The Name of the Engineer

At the back of many of these posts lurks the definition as well as the name of the engineer. From the earliest  posts to the more recent , The Lad implies a definition of what makes an engineer and what does not .

The core is that the engineer works with the various forces that exist in nature  to turn them to the advantage of all humanity. At first, the ‘forces’ aspect seemed to be sufficient. Then recently he saw a newspaper [what else?] carry a picture of roustabouts on an oil platform and called them engineers. It is clear that they are vital workers, but, although central to the oil industry and estimable for their herculean work in terrible conditions, to all except the media they are not engineers.

Why not? For aren’t they are wrestling with those natural forces in the massive rig and drill steelwork and the weather? Not half! Something similar can also be used to promote car mechanics to the ranks of engineers. A spanner and a hydraulic car lift certainly consist of natural forces, don’t they? They surely do.

The definition of the engineer, as The Lad knows her, needs to reflect how the roustabout and the mechanic are not engineers.

The mechanic and the roustabout do not design the equipment on which they work. This is the crucial difference.

The posts also implied that the benefit ought to be to all humankind. There are two difficulties here. One is to ask who knows whether an engineering artefact is really a benefit to all or only to some and also whether, in the long or medium term, it could damage. The other is that the engineering may be of benefit to some that are not of humankind. Think of a salmon ladder in civil hydraulic works or modern enclosures in a zoo.

Let us leave out Humankind. Let it stand as ‘benefit’ with the implication of ‘as best we know and can’.

So! Here we have it.

Update, June 22, 2013 – Realised that essential Production Engineering is not subsumed in the definition. To clear this most succinctly, the word ‘forming’ is added

Engineering directs for benefit any or all of the processes of imaginative conception, design definition, forming or analysis of devices or structures that use any of the  forces acting in the universe.