Engineering By Discipline

"Theatrum Machinarum Generale: Schauplatz des Grundes Mechanischer Wissenschaften"

"Explaining and Demonstrating the General Laws of Motion, the Laws of Gravity, Motion of Descending Bodies, Projectiles, Mechanic Powers, Pendulums, Centers of Gravity, &c. Strength and Stress of Timber, Hydrostatics, and Construction of Machines. A Work Very Necessary to be Known, by All Gentlemen and Others, that Desire to Have an Insight Into the Works of Nature and Art. And Extremely Useful to All Sorts of Artificers; Particularly to Architects, Engineers, Shipwrights, Millwrights, Watchmakers, &c, Or Any that Work in a Mechanical Way."

"To the art of mechanics is owing all sorts of instruments to work with, all engines of war, ships, bridges, mills, curious roofs and arches, stately theatres, columns, pendent galleries, and all other grand works in building. Also clocks, watches, jacks, chariots, carts and carriages, and even the wheel-barrow. Architecture, navigation, husbandry, and military affairs, owe their invention and use to this art."

"THEORY and practice principally distinguish science from arts, and accordingly most branches of knowledge pass under one or the other of these denominations; tho we must allow, that our ideas in this respect are not always sufficiently precise; for we are often at a loss in naming the branches of knowledge where speculation is joined with practice. There are rules for the operations of the mind, and others for those of the body; the latter being confined to external subjects, require no more than the assistance of the hand to perform them. Hence proceeds the distinction between the liberal and mechanic arts, and the preference given to the former, tho very unjustly in many respects. The mechanic arts depending upon manual operation, and confined to a certain beaten track, are assigned over to those whom prejudice places in a lower class: and necessity rather than taste and genius, compelling them to the exercise of these arts, the arts themselves in time became subject to contempt; whilst the free operations of the mind were claimed by others, who, because they were more exempt from indigence, possibly thought themselves more favoured by nature. But this assumed superiority of the liberal over the mechanic arts, from the former's employing only the attention of the mind, and from the difficulty of excelling therein, is sufficiently counter-balanced by the greater utility commonly arising from the latter."

"The work before us is a proof that the doctrine of mechanics is of the utmost importance to mankind in general, and to civil society in particular, which could hardly subsist without it. The author of this work is Mr. W. Emerson who is well known in the literary world, from several ingenious writings with which he has obliged the public; some of which have passed under our consideration since the commencement of the Review. In this treatise Mr. Emerson has laid down the fundamental principles both of theory and practice, and demonstrated most of them from the common elementary geometry, and the rest from the common rules of algebra; which is certainly the best method of rendering a treatise of this kind useful to the generality of readers, the fluxionary calculus being too difficult for them to understand. The work is divided into thirteen sections: the 1st. contains the general laws of motion. 2. The laws of gravity, the descent of heavy bodies, and the motion of projectiles. 3. The properties of the mechanical powers; the balance, the leaver, the wheel, the pulley, the screw, and the wedge. 4. The descent of bodies upon inclined planes, and in curve surfaces; and the motion of pendulums. 5. The center of gravity, and its properties. 6. The centers of percussion, oscillation, and gyration. 7. The quantity and direction of the pressure of beams of timber, by their weight; and the forces necessary to sustain them. 8. The strength of beams of timber in all positions; and their stress by any weight acting upon them, or by any forces applied to them. 9. The properties of fluids, the principles of hydrostatics, hydraulics, and pneumatics, 10. The resistance of fluids, their forces and actions upon bodies; the motions of ships, and the positions of their fails. 11. Methods of communicating, directing, and regulating any motion in the practice of mechanics. 12. The powers and properties of compound engines; of forces acting within the machines; and concerning friction. 13. The description of compound machines or engines, and the methods of computing their powers or forces; with some account as the advantages or disadvantages of their construction."

"The course of study includes the teaching of English, mathematics, mechanics, chemistry, physics, and drawing ; designing, weaving, and manufacturing ; dyeing, mechanical engineering; and metal working ; building construction and wood."

"This is a great drawback on the introduction of steam-vessels generally abroad; and until the profession of mechanical engineering is considered a fit pursuit for respectable young men, it must remain so."

"Mechanical Engineering is applicable rather to works connected with private enterprise, such as the designing and construction of steam machinery for the purposes of navigation and transportation, the adaptation of such machinery to mills and factories, the construction of water-wheels, the fabrication of materials, iron, steel, and brass, for the purposes of the engineer, the architect, and manufacturer ; and the manufacture of implements and machinery for agriculture, for mining, and for domestic purposes."

"The number of our students of Engineering, especially of Civil and Mechanical Engineering, is becoming so great that we are somewhat embarrassed to make proper provision for them."

"Announcement of the ; A School of Mechanical Engineering, founded by Edwin A. Stevens, Esq. Hoboken, New Jersey. 1874."

"Mechanical Engineering may be defined as being the application of mathematics to Science, with particular reference to the design and fabrication of all forms of machinery. Since engineering is the combined science and art of utilizing the forces and materials of nature, and since this utilization is accomplished in nearly all cases by machines, or by processes working through machines, it is evident that mechanical engineering is the basis of all art and industry."

"There are many good mechanical engineers; — there are also many good " businessmen ;"— but the two are rarely combined in one person."

"It has been suggested that because the able mechanical engineers who have taken up the subject of construction are mainly to be credited with the advances which have been made in electrical lightning, therefor electrical engineering per se is to be a thing of the past. For the further, those who would be electrical engineers must first be mechanical engineers, and then somehow obtain a smattering of electrical knowledge, and all will be will with them..."

"Mechanical differs from Civil Engineering in the fact that the former provides or makes what the latter uses. On this account, a knowledge of mechanical engineering is of invaluable service to the civil engineer, and it should be the rule to obtain this practically, whatever branch of engineering the student may ultimately follow."

"The young man fresh from a great public school, or the refinement of a well-kept English home, will find the practical work of mechanical engineering extremely irksome and distasteful at first. Mechanical engineering is distinctly dirty work."

"Mechanical Engineering may be defined as being the application of mathematics to Science, with particular reference to the design and fabrication of all forms of machinery. Since engineering is the combined science and art of utilizing the"

"Mechanical Engineering is that branch of engineering which broadly speaking covers the fields of heat, power, design of machinery, industrial management, and manufacturing problems."

"Mechanical engineering may be defined as "the science and art of utilizing by machines the forces and materials of nature.""

"The analytical and factual approach to engineering problems is identical with that to business problems. There is no more fundamental training or mental discipline for business than engineering, particularly mechanical engineering."

"Learning to practice mechanical engineering is a lifetime assignment. New problems are continually demanding new analyses, new measurements, and new experiments for their solution."

"Mechanical engineering is now the largest branch, with nearly 40 percent of the profession's members. Civil engineering, which was the largest branch prior to World War II, has dropped to second place, with about 25 percent of all engineers."

"Mechanical engineering is that branch of the profession which deals with devices and equipment whose design, manufacture, and operation are essentially mechanical in nature."

"The mechanical engineer is concerned with the generation and use of power, the design and development of a wide variety of products and machinery, and the operations and methods of manufacture. As such he engages in the design operation, and control of conventional and nuclear power plants. He designs and develops automobiles, engines, turbines, fluid machinery, production machinery, and equipment; heating, ventilating, air conditioning, refrigeration systems and equipment, appliances and other consumer goods."

"Engineering is no longer just an industrial discipline or technology — it is also a concept of statesmanship and of humanitarianism and a challenge worthy of our best. Mechanical Engineering is a career which follows a never-setting sun."

"Mechanical engineering may be defined as the manufacture, installation, and repair of all kinds of machinery (including machine tools), prime movers and boilers, and engines"

"Mechanical engineering is scientific theory. But actual mechanical engineering is impossible without praxis. Even in mechanical technology, concrete reality, or the individual gestalt, always contains"

"The field of mechanical engineering is so broad that several specialized branches have grown from it."

"Mechanical engineering is a major area of engineering. Mechanical engineering design, or mechanical design in short, refers to the design of devices, products, systems, or processes of a mechanical nature."

"The field of mechanical engineering is frankly as old as human life itself. Fire, the wheel, the printing press, and many of the life- changing discoveries and inventions of the past few centuries are simply applications of mechanical engineering in order to solve everyday problems."

"The systems engineering method recognizes each system is an integrated whole even though composed of diverse, specialized structures and sub-functions. It further recognizes that any system has a number of objectives and that the balance between them may differ widely from system to system. The methods seek to optimize the overall system functions according to the weighted objectives and to achieve maximum compatibility of its parts."

"Systems engineering should be, first and foremost, a state of mind and an attitude taken when dealing with complexity."

"Systems engineering as an approach and methodology grew in response to the increase size and complexity of systems and projects... This engineering approach to the management of complexity by modularization was re-deployed in the software engineering discipline in the 1960s and 1970s with a proliferation of structured methodologies that enabled the analysis, design and development of information systems by using techniques for modularized description, design and development of system components. Yourdon and DeMarco's Structured Analysis and Design, SSADM, James Martin's Information Engineering, and Jackson's Structured Design and Programming are examples from this era. They all exploited modularization to enable the parallel development of data, process, functionality and performance components of large software systems. The development of object orientation in the 1990s exploited modularization to develop reusable software. The idea was to develop modules that could be mixed and matched like Lego bricks to deliver to a variety of whole system specifications. The modularization and reusability principles have stood the test of time and are at the heart of modern software development."

"System engineering is the art and science of creating optimal solution systems to complex issues and problems."

"[In the year 1957] I have just returned from an exciting meeting of the American Society for Engineering Education where I heard a paper on the new discipline of systems engineering. It is no longer sufficient for engineers merely to design boxes such as computers with the expectation that they would become components of larger, more complex systems. That is wasteful because frequently the box component is a bad fit in the system and has to be redesigned or worse, can lead to system failure. We must learn how to design large-scale, complex systems from the top down so that the specification for each component is derivable from the requirements for the overall system. We must also take a much larger view of systems. We must design the man-machine interfaces and even the system-society interfaces. Systems engineers must be trained for the design of large-scale, complex, man-machine-social systems"

"The motives for conceiving modern systems engineering are to be found, at least in part, in past disasters. Arthur D. Hall III [1989] cites: the chemical plant leakage in Bhopal (1986); the explosion of the NASA Challenger space shuttle (1986) and the Apollo fire (1967); the sinking of the Titanic (1912); the nuclear explosion in Chernobyl (1986) and the disaster at Three Mile Island power plant (1979). He cites, too, the capture of markets by Japan from the U.S., the decline in US productivity and the failure of the US secondary school system. He identifies the millions of people dying of starvation every year while other nations stockpile surplus food, medical disasters such as heart disease, while governments subsidize grains used to produce high cholesterol meat, milk and eggs; and many more. One implication is clear: systems engineering faces challenges well beyond the sphere of engineering."

"Complex engineering projects should be managed as evolutionary processes that undergo continuous rapid improvement through iterative incremental changes performed in parallel and thus is linked to diverse small subsystems of various sizes and relationships. Constraints and dependencies increase complexity and should be imposed only when necessary. This context must establish necessary security for task performance and for the system that is performing the tasks. In the evolutionary context, people and technology are agents that are involved in design, implementation and function. Management’s basic oversight (meta) tasks are to create a context and design the process of innovation, and to shorten the natural feedback loops through extended measures of performance."

"Among the first texts to use the term [Systems engineering] was ’s Radar System Engineering, published in 1947 as part of the Radiation Laboratory’s series of textbooks. The title refers to the physiological sense of system, that is “how to engineer a radar system,” – where an individual radar is a connected set of components like magnetrons, waveguides, power supplies, and display tubes. Title does not refer to the philosophical sense of system, as in “how to system engineer a radar,” but such ideas are nascent in the book: it covers not only wave propagation and noise models, but also the appropriate design of displays and the dissemination of information through a radar organization. Ridenour’s text includes no discussion of feedback or servomechanisms, or of the dynamic characteristics of radar systems. A McGraw Hill text, System Engineering [by , and Robert E. Machol, published ten years later, included probability, analog and digital computers for simulation, queuing theory, game theory, information theory, servomechanism theory, and sections on “human engineering,” management, and economics."

"Rocket engineering is not like ditch digging. With ditch digging you can get 100 people and dig a ditch, and you will dig it a hundred times as faster if you get 100 people versus one. With rockets, you have to solve the problem of a particular level of difficulty; one person who can solve the problem is worth an infinite number of people who can’t."

"Systems engineering is the key technology to manage this complexity"

"Before the 1940s the terms "system" and "systems thinking" had been used by several scientists, but it was Bertalanffy's concepts of an open system and a general systems theory that established systems thinking as a major scientific movement... With the subsequent strong support from cybernetics, the concepts of systems thinking and systems theory became integral parts of the established scientific language, and led to numerous new methodologies and applications -- systems engineering, systems analysis, systems dynamics, and so on."

"System engineering is a robust approach to the design, creation, and operation of systems. In simple terms, the approach consists of identification and quantification of system goals, creation of alternative system design concepts, performance of design trades, selection and implementation of the best design, verification that the design is properly built and integrated, and post-implementation assessment of how well the system meets (or met) the goals."

"System engineering is the art and science of creating effective systems, using whole system, whole life principles."

"A.D. Hall's (1962) classic account of the methodology was based on his experience with the Bell Telephone Laboratories. Hall sees systems as existing in hierarchies. In systems engineering, plans to achieve a general objective must similarly be arranged in a hierarchy, with the systems engineer ensuring the internal consistency and integration of the plans, The methodology itself ensures the optimization of the system of concern with respect to its objectives. This requires a number of steps, the most important being problem definition, choosing objectives, systems synthesis, systems analysis, systems selection, system development, and current engineering. With Hall, the system of concern is usually a physical entity."

"Significant formal investigators of systems engineering have included Goode and Machol (1957), A.D. Hall (1962), Chestnut (1965, 1967), Sage (1977a,b), and Blanchard and Fabrycky (1981), whose descriptions span 24 years. Although each investigator has approached this subject with a slightly different orientation, all have dealt with defining the elements of systems engineering and various methods of approaching the implementation of these elements. In addition, the US government, through its development and acquisition of large-scale systems over the years, has addressed all aspects of systems engineering. These have been documented in government- sponsored texts (e.g.. System Engineering Management Guide 1986) as well as numerous related standards, directives and handbooks, especially those printed by the US Department of Defense."

"Management of an industrial company must be giving targets to the engineers constantly; that may be the most important job management has in dealing with its engineers."

"The notion of "system" has gained central importance in contemporary science, society and life. In many fields of endeavor, the necessity of a "systems approach" or "systems thinking" is emphasized, new professions called "systems engineering," "systems analysis" and the like have come into being, and there can be little doubt that this this concept marks a genuine, necessary, and consequential development in science and world-view."

"Chestnut (1965) devotes one page of the more than 600 pages in his book to man as an operator or an element of man-machine systems. Hall (1962) devotes about a page and a half to human factors applications. Machol (1965) has a brief chapter of limited content on human factors, in which man is considered only as an information processor. Shearer et al. (1967) mention a driver and a steersman in their introductory chapter; thereafter, there is no of man, his characteristics, or his behavior. Wilson (1965) allocates three pages to human factors. For every book on systems engineering containing a mention of the human operator, there is another in which the words human, man, human factors, and psychology do not appear."

"My analysis of living systems uses concepts of thermodynamics, information theory, cybernetics, and systems engineering, as well as the classical concepts appropriate to each level. The purpose is to produce a description of living structure and process in terms of input and output, flows through systems, steady states, and feedbacks, which will clarify and unify the facts of life."

"Systems Engineering is the science of designing complex systems in their totality to ensure that the component sub-systems making up the system are designed, fitted together, checked and operated in the most efficient way."

"Systems thinking plays a dominant role in a wide range of fields from industrial enterprise and armaments to esoteric topics of pure science. Innumerable publications, conferences, symposia and courses are devoted to it. Professions and jobs have appeared in recent years which, unknown a short while ago, go under names such as systems design, systems analysis, systems engineering and others."