Engineering is the practice of systematically applying natural science and mathematics to design and improve systems, devices, or processes that solve problems under constraints. It is typically motivated by satisfying human needs, resulting in creations such as bridges, engines, smartphones, pacemakers, the internet, spacecraft, and washing machines. Engineering involves balancing competing demands such as safety, performance, aesthetics, cost, and time, while operating within fundamental limits such as the laws of physics.
As a human endeavor, engineering has existed since ancient times, starting with the six classic simple machines. Examples of large-scale engineering projects from antiquity include impressive structures like the pyramids, elegant temples such as the Parthenon, and water conveyances like hulled watercraft, canals, and the Roman aqueduct. Early machines were powered by humans and animals, then later by wind. Machines of war were invented for siegecraft. In Europe, the scientific and industrial revolutions advanced engineering into a scientific profession and resulted in continuing technological improvements. The steam 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, and aerospace requirements, plus the use of new materials for greater efficiencies.
The word engineering is derived from the Latiningenium. Engineers typically follow a code of ethics that favors honesty and integrity, while being dedicated to public safety and welfare. Engineering tasks involve finding optimal solutions to constrained problems, with testing and simulations 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 this product lifecycle management is now assisted with computer software, from design to testing and manufacturing. At larger scales, this process is normally funded by a company, multiple investors, or the government, so a knowledge of economics and business practices is needed. (Full article...)
An engineer is a practitioner of engineering. The word engineer is derived from the Latin words ingeniare ("to contrive, devise") and ingenium ("cleverness"). Ir is an honorific of an engineer in countries like Belgium, the Netherlands, and Indonesia (from Latin: ingeniator). The foundational qualifications of a licensed professional engineer typically include a four-year bachelor's degree in an engineering discipline, or in some jurisdictions, a master'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...)
... that during hearings for a new TV station in the state of Washington, an engineer collapsed on the witness stand, a radio station owner suffered food poisoning, and his rival's wife was hospitalized?
... that Alberta Devor left her job as a Google software engineer to post satirical videos about technology and AI?
Credit:National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Manufacturing Engineering
Computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) is the manufacturing approach of using computers to control the entire production process. 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 on closed-loop control processes, based on real-time input from sensors. It is also known as flexible design and manufacturing.
These are Good articles, which meet a core set of high editorial standards.
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The Avrocar S/N 58-7055 (marked AV-7055) on its rollout.
The Avro Canada VZ-9 Avrocar is a VTOL aircraft developed by Avro Canada as part of a secret U.S. military project carried out in the early years of the Cold War. The Avrocar intended to exploit the Coandă 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 a flying saucer.
Originally designed as a fighter-like aircraft capable of very high speeds and altitudes, the project was repeatedly scaled back over time and the U.S. Air Force eventually abandoned it. Development was then taken up by the U.S. Army for a tactical combat aircraft requirement, a sort of high-performance helicopter. In flight testing, the Avrocar proved to have unresolved thrust and stability problems that limited it to a degraded, low-performance flight envelope; subsequently, the project was cancelled in September 1961. (Full article...)
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Buro Happold Limited (previously BuroHappold Engineering) is a British professional services firm that provides engineering consultancy, design, planning, project management, and consulting services for buildings, infrastructure, and the environment. It was founded in Bath, Somerset, in 1976 by Sir Edmund Happold when he took up a post at the University of Bath as Professor of Architecture and Engineering Design.
Originally working mainly on projects in the Middle East, the firm now operates worldwide and in almost all areas of engineering for the built environment, working in 24 locations around the world. (Full article...)
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Genetic engineering, also called genetic modification or genetic manipulation, is the modification and manipulation of an organism's genes using technology. It is a set of technologies used to change the genetic makeup of cells, including the transfer of genes within and across species boundaries to produce improved or novel organisms. New DNA is obtained by either isolating and copying the genetic material of interest using recombinant DNA methods or by artificially synthesising the DNA. A construct is usually created and used to insert this DNA into the host organism. The first recombinant DNA molecule was designed by Paul Berg in 1972 by combining DNA from the monkey virus SV40 with the lambda virus. As well as inserting genes, the process can be used to remove, or "knock out", genes. The new DNA can either be inserted randomly or targeted to a specific part of the genome.
An organism that is generated through genetic engineering is considered to be genetically modified (GM), and the resulting entity is a genetically modified organism (GMO). The first GMO was a bacterium generated by Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen in 1973. Rudolf Jaenisch created the first GM animal when he inserted foreign DNA into a mouse in 1974. The first company to focus on genetic engineering, Genentech, was founded in 1976 and began the production of human proteins. Genetically engineered human insulin was produced in 1978, and insulin-producing bacteria were commercialised in 1982. Genetically modified food has been sold since 1994, with the release of the Flavr 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 the United States in December 2003. In 2016, salmon modified with a growth hormone were sold. (Full article...)
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Fizeau–Foucault apparatus may refer to either of two nineteenth-century experiments to measure the speed of light:
The Sinclair C5 is a small battery electric one-person recumbent tricycle, technically an "electrically assisted pedal cycle". It was the culmination of the English entrepreneur Clive 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 a knighthood, for his successful Sinclair Research range of home computers in the early 1980s. He hoped to repeat his success in the electric vehicle market, which he thought had potential 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 a polypropylene body and a chassis designed by Lotus 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, mostly due to the poor public response to the C5. (Full article...)
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The radius of maximum wind of a tropical cyclone lies just within the eyewall of an intense tropical cyclone, such as Hurricane Isabel from 2003 The radius of maximum wind (RMW) is the distance between the center of a cyclone and its band of strongest winds. It is a parameter in atmospheric dynamics and tropical cyclone forecasting. The highest rainfall rates occur near the RMW of tropical cyclones. The extent of a cyclone's storm surge and its maximum potential intensity can be determined using the RMW. As maximum sustained winds increase, the RMW decreases. Recently, RMW has been used in descriptions of tornadoes. When designing buildings to prevent against failure from atmospheric pressure change, RMW can be used in the calculations. (Full article...)
The 2009 North Korean nuclear test was the underground detonation of a nuclear device conducted on Monday, 25 May 2009 by North Korea. This was its second nuclear test, the first test having taken place in October 2006. Following the nuclear test, Pyongyang also conducted several missile tests. A scientific paper later estimated the yield as 2.35 kilotons.
William Barton Rogers founded MIT to accelerate American industrialization through scientific knowledge. Initially funded by a federal land grant, the institute adopted a German polytechnic model emphasizing laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering, and moved from Boston's Back Bay to its current campus in Cambridge in 1916. Early growth came through research contracts with private industry, though the institute remained financially constrained and focused primarily on practical engineering education into the 1930s. (Full article...)
The tubes were constructed using the shield method and are each 6,550 feet (2,000m) long and 15.5 feet (4.7m) wide. The interiors are lined with cast-iron "rings" formed with concrete. The tubes descend 91 to 95 feet (28 to 29m) below the mean high water level of the East River, with a maximum gradient of 3.1 percent. During the tunnel's construction, a house at 58 Joralemon Street in Brooklyn was converted into a ventilation building and emergency exit. (Full article...)
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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. In mathematical analysis, the Dirac delta function (or distribution), also known as the unit impulse, is a generalized function on the real numbers, whose value is zero everywhere except at zero, where it is infinite, and whose integral over the entire real line is equal to one. Thus it can be represented heuristically assuch that
Since no function has this property, modelling the delta "function" rigorously involves the use of limits or, as is common in mathematics, measure theory and the theory of distributions. (Full article...)
Meticulous naval inventories show that HMS Beagle carried a total of at least 34 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 of the two known survivors from the second voyage are owned by the British Museum (the second is registration No. CAI.1743). (Full article...)
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The Churchill Machine Tool Company Limited began as the manufacturing subsidiary of the machine tool importers Charles Churchill & Company Limited founded in the early 1900s by US-born Charles Churchill (1837–1916). Created out of the personal bankruptcy of Charles Churchill, the company developed to become one of the largest British importers of machine tools from the United States and a major manufacturer of such tools, initially under licence and later of its own development.
The original business importing American machine tools into Britain began with Charles Churchill as sole proprietor and later as a partnership with two others. It became a limited company in 1889. In 1906 a separate company, The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd, was established with the purpose of adapting tools imported by Charles Churchill & Co. The former expanded, producing American tools under licence and then manufactured tools of its own design, in particular precision surface grinders and similar engineering machinery. In 1918 The Churchill Machine Tool Co relocated its factories onto a single site at Broadheath, near Altrincham. (Full article...)
The Wignacourt Aqueduct (Maltese: L-Akwedott ta' Wignacourt) is a 17th-century aqueduct in Malta, which was built by the Order of Saint John to carry water from springs in Dingli and Rabat to the newly built capital city Valletta. The aqueduct carried water through underground pipes and over arched viaducts across depressions in the ground.
The first attempts to build the aqueduct were made by Grand Master Martin Garzez in 1596, but construction was suspended before being continued in 1610. The watercourse was inaugurated five years later on 21 April 1615. Several engineers took part in the project, including Bontadino de Bontadini, Giovanni Attard and Natale Tomasucci. The aqueduct was named after Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt, who partially financed its construction. (Full article...)
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ODB++ is a proprietary CAD-to-CAM data exchange format used in the design and manufacture of electronic devices. Its purpose is to exchange printed circuit board design information between design and manufacturing and between design tools from different EDA/ECAD vendors. It was originally developed by Valor Computerized Systems, Ltd. (acquired in 2010 by Mentor Graphics which was later acquired by Siemens in 2016) as the job description format for their CAM system.
ODB stands for open database, but its openness is disputed, as discussed below. The '++' suffix, evocative of C++, was added in 1997 with the addition of component descriptions. There are two versions of ODB++: the original (now controlled by Mentor) and an XML version called ODB++(X) that Valor developed and donated to the IPC organization in an attempt to merge GenCAM (IPC-2511) and ODB++ into Offspring (IPC-2581). (Full article...)
The following are images from various Engineering-related articles on Wikipedia.
Image 1The application of the steam engine allowed coke to be substituted for charcoal in iron making, lowering the cost of iron, which provided engineers with a new material for building bridges. This bridge was made of cast iron, which was soon displaced by less brittle wrought iron as a structural material. (from Engineering)
Image 9Archimedes is regarded as one of the leading scientists in classical antiquity whose ideas have underpinned much of the practice of engineering. (from Engineer)
Image 13A drawing for a steam locomotive. Engineering is applied to design, with emphasis on function and the utilization of mathematics and science. (from Engineering)
Image 14A water-powered mine hoist used for raising ore, Germany, c.1556 (from Engineering)
Image 24Design of a turbine requires collaboration of engineers from many fields, as the system involves mechanical, electro-magnetic and chemical processes. The blades, rotor and stator as well as the steam cycle all need to be carefully designed and optimized. (from Engineering)
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