We Will Always Have Jobs
A Brief History of Engineering

Jacob Eliosoff, 1996
         So, you think you're an engineer. You're civil, you're applied, the buttons on your fx-991 are worn off, the notion of paying for cable amuses you. You're well on your way to joining some big corporation's payroll as a Contributing Member of Society. But how much do you know about the history of your trade?
         The fact is, nothing has personified human progress more than the hardworking engineer - solving powerful people's problems for a fee since the birth of civilization. But McGill doesn't teach you about the giant iron "beaks and claws" Archimedes designed to hold off the Roman navy for three years, or the series of brilliant experiments that led to GE engineer James Wright's invention of Silly Putty in 1943. So here's a proud look at a few of our profession's highlights over the millennia...

• The Pyramids at Giza: King Cheops knew he just wouldn't be comfortable in the afterlife without 6,000,000 tons of solid rock surrounding his mummified corpse. So he passed on the word to 100,000 of his closest friends, and they were only too happy to spare him a couple of decades. Critics may wonder if the whole enterprise wasn't just a wee bit pointless, but nobody denies the Pharaoh's engineers knew their business: the pyramids' measurements are accurate to within 0.1%, they were the tallest man-made structures until the 19th century, and they haven't tipped once in 4500 years.
• The Great Wall of China: Nothing says "do not enter" like 4000 miles of sheer 30-foot rock face, and Shih Huang-ti was an emperor who liked his privacy, particularly where the pesky Mongolian hordes to the north were concerned. His engineers set to work merging the existing patchwork of walls along the north border, and the largest construction project of all time got underway. Over a million Chinese peasants died in the process, but the Wall was a pain in the ass of invaders for the next 2000 years, though Japanese bombers flying overhead in the 1930's reportedly were not impressed.
• The Guillotine: Dr Joseph Ignace Guillotin didn't invent the guillotine; it was the product of hundreds of years of painstaking European experimentation. He just helped convince the new French republic of 1789 that capital punishment ought to be conducted in the most efficient, painless manner available. Crowds complained that the device was a little too efficient to make for a good satisfying execution, but Robespierre was a big fan and by the time he finally hit the basket himself, 5 years and tens of thousands of efficiently, painlessly removed heads later, the guillotine was the talk of Paris.
• The Panama Canal: At the turn of this century, Panama desperately needed a canal. At least that's what the Americans thought - with the Spanish-American War their navy had been seeing a lot of action, and South America kept getting in the way. So they arranged Panama's secession from Colombia, brought in cheap West Indian labor and 40 tons of dynamite, and built the 50-mile marvel we have today. The 10-year construction went pretty much according to plan, unlike Ferdinand de Lesseps' attempt for France during the 1880's, which lost 22,000 lives to malaria and yellow fever and resulted in a 3-mile ditch to nowhere. Now all Lucien Bouchard needs to do is convince Clinton of the vital strategic importance of James Bay.
• Ammonia Synthesis: Chemist Fritz Haber's 1908 discovery of a process for synthesizing ammonia, adapted to industry by engineer Carl Bosch, kickstarted the agricultural revolution and earned them both Nobel prizes. It also allowed Germany to keep producing explosives in the First World War after nitrate imports from Chile were cut off, and Haber, a patriotic German, volunteered his services to pioneer poison gas warfare. By the time Hitler got the ball rolling again in 1933, Bosch had a senior position in chemicals cartel IG Farben, which went on to run one of the camps at Auschwitz and supplied Zyklon-B gas for the chambers. Meanwhile Haber had left the country; being a Jew under Hitler took all the fun out of flag-waving, not to mention poison gas.
• The Automobile: There's an alternate reality where Mad Max drives a heavily armored mountain bike and Crash is a snuff film about horses. But we can't imagine that world, because we live in the twentieth century, and the twentieth century is all about cars. From the Model T to the Testarossa, we've been suckers for the latest model in speed and sexy aerodynamic design; and with 30,000-part, 100-mph vehicles affordable for most of the industrialized world, cars are a legitimate engineering wonder. But while yuppies drive Beemers home to their three-car garages in the suburbs, the phrase "no air" has taken on a new meaning in urban centers from Tokyo to Mexico City, where inner-city plebes inhale a thickening brew of sulfuric ozone monoxides and then get stuck taking the bus.
• Nuclear Weapons: Albert Einstein may have been a great physicist but he was a lousy engineer - half a century of theorizing about energy and matter, and he never produced anything more combustible than a few books. Compare this with the hard-nosed badasses behind the Manhattan Project, who took only four years (and 2 billion dollars) to translate a bunch of mathematical formulas into a really shitty day in Hiroshima. Just think where we could be today if Big Al himself had gotten his act together a bit on the applications side of things.
• Ramen Noodles: What's not to love about Ramen Noodles? They're insanely cheap, their ingredients list is like a Who's Who of addictive chemical flavorants, and they may not even be carcinogenic! You have to wonder who came up with these perfect four-for-a-dollar packets of fat, salt, and mmmonosodium glutamate. The answer may involve a research chemist on a shoestring budget, or a Japanese Kraft Dinner imitator gone awry. It definitely involves the automated production-line techniques of massive corporations, the same economy-of-scale leviathans that kill small businesses, invest in brutal dictatorships, and pollute like there's no tomorrow. In the end we may have only McDonald's and Sapporo Ichiban to choose from and have chronic digestive ailments like the Japanese, but at least we'll have our MSG.
• The Internet: Megahype notwithstanding, the fact is the net is a brilliant technological achievement which has moved at an incredible pace in its short history. It's even been the site of a fair amount of human creativity and originality. But it was created by the Pentagon, nobody's more excited about it than big American corporations, and there's no reason to think it's about to start benefiting anyone other than the interests it's served so far - wealthy first-worlders with the cash and background to plug in. Will it really revolutionize our lives and make everything more convenient? Probably. But as our lives get better, the world's poor will stay offline and the gap between haves and have-nots will increase, and there's nothing revolutionary about that.

         So rest easy, my fellow tools-in-training. Rulers and civilizations come and go, but there's always some entrenched interest with dirty work that needs doing, and any autocrat knows there's nothing like an engineer to get things running smoothly. As long as the Man can pay our bills there we'll be, comfortably nestled on his dick, solving his problems with the mindless efficiency of a finely crafted screwdriver. And if times change and what we were doing doesn't seem so noble anymore, we can always turn to the Engineer's Alibi: I was just doing my job.


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