LOUIS XIV LOVED to have things in order.
As the Sun King of France, he wrote that “good order makes us look assured, and it seems enough to look brave.” He built his entire artillery around this principle. But by 1715—at the end of one of the longest regimes in European history and some of its most ruinous wars—Louis XIV’s orderly system of defense had become a hodgepodge of improvised work-arounds. His successor, Louis XV, issued a royal ordinance in 1732 that put his lieutenant general, Florent-Jean de Vallière, to work.
Vallière’s assignment was to reorganize the artillery, and he was an absolutist. He wanted to create “a system of control: rationality made to serve despotism,” as historian Ken Alder writes. Vallière’s plans produced a level of centralization previously unimaginable in the French army. Among the impressive results of this exercise were pieces like the Canon de 24—long, thick-cast, bronze-bodied, 24-pound guns that, along with other munitions, were standardized and beautifully ornamented. These guns had superior ranges and were very effective.
But the cannons had one major drawback. Although they excelled at coastal and fortress defense, as well as during siege fights, they fared poorly in offensive warfare. The Vallière cannons were unwieldy and hard to move. Maneuvering them during an open field battle invited a logistical disaster.
In the 1600s, according to one military historian, it took up to twenty horses and an artillery crew of thirty-five men to drag the barrel of a 34-pounder. Even Vallière’s 4-pound guns spanned 88 inches and weighed on the order of 1,150 pounds—approximately 288 times the weight of the cannonball. The French finally realized that their siege equipment was useful only against static targets. The tactical choices for that era needed to be redefined.
Agility was crucial; swiftness, essential. They needed a new system.
AS A CHILD, Jean-Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval was curious about instruments. Born in 1715 into a family of lawyers, he later went to an artillery school to learn ballistics engineering. At seventeen, he volunteered for the French army. In 1748, Gribeauval modified the design of a naval carriage unit to potentially transport guns for offensive operations. In 1749 he was promoted to captain. Later that year, Vallière rejected Gribeauval’s proposal for mass-producing his gun carriage units, which may have made it easier to move the bulky cannons.
Gribeauval was frustrated. He respected the rule-bound order of the Vallière cannons but felt they were mired in an artisanal mode of production. There was something even more demoralizing for Gribeauval: he lacked authority within the corps. His ideas carried no influence. With jealousy and rivalry the norms of the day, military promotions occurred at a sluggish pace. Overall, he had little incentive to stay in his position.
The French and Prussians had been allies since 1741, but the 1756 signing of the first Treaty of Versailles between France and Austria—two staunch rivals—infuriated Prussia. The Franco-Prussian relationship corroded. Prussia quickly formed an alliance with Great Britain and attacked France and its partners—Austria, Bavaria, Russia, Saxony, and Sweden—thus kindling the Seven Years’ War, what Winston Churchill in later years referred to as “the first world war.”
After the war began, Austria realized that it desperately needed good military engineers; its armies had an overhang of poorly trained technical officers who went up the ranks through favoritism, not merit. Gribeauval saw an opportunity and got himself lent to Austria as a wartime ally. He intuitively knew that lightweight cannons were critical for offensive warfare, something that the Vallière system sorely lacked compared to the mobile armies of Prussia. Gribeauval employed to great technical success some of his redesigned guns and his much-improved 1748 naval carriage unit.
Following this demonstration, Gribeauval steadily gained influence in the Austrian army. His eyes were now set on reforming the Austrian manufacturing process and taking it beyond artisanship. He inspired his superiors by noting that Austria had massive advantages over the French cannons. “An enlightened man without passion who understood the [relevant] details and had sufficient credit to cut straight to the truth, would find in these two artilleries the means to compose a single one which would win almost every battle in the field,” Gribeauval wrote. “But ignorance, vanity, and jealousy always intervene; it is the devil’s work and cannot be changed as easily as a suit of clothes, it costs too much and one runs a great danger if one is not sure of success.”
In 1762, at the peak of the Seven Years’ War, Gribeauval made his move. During the siege of Schweidnitz, he commanded a handful of troops against a massive Prussian army unit. Gribeauval held out against the Prussians for sixty-three days in one of the bloodiest battles of that time, consuming about three thousand lives. Even his enemy, Frederick the Great, was impressed by Gribeauval’s methods. In the end, though, the Prussians won. Gribeauval was arrested but released at the end of the Seven Years’ War.
Gribeauval was now an “authentic military hero.” The French, having observed Gribeauval’s rise, now offered him authority and a lucrative return package. In an audacious first step, Gribeauval dethroned Vallière’s system—which in his mind had contributed to the French defeat. As a result, a great rivalry rose within the corps. Gribeauval and Vallière were embroiled in “the ‘Star Wars’ dispute” of the day, writes Alder, on “a public debate over the offensive and defensive capabilities of the nation and effectiveness of high-tech gadgetry.” It was a duel between the “ancients” and the “moderns.”
Gribeauval began to hone the design of the French cannons. He was obsessed with precision and laid out specifications that could be verified to within one-thousandth of an inch—less than the thickness of a single sheet of paper. Using skilled metallurgists and sophisticated boring machinery, he added elevation screws that enabled precise adjustments offering highly effective aiming. The addition of rear sights to better position the guns, and leather straps to pull them, turned out to be of tremendous help to the soldiers during combat operations. Gribeauval introduced larger wheels for the guns so that they could tread easily on rough terrains, and he replaced wooden axles with cast iron for easy maintenance and repairs. These were small but critical adjustments that improved the cannons’ usability. They also defined Gribeauval’s tactics.
Vallière’s cannons had to be returned to gunsmiths for maintenance and troubleshooting. In contrast, Gribeauval’s designs could be readily dismantled and reconfigured. One part of the cannon could be used to replace a different part with the same specification. This interchangeability was possible because of the principles of “parameter variation,” in which the various components are tested individually while others are kept constant, similar to how algebraic equations are solved. The “combination of factors”—which Gribeauval began to glean from his artillery examiner Pierre-Simon Laplace, a mathematical genius—was experimentally applied to maximize output, Alder explains.
In this process, Gribeauval had created a technology development platform for the future. His strategy was to achieve what no one had been able to in the past: high efficiency, uniformity, and exchangeability. Product construction tables were developed, manufacturing standards were introduced, and protocols were established for easy and fast servicing of the guns. This systematic process led to the development of lightweight cannons and made the Gribeauval system the most effective artillery in Europe.
This was a radical idea in an era of siege warfare. “The most significant innovation” with Gribeauval’s system was “that it was indeed a system: a thorough synthesis of organization, technology, material, and tactics,” writes historian Howard Rosen. “Every aspect of the system, from the harnessing of the horses to the selection and organization of personnel, embodied a single functional concept. Utility was its principle, mobility was its goal.”
None of these relied on the classical rules of the day.
THE CORE OF the engineering mind-set is what I call modular systems thinking. It’s not a singular talent, but a mélange of techniques and principles. Systems-level thinking is more than just being systematic; rather, it’s about the understanding that in the ebb and flow of life, nothing is stationary and everything is linked. The relationships among the modules of a system give rise to a whole that cannot be understood by analyzing its constituent parts.
A specific technique in modular systems thinking, for example, includes a functional blend of deconstructionism (breaking down a larger system into its modules) and reconstructionism (putting those modules back together). The focus is on identifying the strong and weak links—how the modules work, don’t work, or could potentially work—and applying this knowledge to engineer useful outcomes. A related design concept, exploited especially by software engineers, is stepwise refinement. Every successive change that engineers make to a product or service expressly contributes to a better result or the development of alternative solutions. Even within this framework of product development, there’s a top-down design strategy—“divide and conquer”—in which each subtask is separately attacked in a progression toward achieving the final objective. The opposite of this approach is a bottom-up design in which the modules are recomposed.
Ruth David, a national security expert and former deputy director for science and technology at the Central Intelligence Agency, frames the issue this way: “Engineering is synonymous not only to systems thinking but also systems building. It’s the ability to look at a problem in different ways. One not only has to understand the pieces and their interdependencies, but also really understand the totality and what it means.” It’s one of the reasons the engineering mind-set is portable across many sectors of society and effective both for individuals and for groups.
Modular systems thinking varies with contexts because there is no widely accepted “engineering method.” Engineering Dubai’s Burj Khalifa is different from coding the Microsoft Office Suite. Whether used to conduct wind tunnel tests on World Cup soccer balls or to create a missile capable of hitting another missile midflight, engineering works in various ways. Even within a specific industry, techniques can differ. Engineering an artifact like a turbofan engine is different from assembling a megasystem like an aircraft, and by extension, a system of systems, such as the air traffic network.
With the changing realities around us, the nature of engineering is also changing. In addition to being the “hardware of culture,” it’s reliably an engine for economic growth. In the United States, for instance, recent estimates suggest that less than 4 percent of the total population are engineers who disproportionately help create jobs for the remainder. Certain engineering innovations do supplant human jobs, but they routinely help generate new opportunities and pathways for development.
THE ENGINEERING MIND-SET has three essential properties.
The first is the ability to “see” structure where there’s none. From haikus to high-rise buildings, our world relies on structures. Just as a talented composer “hears” a sound before it’s put down on a score, a good engineer is able to visualize—and produce—structures through a combination of rules, models, and instincts. The engineering mind gravitates to the piece of the iceberg underneath the water rather than its surface. It’s not only about what one sees; it’s also about the unseen.
A structured systems-level thinking process would consider how the elements of the system are linked in logic, in time, in sequence, and in function—and under what conditions they work and don’t work. A historian might apply this sort of structural logic decades after something has occurred, but an engineer needs to do this preemptively, whether with the finest details or top-level abstractions. This is one of the main reasons why engineers build models: so that they can have structured conversations based in reality. Critically, envisioning a structure involves having the wisdom to know when a structure is valuable, and when it isn’t.
As can be seen from the works of Vallière and Gribeauval, military systems are renowned for their structured approach to innovation. Consider, for example, the following catechism by George Heilmeier—a former director of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), who also engineered the liquid crystal displays (LCDs) that are part of modern-day visual technologies. His approach to innovation is to employ a checklist-like template suitable for a project with well-defined goals and customers.
What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon.
How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice?
What’s new in your approach and why do you think it will be successful?
Who cares? If you’re successful, what difference will it make?
What are the risks and the payoffs?
How much will it cost? How long will it take?
What are the midterm and final “exams” to check for success?
At a basic level, this type of structure helps ask the right questions in a logical way.
The second attribute of the engineering mind-set is the adeptness at designing under constraints. Any real-world scenario has constraints that make or break our performance potential. Given the innately practical nature of engineering, the pressures on it are far greater compared to other professions. Constraints—whether natural or human-made—don’t permit engineers to wait until all phenomena are fully understood and explained. Engineers are expected to produce the best possible results under the given conditions. Even if there are no constraints, good engineers know how to apply constraints to help achieve their goals. Time constraints on engineers fuel creativity and resourcefulness. Financial constraints and the blatant physical constraints hinging on the laws of nature are also common, coupled with an unpredictable constraint—namely, human behavior.
“Imagine if each new version of the Macintosh Operating System, or of Windows, was in fact a completely new operating system that began from scratch. It would bring personal computing to a halt,” Olivier de Weck and his fellow researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology point out. Engineers often augment their software products, incrementally addressing customer preferences and business necessities—which are nothing but constraints. “Changes that look easy at first frequently necessitate other changes, which in turn cause more change. . . . You have to find a way to keep the old thing going while creating something new.” The pressures are endless.
The third attribute of the engineering mind-set involves trade-offs—the ability to make considered judgments about solutions and alternatives. Engineers make design priorities and allocate resources by ferreting out the weak goals among stronger ones. For an airplane design, a typical trade-off could be to balance the demands of cost, weight, wingspan, and lavatory dimensions within the constraints of the given performance specifications. This type of selection pressure even trickles down to the question of whether passengers like the airplane they’re flying in. If constraints are like tightrope walking, then trade-offs are inescapable tugs-of-war among what’s available, what’s possible, what’s desirable, and what the limits are.
Science, philosophy, and religion may well be in the business of pursuing truth as it looks to them, but engineering is at the center of producing utility under constraints. Structure, constraints, and trade-offs are the one-two-three punch of the engineering mind-set. They are to an engineer as time, tempo, and rhythm are to a musician.
SEPTEMBER 12, 1962. “If I were to say, my fellow citizens,” President Kennedy told a gathering at Houston’s Rice Stadium on a warm day,
that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun . . . and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out—then we must be bold.
The most crucial part of Kennedy’s vision was not the technical ambition but the assertion “before this decade is out.” This time pressure forced the project engineers to accomplish the objective. The Apollo 11 mission successfully landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, ahead of the actual deadline. The process leading up to the lunar landing created several valuable by-products, including new materials like carbon fiber and advanced navigation systems that are now used by commercial airlines. Though engineering is what put humans on the moon and brought them back safely, the whole effort is often called rocket “science.”
If the core of science is discovery, then the essence of engineering is creation. Going back to the very roots of human history, as a civilization we were tool builders before we were discoverers. In fact, many tools of engineering have enhanced our capabilities to produce better science. Scientists now increasingly rely on engineering to obtain unimaginable amounts of data and results in order to propose, test, or advance their theories. Engineering does rely on natural laws and scientific evidence, but it also helps generate new bodies of scientific knowledge. Airplanes flew before a formal study of aeronautics became a reality. Steam engines gave birth to the science of thermodynamics. Further, the industrial revolution robustly expanded avenues available to scientific inquiry. According to Tom Peters, a professor at Lehigh University, engineers even “gladly ‘creatively misinterpret’ scientific method or results if that helps get the job done.”
History shows that “most of the Ages are characterized by engineering,” reminds Dan Mote, president of the National Academy of Engineering. “The Stone Age . . . was named after chipping rocks by hand to create tools; the Bronze Age was named for the smelting of tin and copper to cast weapons, tools, and artifacts; the Iron Age was named after hammering and bending iron to create farming implements and tools; and the Silicon Age reflects the material foundation for electronics manufacturing,” Mote says. “OK, the Ice Age was not a human creation—as a natural phenomenon it belongs to science.”
Scholars have gone on to argue that engineering occupies a separate realm of knowledge and practice—one that’s far more secure and reliable than other intellectual traditions rooted in philosophy—and therefore deserves distinct respect. Since Plato, a Western intellectual bias emphasizing the superiority of “pure” knowledge has downplayed engineering. It’s also unfortunate that “science and technology” are almost always discussed together without mention of engineering, even though technology is an outcome of both science and engineering. “Science is a tool of engineering, and as no one claims that the chisel creates the sculpture, so no one should claim that science makes the rocket,” writes engineering historian Henry Petroski. “Relying on nothing but scientific knowledge to produce an engineering solution is to invite frustration at best and failure at worst.”
George Whitesides, an eclectic Harvard chemist-turned-engineer, offers another useful comparison between science and engineering. If science is interested in “tracing a mechanistic pathway from ions and neurotransmitters to the Brahms Requiem,” then engineering is focused on providing “practical solutions to sequester unlimited amounts of carbon dioxide, and providing unlimited power and clean water with a guaranteed 30 percent after-tax return on investment, using equipment not readily available in Namibia.” Knowledge for the sake of knowledge has its role, but practical reality shapes social progress.
Neuroscientist Stuart Firestein likens the scientific process to finding a black cat in a dark room—especially when there’s no cat. This is different from the image people typically have of scientists: “patiently piecing together a giant puzzle.” Scientific knowledge goes hand in hand with ignorance. Science is driven by a continuous “communal gap in knowledge,” as Firestein frames it. The knowledge is not always useful and can’t “be used to make a prediction or statement about some thing or event. This is knowledgeable ignorance, perceptive ignorance, insightful ignorance,” he adds. “It’s not facts and rules. It’s black cats in dark rooms.”
Mathematician Andrew Wiles, quoted in Firestein’s book Ignorance: How It Drives Science, amplifies this view: “It’s groping and probing and poking, and some bumbling and bungling, and then a switch is discovered, often by accident, and the light is lit, and everyone says ‘Oh, wow, so that’s how it looks,’ and then it’s off into the next dark room, looking for the next mysterious black feline.”
The value of science, we’ve been taught, resides in its objectivity. Ideally, science eschews planned outcomes. Engineering frequently runs contrary to this idea: at its finest, it’s allied with subjectivity. Yet objectivity can be an especially helpful principle for engineers when trying to prevent or analyze failures. In a real, symbiotic way, science and engineering help each other to uncover their inconsistencies and shortcomings. Unlike the blueprint of the Brooklyn Bridge, for science there is no final draft of knowledge. Our hypotheses can take us in any direction.
BECAUSE I WAS BORN in a lower-middle-class, orthodox Hindu Brahmin family in rural Tamil Nadu, a coastal state in southern India, my pathway to engineering emerged from a sink-or-swim circumstance. It wasn’t a chemistry set—my parents couldn’t afford it—that sparked my interest in science, nor did I have a congenital instinct to build Lego robots. Perhaps my earliest technical curiosities blossomed from watching coal-fired steam engines in the early 1980s—thanks to my father, who took me on his morning bicycle rides to the local railway station.
As far as I can remember, I wasn’t even particularly good in mathematics. Before I took my exams, I was sure to visit a temple of Ganesha—the elephant god—to pray for good grades. My paternal grandfather was a farmer during the day, and a priest at dawn and dusk. During our early years, my younger brother and I were his assistants in our village temple near Tiruvannamalai—a grouping of hills considered to be older than the Himalayas. We were mesmerized by our grandfather’s soulful Sanskrit mantras during his morning and evening prayers. Our bedtime treats were his stories from the ancient epics Ramayana and Mahabharata as we fell asleep on straw mats.
Throughout my education in India, the vigorous environment drove my aspirations. Sharp focus, fewer distractions, and first-rate academic performance were the most desired outcomes for my schools. In essence, my education was on an assembly line. During my high school years, I mused over what else I might be interested in; degrees in medicine, commerce, and engineering were especially prized in my local culture. I’d soak my feet in the waves of the Bay of Bengal at the Madras marina hoping for inspiration. My father—a chemist-turned-accountant—and my stay-at-home mother encouraged me to pursue any field that held my interest.
The brutal competition at school didn’t give me—or my brother and our friends—the time or liberty to explore, experiment, and “fall in love” with something. Frankly, my entry into engineering was like an arranged marriage—a pragmatic route for success where I was trained. I chose to major in instrumentation and control systems engineering—back then a fresh, relatively uncrowded, and marvelously challenging degree program offered by the University of Madras. My eventual interests in developing biomedical technologies, coupled with a generous scholarship, flew me to a graduate school in New York—a month before September 11, 2001.
Over time, I realized engineering was a force larger than the mathematical models I wrestled with, more meaningful than the electronic circuits I designed, more precise than the sensors and devices I tested, more insightful than the software codes I debugged, and far more breathtaking than the vapid technical jargon could ever convey. What had started out in me as a synthetic fascination gradually matured into an organic, renewing love for engineering.
GRIBEAUVAL’S TOOLS were also developed within the triad of structure, constraints, and trade-offs. The resulting creations offered a blueprint for precision and large-scale manufacturing that has since affected the far reaches of our society. Moreover, these ideas helped initiate the age of mass production, which then spurred on the spread of modern engineering.
With structure, Gribeauval brought a superior sense of purpose to cannons and their use. He guided the mixing and matching of relevant parts, capitalizing on the practice of interchangeable design, which remains an active approach in the world of engineering. One of the technical aspects underlying interchangeability is the practice of “functional binding.” The modules weren’t a mishmash bricolage, but a strategically interconnected system that had to fulfill a single function. With this strategy, errors were quickly identified, tested, fixed, and retested—a practice that the future assembly line technology would go on to perfect with precision. The cannons had to perform with accuracy and durability. In the centuries preceding sophisticated modeling and simulation software, engineers like Gribeauval relied on their calculations and tacit know-how to arrive at stable solutions. They usually overengineered temples, bridges, castles, and other systems to ensure that they wouldn’t fail.
Constraints were constant companions to Gribeauval. The stakes were monumental—there was a war to be won—and therefore his solutions had to work. For natural philosophers like Galileo and Newton, the study of ballistics had been what Ken Alder calls a “mathematical gymnasium,” located purely in the confines of their intellect. Mathematics, for them, was “a form of ‘descriptionism,’ a way to quantify how changes in certain measurable parameters affected some other relevant parameter,” explains Alder. “Mathematics, more often than not, enabled engineers to evade real causal explanation.” Unlike others, who didn’t necessarily have to apply their knowledge to concrete use, Gribeauval had to overcome the real difficulties of wind and air resistance over the course of improving his cannons’ projectiles. He capitalized on the method of parameter variation—by deconstructing and reconstructing the cannon modules—to assess the strengths and weaknesses in his manufacturing system and how he could improve the cannons’ performance. His guns needed to fire accurately and as expected. That’s how they fulfilled their purpose.
Finally, circumstances required Gribeauval to make design choices. Was achieving improved maneuverability more important than designing cannons that fired with increased force? Could excessive weight be reduced without increasing the gun’s failure rates? As one design feature, Gribeauval eliminated superfluous decorative ornamentations on the cannons. Agility trumped cosmetics. His judicious trade-offs, coupled with continued experimentation on parameter variation, dramatically improved the ability to produce and transport better artillery.
When serving the Austrian army, Gribeauval was astonished by the prevailing custom of flagrant favoritism in the hiring and promotion of incompetent technical officers. Good engineers really suffered. He wrote,
[Engineers] are treated in a way that is harsh and even indecent. . . . When an officer, no matter how junior, is dispatched on some mission, he invariably takes a couple of engineers with him to see to the hard and uncongenial parts of the task; they load the blame on them [if] anything goes wrong, but take the credit if [it] turns out well. Just look at the state of the engineers . . . you will see that most of them have lost their horses and money, and that they are worn by exhaustion and maltreatment.
To circumvent the problem, Gribeauval helped codify a merit-based training system for his labor force, helping to create an era of what Alder calls “enlightenment engineering.” Geometry, technical drawing, and analytical calculus were used to assess principal competencies, and then became standard courses in artillery schools and military academies. Centuries later, these courses remain at the heart of engineering education. In transforming his technical conscience into applied realities, Gribeauval helped maximize defense innovations, create jobs, proliferate new industries, and advance national security. After all, as the saying goes, “In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.”
