. We see beauty in engineering, just like we do in art and nature.

In all of these different ways, engineers move society forward. They create new technologies that make our lives better. They lower costs so more people can participate. They build things that amaze us, and make us proud to be human beings. They create things on which our modern lives depend.