Quotes About Engineering

I am really good with Lego!

A Rube Goldberg machine is, in its essence, a trial-and-error thing.

As for ourselves, we love our machines.

Engineers and designers simultaneously know too much and too little. They know too much about the technology and too little about how other people live their live and do their activities.

market-driven pressures plus an engineering-driven company yield ever-increasing features, complexity, and confusion. But even companies that do intend to search for human needs are thwarted by the severe challenges of the product development process, in particular, the challenges of insufficient time and insufficient money.

when a device as simple as a door has to have a sign telling you whether to pull, push, or slide, then it is a failure, poorly designed.

Engineers and designers who believe they do not need to watch the people who use their products are a major source of the many poor designs that confront us.

furniture designers, incredibly, are not taught during their formal training how to calculate the deflection in an ordinary bookshelf when it is loaded with books,

Numerically, the stress in any direction at a given point in a material is simply the force or load which happens to be acting in that direction at the point, divided by the area on which the force acts.

The science of elasticity is about the interactions between forces and deflections.

slope of the stress-strain diagram measures how readily each material strains elastically under a given stress.

Where human life is concerned, it is clearly desirable that a 'safe' crack should be long enough to be visible to a bored and rather stupid inspector working in a bad light on a Friday afternoon.

The quantity of energy required to break a given cross-section of a material defines its 'toughness', which is nowadays more often called its 'fracture energy' or 'work of fracture'.

The science of elasticity is about the interactions between forces and deflections in materials and structures.

Geometrical irregularities, such as holes and cracks and sharp corners, which had previously been ignored, may raise the local stress ? often only over a very small area ? very dramatically indeed.

Resilience may be defined as 'the amount of strain energy which can be stored in a structure without causing permanent damage to it'.

It is necessary to avoid confusion between the strength of a structure and the strength of a material.

strain is a ratio, which is to say a number, and it has no units, SI, British or anything else. All

Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them.

A funny thing about code is that when left alone, it gets moldy and breaks of its own accord. This is true of product code and test code. A large part of maintenance engineering is about monitoring quality, not looking for new issues.

first personal computer—that was the LINC of Wes Clark

the integrated circuit itself; that honor goes to Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments, who demonstrated his first device in Dallas on September 19, 1958.

Jobs and his top engineers finally showed up for an afternoon visit in December 1979, the presentation was as minimal as Goldberg could make it.

Human Factors in Electronics.