I don’t have an engineering degree- though I do engineering work. I am an autodidact innalmost everything I’ve done, and that ability, to learn what I need to learn quickly, has served me well.

What I have done, is become an engineer the way engineers USED to be made, the way they’re educated to this day, in the UK.

IN this country, at the turn of the century, an engineer was a man capable of operating an engine, hence the term. When most people think “engine” they think “motor”, but that’s not what an engine is, an engine, strictly speaking, is a mechainism. Most people think of “internal combustion engine” or “steam engine” but those are just mechanisms used to convert one form of energy into another.

Consider the lathe. At one time, lathes were just things that turned. Most of what they did was let you cut or file or turn something that was round. Around 1810, Henry Maudslay invented a machine that combined the accuracy of Jesse Ramsden’s “dividing engine” with his rigid, accurate lathe.

THis created the engine lathe. There are still bucketloads of people who think that an engine lathe is used to make engines. An engine lathe is used to make accurate cuts on metal, both inside and outside diameter, and most importantly, cut threads. Up to this time, most threads were cut by wrapping a piece of line around the part and the threads cut with a file. An engine lathe meant, that for ther very first time, threads coupd be accurately cut, and a thread made on one machine would fit a thread made on another.

Okay, you in the back, wake the fuck up.

Where I’m going wiht this little bit oif history, is that the engineering accomplisments of the last century were made, in the main, by talented amateurs. In some places, the smae is true today. No group of MIT educated programmers wrote Napster, it was a kid. Google wasn’t written by a huge conglomerate. The things that subtly change the world, come out of left field, more often than not, and nobody knows where the next one is coming from.

Frinstance: Years back, the Big Three experimented with turbine powered cars. In an era of big blocks, they weren’t well accepted. They were also engineering marvels, because of the brute force needed to take the high speed turbine output and turn it into something that the car could use. These days, I wonder why someone doesn’t apply that same tech to making a little hybrid. You could easily gear a turbine to a single speed generator, no accel/decel issues, use the generator to charge batteries, use the batteries to run the car. Old tech and new to make a third, different thing. No, I haven’t done the math, and it may be utterly impausible- but I do know that a turbine is more efficient than a recip, otherwise airplanes would still have propellors. THere are tons and tons of turnings in engineering, many we have never imagined- but someone someday will. And I’ll lay odds it’s not going to be a college professor that does it.

A few years back, an engineering colleague of mine went through the process of upgrading his degree, and when he did, I helped him with some of his labs. I was amazed at the things he was doing, and he got great grades for the class I helped him with. Turns out the piece I helped him make was something he invented off the cuff to test something at his plant, and he just had the idea and ran with it. The education he was getting made it easier to figure out the fine details, but basis of the idea was his, out of the blue, and worked perfectly.