Item — HN Reader

I don't. Our ability to understand problems and validate our solutions for them before even a single part is made is so much more advanced today (in the mechanical engineering world) it would be astonishing to them.

I'm not sure what you mean exactly by the human hours comment, I'm guessing that our advances today are more from low quality, high quantity work then ingenuity? Or something to that effect? I would say that might just be a result of the perception from looking back at a time of rapid advancement, where huge leaps occurred in a short time (and that we only look back at the successful end results, not all the R&D or the failures). Much of the slowness and expansiveness of engineering projects today is due to the increased use of analysis, validation, testing, quality assurance, etc. based on lessons learned from those days. Doesn't mean there is any less ingenious stuff happening, just doesn't stand out in the same way.

As for giving them the tools of today, I doubt they would be able to do much more than the same caliber of people today. In many fields we are pushing the capabilities of materials, analysis, design, etc. to their limits.

I would say the average engineer back then might be better but that's more related to the commodification of degrees than engineering getting worse. In 1970 you had about 9k meche's graduate for a population of 200 mil, in 2015 you had about 26k for a population of 320 mil. A 3x increase for only a 0.5x increase in population. I think the increase is due to alot more people being there for the paycheck, not the passion, which I think was much rarer back in the day.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_325.47.a...

All that being said, the engineering/engineers of that era is/are amazing. I mean they did most everything with paper, pencils and slide rules. Slide rules!

1 comments

Your last sentence best captures my thinking that generation worked so closely to the physics of the problem that the result was quite minimal and robust. I don't see today's problems approached with the same care.

Interesting enough during the rapid advancement of inertial guidance development the developers came from all walks of life and not necessarily college. There was period of maturation were the un-educated were purged from the projects.

I would say they were closer to the problem but not necessarily the physics of them. And that doesn't really have anything to do with why their solutions were simple and robust, they just didn't have any other choice in how to build things. Their limited knowledge and manufacturing capabilities made designing complex solutions difficult and they were robust because they didn't understand the physics well enough to build them with slimmer margins.

There's a saying along the lines of "It doesn't take a great engineer to make a bridge that stands but it does to make one that barely stands.".

As for being approached with the same care, well that's hard to say overall. I don't think you'd see a project like the James Webb be successful without the care of alot of people though.

I do have mixed feelings about the education requirement that is a wall for some people. I know alot of folks that could probably have had great careers as engineers but were stopped by the high end math needed for the degree. I also know many people that have zero engineering intuition that made it through and work in the field.

I'm basing my thinking on a publication by Autonetics publication EM-1488 in Jan. 1958. Titled an "Introduction to Digital Airborne Computing Techniques." It's 79 pages self bound book published to bring people up to speed on what is going on.

Page 1 is a definition of a digital computer it progresses to number systems, storage devices, boolean algebra, logical design, code design.

That is the first half of the book up to page 38.

The remaining sections cover General purpose computing, Digital Differential Analyzer operations, Digital Differential Analyzer Programming, D.D.A. decision and servo integration, Incremental and Whole Value Solutions of Control Problems.

The book contains a schematic of subsystems and the one complete circuit in the book is of a flip-flop.

I think the systems were robust becuase the computing problem was so tightly bound to the hardware.