What is Engineering?

Crash Course Engineering #1

You live in a world of creations. All of the things you see around me were created by
people. The technology that’s being used to record me, and watch me, were likewise created.
And not by lone geniuses, but by whole teams – sometimes entire generations – of clever
designers. Those designers were engineers. And engineers are, when it comes right down to
it, creators.
The word “engineering” itself comes from the Latin ingenium, meaning “cleverness”,
and ingeniare, meaning “to design or devise”. And that makes sense since you have to be
clever if you’re going to solve the problems that engineers face every day. Now, you might
think of engineering as a kind of science – and that’s not wrong. But it’s more useful to think of
science as a tool, a tool that engineers use – along with mathematics – to perform their unique
duties.
Throughout this course, we’re going to show you just what you can accomplish through
engineering. Math is at the core of engineering, but what’s more important are the ideas and
the applications. They help us understand how we use math to solve problems. So we’ll be
teaching you some math, but also the concepts that those equations explain, in their own way.
We’ll survey what we’ve already achieved, explore what we’re still discovering, and dream
about what we hope to make possible. And we’ll show you the ideas you can use to engineer
great things! We want you to be inspired and as interested in engineering as we are. That’s
what this course is all about. I’m Dr. Shini Somara and this is Crash Course Engineering.

Imagine you’re walking through town, maybe on your way to class, or to the gym, or to a
meeting for work. And right there on the pavement, you come across...a blob. Of…something.
It’s fairly large, and blue, and jiggly. Pretty strange, right? What do you do?
Well, you’re a curious person, and you know a little something about scientific inquiry, so
you want to use science to study the blob. Maybe your background is in chemistry. So you
might analyze the blob’s molecular structure or the chemical components in it, to try and figure
out what the blob is made of. Or maybe the blob is moving or making sounds, and you think it
might be alive. So you might try to see how it responds to, say, water or a poke with your pen.
Maybe you even decide to remove a sample of it to learn about the blob’s biology. You could
even look at it from the perspective of physics and see how it operates in motion. Maybe this
goo has some special properties.
Any of these responses would be approaching the situation as a scientist. You’re curious
about the blob and want to understand it. That’s science. Scientists ask questions about the
nature of the universe, from our expanding knowledge of space to the tiniest particles found in
the tip of your pencil. But engineers want to take the answers to those questions and solve
problems. Because, in the process of designing clever things, what engineering really does
is solve problems. And the good news is, you already know how to think like an engineer.
You’ve dabbled in engineering if you’ve ever wondered what you can do with something.
You’ve used your engineer’s mind if you went outside on a snowy morning and built a
snowman, after figuring out the packing properties of the snow.
 I’m not saying you should put that on your resume, but you do get a thumbs-up! So, from
an engineering perspective, your response to the mysterious sidewalk blob would be a little
different. But it may depend on what kind of engineer you are.
Today, engineering is much broader and more varied than it used to be. That’s because
engineering originally referred specifically to military engineering. Military engineering
involves designing and building military works, along with ways of communicating and
transporting people and things.
Think of catapults, trebuchets, and siege towers. These types of war machines and
military structures have been found as far back as the 11th century BCE, by the Babylonians
and Assyrians. You needed a good engineer if you want to storm a castle.
So from the perspective of this field, the main problem that an engineer might want to
solve is simply how to destroy the blob. Or to protect yourself from it.

Now, the first modern field of engineering to emerge after military engineering was civil
engineering. This branch had its official start around the 18th century. Like the name implies,
civil engineering was used for civilian purposes, rather than military ones. It focuses on
building structures of all kinds, along with highways, sanitation systems, and even entire cities.
Under this branch of engineering, we might want to study the blob, to figure out what
properties it has that can be used to solve problems of daily civilian life. Like maybe the blob’s
goo is better insulating material than what’s currently in your house. Or maybe it turns out to
be really elastic, or waterproof, or have some other property that could make it useful in
construction, infrastructure, or urban planning.
The 19th century led to an increasing focus on the machinery industry, which gave rise
to the branch of mechanical engineering. Which I must say, as a mechanical engineer
myself, is a fine discipline! This branch focuses on machinery and mechanical systems,
from robots to engines.
Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen, two English inventors who are credited with
creating the steam engine in the early 1700s, were both mechanical engineers. And so was
James Watt, the Scottish scientist who made their design much more efficient by recapturing
the steam in the engine. The industrial revolution was led by mechanical engineers like them.
Then, electrical engineering was a natural progression, once we were able to generate
electricity and create electronics. Dating back to the 19th century, electrical engineering deals
with devices and systems that can range anywhere from microchips and cell phones to the
giant power station generators that help supply energy to big cities.
Electrical and mechanical engineering often come together to create some pretty
fantastic inventions. If you want a robot that can move about as we do, you’re going to need a
mechanical engineer to set up the “skeleton” of the machine. Then, to give it a “heart” of
electricity, you’ll need an electrical engineer to provide power to the robot with electronics.
And if you want it to act like us too, you’ll need someone skilled in computer science.
But engineering doesn’t stop there.
Another field was founded in the late 19th century: chemical engineering. These
engineers have quite a wide focus, not only designing and operating chemical plants that do
things like refine oil and distill alcohol. They also deal with food, medicine, the environment,
and much more. They’re involved not only with the preservatives and artificial flavors found in
the pizza pocket you ate last night but also with the medicine you took the next day to help
your upset stomach.
Together, civil, mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineering are often seen as the
four main branches of engineering in the modern world. But there are many more fields that
specialize even further. We have aerospace engineers building machines that fly in the air
and space; nuclear engineers harnessing the energy released from nuclear reactions, and
biomedical engineers creating medical equipment and devices to solve clinical problems.
The list goes on!
And one branch that supports all of them is industrial engineering. Engineers in this
field design and optimize the facilities, equipment, and systems that many other
engineers use to create their products. Think of them as the support class of the engineering
world. They provide the all-important groundwork for many of our engineering advances. We’ll
need some industrial engineers to help us with our factory when we start manufacturing our
cool new products based on whatever this blob is made of.
With the power of engineering at our fingertips, we’ve already been able to do some
pretty amazing things.
● We’ve built spaceships that have sent people to the moon and given Mars a few
rovers, which are fantastic works of engineering themselves.
● We’ve made artificial hearts to pump blood through the human body and artificial
limbs to replace the ones that were lost.
● We’ve designed giant skyscrapers that wave at the clouds and show the world
just how high we can reach.

And we’ve only just begun!

In the future, it’s very possible that we’ll see advances like an artificial pancreas that
would effectively cure Type 1 Diabetes. And new nanotechnology that will show the might of
being small, and rockets that will finally send people to Mars to hang out with those rovers.
This and much more could all come from engineering. Maybe one day you’ll be the one to
create something truly amazing!
As for the blob you found on the pavement, I don’t know what that thing is. Maybe it’ll
turn out to be a huge wad of used chewing gum. Or maybe it’s a new lifeform. No matter what,
it won’t be the first or last, mysterious object you’ll encounter as a student of engineering. The
world is full of strange things with great potential for solving problems.
When you use your engineering mind, everything suddenly seems both perplexing and
exciting. So, over the next forty-odd weeks, we’ll show you how to build things. Design things.
We’ll show you how to solve problems. We want you to be able to make things better and
figure out what’s next for the world. Because we all live in a world of creation, and we want
you to be a creator. Next time, we’ll continue our journey by diving deeper into civil
engineering. We’ll learn more about its history and the types of work that civil engineers do,
getting you one step closer to being an engineering master of the universe.
Thanks for watching and I’ll see you then!