October
- November
2001
OpEd Corner
Engineers
get blame, not respect
by
George F. McClure
John Hall, the
Washington bureau chief for Media-General News Service, writes a weekly
commentary carried in several newspapers. His opinions are not always on
the mark. On 9 September, his column was titled, "No other human
horror matches a shark attack." On 13 September, he had an extra
column in which he described the mastermind behind the New York and
Washington terrorist attacks as "An engineer for terrorism,"
writing that this "engineer" knows how to collapse buildings
with airliners, planning his operation with military economy and
precision. You can read it at www.timesdispatch.com/frontpage/MGBVVQJVJRC.html
I have to object to
this branding of the diabolical mind behind the terrorist attacks of 11
September as "the engineer."
Engineers are
designers, builders and innovators, not destroyers.
The ancient Egyptian
engineer Imhotep built the first stepped pyramid, at Saqqara near Cairo,
as a tomb for King Zosar in 2680 B.C., before the great pyramids at
Giza were even conceived. On his death, Imhotep was elevated to the
status of a god.
Leonardo da Vinci was
a military engineer who designed the first submarine and the first
airborne vehicle. He told his sponsors that, in time of peace, he could
also do architecture, building, art and sculpture.
George Washington, our
first president, was an engineer whose birthday is celebrated in the
United States during National Engineers' Week, to honor the
contributions of all engineers to our quality of life.
Roman engineers
designed 186,000 miles of good roads in the empire, 10 aqueducts that
brought Rome 220 million gallons of water daily, and the Pantheon dome,
which spans more than 142 feet. Some of these achievements and others
are detailed in a good book, The Civilized Engineer, by Samuel C.
Florman (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987). Florman was inspired to
study civil engineering while visiting the New York World's Fair in
1939.
More recently,
engineers have enabled cable-stayed suspension bridges, passenger jet
aircraft, communication satellites, the Global Positioning System, the
Internet, wireless personal communications, the space shuttle and the
International Space Station.
Structural engineers
reportedly designed the World Trade Center
towers to withstand the impact of a 707 jet aircraft, the
state of the art in the 1970s.
Why is an engineer's
image not more positive, in the eyes of the public? More often
than not, scientists are credited with engineering achievements. Such
errors may reflect the naiveté of the press reporting on the achievements.
Even our favorite comic strip character, Dilbert, most often comes
across as long-suffering and cynical, striving to get his job done in
spite of incompetent management. We can identify with some of the
Dilbert situations, but the public hasn't a clue; it's an inside joke.
Television has offered
its viewers Marcus Welby, M.D., but not Marcus Welby, P.E.;
L.A. Law, but
not L.A. Engineer. The old sitcom, My Three Sons portrayed a
father, played by Fred McMurray, who was said to be an engineer, but the
plots focused on problems he had with his sons and their live-in uncle,
never on the engineering. Given the setting of southern California, he
could have worked at Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach. But we never knew.
The house they used is on the Universal Studio tour in Los Angeles.
A current documentary,
Electric Money, on PBS, dramatizes the role of Walter
Wriston of Citibank, who took a chance and financed the first
system-wide automatic teller machines in 1977, but only one
mention is made (and no photo shown) of the engineering genius who, in three months,
designed and created a working model of a banking computer for Citibank that could show any customer how much money was in the account. The
program shows how credit cards and the worldwide funds transfer banking
system we have today depends on computers and communications satellites.
But the founders of Tandem Computer, the first highly reliable digital
data processor, are the only innovators shown, other than the
entrepreneurs who saw a market for credit cards and filled the need.
Granted, engineers do
not get the respect and credit (to say nothing of adulation) they
deserve, but in my view, to label the leader
of nihilistic terrorists who are willing to lose their lives — and
take the lives of some 6,500 innocent civilians — by
turning hijacked civilian aircraft into kiloton bombs with civilian
targets as "The Engineer," slanders a million engineers in the United States who work for the
betterment of mankind.
John Hall must have
received many complaints about his use of "The Engineer,"
because he appended the following to a column on 16 September:
"As the brother
of a chemical engineer, I surely meant no offense to engineers in a
column a few days ago, but I have received several e-mails protesting my
reference to the mastermind of destruction of the World Trade Center
twin towers as "The Engineer."
"I apologize to
members of this noble profession who took offense and make the following
explanation: The dictionary definition of engineer is "a person who
carries through an enterprise by skillful or artful contrivance,"
and this is the generic sense in which I used this term. I never said
the perpetrator was educated as an engineer. Metaphors are important
tools for writers. To say that this thug had the technical skills of an
engineer is not to elevate him or disparage engineers, but to try and
understand our enemy, which we must do before we can find him and put
him out of business."
George
F. McClure is IEEE-USA's Technology Policy Editor and co-chair of the
IEEE-USA Workforce Committee.
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