As a human endeavor, engineering has existed since ancient times, starting with the six classicsimple machines. Examples of large-scale engineering projects from antiquity include impressive structures like thepyramids, elegant temples such as theParthenon, and water conveyances likehulled watercraft,canals, and theRoman aqueduct. Early machines were powered by humans and animals, then later by wind. Machines of war were invented forsiegecraft. In Europe, thescientific andindustrial revolutions advanced engineering into a scientific profession and resulted in continuing technological improvements. Thesteam engine provided much greater power than animals, leading to mechanical propulsion for ships and railways. Further scientific advances resulted in the application of engineering to electrical, chemical, andaerospace requirements, plus the use of new materials for greater efficiencies.
The wordengineering is derived from theLatiningenium. Engineers typically follow a code of ethics that favors honesty and integrity, while being dedicated to publicsafety andwelfare. Engineering tasks involve findingoptimal solutions based on constraints, with testing andsimulations being used prior to production. When a deployed product fails,forensic engineering is used to determine what went wrong in order to find a fix. Much of thisproduct lifecycle management is now assisted with computersoftware, fromdesign totesting andmanufacturing. At larger scales, this process normally funded by a company, multiple investors, or the government, so a knowledge of economics and business practices is needed. (Full article...)
Anengineer is a practitioner ofengineering. The wordengineer (Latiningeniator, the origin of the Ir. in the title of engineer in countries like Belgium, The Netherlands, and Indonesia) is derived from the Latin wordsingeniare ("to contrive, devise") andingenium ("cleverness"). The foundational qualifications of a licensed professional engineer typically include a four-yearbachelor's degree in an engineering discipline, or in some jurisdictions, amaster's degree in an engineering discipline plus four to six years of peer-reviewed professional practice (culminating in a project report or thesis) and passage of engineering board examinations. (Full article...)
... thatEd McCann chose a career in civil engineering after being dissuaded from other branches of engineering by their military applications?
... that after supervising construction of London'sTower Bridge in the 1890s, engineerEdward Cruttwell was retained as consulting engineer to the bridge until his death in 1933?
... thatCarmel Naughton, having been told that girls were "stupid and couldn't do maths", sponsored aSTEM scholarship fund?
... that theDIMA-1 Mk. III rifle was made in Myanmar as a reverse-engineered copy of the ChineseQBZ-97?
... that aerospace engineering firmHelliwells Ltd began as a maker of fireplace accessories?
... that aFloppy Disk Controller is a special-purposechip and associated circuitry that directs and controls reading from and writing to a computer's floppy disk drive?
Credit: National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Manufacturing Engineering
Computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) is themanufacturing approach of usingcomputers to control the entire productionprocess. This integration allows individual processes to exchange information with each other and initiate actions. Although manufacturing can be faster and less error-prone by the integration of computers, the main advantage is the ability to create automated manufacturing processes. Typically CIM relies onclosed-loop control processes, based on real-time input from sensors. It is also known asflexible design and manufacturing.
Achicken gun orflight impact simulator is a large-diameter, compressed-air gun used to fire bird carcasses at aircraft components in order to simulate high-speedbird strikes during the aircraft's flight.Jet engines and aircraftwindshields are particularly vulnerable to damage from such strikes, and are the most common target in such tests. Although various species of bird are used in aircraft testing and certification, the device acquired the common name of "chicken gun" aschickens are the most commonly used 'ammunition' owing to their ready availability. (Full article...)
Baron Pavel Lvovitch Schilling (April 16 [O.S. April 5] 1786 – August 6 [O.S. July 25] 1837), also known asPaul Schilling, was a Russian inventor, military officer anddiplomat ofBaltic German origin. The majority of his career was spent working for the imperial RussianMinistry of Foreign Affairs as a language officer at the Russian embassy inMunich. As a military officer, he took part in theWar of the Sixth Coalition againstNapoleon. In his later career, he was transferred to the Asian department of the ministry and undertook a tour ofMongolia to collect ancient manuscripts.
In response toAmerican industrialization,William Barton Rogers organized a school in Boston to create "useful knowledge." Initially funded by afederal land grant, the institute adopted a polytechnic model that stressed laboratory instruction inapplied science andengineering. MIT moved from Boston to Cambridge in 1916 and grew rapidly through collaboration with private industry, military branches, and new federal basic research agencies, the formation of which was influenced by MIT faculty likeVannevar Bush. In the late twentieth century, MIT became a leading center for research incomputer science,digital technology,artificial intelligence andbig science initiatives like theHuman Genome Project. Engineering remains its largest school, though MIT has also built programs in basic science, social sciences, business management, and humanities. (Full article...)
Meticulous naval inventories show that HMSBeagle carried a total of at least34 recorded chronometers on its three main survey voyages from 1826 to 1843, and 22 on the second voyage with Darwin on board, when they had a dedicated cabin. Some were Navy property and others were on loan from the manufacturers, as well as six on the second voyage owned by the captain,Robert FitzRoy. Both the two known survivors from the second voyage are owned by the British Museum (the second is registration No. CAI.1743). (Full article...)
Image 5
ODB++ is a proprietaryCAD-to-CAM data exchange format used in the design and manufacture of electronic devices. Its purpose is to exchangeprinted circuit board design information between design and manufacturing and between design tools from differentEDA/ECAD vendors. It was originally developed by Valor Computerized Systems, Ltd. (acquired in 2010 byMentor Graphics which was later acquired bySiemens in 2016) as the job description format for their CAM system.
ODB stands for opendatabase, but its openness is disputed, as discussed below. The '++' suffix, evocative ofC++, was added in 1997 with the addition of component descriptions. There are two versions of ODB++: the original (now controlled by Mentor) and anXML version called ODB++(X) that Valor developed and donated to theIPC organization in an attempt to merge GenCAM (IPC-2511) and ODB++ into Offspring (IPC-2581). (Full article...)
Image 6
The Avrocar S/N58-7055 (markedAV-7055) on its rollout.
TheAvro Canada VZ-9 Avrocar is aVTOL aircraft developed byAvro Canada as part of a secret U.S. military project carried out in the early years of theCold War. The Avrocar intended to exploit theCoandă effect to provide lift and thrust from a single "turborotor" blowing exhaust out of the rim of the disk-shaped aircraft. In the air, it would have resembled aflying saucer.
Originally designed as afighter-like aircraft capable of very high speeds and altitudes, the project was repeatedly scaled back over time and theU.S. Air Force eventually abandoned it. Development was then taken up by theU.S. Army for a tactical combat aircraft requirement, a sort of high-performancehelicopter. In flight testing, the Avrocar proved to have unresolved thrust and stability problems that limited it to a degraded, low-performanceflight envelope; subsequently, the project was cancelled in September 1961. (Full article...)
Image 7
1869 Birdsill Holly fire-hydrant Birdsill Holly Jr. (November 8, 1820 – April 27, 1894) was an American mechanical engineer and inventor of waterhydraulics devices. He is known for inventing mechanical devices that improved city water systems and patented an improved fire hydrant that is similar to those used currently for firefighting. Holly was a co-inventor of the Silsbysteam fire engine. He founded the Holly Manufacturing Company that developed into the larger Holly Steam Combination Company that distributed heat from a central station and developed commercialdistrict heating for cities in the United States and Canada. (Full article...)
Image 8
A hypothetical depiction of a Dyson swarm surrounding a star
ADyson sphere is a hypotheticalmegastructure that encompasses astar and captures a large percentage of itspower output. The concept is athought experiment that attempts to imagine how aspacefaring civilization would meet its energy requirements once those requirements exceed what can be generated from the homeplanet's resources alone. Because only a tiny fraction of a star's energy emissions reaches the surface of any orbiting planet, building structures encircling a star would enable a civilization to harvest far more energy.
The earliest modern imagining of such a structure was byOlaf Stapledon in his science fiction novelStar Maker (1937). The same concept was later used by physicistFreeman Dyson in his 1960 satirical paper "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources ofInfrared Radiation". Dyson speculated that such structures would be the logical consequence of the escalating energy needs of a technological civilization and would be a necessity for its long-term survival. A signature of such spheres detected in astronomical searches would be an indicator ofextraterrestrial intelligence. (Full article...)
Beryl May DentMIEE (10 May 1900 – 9 August 1977) was an Englishmathematical physicist, technical librarian, and a programmer of early analogue and digital computers to solve electrical engineering problems. She was born inChippenham, Wiltshire, the eldest daughter of schoolteachers. The family left Chippenham in 1901, after her father became head teacher of the then recently establishedWarminster County School. In 1923, she graduated from theUniversity of Bristol withFirst Class Honours inapplied mathematics. She was awarded theAshworth Hallett scholarship by the university and was accepted as a postgraduate student atNewnham College, Cambridge.
She returned toBristol in 1925, after being appointed a researcher in the Physics Department at the University of Bristol, with her salary being paid by theDepartment of Scientific and Industrial Research. In 1927,John Lennard-Jones was appointed Professor ofTheoretical physics, a chair being created for him, with Dent becoming his research assistant in theoretical physics. Lennard‑Jones pioneered the theory of interatomic and intermolecular forces at Bristol and she became one of his first collaborators. They published six papers together from 1926 to 1928, dealing with the forces between atoms and ions, that were to become the foundation of her master's thesis. Later work has shown that the results they obtained had direct application toatomic force microscopy by predicting that non-contact imaging is possible only at small tip-sample separations. (Full article...)
Image 11
Schematic representation of the Dirac delta function by a line surmounted by an arrow. The height of the arrow is usually meant to specify the value of any multiplicative constant, which will give the area under the function. The other convention is to write the area next to the arrowhead. Inmathematical analysis, theDirac delta function (orδ distribution), also known as theunit impulse, is ageneralized function on thereal numbers, whose value is zero everywhere except at zero, and whoseintegral over the entire real line is equal to one. Thus it can berepresented heuristically as
TheSinclair C5 is a small one-personbattery electricrecumbenttricycle, technically an "electrically assisted pedal cycle". It was the culmination of SirClive Sinclair's long-running interest in electric vehicles. Although widely described as an "electric car", Sinclair characterised it as a "vehicle, not a car".
Sinclair had become one of the UK's best-known millionaires, and earned aknighthood, on the back of the highly successfulSinclair Research range of home computers in the early 1980s. He hoped to repeat his success in the electric vehicle market, which he saw as ripe for a new approach. The C5 emerged from an earlier project to produce a small electric car called the C1. After a change in the law, prompted by lobbying from bicycle manufacturers, Sinclair developed the C5 as an electrically powered tricycle with apolypropylene body and a chassis designed byLotus Cars. It was intended to be the first in a series of increasingly ambitious electric vehicles, but the development of the follow-up C10 and C15 models never progressed further than the drawing board, mostly due to the poor public response to the C5. (Full article...)
Image 13
Overhead View of Tehachapi Energy Storage Project, Tehachapi, CA
TheTehachapi Energy Storage Project (TSP) was a 8MW/32MWhlithium-ion battery-basedgrid energy storage system at the Monolith Substation ofSouthern California Edison (SCE) inTehachapi, California, sufficient to power between 1,600 and 2,400 homes for four hours. At the time of commissioning in 2014, it was the largest lithium-ion battery system operating inNorth America and one of the largest in the world. TSP is considered to be a modern-day energy storage pioneer with significant accomplishments that have proven the viability of utility-scale energy storage using lithium-ion technology. While originally envisioned as aresearch and development project, TSP operated as adistribution-level resource for SCE and for calendar year 2020, SCE reported that TSP operated in thewholesale energy market with revenue exceeding operating and maintenance costs. In 2021, SCE began the decommissioning of TSP, which was followed by formal decommissioning by state regulators in 2022. The physical dismantlement of TSP is expected to be completed by the end of 2022. (Full article...)
Little Boy was developed byLieutenant CommanderFrancis Birch's group at theLos Alamos Laboratory. It was the successor to aplutonium-fueled gun-type fission design,Thin Man, which was abandoned in 1944 after technical difficulties were discovered. Little Boy used a charge ofcordite to fire a hollow cylinder (the "bullet") of highly enriched uranium through an artillery gun barrel into a solid cylinder (the "target") of the same material. The design was highly inefficient: the weapon used on Hiroshima contained 64 kilograms (141 lb) of uranium, but less than a kilogram underwentnuclear fission. Unlike theimplosion design developed for the Trinity test and theFat Man bomb design that was used againstNagasaki, which required sophisticated coordination of shaped explosive charges, the simpler but inefficient gun-type design was considered almost certain to work, and was never tested prior to its use at Hiroshima. (Full article...)
Image 10Design of aturbine requires collaboration of engineers from many fields, as the system involves mechanical, electro-magnetic and chemical processes. Theblades,rotor and stator as well as thesteam cycle all need to be carefully designed and optimized. (fromEngineering)
Image 19Archimedes is regarded as one of the leading scientists inclassical antiquity whose ideas have underpinned much of the practice of engineering. (fromEngineer)
Image 21The application of the steam engine allowed coke to be substituted for charcoal iniron making, lowering the cost of iron, which provided engineers with a new material for building bridges. This bridge was made ofcast iron, which was soon displaced by less brittlewrought iron as a structural material. (fromEngineering)
Image 22Engineers conferring on prototype design, 1954 (fromEngineer)
Image 24A drawing for asteam locomotive. Engineering is applied todesign, with emphasis on function and the utilization of mathematics and science. (fromEngineering)
This list was generated fromthese rules. Questions and feedbackare always welcome! The search is being run daily with the most recent ~14 days of results.Note: Some articles may not be relevant to this project.
Featured articles are displayed here, which represent some of the best content on English Wikipedia.
.jpg)
.jpg)
