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The World of Engineering
What is really engineering?


Everybody has certainly seen huge buildings while driving, like a suspension bridge, and wondered “how can that bridge hold up? How has it been designed and built?”.

This is what engineering is for: a technical-scientific discipline, whose goal is to produce systems and solutions for technical and material requirements through design and creation of a good or a service, or for the development and control of the industrial process.

The word “engineering” comes from Latin INGENIUM, and from the same root the English word INGENUITY; as a matter of fact, engineer means someone smart, pragmatic and problem-solver. There have been many famous people in past centuries, which could be called engineer:

• Leonardo Da Vinci, an Italian inventor and artist of Renaissance. He’s considered one of the greatest geniuses of all times.
• James Watt, a Scottish engineer who contributed to the development of the steam engine.
• Thomas Edison, Italian-American inventor, thank whose inventions electricity has become well-known all over the world

However the very first person with this title was even older than them. In 2625 B.C. and in 2530 B.C. two celebrities among buildings, Saqqara Pyramid of Djoser and the Pyramid of Cheops, were designed and built by Imhotep who is considered the first engineer ever.
The link between history of science and history of engineering is strong: masterpieces of engineering are often direct consequences of scientific discoveries. If James Parker in 1796 had never experimented a new formula for fast-setting cement in his plant in England, great buildings like The Empire State Building or the Guggenheim Museum in New York would never exist.

We must say that on one hand new inventions help engineers a lot in designing gigantic projects, on the other engineers are very capable of making best use of materials, tools and knowledge to solve social and industrial problems: let’s think about Fazlur Rahman Khan, considered the “Einstein” of structural engineering as well as a pioneer of tubular design. Or Radia Perlman, a network engineer also called “the mother of the internet”, is one of the major world experts in software design and computer networks, without whom the Internet would never exist.

Over the years, thanks to scientific discoveries, engineering has been divided into various specialisations, each field with its own characteristics and areas of work; from the well-known MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, which is the most ancient discipline established in Europe since the Industrial Revolution of the XVIII century, going on to the ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING, which deals with the methods for producing and spreading electricity. And to end with the most recent COMPUTER ENGINEERING, which deals with the realisation and management of systems and solutions for data management.

Since now we’ve talked about just a small part of the big world of engineering. In the next videos we will analyse all the specialisations and fields, where these brilliant people work: ENGINEERS.