The History of Engineering

"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants." - Isaac Newton

Why learn the history? New innovations stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before.

The speed at which things now change indicate the urgency of understanding the process of innovation.

Just for fun:

40 Maps That Will Help You Make Sense of the World

https://unofficialnetworks.com/2020/01/31/maps-make-sense-of-the-world/

Students heading into their first year of college this year...
https://www.marist.edu/-/marist-mindset-list-class-of-2024

We live in the information age.
Change is expected.
New generations do not do things the way older generations did.

Now:
Make a house frame in a single day

Then:
200 years to build a church.

Discussion question:

Why were there so few innovations in the early years?
We have progressed more in the last 200 years, than in the previous 5,000+ years....
For thousands of years, people farmed with crude manual labor, lived their whole life within a small radius, battles were fought with spears and arrows - technology was stagnant for thousands of years...

- Communication & Transportation.

No printing press, no internet, no phones, everyone had to reinvent the wheel for themselves because they could not learn from anyone except the people living in the same village as them.

Moral of the story?

It's important to learn how to write, present, and otherwise share information. Information is key to engineering.

Prehistoric Culture:
- No math or science

- No written language
- Limited verbal language
- Limited means of transportation
- They didn't go to school
- Spent most of life as hunter / gatherer
- Built using trial and error
- Used intuition
- Craftsmen

Lesson of Prehistoric Man: You can make things without understanding the science behind why it works.... but the more you understand, the better your product will be.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize

Discussion Question:
Are we better off?
Archimedes refused to release information that could be used to make more effective weapons; he knew it would be used for evil... only when his home city was no longer able to hold off Roman attacks did he release his inventions to the military.

1.3 Earliest Days

- improved ways to hunt and fish
- methods for providing shelter
- Weapons for power struggles
- religious observances

Everyday life was an engineering project.

Every person was an engineer

4000 - 3500 BC in Mesopotamia

Egypt and Mesopotamia
The dawn of specialization.
- Toolmakers concentrated on making tools, Farmers concentrated on their farm, hunters concentrated on hunting. Working cooperatively in larger communities allowed everyone to attain greater skills in areas of specialization.

4000-2000 BC
- copper and bronze tools
- stone tools
- development of the plow
- wheel, sailing boat, methods of writing

Pyramids 2700-2500 B.C.

The great Pyramid
- largest masonry structure ever built
- 756 feet per side, 480 feet tall - dimensions indicate they understood 3.14159
- 2.3 million stone blocks, each weighing between 2.5 tons (5,000 pounds) to 20 tons (40,000 pounds)

- 58,000,000 tons total.
To build it, had to - transport large stones long distances
- aligned almost perfectly North South
- create an almost perfect square (only a few inches off)
- symmetrical, precise angles
- Ingeniously design internal chambers that would not cave in under the immense weight of the rocks above it through use of relieving chambers above rooms.

- Precision achieved despite being built on irregular rocky knoll.
- Has survived earthquakes, climate changes, etc. still standing after thousands of years.
- the only one of the 7 wonders of the world still standing.

1.4 Ancient Engineering

Parthenon in Athens : 447-438 B.C.House 40' tall Athena statue Ratios and dimensions indicate an understanding of math.

Roman Aqueduct:

Roman Roads
- 4-6" bed of sand
- large flat stones
- clay cement
- retaining walls
- concrete
- Gravel
- roads were 2 to 5 feet thick
- Romans understood the importance of transportation - roads bound their empire together.

- roads encouraged the free exchange of ideas, joined otherwise isolated communities.

The Great Wall of China: ~220 B.C.
Purpose - military - repel Mongolians, protect commerce.
3,080 miles long

Metallurgical and Materials Engineering:

Empires rose and fell based on materials engineering.

Stone Age -
ended between 4500 BC and 2000 BC with the advent of metalworking.

Bronze Age -

The use of copper and it's alloy bronze (Copper + Tin)

Copper melts at 1,085°C

Tin - melts at 231.9°C

Iron Age -

Iron melts at 1,538°C

Harder to melt - harder to make, plus you have to worry about impurities introduced in the heating process. (Impurities generally make iron brittle and worthless)

The stronger the material a society had, the more it could build, the more powerful the military (long swords vs. short swords) the more powerful the society.

Engineering is dependent on the strength of the materials it has to work with.

1200 B.C.
- better iron, better swords
- Siege towers
- Greeks invent manufacturing
- Archimedes introduces math
- high quality concrete used for roads, bridges, and aqueducts in Rome.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_(word)

False Teeth 750 BC in Etruria (Italy)

Gears, 4th century BC in China

AD 1-1000
- Chinese develop math

- Gunpowder is perfected

- Cotton and silk manufactured

Steam Turbine 1st century Hero of Alexandria:

Paddle wheel boat - Romans

Spinning Wheel - Invented in India, between 500 and 1000 A.D.

The ambulance : In the 11th Century in Lebanon and Israel the ambulance was invented because of the crusades.

AD 1000-1400
- silk and glass industries grow
- Leonardo Fibonacci (1170-1240) invents algebra

AD 1400-1700

1439: The printing press is invented in the Holy Roman Empire by Johannes Gutenberg before 1440, based on existing screw presses. The first confirmed record of a press appeared in a 1439 lawsuit against Gutenberg.

- Metallurgy! De re Metallica by Georgius Agricola

- First timed bomb - Giambelli

- The first water closet (toilet) England

- Galileo makes and looks through telescopes

- Windmills - Leeghwater

- First vacuum - Guericke

- Pendulum-driven clock - Huygens

- Watch spring - Hooke

- Royal Society of England - first science community

- Isaac Newton makes first reflecting telescope

- Languedoc Canal

- First steam pump - Savery

- Agriculture, mining, textile, and glass-making industries expanded

- Scientific Method originates

- Humanities separated from science

- Boyles' Law - gas pressure varies inversely with volume

AD 1700-1800

Electricity! Leyden jar

1760 Industrial Revolution!

- James watt makes first rotary engine

- 1st Civil Engineering School
- First submarine

- pudding furnace, and crucibles for making iron

Electric Motor: 1834: Moritz von Jacobi, a German-born Russian

1800-1825
- Automation
- First railroad locomotive

- Fourier - complex wave = sum of simple waves
- Fulton steamboat service
- Chemical symbols developed
- Wire telegraph
-photography

- electromagnetism
-thermocouple
- Aluminum
- Electric current in motors - Andre Ampere
- Thermodynamics - Carnot

1825-1875

Vulcanized rubber by Charles Goodyear

-iron hulled steam engine

- rotary printing press

- reinforced concrete

- Singer invents sewing machine

- symbolic logic - Boole

- celluloid - synthetic plastic - Alexander Parkes

- Mass produced steel - Bessemer

- First oil well drilled in Pennsylvania

Typewriter perfected

Challenger Ocean Expedition

1875-1900

-Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone

-Phonograph - Thomas Edison

- Light bulb - Edison?

Steam turbine

Gas engine - Daimler

Automobile - Karl Benz

1900-1925

- My grandparents were born
The "golden" generation has lived long enough to see:

1909: The first instantaneous transmission of images, or television broadcast, is carried out by Georges Rignoux and A. Fournier.

- Wright brothers: 1871-1948
power vs. refinement...

Detroit center of auto industry
stainless steel in Germany
Tractors
First commercial airplane between London and Paris

Diesel locomotives

1933: FM radio is patented by inventor Edwin H. Armstrong.

1925-1950
- Sound recordings
- The first demonstration of the instantaneous transmission of images was by Georges Rignoux and A. Fournier in Paris in 1909. A matrix of 64 selenium cells, individually wired to a mechanical commutator, served as an electronic retina. Philo Farnsworth gave the world's first public demonstration of an all-electronic television system, using a live camera, at the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia on August 25, 1934.

- VW beetle
- First nuclear bomb 1945

Movie: Radioactive → write review for b onus points.

1947: Holography is invented by Dennis Gabor

Transistor (Transformitave-changing variable resistor)

1950-1975

Hovercraft 1955: The hovercraft is patented by Christopher Cockerell.

Computers

1956: The hard disk drive is invented by IBM

first artificial satellite
1960: Lasers

Integrated circuits
1969: first manned moon landing

1971: Email is invented by Ray Tomlinson

1973: The first capacitive touchscreen is developed at CERN.

1975-1990
Supersonic transport from US to Europe
Cosmonauts
Columbia Space Shuttle
First artificial human heart

1980: Flash memory (both NOR and NAND types) is invented in Japan by Fujio Masuoka while working for Toshiba. It is formally introduced to the public in 1984.