Article on ENGINEERS AND YOU

THE ENGINEER AND YOU
Engineers seldomget the praise they deserve from the ordinary man. Interesting stories for young people have been written about famous investors, doctors, travellers and other notable people, but the names of famous engineers remain largely unknown except to student of technical institutions.
This is not because engineers have contributed less than those others to the progress of mankind, but because the details of their achievements are usually too technical to be understood by the ordinary reader. A layman without some knowledge of technical terms, as well as some knowledge of physics and mathematics, would find it difficult to appreciate fully the greatness of I. K. Brunel and the other famous engineers who worked on the problems of the early railways--deciding on points like the basic designs of the engine, what weight it should be, the size of the boiler, the best type of rails, wether the sleepers should be wood or metal and wether the rails should be 7ft. apart(broad gauge) or 4ft. 8 1/2 in.(standard gauge) or even less(narrow gauge).
The result is that apart from one or two people like James Watt and George Stephenson, who have been given credit accorded to inventors, very little popular appreciation has gone to other engineers. Yet so much work has been done on railway development by men like Brunel that they have changed railways from the crude steam locomotives of the early days, which achieved a speed of 12 m.p.h., to powerful electric locomotives of today, some of which are capable of exceeding a speed of 14
m.p.h.
Even less known, or rather, less wondered at, are others feats of engineering such as the bulding of tunnels and bridges. We all know about tunnels, especially the railway tunnels which carry railways through hills, but not many people realise that it is a very difficult task, demanding a lot of thinking on the part of the engineer, to construct a tunnel in exactly the right place, going in exactly the right direction, and so strong that there is no danger of tons of earth falling and burying the people using tunnel.
Bridges which we use practically every day, are better known---so well know that it hardly ever occours to us that each bridge is a challenge to the skill of the engineer, who has to study the nature of the site and the soil, the volume of water in the river to be bridged, e.t.c., before he finally sits down at his desk to work out technical problems such as the type of bridge to be used, the precise design and weight of arches and pillars, and the kind and amount of steel reinforcement to be used in the concrete, to name a few. It is only when all these problems have been successfull solved that the bridge can be built, to be used by ordinary citizens like ourselves, without any fear of its one day collapsing under us.
Most familiar of all, and therefore most taken for granted, are the houses we live in. We gaze in open-mouthed wonder at a multi-storey skyscraper when we see one, awed by the thought of so many thousands of tons of concrete, steel and glass towering so high above our heads; but we hardly ever gaze in awe at our own house. Yet the simplest house is a tribute to the skill of the engineer.
We have came a long from the mud and that thatchd roofs of the past, to the convinence of the modern house, with its solid walls, heat-resistant roofing, windows of all shapes and sizes, and up-to-date plumbing which gives up pipe-borme water right where we need it----wether at the kitchen sink for cooking and washing up, or in the bathroom and toilet to provide running water for our bath and hygienic disposal of waste in the water closet. In fact the modern house is becoming more wonderful every day.