The term engineering is derived from the Latiningenium, meaning "cleverness". (Full article...)
Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who invent, design, analyze, build and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while considering the limitations imposed by practicality, regulation, safety and cost. The word engineer (Latiningeniator, the origin of the Ir. in the title of engineer in countries like Belgium, The Netherlands, and Indonesia) is derived from the Latin words ingeniare ("to contrive, devise") and ingenium ("cleverness"). The foundational qualifications of a licensed professional engineer typically include a four-year bachelor's degree in an engineering discipline, or in some jurisdictions, a master's degree in an engineering discipline plus four to six years of peer-reviewed professional practice (culminating in a project report or thesis) and passage of engineering board examinations. (Full article...)
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The Sholes and Glidden typewriter (also known as the Remington No. 1) was the first commercially successful typewriter. Principally designed by the AmericaninventorChristopher Latham Sholes, it was developed with the assistance of fellow printer Samuel W. Soule and amateur mechanic Carlos S. Glidden. Work began in 1867, but Soule left the enterprise shortly thereafter, replaced by James Densmore, who provided financial backing and the driving force behind the machine's continued development. After several short-lived attempts to manufacture the device, the machine was acquired by E. Remington and Sons in early 1873. An arms manufacturer seeking to diversify, Remington further refined the typewriter before finally placing it on the market on July 1, 1874.
During its development, the typewriter evolved from a crude curiosity into a practical device, the basic form of which became the industry standard. The machine incorporated elements which became fundamental to typewriter design, including a cylindrical platen and a four-rowed QWERTY keyboard. Several design deficiencies remained, however. The Sholes and Glidden could print only upper-case letters—an issue remedied in its successor, the Remington No. 2—and was a "blind writer", meaning the typist could not see what was being written as it was entered. (Full article...)
... that a 16-year-old high-school student reverse-engineered iMessage to let Android users text iPhone users with blue chat bubbles using the Beeper Mini app?
... that 19th-century construction of the bathing ghat at Bulandshahr was delayed because an executive engineer deemed it an "eye-sore"?
... that Taingda Mingyi U Pho engineered the massacre of around 40 members of the Burmese royal family in order to eliminate nearly all possible heirs to the throne?
... that the DI MA-1 Mk. III rifle was made in Myanmar as a reverse-engineered copy of the Chinese QBZ-97?
A micrometer, sometimes known as a micrometer screw gauge, is a device incorporating a calibrated screw widely used for precise measurement of components in mechanical engineering and machining as well as most mechanical trades, along with other metrological instruments such as dial, vernier, and digital calipers. Micrometers are usually, but not always, in the form of calipers (opposing ends joined by a frame), which is why micrometer caliper is another common name. The spindle is a very accurately machined screw and the object to be measured is placed between the spindle and the anvil. The spindle is moved by turning the ratchet knob or thimble until the object to be measured is lightly touched by both the spindle and the anvil.
Micrometers are also used in telescopes or microscopes to measure the apparent diameter of celestial bodies or microscopic objects. The micrometer used with a telescope was invented about 1638 by William Gascoigne, an English astronomer.
Colloquially the word micrometer is often shortened to mike or mic.
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Carl Edgar Myers (1842–1925) was an American aeronautical engineer. He was born at March 2, 1842 at Herkimer, New York, to Abram H. and Eliza Ann (Cristman) Myers. At various times in his life, he was employed as carpenter, mechanician, plumber, electrician and chemist, banker, and photographer. After 1978, he focused on aeronautical engineering. He became known as the inventor of new or improved systems for generating gases, and as the constructor of hydrogen balloons and airships, including the aerial velocipede, gas kite, sky-cycle and electrical aerial torpedo. He married Mary Breed Hawley on November 8, 1871.
Myers, after spending two years hiring professional balloonists to test his designs, Myers went up in a balloon himself. (Full article...)
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A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its power output. The concept is a thought experiment that attempts to imagine how a spacefaring civilization would meet its energy requirements once those requirements exceed what can be generated from the home planet's resources alone. Because only a tiny fraction of a star's energy emissions reaches the surface of any orbiting planet, building structures encircling a star would enable a civilization to harvest far more energy.
The first modern imagining of such a structure was by Olaf Stapledon in his science fiction novel Star Maker (1937). The concept was later explored by the physicist Freeman Dyson in his 1960 paper "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation". Dyson speculated that such structures would be the logical consequence of the escalating energy needs of a technological civilization and would be a necessity for its long-term survival. A signature of such spheres detected in astronomical searches would be an indicator of extraterrestrial intelligence. (Full article...)
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A post-war Little Boy model
Little Boy was a type of atomic bomb created by the United States as part of the Manhattan Project during World War II. The name is also often used to describe the specific bomb (L-11) used in the bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima by the Boeing B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay on 6 August 1945, making it the first nuclear weapon used in warfare, and the second nuclear explosion in history, after the Trinity nuclear test. It exploded with an energy of approximately 15 kilotons of TNT (63 TJ) and had an explosion radius of approximately 1.3 kilometres (0.81 mi) which caused widespread death across the city. It was a gun-type fission weapon which used uranium that had been enriched in the isotope uranium-235 to power its explosive reaction.
Little Boy was developed by Lieutenant CommanderFrancis Birch's group at the Los Alamos Laboratory. It was the successor to a plutonium-fueled gun-type fission design, Thin Man, which was abandoned in 1944 after technical difficulties were discovered. Little Boy used a charge of nitrocellulose to fire a hollow cylinder (the "bullet") of highly enriched uranium through an artillery gun barrel into a solid cylinder (the "target") of the same material. The design was highly inefficient: the weapon used on Hiroshima contained 64 kilograms (141 lb) of uranium, but less than a kilogram underwent nuclear fission. Unlike the implosion design developed for the Trinity test and the Fat Man bomb design that was used against Nagasaki, which required sophisticated coordination of shaped explosive charges, the simpler but inefficient gun-type design was considered almost certain to work, and was never tested prior to its use at Hiroshima. (Full article...)
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Pavel Lvovitch Schilling. Portrait by Karl Bryullov, 1828
Baron Pavel Lvovitch Schilling (1786–1837), also known as Paul Schilling, was a Russian inventor, military officer and diplomat of Baltic German origin. The majority of his career was spent working for the imperial Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a language officer at the Russian embassy in Munich. As a military officer, he took part in the War of the Sixth Coalition against Napoleon. In his later career, he was transferred to the Asian department of the ministry and undertook a tour of Mongolia to collect ancient manuscripts.
The Castaing machine is a device used to add lettering and decoration to the edge of a coin. Such lettering was necessitated by counterfeiting and edge clipping, which was a common problem resulting from the uneven and irregular hammered coinage. When Aubin Olivier introduced milled coinage to France, he also developed a method of marking the edges with lettering which would make it possible to detect if metal had been shaved from the edge. This method involved using a collar, into which the metal flowed from the pressure of the press. This technique was slower and more costly than later methods. France abandoned milled coinage in favour of hammering in 1585.
England experimented briefly with milled coinage, but it wasn't until Peter Blondeau brought his method of minting coins there in the mid-seventeenth century that such coinage began in earnest in that country. Blondeau also invented a different method of marking the edge, which was, according to him, faster and less costly than the method pioneered by Olivier. Though Blondeau's exact method was secretive, numismatists have asserted that it likely resembled the later device invented by Jean Castaing. Castaing's machine marked the edges by means of two steel rulers, which, when a coinage blank was forced between them, imprinted legends or designs on its edge. Castaing's device found favour in France, and it was eventually adopted in other nations, including Britain and the United States, but it was eventually phased out by mechanised minting techniques. (Full article...)
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The Sinclair C5 is a small one-person battery electricrecumbenttricycle, technically an "electrically assisted pedal cycle". It was the culmination of Sir Clive Sinclair's long-running interest in electric vehicles. Although widely described as an "electric car", Sinclair characterised it as a "vehicle, not a car".
Sinclair had become one of the UK's best-known millionaires, and earned a knighthood, on the back of the highly successful Sinclair Research range of home computers in the early 1980s. He hoped to repeat his success in the electric vehicle market, which he saw as ripe for a new approach. The C5 emerged from an earlier project to produce a small electric car called the C1. After a change in the law, prompted by lobbying from bicycle manufacturers, Sinclair developed the C5 as an electrically powered tricycle with a polypropylene body and a chassis designed by Lotus Cars. It was intended to be the first in a series of increasingly ambitious electric vehicles, but the development of the follow-up C10 and C15 models never progressed further than the drawing board, mostly due to the poor public response to the C5. (Full article...)
The Churchill Machine Tool Company Limited began as the manufacturing subsidiary of the machine tool importers Charles Churchill & Company Limited founded in the early 1900s by US-born Charles Churchill (1837–1916). Created out of the personal bankruptcy of Charles Churchill, the company developed to become one of the largest British importers of machine tools from the United States and a major manufacturer of such tools, initially under licence and later of its own development.
The original business importing American machine tools into Britain began with Charles Churchill as sole proprietor and later as a partnership with two others. It became a limited company in 1889. In 1906 a separate company, The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd, was established with the purpose of adapting tools imported by Charles Churchill & Co. The former expanded, producing American tools under licence and then manufactured tools of its own design, in particular precision surface grinders and similar engineering machinery. In 1918 The Churchill Machine Tool Co relocated its factories onto a single site at Broadheath, near Altrincham. (Full article...)
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A voltage doubler is an electronic circuit which charges capacitors from the input voltage and switches these charges in such a way that, in the ideal case, exactly twice the voltage is produced at the output as at its input.
The simplest of these circuits is a form of rectifier which take an AC voltage as input and outputs a doubled DC voltage. The switching elements are simple diodes and they are driven to switch state merely by the alternating voltage of the input. DC-to-DC voltage doublers cannot switch in this way and require a driving circuit to control the switching. They frequently also require a switching element that can be controlled directly, such as a transistor, rather than relying on the voltage across the switch as in the simple AC-to-DC case. (Full article...)
Meticulous naval inventories show that HMS Beagle carried a total of at least 34 recorded chronometers on its three main survey voyages from 1826 to 1843, and 22 on the second voyage with Darwin on board, when they had a dedicated cabin. Some were Navy property and others were on loan from the manufacturers, as well as six on the second voyage owned by the captain, Robert FitzRoy. Both the two known survivors from the second voyage are owned by the British Museum (the second is registration No. CAI.1743). (Full article...)
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The radius of maximum wind (RMW) is the distance between the center of a cyclone and its band of strongest winds. It is a parameter in atmospheric dynamics and tropical cyclone forecasting. The highest rainfall rates occur near the RMW of tropical cyclones. The extent of a cyclone's storm surge and its maximum potential intensity can be determined using the RMW. As maximum sustained winds increase, the RMW decreases. Recently, RMW has been used in descriptions of tornadoes. When designing buildings to prevent against failure from atmospheric pressure change, RMW can be used in the calculations. (Full article...)
Project Alberta was formed in March 1945, and consisted of 51 United States Army, Navy, and civilian personnel, including one British scientist. Its mission was three-fold. It first had to design a bomb shape for delivery by air, then procure and assemble it. It supported the ballistic testing work at Wendover Army Air Field, Utah, conducted by the 216th Army Air Forces Base Unit (Project W-47), and the modification of B-29s to carry the bombs (Project Silverplate). After completion of its development and training missions, Project Alberta was attached to the 509th Composite Group at North Field, Tinian, where it prepared facilities, assembled and loaded the weapons, and participated in their use. (Full article...)
Image 4Engineers conferring on prototype design, 1954 (from Engineer)
Image 5A drawing for a steam locomotive. Engineering is applied to design, with emphasis on function and the utilization of mathematics and science. (from Engineering)
Image 18Archimedes is regarded as one of the leading scientists in classical antiquity whose ideas have underpinned much of the practice of engineering. (from Engineer)
Image 24The application of the steam engine allowed coke to be substituted for charcoal in iron making, lowering the cost of iron, which provided engineers with a new material for building bridges. This bridge was made of cast iron, which was soon displaced by less brittle wrought iron as a structural material. (from Engineering)
Image 28Design of a turbine requires collaboration of engineers from many fields, as the system involves mechanical, electro-magnetic and chemical processes. The blades, rotor and stator as well as the steam cycle all need to be carefully designed and optimized. (from Engineering)
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