Celebrating our nation's engineers by honoring our first one

I am an engineer.

Engineer (noun): a person who has scientific training and who designs and builds complicated products, machines, systems, or structures

This week, we celebrate National Engineers Week (when are you holding YOUR party?).  Like most things associated with engineering, no one knows about it.  Engineering has been called the "stealth profession" because you only notice engineering when it goes terribly wrong.  When a bridge collapses, a space shuttle breaks up, or a building makes someone sick, we notice the poor engineering.  However, almost everything we do every day comes from the work of an engineer.

"Scientist discover the world that exists; Engineers create the world that never was." - Theodore Von Karman, aeronautics engineer

As applied science, engineers constantly balance between conservatively working within established limits and identifying innovative applications.  An interesting story traces the history of the engineering that led to the design choice for the size of the solid rocket boosters on the space shuttle to the width of the back sides of two Roman horses.  It highlights how train engineers relied on the carts used widely at the time in order to size their tracks, how the size of those carts came from those widely used on roads dating back to the Appian Way, and how NASA in choosing to transport the solid rocket boosters by train, had to restrict the width to something that would pass through a train tunnel.  In all of these cases, engineers used the known as a basis for creating the previously unknown.

Engineer (noun): a professional who applies science and math to create something of value

So now we come to the choosing of when to celebrate National Engineers Week.  George Washington, beyond his role as father of our nation and first president, is also considered our first engineer.  This primarily comes from his lifetime of work as a surveyor, mapping out large areas of Virginia and Ohio, but also connects to many of this other activities.  Washington "invented" a two-story barn that used horses to separate grain from stalk, as well as a plow that also planted seed.  He recognized the importance of engineering to military pursuits, using engineers as part of the forward thrust that created infrastructure for troop movement and fortification.  (This concept would lead to the formation of military units like the SeaBees - of which my grandfather was one - that would follow the Marines and create camps and bases out of nothing.  We also find it reflected in the establishment of the Eisenhower Interstate System, which was primarily devised to ease troop movements around the country.)  Although he never got to see it come to fruition, Washington pushed for a college devoted to engineering in support of military efforts.  When Jefferson established West Point, it stood for nearly half a century as the only engineering college in the US.

"There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature.  Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness." - George Washington

There was a time when most of our country had some basic understanding of some form of engineering.  Certainly the pioneers understood construction, agriculture, and transportation.  Our urban areas thrived because of the crafts and tradespeople who manufactured goods, built structures, and moved materials where we needed them.  Over the centuries, we have created a society where fewer and fewer understand - or need to understand - how things work.  This has created a chasm that separates those who set policy and manage finances from those who make the world we live in happen.  That chasm gets wider every year, and with that widening comes the cracking of the foundation of the nation.  Our infrastructure grows weaker even as we push to build even more.  Our energy systems continue to poison us, even as we demand more and more every year.  Some of this comes from deliberate choice, but much of it comes from incomplete understanding of not just how technology improves our lives, but how the technology reaches that goal.  The more we incorporate the understanding of both science and engineer into not just education, but our culture, the richer we will be and the more stable we will become.

And the more likely we are to realize the vision our nation's first president - and engineer - had for this country.