Quotes About Engineering

Stone and wood had been the coin of the building realm until the arrival of cast iron in the middle of the nineteenth century. Until then the weight of buildings had been borne by their walls, but in 1848 James Bogardus used a skeleton of cast-iron posts and beams to support a building from within. Since the walls no longer bore the load, they could be freed from their former obligations.

For all their talk of democracy, the conquerors worked hard to engineer consensus; and on many critical issues, they made clear that the better part of political wisdom was silence and conformism. So well did they succeed in reinforcing this consciousness that after they left, and time passed, many non-Japanese including Americans came to regard such attitudes as peculiarly Japanese.

I am afraid of some math, science, and engineering problems, but I know I can at least read the chapters through and perhaps the fear will go away at some point in the future as I attempt the work and ask the experts.

I guess the two things I was most interested in were telescopes and steam engines. My father was an engineer on a threshing rig steam engine and I loved the machinery.

Funny, there had been a time when building things was what America did. From massive dams to towering skyscrapers, from mechanized factories to moon rockets, the nation had created, had viewed that as part of the national identity. Being an engineer or an architect had once been high aspirations.

fluorescent bulbs were the result of a multimillion-dollar program specially engineered to offer the most hopeless light possible.

Funny, there had been a time when building things was what America did. From massive dams to towering skyscrapers, from mechanized factories to moon rockets, the nation had created, had viewed that as part of the national identity.

Her life seemed to her a great engineering work scarcely begun. Lately more excavation than construction had occurred. She had lost a sense of her own invincibility. In that way she was no longer archetypically American.

If the black box flight recorder is never damaged during a plane crash, why isn't the whole airplane made out of that stuff?

The joy of engineering is to find a straight line on a double logarithmic diagram.

Electronic calculators can solve problems which the man who made them cannot solve; but no government subsidised commission of engineers and physicists could create a worm.

Travel in Italy has always been difficult because of the hills and mountains. The Romans of ancient Italy were great engineers, and about 2,000 years ago they laid out a system of roads across the country to improve transport. Some of their routes are still in use today.

Roman engineering The Romans accomplished amazing feats of engineering as they built roads, bridges, and aqueducts (bridges for water conduits) across their empire. This 2,000-year-old Roman aqueduct at Segovia, in central Spain, has 128 arches. No mortar was used to cement the large blocks of granite together. Good roads were one of the reasons for the success of the Roman Empire. They allowed troops and supplies to be moved swiftly, before the enemy could either attack or escape.

monorails writhing like phosphorescent vipers.

Put another way, road engineers had relied on the supposedly apolitical principles of highway building as their major form of political expression.

freedom of expression is great for art, but lousy for engineering.

We cannot criticise global warming sceptics for denying the scientific consensus on climate when we ignore the same consensus on both the safety and the beneficial uses of nuclear power and genetic engineering.

There is no doubt that new designs available today are dramatically safer than those of the past, and that the potential for severe accidents in future vastly reduced.

This was what we did as a species, after all: we built ingenious devices, and we destroyed things.

intellectuals who reject eternal truths and experience through the ages for the social engineering by supposed experts and their administrative state—which claim to use data, science, and empiricism to analyze, manage, and control society.

They self-righteously advocate public policies that obligate future generations' labor and resources to their own real and perceived benefit, empowering governmental abuse via social engineering and economic depredation. They disguise the delinquency as compassionate and premised on good intentions, often insisting their objectives will improve the prospects of those most severely burdened by them—"the children.

The Romans spent the next 200 years using their great engineering skill to construct ruins all over Europe.

I never knew what an engineer did for a living when I was a kid. I still don't.

#3 pencils and quadrille pads.