Dream a unique engineering dream!
Engineering remains a profession many aspire to. It is truly a professional’s profession, but even this noble profession has recently lost its luster. This is mainly because students are not staying true to their passions but following the crowd in pursuing careers in fields distant from their passions.
To use an illustration, Jethro Tull –studied to be a lawyer but he ended up inventing the seed drill, a mechanical instrument that revolutionized agriculture. The trend today seems to be the opposite. We follow our passions into college – take up specialized courses but when it comes to choosing our careers, we bury our passions and follow the crowd.
CADDZOOM is carrying a series that takes a more in-depth look into the various engineering streams. We kick start this series with Mechanical Engineering.
Mechanical Engineering: inventing leverage!
Mechanical engineering, using principles of heat and mechanical power, designs, produces, and maintains mechanical systems. Mechanical engineers design and manufacture everything from small individual parts and devices (e.g., microscale sensors and inkjet printer nozzles) to large systems (e.g., spacecraft and machine tools). The sub disciplines of mechanical engineering include structural analysis, mechatronics and robotics, design and drafting, etc. Mechanical engineering emerged as a full-fledged stream during the industrial revolution.
However the mechanical engineering legacy starts with the simple machines. The six simple machines are: Lever, Wheel and Axel, Pulley, Inclined Plane, Wedge, Screw. A simple machine is an elementary device that has a specific movement (mechanism) providing a mechanical advantage. The invention of the wheel has been attributed as the invention, that changed the face of technology – its inventor can be regarded as the first mechanical engineer. Can you imagine what would have happened if he too had just gone with the flow? If farming was the trend then, the inventor of the wheel would have just gone on pulling the plough himself. The wheel wouldn’t have been invented!
Ferris wheel!
The Ferris wheel has brought joy to numerous fans since day one. The abandonment and freedom that a Ferris wheel provides, was possible only because George Ferris remained true to his design and passions. In response to a challenge to create a monument to outdo The Eiffel tower, at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Ferris responded with a proposed wheel from which visitors would be able to view the entire exhibition. The planners feared his design for a rotating wheel towering over the grounds could not possibly be safe. Ferris persisted. He returned in a few weeks with several respectable endorsements from established engineers, and the committee agreed to allow construction to begin, also recruited several local investors to cover the $400,000 cost of construction. The Ferris wheel thus stands as a testament to a mechanical engineer’s passions.