Engineering and civilization have always gone together, it is difficult to imagine one existing without the other. Indeed, we tend to associate ancient civilizations specifically with their technological achievements, which, in many cases, remain as monuments to the culture. The Pyramids are a most prominent example. The first engineer whose name is known to us was the Egyptian Imhotep, who is credited with the design of massive piles of stones as burial structures.
After millennia, the Pyramids still stand as awesome symbols of engineering design and construction. Although the processes by which the great edifices were realized remain topics of considerable speculation and debate, there is no denying that it took an engineering imagination to conceive of and lay out the elegant external and complex internal structures, and to devise and execute the necessary systems of transporting to the construction site large numbers of stones and lifting them into place in an orderly fashion.
Roman engineering achievements are no less remarkable. The towering aqueducts that still stand may be the most visible manifestations of highly developed and reliable water distribution systems, but the integrated component parts consisting of tunnels, pipes, valves, baths, and drains were all designed to achieve their individual ends and contribute to the overall plan.
While no documents give us detailed information on how the Egyptians accomplished their great engineering projects, the two-millennia-old Ten Books on Architecture by the Roman architect/engineer Vitruvius gives us considerable insight into how ancient engineering was practiced. One of the most remarkable aspects of this oldest surviving book on engineering is how it demonstrates that the way engineers thought about design in ancient times appears to have been fundamentally the same as how we think today, and in their technological context the problems with which the Romans dealt could be as thorny as those we know today.
As is evident in Vitruvius’s Ten Books -- still eminently readable for such an old treatise -- ancient architects and engineers wrestled with design problems defined by competing goals and bounded by technical and nontechnical constraints, including economic ones. Vitruvius describes how the architects and engineers of his time had to be masters of a wide variety of knowledge and skill -- essentially, they had to be broadly interdisciplinary people, something we hear expressed often today.
Greek architecture was obviously aesthetically distinct from Roman, but as Vitruvius made clear, underlying engineering principles were common to both. The design of structures in ancient times was based on geometry, with the Romans favoring the semicircular arch and hemispherical dome as a basic building unit and the Greeks employing mainly post-and-lintel construction. Whichever form was used to build in stone, ancient engineers found limits of use defined by failure.
It is CRAZY when "legal representatives" overrule engineering opinions, especially in Regulatory Commissions' decissions. It seems the permits were given before explosions, e.g. BP Gulf and paying small fees approved by inspectors instead of serious safety corrections - WV cosl mine, etc. in last years.
"Quality Junk"? Good design will yield a quality product at the targeted price point! To suggest that the production of "junk" that meets "specifications" is acceptable is nothing more than an inferior, lazy design shortcut.
Straying just a bit off the course I have to comment about TV's outlasting consumers' interest. It remains to be seen if LCD back lit flat panel monitors will ever achieve the life expectancy of CRT TV's.
Back in the late 1940's my parents were early adopters of televison in their home. Their Magnavox TV saw the factory authorized repairman several times a year to keep that sucker working! There were lots of silly engineering mistakes in that early set design. One that comes to mind involved the main power supply subchassis. It consisted of a pair of 5U4 rectifier tubes. The subchassis was mounted on the inside wall of the cabinet such that those tubes were horizontal. Well, they were designed to be operated base down, not base to one side. Thus, the filament ribbons (cathodes) would eventually sag sufficiently to short out!
Once the vacuum tube count was greatly reduced, TV's became more reliable requiring fewer repairs during their expected service life. With the advent of modern solid state designs TV's became carefree devices that would last as long as their CRT's.
Early CRT's had metal to glass seals around their faces as the body of the tube was a metal cone! But, it was typically the electron gun that would wear out as the cathode emission would drop off. CRT boosters were quite popular. They were devices installed in series with the CRT socket to boost the filament voltage to squeeze a few more months life out of a tube.
Back when all computer monitors were CRT's I almost never replaced them due to failure. Flat screen LCD's have been quite the opposite, typically going dark due to failed backlights and/or failed switch mode power supplies to drive them.
Though MTBF has diminished for modern TV's, the pace of available new features has accelerated. So, you are right that for consumers today their interest will most likely wane faster than the failure rate of their TV's compared to yesteryear.
Couple points here. First - seeing something that was made with good functionality long lasting quality and aesthetic beauty is alway a treat. However, in many cases, we are often comparing apples and oranges when talking about old engineering versus new. I am not sure that a Roman road built in a more extreme hot/cold climate such as Minnesota and pounded with heavy 18 wheelers all day would fair any better than our current construction.
The automobile is a another prime example of progress from recent decades and people's poor memories. People talk about how good the old cars were mainly because the body structures were so heavily built, but I beg to differ that they were necessarily always better. Our modern vehicle see more mileage, have less corrosion problems, and have more features while getting decent gas mileage in spite of overbearing government regulation and silly ethanol mandates.
Additionally, the fact that we view many items as "temporary use" is a testament to just how fast technology and engineering is progressing. We marvel at ancient technology, but only for the sake of how it compared to the "standard" knowledge of ancient times.
On a final thought - If I am correct, the Romans often used lead in their piping systems - so plastic does seem a bit better.
Larry S.; Re-read your post and you will see that you have contradicted yourself. The price-point determines how much 'quality' a product can have and still be sold at a profit. Or do you blame 'inferior, lazy design' for a Chevrolet Chevette not having the same 'quality' as a Chevrolet Corvette ? 'Quality' expectations are higher for more expensive products. And are you familiar with Deming ? e.g. defect does not equal defective.
It is a disturbing trend, Chuck. Consumers are discarding products that work just fine. New features make their predecessor obsolete long before there are any problems with the product. Millions of dumb phones that work perfectly well are getting discarded years before they would experience any malfunctions.
I agree, Mydesign. Innovation doesn't come through caution. IBM's response to its findings was to look at its culture to see if there were impediments to risk taking.
Good points, Bdcst. Sometimes I wonder whether we could reach a point where the advances in new features could be added without replacing the hardware. I know we're nowhere near that yet, but with advances in cloud computing, we may see a day when existing hardware gets refreshed with new features.
Actually, we are there regarding devices whose feature set can evolve over time without new hardware costs. I have on my bench, as I type, a state of the art FM broadcast audio processor whose internal DSP farm was designed for the future. The manufacturer considers this to be their flagship processor in a line of three current production models. In fact, their present firmware is quite lacking in features all promised for future releases. This is a quick way to get a superior product out in the field and begin to recoup some of its R&D costs before tying all the ribbons on it.
Granted, this is a niche product for a specific industry. But take a look at software defined radios. In the hobby field there are several amateur radio transceivers whose feature sets keep evolving. The end user can upgrade for free by downloading new firmware. Heck, the same sort of thing happens ocassionally in the broader consumer market too. I'm on my third Android cell phone update and my Blu-ray players at home have had at least one firmware update in the past 6 months. In both instances the updates were more than bug fixes.
Obviously, unless there is a mechanism to reward manufacturers for long term product support, there is no incentive to build upgradeability into their hardware. So, maybe if those Android updates were awards from the cellular carrier for staying loyal rather than trying to sell you, at discount, a new phone every two years, we could keep handsets out of the landfill longer.
Thanks for a thoughtful discussion of this subject. In the Neolithic, long before the pyramids of Egypt, some truly amazing stone structures, the megalith monuments, were erected throughout Western and Northern Europe out of huge stones. It wasn't until the 1970s that the tree-ring dating revolution in archaeology gave us any idea just how old these structures are. More recently, some 20,000 year old dwellings have been found in the Middle East. Those are not particularly remarkable, except for their age. "To engineer is human" may be true.
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When a crane doesn't have a monitoring system, crane owners schedule service every six months and simply scrap the parts they replace, even if a part has had little use and doesn't need replacing. This can cost thousands.
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