Engineering Quotes

[DanLevin247]

For your enjoyment, taken from some great websites, many of which are now, broken links.

1. "Mach 2 travel feels no different." a passenger commented on an early Concorde flight. "Yes," Sir George (an engineer )replied. "That was the difficult bit."

2. Phases of a Project:
1 -- Exultation
2 -- Disenchantment
3 -- Search for the Guilty
4 -- Punishment of the Innocent
5 -- Praise for the Uninvolved

3. A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

4. The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong, it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.

5. Engineering ... to define rudely but not inaptly, is the art of doing that well with one dollar, which any bungler can do with two after a fashion.

6. One has to watch out for engineers - they begin with the sewing machine and end up with the atomic bomb.

7. It takes an engineer to undertake the training of an engineer and not, as often happens, a theoretical engineer who is clever on a blackboard with mathematical formulae but useless as far as production is concerned.

8. The history of engineering is really the history of breakages, and of learning from those breakages. I was taught at college 'the engineer learns most on the scrapheap'.

9. An engineer is someone who is good with figures, but doesn't have the personality of an accountant.
- An Arts graduate's view of engineers

10. Architects and engineers are among the most fortunate of men since they build their own monuments with public consent, public approval and often public money.

11. An engineer is someone who washes his hands before going to the toilet

12. A theory may be so rich in descriptive possibilities that it can be made to fit any data.

13. Boring ( adj. ) - see: Civil Engineers.

14. Engineering problems are under-defined, there are many solutions, good, bad and indifferent. The art is to arrive at a good solution. This is a creative activity, involving imagination, intuition and deliberate choice.

15. Engineering refers to the practice of organizing the design and construction [and, I would add operation] of any artifice which transforms the physical world around us to meet some recognized need.

16. Engineers ... are not mere technicians and should not approve or lend their name to any project that does not promise to be beneficent to man and the advancement of civilization

17. ...(that) any general system of conveying passengers would ... go at a velocity exceeding ten miles an hour, or thereabouts, is extremely improbable.
- Railway engineer Thomas Tredgold, 1835

18. A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible

19. Engineering is the art of modelling materials we do not wholly understand, into shapes we cannot precisely analyze so as to withstand forces we cannot properly assess, in such a way that the public has no reason to suspect the extent of our ignorance.

[Reed B.]

An engineer's costs, explained:
Chalk mark: $1
Knowing where to put it: $39,999

Tinkering is essence of Engineers