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If his works do not work the engineer is damned. Herbert Hoover
Twenty-two-year-old Penny Hale was also working in something of a man’s world. The only woman technician on a team building a great British techno dream: Concorde. Kirsty Young, The British at Work: Them and US 1964-1980
Every living being is an engine geared to the wheelwork of the universe. Though seemingly affected only by its immediate surrounding, the sphere of external influence extends to infinite distance. Nikola Tesla
Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine. Elvis Presley
The reason I moved to California the first time was to build the Cobra. I thought it was stupid to have a 1918 taxicab engine in what Europeans like to call a performance car when a little American V-8 could do the job better. Carroll Shelby
Gentlemen, I give you the Whittle engine. Frank Whittle
Automobiles have always been part of my life, and I’m sure they always will be. What is it about them that moves me? The sound of a great engine, the unity and uniqueness of an automobile’s engineering and coachwork, the history of the company and the car, and, of course, the sheer beauty of the thing. Edward Herrmann
If we’re on long-haul flights I’ve been known to sleep on the floor so I hear the engine. Wayne Rooney
Every small boy wanted to be a steam-engine driver when they grew up in the old days, including me. There’s something very special about them – the noise, the smell, the steam coming out everywhere. Michael Bond
Aerodynamics are for people who can’t build engines. Enzo Ferrari
I build engines and attach wheels to them. Enzo Ferrari
The civil engineer is the real 19th century architect. William Burges
A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering. Freeman Dyson
Aviation is the branch of engineering that is least forgiving of mistakes. Freeman Dyson
I am, and ever will be, a white socks, pocket protector, nerdy engineer. Neil Armstrong
The Swedish engineer who invented the zip fastener made a greater intellectual leap than many scientists do in a lifetime. Martin Rees
Manufacturing doesn’t just mean building cars and metal-bashing; it includes making pharmaceuticals and hi-tech electronics. A crucial part of the process is the research and development that allows better and greener products to come to market. Britain has traditionally had a strong science and engineering base. Martin Rees
I’m an engineer. I see myself as a toolmaker and the musicians are my customers ... They use my tools. Robert Moog
When you want to know how things really work, study them when they’re coming apart. William Gibson, Zero History
When Henry Ford decided to produce his famous V-8 motor, he chose to build an engine with the entire eight cylinders cast in one block, and instructed his engineers to produce a design for the engine. The design was placed on paper, but the engineers agreed, to a man, that it was simply impossible to cast an eight-cylinder engine-block in one piece.
Ford replied, ‘Produce it anyway.’ Henry Ford
We tend to hear much more about the splendors returned than the ships that brought them or the shipwrights. It has always been that way. Even those history books enamored of the voyages of Christopher Columbus do not tell much about the builders of the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria or about the principle of the caravel. These spacecraft, their designers, builders, navigators and controllers are examples of what science and engineering set free for well-defined peaceful purposes can accomplish. Those scientists and engineers should be role models for an America seeking excellence and international competitiveness. They should be on our stamps. Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Stephenson had large wrought-iron boiler plates available and he also had the courage of his calculations ... The idea found its best-known expression in the Menai railway bridge opened in 1850. Stephenson’s beams, which weighed 1,500 tons each, were built beside the Straits and were floated into position between the towers on rafts across a swirling tide. They were raised rather over a hundred feet up the towers by successive lifts with primitive hydraulic jacks. All this was not done without both apprehension and adventure; they were giants on the earth in those days. J E Gordon, The New Science of Strong Materials or Why You Don’t Fall Through the Floor
There was no room for dust devils in the laws of physics, as least in the rigid form in which they were usually taught. There is a kind of unspoken collusion going on in mainstream science education: you get your competent but bored, insecure and hence stodgy teacher talking to an audience divided between engineering students, who are going to be responsible for making bridges that won’t fall down or airplanes that won’t suddenly plunge vertically into the ground at six hundred miles an hour, and who by definition get sweaty palms and vindictive attitudes when their teacher suddenly veers off track and begins raving about wild and completely non-intuitive phenomena; and physics students, who derive much of their self-esteem from knowing that they are smarter and morally purer than the engineering students, and who by definition don’t want to hear about anything that makes no fucking sense. This collusion results in the professor saying: (something along the lines of) dust is heavier than air, therefore it falls until it hits the ground. That’s all there is to know about dust. The engineers love it because they like their issues dead and crucified like butterflies under glass. The physicists love it because they want to think they understand everything. No one asks difficult questions. And outside the windows, the dust devils continue to gambol across the campus. Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
No matter what engineering field you’re in, you learn the same basic science and mathematics. And then maybe you learn a little bit about how to apply it. Noam Chomsky
What we usually consider as impossible are simply engineering problems ... there’s no law of physics preventing them. Michio Kaku
Engineering stimulates the mind. Kids get bored easily. They have got to get out and get their hands dirty: make things, dismantle things, fix things. When the schools can offer that, you’ll have an engineer for life. Bruce Dickinson
The engineering marvels were a magnificent industrial achievement on a scale unrivalled since the building of the railways. Crude Britannia: The Story of North Sea Oil 1/3, BBC 2009
Britain’s greatest engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and East London’s shipbuilders created vessels that were bigger, faster and tougher than ever before. Brunel’s Last Launch: A Time Team Special, Channel 4 2011
A hundred and fifty years ago Brunel created a ship five times bigger than anything that had gone before. The most revolutionary vessel the world had ever seen: the SS Great Eastern. ibid.
Launching such a big vessel proved to be a disaster. ibid.