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, Ir is the term and or title of an 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...)
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Studio portrait of Selfe
Norman Selfe (9 December 1839 – 15 October 1911) was an Australian engineer,naval architect, inventor,urban planner and outspoken advocate of technical education. After emigrating toSydney with his family from England as a boy he became an apprentice engineer, following his father's trade. Selfe designed many bridges, docks, boats, and much precision machinery for the city. He also introduced new refrigeration, hydraulic, electrical and transport systems. For these achievements he received international acclaim during his lifetime. Decades before theSydney Harbour Bridge was built, the city came close to building a Selfe-designed steelcantilever bridge across the harbour after he won the second public competition for a bridge design.
Selfe was honoured during his life by the name of the Sydney suburb ofNormanhurst, where his grand houseGilligaloola is a local landmark. He was energetically involved in organisations such as theSydney Mechanics' School of Arts and theAustralian Historical Society. As president of theBoard of Technical Education, he fought consistently for the establishment of an independent system of technical education to serve the needs of a rapidly industrialising society. He was acknowledged upon his death as one of the best-known people in, and greatest individual influences upon, the city of Sydney.(Full article...)
... 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?
... that the leading engineer during the1702 siege of Liège was so angered by a colleague's disobedience that he threatened to abandon the siege?
Inelectronics andelectrical engineering, afuse is a type of low resistanceresistor that acts as asacrificial device to provideovercurrent protection, of either the load or source circuit. Its essential component is a metal wire or strip that melts when too much current flows through it, interrupting thecircuit that it connects.Short circuits, overloading, mismatched loads, or device failure are the prime reasons for excessive current. Fuses can be used as alternatives tocircuit breakers.A fuse interrupts an excessive current so that further damage by overheating or fire is prevented. Wiring regulations often define a maximum fuse current rating for particular circuits. Overcurrent protection devices are essential in electrical systems to limit threats to human life and property damage. The time and current operating characteristics of fuses are chosen to provide adequate protection without needless interruption. Slow blow fuses are designed to allow harmless short term currents over their rating while still interrupting a sustained overload. Fuses are manufactured in a wide range of current and voltage ratings to protect wiring systems and electrical equipment. Self-resetting fuses automatically restore the circuit after the overload has cleared, and are useful in environments where a human replacing a blown fuse would be difficult or impossible, for example in aerospace or nuclear applications.
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Dent in 1928
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...)
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Genetic engineering, also calledgenetic modification orgenetic manipulation, is the modification and manipulation of an organism'sgenes usingtechnology. It is a set oftechnologies used to change the genetic makeup of cells, including the transfer of genes within and across species boundaries to produce improved or novelorganisms. NewDNA is obtained by either isolating and copying the genetic material of interest usingrecombinant DNA methods or byartificially synthesising the DNA. Aconstruct is usually created and used to insert this DNA into the host organism. The first recombinant DNA molecule was designed byPaul Berg in 1972 by combining DNA from the monkey virusSV40 with thelambda virus. As well as insertinggenes, the process can be used to remove, or "knock out", genes. The new DNA can either be inserted randomly ortargeted to a specific part of thegenome.
An organism that is generated through genetic engineering is considered to be genetically modified (GM), and the resulting entity is agenetically modified organism (GMO). The first GMO was abacterium generated byHerbert Boyer andStanley Cohen in 1973.Rudolf Jaenisch created the first GM animal when he inserted foreign DNA into amouse in 1974. The first company to focus on genetic engineering,Genentech, was founded in 1976 and began the production of human proteins. Genetically engineered humaninsulin was produced in 1978, and insulin-producing bacteria were commercialised in 1982.Genetically modified food has been sold since 1994, with the release of theFlavr Savr tomato. The Flavr Savr was engineered to have a longer shelf life, but most current GM crops are modified to increase resistance to insects and herbicides.GloFish, the first GMO designed as a pet, was sold in theUnited States in December 2003. In 2016,salmon modified with a growth hormone were sold. (Full article...)
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Avoltage doubler is an electronic circuit which charges capacitors from the input voltage and switches these charges in such a way that, in the ideal case, exactly twice the voltage is produced at the output as at its input.
The simplest of these circuits is a form ofrectifier which takes an AC voltage as input and outputs a doubled DC voltage. The switching elements are simple diodes and they are driven to switch state merely by the alternating voltage of the input. DC-to-DC voltage doublers cannot switch in this way and require a driving circuit to control the switching. They frequently also require a switching element that can be controlled directly, such as atransistor, rather than relying on the voltage across the switch as in the simple AC-to-DC case. (Full article...)
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TheSinclair C5 is a small one-personbattery electricrecumbent tricycle, technically an "electrically assisted pedal cycle". It was the culmination of SirClive Sinclair's long-running interest inelectric 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...)
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...)
Introduced in 2003, HDMI largely replaced olderanalog video standards such ascomposite video,S-Video, andVGA inconsumer electronics. It was developed based on theCEA-861 standard, which was also used with the earlierDigital Visual Interface (DVI). HDMI is electrically compatible with DVI video signals, andadapters allow interoperability between the two without signal conversion or loss of quality. Adapters and active converters are also available for connecting HDMI to other video interfaces, including the older analog formats, as well as digital formats such asDisplayPort. (Full article...)
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A depiction of a hypothetical 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...)
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Three Musketeers -Chrysler Engineers Carl Breer (right), Fred Zeder (center), and Owen Skelton (left) in 1933.
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 (ordistribution), 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 such that
Since there is no function having this property, modelling the delta "function" rigorously involves the use oflimits or, as is common in mathematics,measure theory and the theory ofdistributions. (Full article...)
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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...)
Project Alberta was formed in March 1945, and consisted of 51 United States Army, Navy, and civilian personnel, including one British scientist. Its mission was three-fold. It first had to design a bomb shape for delivery by air, then procure and assemble it. It supported the ballistic testing work atWendover Army Air Field, Utah, conducted by the216th Army Air Forces Base Unit (Project W-47), and the modification ofB-29s to carry the bombs (ProjectSilverplate). After completion of its development and training missions, Project Alberta was attached to the509th Composite Group atNorth Field, Tinian, where it prepared facilities, assembled and loaded the weapons, and participated in their use. (Full article...)
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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...)
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Fizeau–Foucault apparatus may refer to either of two nineteenth-century experiments to measure the speed of light:
Image 9The Ancient Romans builtaqueducts to bring a steady supply of clean and fresh water to cities and towns in the empire. (fromEngineering)
Image 10The 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 13Archimedes is regarded as one of the leading scientists inclassical antiquity whose ideas have underpinned much of the practice of engineering. (fromEngineer)
Image 16Design 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 17Engineers conferring on prototype design, 1954 (fromEngineer)
Image 18Hoover Dam is regarded as a major accomplishment in civil engineering (fromEngineering)
Image 24A drawing for asteam locomotive. Engineering is applied todesign, with emphasis on function and the utilization of mathematics and science. (fromEngineering)
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