Century's Best Engineering Projects

Strange choice, I think of the Spruce Goose as a very expensive "folly".

The Panama Canal was finished in 1914, and most of the successful engineering feats that made it's construction feasible occurred during the first decade of the 20th Century. I don't think anyone would consider the Panama Canal a "folly" (although, I am not sure the same can be said about the enlargement project currently under way).

Hard to beat. ==== A MAN A PLAN A CANAL PANAMA====

The incorporation of the existing, natural water system to work the locks, turns a problem into a solution, brilliant practical engineering.

Solving the problem of disease, making one of the first motion picture animations to demonstrate the proposed lock system, making the "panama" hat popular, this nomination has a lot going for it.

As Miss Congeniality, I nominate the team that designed and built the 747, with slide rules and marks in wet clay tablets.

The Spruce Goose is a great example. Even though it was never a good plane, it was a cutting edge research vehicle. It gave us the first fly by wire technology, began a revolution in plywood and the principles of layer technology, large body aerodynamics, etc. etc.

My favorite in my life time is what I am typing on right now. I believe it was and is the greatest invention since the horseless carriage of the 20'th century. Think of the computing power you have on you desk right now. Plus the ability to communicate across the globe.

Calculations and tasks that used to take us days to complete in design, were reduced to 4 hours 25 years ago and know only take the time to input the data.

I marvel everyday on how far this technology has effected our lives and changed the way we do business.

Keep in mind when I started we had typewriters, mimeograph machines and slide rules.

Based on mission, scale, and pure spectacle during use, my favorite is the Saturn V that took us to the moon.

Hooker

Yesterday I was thinking about the Manhattan Project. It was quite an engineering project and (I think) was done without electronic computers.

The whole moon landing program, of which the Saturn was only one part, was done with rudimentary (by today's standards) computers and slide rules.

Ahhhhh, the slide rule days...

When you had to actually sit down and plan a project for weeks or months instead of just jumping in headfirst with computer power.

Actually, at NASA Langley we had one of those new fangled humongous Wang calculators down in the basement with four function vacuum tube keypads on our drawing boards. The cat's meow...

Hooker

Hey General,

I'm always curious about the "process". When complex projects are envisioned/executed it seems to my layman's mind it's a bit of the chicken vs. egg thing. I can understand that there would be a goal but where do you start?

As a hypothetical example; you want to carry a load x -miles at x- speed at x-altitude, who, design wise starts the ball rolling? To avoid problems like," well, the speeds there, the skins not going to melt,but we want to include this feature, now the weights up , we don't have enough power, now we need more fuel, more weight , the loads going to be reduced, ad nauseam".

Now you can apparently plug in your design goal and then tweak the answer, I'm sure that's an oversimplification, but what did one do back in the old days?

Packrat

Don't call me General. I was an enlisted man!!!!

Anyway, most of the projects I was involved in at NASA were incremental works, heavily based on previous efforts. Throw in an occasional unanticipated breakthrough or revelation and we move on. Sometimes pure research was necessary to get over a hurdle. But, all in all, most of the stuff was highly choreographed by the planners from prior work.

Nowadays, it seems when I get a job I just jump on the computer and throw together a rough 3D simulation. When the job gets a go, I then refine the rough sim into working detail for our shop guys. The actual finalized drawings are mostly an afterthought required more for regulatory requirements by our FAA masters than anything else.

In any case, I still fight the same battles in my present job, which is mostly mounting mission equipment on aircraft. The customers always want to carry too much equipment, limiting the amount of fuel that can be safely carried, and resulting in insufficient time in the air to complete the mission. Everything's a tradeoff requiring mucho compromise...

Or convince them to spend more money to get a bigger aircraft with more capability, which invariably puts them beyond their initial budgetary allowances, which revelation results in massive loss of hair (on their part).

If only we had that great breakthrough in anti-gravity!!

Oh, scratch that. I'd probably be out of a job...

Hooker

Invention inspires invention, ad infinitum. Cumulative knowledge... to reach the wilderness, even the most intrepid explorer treads a path made by his predecessors. It is the sum of knowledge always being added to that seems so amazing to me. I once half-joked that we would wreck history by cutting down all the trees to write it on. But then someone came up with "digital," and now everything is changing.

All engineering is surplus store engineering. You use what is available, rather than some idealized, perfect unobtainable thing. Then you bend it to fit and paint it to match.

It is this second step where the invention comes in. All the hard work is here, trying to imagine what will happen before you build it, and/or doing many trial-and-error prototypes (if you can afford them).

Engineering design is art for function's sake. Like a sculptor putting an image into a stone, the engineer puts an idea into machinery. But you have to have a combination of imagination and skill that allows you to see that such a machine is possible and how to make it. This is the same as an artist imagining an image of life and seeing how to carve it into stone or paint it on canvas.

Where do you start? You look at what is already working to see if you can scale it to your problem - the bend to fit, paint to match part. Or you see what is out there that you can connect together to to the job. Then you do the inventing to convert the existing into the new.

The Manhatten Project took lab data on fission plus knowledge of nuclear science plus knowledge of explosives to make fission bombs. The Apollo moon shot started with Goddard's liquid fuel rocket, and the German V2 extension of it to make a Really Big liquid fuel rocket with humans as the payload. Simple; not easy. (The basic engineering inequality.)

THE BULLET TRAIN.

The modern timer, pop-up toaster.

The best thing since for sliced bread.

Interesting to see that all of the nominated answers are high technology solutions to problems that in themselves are inconsequential to life. Sure aircraft, computers and even toast are lovely to have, but life can continue without them.

Ok maybe not toast

The greatest engineering achievement of all is an absolute, immune to opinion, devoid of religion, race, creed or colour and......, well lets see if we can figure it out for oursleves:

- everyone uses it (no exceptions, I mean everyone)

- nobody wants to use it

- without it we would die

- without it our modern cities would not exist

Too much for now.

Plumbing...

Especially the outbound "stuff".

Without a doubt!!

Hooker

Yikes that was quick! Well I thought I gave away too much...

Of course you are correct, sanitation systems permit our daily existence. Without even rudimentary sanitation our population would simply be wiped out. Just think, no-one to punt along the Panama canal....

I think it is an unheralded feat of modern engineering, and so sucessful that most of us are blissfully unaware of either its existence or its continuous performance, even as it deals with our own performances

As all relief organisations know, the aftermath of any catastrophe is usually widely publicised, but the ongoing deaths from simplistic diseases such as cholera are often neglected.

So here's to the humble dunny, as they say locally...

BG,

Plumbing, GOOD!

Funny that typically everyone points at realisations of the US.

But why can't it be something from the USSR? or even French?

Napoleon once dreamed about it and even started the construction, but it would take another 200 years before it really was reality: the chunnel.

I think the Italians probably came up with a lot of the modern plumbing but the English invented the "crapper." The French invented the guillotine, champange, and innumerable kitchen utensils. I'm not sure of Russian inventions that have been adopted worldwide. Anyone?

I would nominate the SR-71, built with slide-rules and innovative use of Titanium.

Also, the Voyager spacecraft, launched then re-programmed mid-flight to accomplish tasks that weren't originally planned.

Many good possibilities. I pick what is now known as the NASA-Glenn Icing Wind Tunnel. It was built in 1944 and still has the largest testing cross-section. Some cute tricks were done in the design of the cooling coil. To achieve low air pressure drop through the coil, yet large face area, the coil was built like a W turned on its side, with four wide but thin sections; all of this in a larger cross-section that tapered into the testing area. There are Web references to this project, which won one or more "best engineering" awards, but so far I haven't seen who the designers and installers were. The relatively small vertical component of drop in each coil section minimized the pressure difference between refrigerant inlet and outlet, thereby maintaining a near-uniform evaporating temperature throughout the coils, and nearly consistent air temperature over the tunnel cross-section.

The real motor of the world is the personal motivation of individualistic passionate persons. Society should rescue the right to be passionate, a fanatic with an obsession, this is not about politics nor generals nor genocides, it is about dreamers that also have the mental tools convert dreams into reality. Some people need to work in teams, good for them; others are better working independently, good for them also; Both kinds of persons deserve the same rights and opportunities. Jaime F. Soto from Chile

I always use the development effort of Kelly Johnson's team at Lockheed's 'Skunk Works' for the SR-71 as an example of engineering and project management greatness. They truly went where no one had gone before. They introduced new metals, fluids, mfg techniques...etc, to build the fastest plane ever built (that we will admit to anyway)!

yeah,

50's technology, amazing achievement, all the hurdles they had to overcome. For instance some of the titanium test samples were failing, eventually traced it to seasonal difference in the water treatment supplied to the plant, apparently more chlorine in the summer.