The Essential Engineer by Henry Petroski is a very important book. I place it along with the books by Jared Diamond Guns Germs and Steel and Collapse in order of importance for our times. Both writers are historians and both understand that history and political science are the same thing. We are pretty smart animals, apoplectic but animals all the same. Engineers are at a particular pinnacle of display of our shared greatness, whereas politicians can go either way. Among politicians we have greats like Churchill, and beasts like Hitler, or the emerging willfully stupid Republican Party of the US Government.
I finished The Essential Engineer last night. I read it on my Kindle which was bought specifically so I could read the book Homeless Dog that I wrote and Ed Hettig and his son Heath Hettig helped me publish as an ebook. Here follow my notes and bookmarks from The Essential Engineer.
Page 20 Location 362.: bookmark Engineering is Rocket Science.
Page 116 – Location 1979: (department at Corning. In the early twenty-first century, that corporation was using the term "research, development and engineering," to emphasize that the task does not end
Page 118 – Location 2023: Those who are honest with themselves see in that mirror not R&D but D&R. This is nothing wholly new. The chemical engineer George Holbrook, who in the late 1950s rose to the position of…
my note: ethics morality but same…{ Ethics trump Morality in the commons as morality may very well not be ethical.} RSD
Page 128 – Location 2144: Water and wind power, among the cleanest, most inexpensive and renewable of all sources, drove mills for centuries, with clever engineering making them more powerful and efficient
Page 129 – Location 2192: There are no easy solutions to tough problems. While the prospect of windmills elicited outrage from Nantucket Islanders and brought corruption to a…
Page 133 – Location 2265 "to develop a technology, you've got to create an industry. You can wait and wait and wait for costs to come down, but it takes too long." Such are the realities of the world of technology and…
Page 134 – Location 2285: There are always complicating issues, including aesthetics, economics, ethics, and politics. In 2002, California mandated that by 2010 utilities like Pacific Gas & Electric…
Page 141 – Location 2416: American military, where small generators in the boots of soldiers were employed to reduce somewhat the burden of carrying heavy batteries into combat. The underfloor concept has been…
Page 144 – Location 2475: A different energy analyst likened the likened the nations energy policy to "playing Russian roulette with every chamber loaded."
Page 146 – Location 2501: has been to combine carbon dioxide from a coal-burning power plant with wastewater from a nearby sewage treatment plant to grow algae that could be made into biofuel. This would be a…
Page 146 – Location 2502: This would be a creative environmental engineering experiment in how to make good use of a greenhouse gas rather than having to sequester it. System and societal effects have…
Page 179 – Location 3096: Engineering is inherently an international and global profession, and experienced engineers have long taken new ideas from technologically richer to technologically poorer countries.
Page 180 – Location 3104: Design work on the Boeing 777 proceeded twenty-four hours a day, as engineers seamlessly passed, like a baton in a relay race, digital data and electronic plans from one time zone to another, picking…
Page 191 – Location 3290: Federal Aviation Administration has developed a reputation for fining airlines that reported errors relating to, say, missed inspections, it is unlikely that such accident precursors will be reported…
Page 200 – Location 3435: United States has left us with a distribution grid that is complicated, fragile, and vulnerable. In the wake of severe hurricanes or winter storms, hundreds of thousands if not millions of…
Page 201 – Location 3458: (bailouts of failed utilities. The experience demonstrated how inextricably intertwined technology, government, and markets can be.
I'm taking a break here, and filing this part which I hope to come back to this morning to finish.