How do they make stuff?

[Spindrift]

Aliens.

/end thread

 

[catsmate]

They were, as some point.
I am not sure when, 50-100 years ago?

.
We don't have memorable names.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel..." built dockyards, the Great Western Railway, a series of steamships including the first propeller-driven transatlantic steamship and numerous important bridges and tunnels."
Buffy Smith.. meh!

Brunel and Telford came to mind, Stephenson too.

I'd personally put him in the top 5 British architects of all time, too. Absolute genius.

Agreed.

 

[jj]

.
We don't have memorable names.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel..." built dockyards, the Great Western Railway, a series of steamships including the first propeller-driven transatlantic steamship and numerous important bridges and tunnels."
Buffy Smith.. meh!

Sir Thomas Bouch,


But serious, Brunel and others lived in an era when the way to do stuff like this was being discovered, they were as much researchers as engineers. And my point of mentioning Bouch is that they WERE learning, and that people who actually were pretty smart made big mistakes.

Nowdays, big mistakes are most often attributed to other things.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I want to know how they make the invisibility cloaks for the interstellar spacecraft that come for my cousin every few weeks. I'd also like to ask the pilots to please keep his dumb ass as Earth already has enough idiots.

 

[Toke]

Sure it is easier to become famous for a new sewer system if you are the first one to put a egg on it's tip.

Still it is not as if there is a lack of new stuff build.

 

[marplots]

Engineers are simpletons when it comes to "how are things made?" If you want to tackle a tough one, figure out how babies are made. In detail.

 

[MikeG]

Brunel and Telford came to mind, Stephenson too.

It niggles me that Stephenson gets mentioned so often, and Richard Trevithic never gets mentioned at all, despite doing everything claimed on behalf of Stephenson, only earlier. Let's not forget Watt, too..........although he must be remembered for a great business plan and a great lawyer as well as for his fantastic engineering.

 

[Didymus]

Apart from Elon Musk and, possibly, Steve Jobs, who is the most recent engineer who became a household name? Werner von Braun is the nearest I could come up with.

 

[ctamblyn]

Apart from Elon Musk and, possibly, Steve Jobs, who is the most recent engineer who became a household name? Werner von Braun is the nearest I could come up with.

James Dyson?

ETA: Maybe Sir Clive Sinclair, too, back in the 1980s.

 

[crescent]

"Rain" - how is "rain" made?

People from other parts of the world come to the desert where I live and try to convince me that this thing called "rain" exists. I don't believe them. It never seems to happen, not that I ever get to see with my own eyes. Water is heavy, very heavy. How does it get way up in the sky? How does it stay there? How gullible do they think I am?

Have I been living in the desert too long?

 

[Denver]

Skyscrapers still blow me away. It's not hard to see logic in a building four, five, maybe ten stories tall. But fifty floors? A hundred floors? And more!? The physics involved seems just amazing to not only keep these things from just falling over, but allowing them to be full of people who trust them to stay up.

I don't think I ever got a card castle stable above 8 layers.

 

[I Ratant]

Trust.
It's built on trust.
The last thing like that worked, so the next one will... even if it's larger or taller or... Trust the engineer!

 

[Dr. Keith]

When I was an engineer I loved to figure out new things to the most minute detail. I loved getting right down into the measurements and modeling things to the fourth significant figure when two would have worked.

Then I learned something completely debilitating to my career: the big picture is more fun than the details, in fact there are typically a dozen different ways to carry out the details.

Once I realized a path to a class of solutions I lost interest. This problem is solvable and those who are interested can solve it.

The flip side is that I also realized for each class of problems there were people who were excessively interested. I just wasn't going to be one of them.

I'm not very good at feigning interest, even for a paycheck.

 

[Dessi]

What else is basically impossible yet all around?

A lot of people view software, especially operating systems, browsers, word processing applications, and video games as impossibly complex miracles.

People have an equally mystified view when looking at most hardware in a computer, such as the cpu, gpu, motherboard, etc.

As a software engineer, I have an intuitive feeling of how most kind of software is designed, without ever having to see the code. Most of the time, I don't think "wow, this is amazing, how could someone have made this?" I think, "wow, I bet that a frustrating meeting when they came up with that"

Mechanical engineers have a similar feeling when they observe just about any kind of physical object: a computer mouse, carpet, vehicle, light bulbs, etc. They have an intuitive feeling of the small, discrete, logical steps needed to construct an object in it's final form.

How come nobody outside the crazy world of engineers knows any engineers? Why aren't these people the most famous superstars in society?

A lot of engineers are famous to other engineers ^_^

 

[marting]

Engineers do it for fun. An engineer that doesn't love their work probably isn't going to be happy long since it requires a lot of effort.

If you read a calculus book for fun you might enjoy being an engineer. If you only read one because a class you are taking requires it then engineering can be pure drudgery. Programming is similar. These careers, like many other technical or scientific careers are demanding. Exhilarating if you enjoy it, and overwhelming if you don't.

 

[JRT]

Years ago at a trade show a company proudly displayed the world's smallest drill bit. A Japanese engineer bought a number of them. He was back the following year and presented the company with one of their drill bits, bored out and threaded.

 

[marplots]

Years ago at a trade show a company proudly displayed the world's smallest drill bit. A Japanese engineer bought a number of them. He was back the following year and presented the company with one of their drill bits, bored out and threaded.

Bored out I could see, but threaded has me stumped.

 

[Toke]

Years ago at a trade show a company proudly displayed the world's smallest drill bit. A Japanese engineer bought a number of them. He was back the following year and presented the company with one of their drill bits, bored out and threaded.

Heard of it too, could be true.

Heard of one time there were a strike in England and a car factory send some cogs for gearboxes off to a Swiss factory for measuring and a quotation on taking up the slack in production.
The answer came back, a rather steep price, but with the addendum that they could make the cogs at a much lower price if teeth of identical size would be acceptable.

 

[I Ratant]

That I believe!
Probably the Rolls Royce factory, where every part that falls off is of the finest British craftsman ship.
.
Think on it... threading the hole drilled through the world's smallest drill shank...

 

[theprestige]

Apart from Elon Musk and, possibly, Steve Jobs, who is the most recent engineer who became a household name? Werner von Braun is the nearest I could come up with.

Steve Jobs, genius though he may have been, was never an engineer.

You want engineers? Robert Noyce. Gordon Moore. Andy Grove.