Vol. 67, No. 5 — Sept/Oct. 1986 —
In Praise of
Engineering
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The world we live in has largely
been created by engineers, who have delivered blessings to
mankind since the dawn of history. Here we examine their role
-and note that it is now more crucial to human survival than
ever before ...
We in the developed countries live in the realm of the engineer.
From the moment we turn on the water in the morning until
we turn off the lights at night, we are surrounded by engineered
structures, systems, products and processes. They help to
feed, shelter, clothe, transport, comfort and entertain us,
and allow us to communicate invisibly with one another. No
matter what we do for a living, much of our own work is done
with things made by engineers.
Yet most of us who are not concerned in our jobs with the
nuts and bolts of technology seldom give more than a passing
thought to how critical the engineering profession is to our
existence. This is because the marvels of engineering have
come to be routine. They are as much a part of our daily environment
as the mountains around a Nepalese Sherpa. They have ceased
to inspire the awe they deserve except when, as in an avalanche,
something goes wrong with disastrous results.
The engineer himself {or, increasingly these days, herself)
has faded into the landscape along with his all-pervasive
output. We know the names of the sculptors and architects
whose works grace our big cities - the Henry Moores and the
I.M. Peis - but who knows who actually erected the buildings
and bridges, who cut the streets and installed the pipes and
wires that make a city run? In any list of historical persons,
engineers rank far below monarchs, politicians and generals.
The reason for this is simple: engineers normally solve problems
instead of creating them, and a problem solved is a problem
out of mind.
The lack of recognition of the engineer in relation to his
significance is hardly a recent phenomenon. History does record
the name of the man who built the Great Pyramid - Khufu-onekh
- but it is less commonly known than that of Cheops, the Egyptian
king for whom that incredible feat of engineering was carried
out. While the poets and philosophers of antiquity are enshrined
in immortality, the builders of the seven wonders of the world
are forgotten. We have all heard of Homer and Plato, but who
was in charge of constructing the Acropolis? Virgil and Cicero
are still quoted, but who engineered the Coliseum?
In particular, the engineer has always lived in the shadow
of the scientist. The latter traditionally has received the
credit for advancing the cause of mankind with discoveries
that might never have done any good for anybody without the
added value of innovative engineering skill. The difference
between the two callings is that the scientist seeks new knowledge
and the engineer seeks ways to apply knowledge for practical
purposes. Neither could function without the other. "There
are science and the application of science, bound together
as the fruit of the tree that bears it," as Louis Pasteur
said.
In fact, the scientist and the engineer have often been
one and the same person. Galileo not only unlocked the secrets
of the sky, he built the first high-powered telescope. Marconi
was a trained physicist, but his fame rests in taking Heinrich
Hertz's equations and applying them to wireless communication
with an antenna and radio sets he built himself.
But what, in the first place, is an engineer? It
is difficult to summarise the work of hundreds of thousands
of men and women in a vast range of technical specialities
in a single sentence. The Encyclopaedia Britannica,
however, came very close when it defined engineering as "the
professional art of applying science to the optimum conversion
of resources to benefit mankind."
The Britannica points out, incidentally, that it
is no accident that engineers live by the exercise of ingenuity.
The words engineer and ingenious have the same Latin root,
ingenerare, meaning "to create."
Though engineers had been at work since before history was
ever written down, no name existed for their occupation until
the Middle Ages, when the term "enginer" was used to describe
the man who fashioned "engines of war" such as swinging battering
rams and catapults. Military engineers had never confined
their skills exclusively to warfare, however. The paved roads
that radiated from Rome throughout Europe and the Middle East
were the work of engineering officers in the Roman legions.
In peaceful times they also turned their minds to the construction
of the massive stone aqueducts that arouse wonder to this
day.
What engineers are meant to do: Take
ideas
and make them work
In medieval times a clear distinction grew up between the
military and the civil engineers who constructed the great
cathedrals of Europe. The craft was becoming more sophisticated;
the cathedral builders employed such devices as groining,
pointed arches and flying buttresses to deal with lateral
thrust and stress. Engineering was also becoming diversified.
Hydraulics engineers had long worked in mines and mills, and
chemical processing systems were in operation. The advent
of clockwork brought the mechanical engineer onto the scene.
It was this type of engineer, with his gears and shafts
and metal screws, who set off the Industrial Revolution. John
Kay's fly shuttle and James Hargreaves' spinning jenny took
workers out of their cottages and into factories. The man
most closely associated with this epochal development, James
Watt, was an engineer in spirit and practice. Watt did not
invent the steam engine - Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen
are variously credited with that - but he improved on the
invention enormously by redesigning it and making additions
to it. Watt made the steam engine an efficient source of power
for industry. He did what engineers are meant to do - take
ideas and make them work.
Watt was a typical old-time engineer in another respect;
he was self-educated, having spent only one year training
as an instrument-maker. So were his contemporaries who built
the canals, railways, highways, foundries and machine tools
that transformed Britain from a small agrarian nation into
a wealthy world power.
The engineer of that era ordinarily served an apprenticeship
under an experienced practitioner, then went on to tackle
the problems of nature with little more than a T-square and
his own skill, knowledge, common sense and intuition. The
celebrated 18th century English canal builder James Brindley
never used models or drawings. As recounted by C.C. Furnas
and Joe McCarthy in their 1966 Life Science Library book The
Engineer, "Once, when asked what the arches of a proposed
canal aqueduct would look like, he sent to the market for
a cheese, sliced it in halves, placed the two semicircular
portions on a table with their round sides up and laid a ruler
across their tops to represent the trough of the canal."
Though the first school of road and bridge construction
was formed in France as early as 1747, the age of rule-of-thumb
engineering did not really end until electricity was put to
its first major practical use in the telegraph in the mid-19th
century. The common sense approach that had governed the building
of things and the formulation of processes in earlier times
could not be applied to electrical reactions because electricity
did not follow common sense rules.
Discoveries in dynamics, chemistry, metallurgy and other
fields also complicated engineering. No longer was it sufficient
to go about with a handbook containing formulas based on the
known data about a subject. In a world becoming ever more
aware of the complexities of nature, the handbook had to give
way to the textbook. Schools of engineering had to be founded,
and standards of competence set by professional societies.
From the beginning, Canada was an
engineer's
country
The colonies that would make up the future Canada entered
early into engineering education. In 1854 our first engineering
school was opened in what is now the University of New Brunswick.
It was the start of an educational movement that would swell
to the point where today one in every hundred working Canadians
is a graduate engineer. Still, for a long time to come, most
of our engineering skills had to he imported from other countries.
The founding of the New Brunswick school was by way of an
acknowledgement that this vast, rugged, undeveloped land was
an engineer's country. Little economic progress could be made
without public works such as roads, harbour improvements and
canals. The great difficulty in maintaining a distinct political
presence north of the United States border was a lack of communication
among the pockets of settlement in British North America.
The railways which were just then being built promised a solution
to the problem.
Canada must be the only nation on earth to have a reference
to an engineering work in its constitution. A commitment to
complete the Intercolonial Railway linking the Maritimes with
the central provinces was a key provision of the British North
America Act. Another railway, the Canadian Pacific, was needed
to bring British Columbia into Confederation and bind the
nation together. Building the CPR across the barriers of the
Canadian Shield and the western mountains presented one of
the mightiest engineering challenges ever undertaken. Its
completion 101 years ago opened the door to the settlement
of the Canadian West.
The new Dominion burst with engineering activity of every
known kind in the years that followed. Canada's great sprawls
of rock were turned from a hobble into a spur to development
through the skills of mining engineers. Their colleagues in
the pulp and paper industry did the same with our forests.
Hydro-electric engineers helped to give Canadians a priceless
legacy of cheap, reliable energy.
Given the central role engineers have played in the building
of our nation, it is fitting that one of them, Sir Sanford
Fleming, should rank high among our national heroes. As a
frontier surveyor and railway builder, he personified the
energy and ingenuity of the engineer in Canada's formative
years. And Fleming represented another tradition among his
Canadian colleagues. He was an internationalist whose best-known
achievement was to establish a system of standard time around
the world.
Even before Fleming rose to fame, Canadian engineers had
their eyes trained outward. In the 1850s and '60s they took
part in such historic projects as laying the transatlantic
telegraph cable between Newfoundland and Ireland and drilling
the first railroad tunnel in the United States. The new science
of petroleum engineering had its cradle in Southern Ontario
at about the same time. tin those days before the internal
combustion engine, the oil was refined for use in kerosene
lamps.} As early as 1874, Canadian petroleum engineers were
exporting their expertise to the Dutch East Indies. From then
until the outbreak of World War I, they were to be found in
the far corners of Europe, Africa, South America, the Middle
East and Australia, drilling and building refineries and pipelines
to meet the growing thirst for oil in the age of the automobile.
In the meantime, the Canadian with the slide rule and the
high laced boots became part of the scenery at mining and
utility construction sites in Latin America and the Caribbean.
It has been said of the British Empire that trade followed
the flag. In Canada's case, exporters often followed the engineer.
'Helping to make life better for people
in other countries'
Today as never before Canadian engineers are spreading their
skills around the world, not only in their traditional fields
of leadership in hydroelectricity, telecommunications and
pulp and paper, but in every aspect of engineering activity
from metallurgy to medicine. In recent years, Canadian firms
have worked on projects and studies in more than 100 countries
- and trade has continued to follow the engineer.
Camille A. Dagenais, Chairman of the Board of the globe-ranging
SNC Group of Montreal, has conservatively estimated the export
spin-offs from overseas engineering activity at $700 million
annually, in addition to the $300 million a year which engineering
companies earn directly from foreign projects. Among a "small
sampling" of items bought from Canadian suppliers he lists
piping, handtools, telephone poles and textbooks, along with
turbines, generators, crushers, cranes and mobile housing.
An uncountable number of jobs at home are dependent on the
jobs Canadian engineers do abroad.
"Other rewards of working abroad, though less utilitarian,
are perhaps more important in the long run to individuals
and groups," writes Mr. Dagenais. "Best of all, perhaps, is
that you have helped make life better for people in other
parts of the world. Today, with widespread drought and the
threat of famine looming in so many countries, the contribution
of Canadian engineers is more vital than ever."
The guiding interest must be concern
for
the fate of man
When the World Federation of Engineering Organisations gathers
in Montreal from May 17 to 22 next year, the vital contribution
which the profession can make to dealing with the desperate
problems of the world will be a prime topic of discussion.
The conference will mark the founding of the Canadian Society
of Civil Engineers (later the Engineering Institute of Canada)
in 1887, and it will doubtless be remarked how much the profession
has changed in those hundred years. Engineers now work in
large teams, drawing on the immense capacity of computers
to aid them in their efforts. They have branched out into
a range of specialities and sub-specialities that would be
utterly bewildering to a member of their profession a century
ago.
But though the approaches, techniques and tools have changed,
the basic function of engineers is constant. They are the
members of society who are ultimately responsible in detail
for getting things done. Not only must they get things done,
but get them done in the most economic manner possible. Consider
that Britannica definition again: "... the optimum
conversion of the resources of nature to benefit mankind."
The depletion of natural resources world-wide has lent this
phrase a keen new meaning. We humans can no longer afford
to waste the dwindling supply of resources at our command.
Nor can we afford more damage to the natural environment.
The waves and clouds of pollution around us are evidence of
the folly of the theory of development at any price.
In the global village of communication created by the engineer,
the social consequences of development weigh heavily on the
public conscience. The harm done to minorities in the pursuit
of an elusive material progress can no longer be overlooked.
A new human dimension has thus been added to the engineer's
professional obligations. Albert Einstein anticipated this
back in the 1930s when he told an audience of students at
the California Institute of Technology that "concern for man
himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of
your professional endeavours.., in order that the creations
of your minds shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind."
The fate of man now more than ever hangs in the balance,
and engineers will play a crucial part in determining whether
that fate will be blessed or cursed by the application of
technology. Enormous problems still haunt the world, and many
of those problems have been man-made. But if anyone can do
something to solve them, it is the engineer, who has been
working "to make life better for people" since the dawn of
history. It is a huge responsibility to be placed on a profession
- but then, engineers have always managed to do the things
that need to be done.
Published by RBC Financial Group. All editions from the RBC
Letter collection are available on our web site at www.rbc.com/responsibility/letter.
Our e-mail address is: rbcletter@rbc.com.
Publié aussi en francais.
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