This abecedarian is one engineer's collection of thoughts, quotations, anecdotes, facts, trivia, arcana, and miscellanea relating to the practice, history, culture, and traditions of his profession. The entries, which represent the distillation of decades of reading, writing, talking, and thinking about engineers and engineering, range from brief essays on concepts and practices that are central to the profession to lists of its great achievements. This book is at the same time an anthology, a commonplace book, and a reference volume.

My approach in composing the entries has generally been to convey as much information in as little space as possible, to create more of a dictionary-like than an encyclopedia-like sense of the topic under discussion. In no case is an entry meant to be definitive or exhaustive, and so references to further information are provided freely. However, I have included no references to the World Wide Web, not only because web sites can come, go, and change so unpredictably, but also because it can be easier to query a reliable search engine than to type in correctly a long web address.

This volume is not intended to be read from first page to last, but rather is meant to be dipped into here and there as the mood strikes the reader, with the alphabetical arrangement promoting serendipity. In time, it is hoped, this book will become the source to which readers come first when they encounter a vague or obscure reference to something related to the softer side of engineering.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Subtitled An Inquiry into Values, this book was written by Robert M. Pirsig (born in 1928) and first published in 1974. It has been widely assigned in engineering design courses for its insights into the nature of design and the idea of quality. A tenth-anniversary edition of the book, published by William Morrow and Company in 1984, included a new introduction by the author in which he reflected on the astounding success of a book that had been turned down by 121 other publishers and also on the tragic death of his son, who played a prominent role in the book's narrative. Pirsig, a biochemist by education who became disillusioned with science and eventually came to be identified as a philosopher, has been quoted as believing that “traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.” That responsibility, at least in the material world, rests more squarely on enlightened and responsible engineering infused with the values of its softer side.

women in engineering. Because engineering in America was, until the 1970s, almost exclusively a male profession, the now-conspicuous and perhaps distracting male pronoun is appropriately used in many of the references to those prior times and in many of the older quotations that appear in this book. That is not to say that women were completely excluded from the engineering profession. In 1876, Elizabeth Bragg Cumming (1859–1929) became the first woman in America to earn a degree in engineering when she received a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.

The first woman to become a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers was Nora Stanton Blatch Barney (1883–1971), who was admitted to the grade of Junior in 1906. In the previous year, she had become the first woman to receive a civil engineering degree from Cornell University, which she did cum laude. When in 1916 Nora Blatch applied to the ASCE for advancement to the next membership grade, her application was denied, and she was subsequently dropped from membership for failing to advance to Associate Member in the required time. The first woman to reach corporate member status in the ASCE was Elsie Eaves (1898–1983), a 1920 civil engineering graduate of the University of Colorado who advanced to Associate Member in the society in 1927. See Engineering News-Record, March 17, 1927, p. 463.

gentlemen and engineers. Herbert Hoover told a story that indicated how far the engineering profession had had to come in the early twentieth century toward regaining the recognition and respect it had had during the Victorian era. According to Hoover, while he was on a steamship journey once, he struck up a conversation with a woman sitting in a deck chair next to his. After some time of wide ranging and urbane talk about cultural pursuits, the woman asked Hoover what was his profession. When he responded, “I am an engineer,” the woman recoiled and said, “Why, I took you for a gentleman.”

Another distinguished and dapper engineer, William Barclay Parsons, did not meet with such skepticism. Parsons, who came from a prominent New York City family, held the position of Chief Engineer of the Rapid Transit Commission, which was responsible for the initial development of the New York subway system. In that position he designed and oversaw the construction of the city's first successful subway line, whose initial nine-mile segment – running from City Hall in lower Manhattan to its West 145th Street station – opened for service in 1904. Shortly afterwards, fulfilling a promise that he would move on to other things when the subway was operating, Parsons resigned his position of ten years to devote time to the Panama Canal Commission on which he sat and, shortly thereafter, to become chief engineer of the Cape Cod Canal project.

keys of honor societies. Traditionally, a key is a charm worn by a member of an honorary society to signify membership. (In contrast, professional society insignia have tended to be in the form of badges and lapel pins.) As late as the middle of the twentieth century, when engineering was still almost exclusively a male profession, it was common for engineers to wear one or more keys and badges suspended from a watch-, key-, or tie-clip chain. By the end of the century, only the oldest generation of engineers followed this practice, and the insignia that professional and honor societies still offered their members increasingly took the form of cuff links, tie tacks, pendants, earrings, and lapel pins, as well as keys.

The term key came to be applied to the older piece of society jewelry first in the nineteenth century, when pocket watches were common and were connected to men's vests by watch chains, which also served to hold small winding keys. Some members of America's oldest academic honor society, Phi Beta Kappa, which predated engineering and scientific honor societies by more than a century, altered their society badges by attaching the steel shank of a watch key to them. (Keys were necessary because the winding stem was not introduced in America until later in the nineteenth century. These watch keys were smaller versions of those used to wind grandfather clocks and spring-driven toys.) The modern honor-society key evolved from these early functional ones.

land-grant institutions. Many state colleges and universities, especially those agricultural and mechanical institutions of earlier times (the A&Ms of today), were founded and expanded with the support of the federal government following the enactment of the Morrill Land Grant Act. This legislation, introduced by Vermont Representative Justin Morrill (1810–1898), was at first defeated by Congress in 1857 and vetoed by President James Buchanan in 1859. The absence of the Southern Congressional delegation during the Civil War allowed the act finally to be passed in 1862. The Morrill Act enabled the federal government to allocate public lands to each state for the establishment and support of colleges engaged especially in “such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts.” The purpose of the act was to promote “the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions of life.” The number of engineering schools in the United States tripled to about seventy in the decade following the passage of the Morrill Act. The institutions so formed have come to be known as land-grant institutions.

The Morrill Land Grant Act also encouraged the teaching of military tactics, which explains why there developed such a strong tradition of cadets at land-grant schools such as Texas A&M and Virginia Tech, whose Blacksburg campus remains centered around an enormous parade field.

named schools of engineering. A number of engineering schools are named after their benefactors or are known by different names from their present parent institutions, often because of their origins or because they have been subsequently endowed. Among the schools of engineering in these categories are the following:

Armour Institute of Technology. In 1940, this Chicago institution merged with the Lewis Institute to become the Illinois Institute of Technology. According to IIT's history, the Armour Institute had its origins in an 1890 sermon preached by the minister Frank Wakely Gunsaulus (1856–1921), in which he declared that if he had a million dollars he “would build a school where students of all backgrounds could prepare for meaningful roles in a changing industrial society.” The sermon inspired the owner of America's largest meatpacking company, businessman Philip Danforth Armour, Sr. (1832–1901), to found the namesake institute, which opened in 1893. The Lewis Institute, a liberal arts, science, and engineering college, dated from 1895. It had been founded by Allen Cleveland Lewis (1821–1877), a Chicago real estate investor.

Carnegie Institute of Technology. This Pittsburgh institution was founded in 1900 as a “first class technical school” by the steel industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919). In 1967 it merged with the city's Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, founded in 1913 by the banker-industrialist brothers Richard Beatty Mellon (1858–1933) and Andrew William Mellon (1855–1937), to form Carnegie-Mellon University, which has since dropped the hyphen in its name.

x. This common designation for an algebraic unknown is often used by engineers to indicate an indefinite quantity, as in “drink x glasses of water to quench your thirst.” While few nonengineers would miss the meaning of such usage, they would also not overlook the curiosity of it. It is not that the use of the letter as a word is unknown. Indeed, the phrase “x marks the spot” is a cliché. However, the allusion to a spot on a treasure map is a far cry from using an algebraic variable for something mundane.

Engineers bring their jobs home with them, and their language gets dragged along. Why this is so is no doubt due to a variety of factors, not the least significant of which is the fact that engineers usually do their jobs totally surrounded by other engineers, often working on the same or a closely related project. There is little need to draw a distinction between technical and social talk – the latter taking place over the water cooler, the lunch table, or, in the old days, the drafting board – because the audience is the same.

Doctors and lawyers are also prone to lapse into using professional jargon before their patients and clients, but the blank stare or the outright questioning of what is meant usually brings the conversation back into the vernacular.

image of engineers. The perception of a poor public image has led engineers and engineering societies over the years to call for action to improve or reinvent the stereotypical image of the engineer. Comparisons are usually drawn to the images of medical doctors and lawyers and their visibility in movies and television shows. What is often meant by image is public recognition and respect; however, it is unlikely that these will be won by engineers and engineering until the education of engineers becomes more like that of doctors and lawyers.

Many successful television series, from “L. A. Law” to the more recent “Harry's Law,” have projected to the public the excitement that could be found in the legal profession. This kind of image-making prompted some engineers in the early 1990s to propose that a television series, usually referred to as “L. A. Engineer,” be developed to bring attention to their profession. Among the most articulate advocates of the idea was Norman Augustine (born in 1935), former chairman of the Martin-Marietta Corporation and a consummate champion of the profession. (See Norman R. Augustine, “‘L. A. Engineer’,” The Bridge, Fall 1994, pp. 27–29.) While there appeared to be much enthusiasm among engineers for the idea at the time, it did not develop any serious support from the American television industry or from professional underwriting or potential commercial sponsors.

Vitruvius. This Roman architect and engineer, whose full name was Marcus Virtuvius Pollio, flourished in the first century B.C. His Ten Books on Architecture, written as a report to the emperor on the state of the art of building design and construction, is believed to be the oldest book on architecture and engineering that has survived. The classic work is often referred to by its author's name rather than by its title.

Early in his First Book, which in modern terminology would be called the opening chapter, Vitruvius lays out the qualities desirable in an engineer:

See Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, translated by Morris Hicky Morgan (New York: Dover Publications, 1960); see also “Rereading Vitruvius,” American Scientist, November–December 2010, pp. 457–461.

calculators. The prototype of the now-ubiquitous and inexpensive hand-held battery- or solar-powered electronic calculator was produced in 1966 by Texas Instruments engineers Jack S. Kilby, Jerry D. Merryman, and James H. Van Tasse. Its dimensions were 4–1/4 by 6–1/8 by 1–3/4 inches, and it weighed 45 ounces. The technology, created at TI under the code name Cal-Tech, was licensed by the early 1970s. The Pocketronic calculator went on sale in Japan in 1970 for the equivalent of $395, and became available in the United States in 1971 for $345.

In January 1972, the HP 35, the first scientific pocket calculator, was offered to the public by Hewlett-Packard at a retail price of $395. The introduction of this and soon other “scientific calculators” that could handle trigonometric functions as well as the basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of the Pocketronic caused much debate among engineering professors at the time as to whether such calculators gave students who could afford them an unfair advantage over those who could not. The latter had to continue to use a slide rule, of course. There was no resolution of the academic debate as to whether electronic calculators should be banned from exams before the point became moot because the price of calculators dropped to where they were generally considered as affordable as a good slide rule.

Marchant calculator. Before the advent of the digital computer, this electrically powered calculating machine, whose keyboard was suggestive of a large cash register, but with much smaller and more numerous keys, was among the most sophisticated pieces of equipment available for extensive engineering calculations. A working Marchant, with its register that moved back and forth like a typewriter carriage, had a characteristic mechanical sound that was rotary and repetitive. In an article titled “Socioengineering” (The Bridge, Fall 1994, p. 5), the aerospace engineer Norman Augustine (born in 1935) remembered the 1950s, when Marchants were “the revolutionary new electromechanical desktop computers of the day.” He went on to recall:

For a description of the calculating power of similar machines, such as the “hand-operated, electrically driven Friden mechanical calculators” in the 1940s, see Walter G. Vincenti, “Engineering Theory in the Making: Aerodynamic Calculation ‘Breaks the Sound Barrier’,” Technology and Culture, October 1997, p. 834, where he relates how for some problems in transonic flow, “the numerical work for the four solutions took the better part of a year,” whereas “the same could be done today in seconds on an electronic desk-top computer.”

back of the envelope. This phrase refers to the practice of making a rough sketch of a design or making a very preliminary calculation for the purpose of recording an idea, demonstrating the practicality of a scheme, estimating the magnitude of a phenomenon, or communicating the essence of a concept to a colleague or potential client. A “back-of-the-envelope” sketch or calculation is often the result of an idea or question that arises away from a desk or regular workspace, and so whatever is handy is used as the recording medium.

The phrase evidently dates from times when there were few telephones, let alone laptop computers and e-mail, and when hotels did not conveniently put little pads of notepaper on the table beside the bed. A supply of paper was not taken for granted, as the evidence of so many reused diary pages and other palimpsests attests. Indeed, it has even been said that Abraham Lincoln's ”Gettysburg Address” was written on the back of an envelope as he rode the train from Washington to the Pennsylvania battlefield. Other versions have it that Lincoln wrote the speech in pencil on a brown paper bag, metaphorically still the “back of an envelope.” Recall that the speech was only 272 words long.

The back of an envelope was almost always blank and, except for the slight ridges associated with the construction of the envelope, provided a clean and unimpeded surface on which to draw, write, or calculate.