Gleanings from the softer side of a profession

Earlier this year Frances Bajet, a publicist at Cambridge University Press in New York City, sent me an advance copy of Henry Petroski’s An Engineer’s Alphabet: Gleanings from the Softer Side of a Profession. The book lives up to its subtitle. Browsing through its pages I found entries on asphalt cookies, concrete canoes, practical jokes (“if at all possible, involve a cow”), and slide rules.

But the book also has a harder side. Petroski writes about engineering’s history, practice and impact on society. Collectively, his numerous, diverse entries gave me a renewed sense of awe and respect for engineers. The book also made me wonder why I didn’t choose to become an engineer myself.

My hometown of Conwy, North Wales, doesn’t lack engineering marvels that might have inspired the younger me. A massive 13th-century castle dominates the town. Two of the bridges that span the River Conwy were built by 19th-century titans of civil engineering, Thomas Telford and Robert Stephenson . In high school, I enjoyed, and was good at, metalwork (“shop” in American parlance).

But I preferred science. The aeronautical engineer and investigator of fluids Theodor von Kármán once said, “The scientist describes what is; the engineer creates what never was.” Even if I’d been familiar with Kármán’s famous quote, the physicist’s quest to understand nature was more attractive to me than the engineer’s quest to build new and useful machines.

I know of at least four Nobel Prize–winning physicists who studied engineering before switching to physics: Paul Dirac, Edward Purcell, Carlo Rubbia, and Eugene Wigner. The influence of engineering on Dirac is hard to discern. His most famous contribution to physics was to unify two abstract theories, quantum mechanics and special relativity.

Rubbia wanted to become a physicist in high school, but he switched to engineering when he failed to win a prestigious scholarship. Fate brought him back to physics when one of the scholarship winners resigned his scholarship, which created an opening. The autobiography that Rubbia wrote for the Nobel Foundation leaves you with the impression that he considered his escape from engineering not only lucky but also welcome.

To their evident benefit, Purcell and Wigner pursued engineering further than Dirac and Rubbia did. Purcell earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in from Purdue University. His discoveries of nuclear magnetic resonance in solids and the 21-cm radiation in the cosmos depended on the construction and operation of novel electronic detectors.

Wigner earned a PhD in chemical engineering at what is now the Technical University of Berlin. After graduating, he worked for his father’s chemical engineering company. Wigner’s engineering background is evident not so much in his theoretical contributions to quantum mechanics, but in his work as a nuclear engineer. He designed the first large-scale nuclear reactors that ran at the Hanford Site in Washington State.

Petroski’s An Engineer’s Alphabet abounds in evidence that the various kinds of engineering are, like physics, challenging and rewarding. Whether today’s high school students pursue engineering, physics, or neither is their choice. But that choice should be made freely and with a familiarity of what those two broad, rich subjects offer.

I hope, therefore, that Petroski’s book finds its way into the hands of students and that someone writes a similar book about physics that is just as entertaining, informative, and inspiring.