The term engineering is derived from the Latiningenium, meaning "cleverness". (Full article...)
Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who invent, design, analyze, build and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while considering the limitations imposed by practicality, regulation, safety and cost. The word engineer (Latiningeniator, the origin of the Ir. in the title of engineer in countries like Belgium and The Netherlands) is derived from the Latin words ingeniare ("to contrive, devise") and ingenium ("cleverness"). The foundational qualifications of a licensed professional engineer typically include a four-year bachelor's degree in an engineering discipline, or in some jurisdictions, a master's degree in an engineering discipline plus four to six years of peer-reviewed professional practice (culminating in a project report or thesis) and passage of engineering board examinations. (Full article...)
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The Sholes and Glidden typewriter (also known as the Remington No. 1) was the first commercially successful typewriter. Principally designed by the AmericaninventorChristopher Latham Sholes, it was developed with the assistance of fellow printer Samuel W. Soule and amateur mechanic Carlos S. Glidden. Work began in 1867, but Soule left the enterprise shortly thereafter, replaced by James Densmore, who provided financial backing and the driving force behind the machine's continued development. After several short-lived attempts to manufacture the device, the machine was acquired by E. Remington and Sons in early 1873. An arms manufacturer seeking to diversify, Remington further refined the typewriter before finally placing it on the market on July 1, 1874.
During its development, the typewriter evolved from a crude curiosity into a practical device, the basic form of which became the industry standard. The machine incorporated elements which became fundamental to typewriter design, including a cylindrical platen and a four-rowed QWERTY keyboard. Several design deficiencies remained, however. The Sholes and Glidden could print only upper-case letters—an issue remedied in its successor, the Remington No. 2—and was a "blind writer", meaning the typist could not see what was being written as it was entered. (Full article...)
Grinding is an abrasive machining process that uses a grinding wheel as the cutting tool.
Grinding practice is a large and diverse area of manufacturing and toolmaking. It can produce very fine finishes and very accurate dimensions; yet in mass production contexts it can also rough out large volumes of metal quite rapidly. It is usually better suited to the machining of very hard materials than is "regular" machining (that is, cutting larger chips with cutting tools such as tool bits or milling cutters), and until recent decades it was the only practical way to machine such materials as hardened steels. Compared to "regular" machining, it is usually better suited to taking very shallow cuts, such as reducing a shaft’s diameter by half a thousandth of an inch or 12.7 μm.
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A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its solar power output. The concept is a thought experiment that attempts to imagine how a spacefaring civilization would meet its energy requirements once those requirements exceed what can be generated from the home planet's resources alone. Because only a tiny fraction of a star's energy emissions reaches the surface of any orbiting planet, building structures encircling a star would enable a civilization to harvest far more energy.
The first modern imagining of such a structure was by Olaf Stapledon in his science fiction novel Star Maker (1937). The concept was later explored by the physicist Freeman Dyson in his 1960 paper "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation". Dyson speculated that such structures would be the logical consequence of the escalating energy needs of a technological civilization and would be a necessity for its long-term survival. A signature of such spheres detected in astronomical searches would be an indicator of extraterrestrial intelligence. (Full article...)
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The radius of maximum wind (RMW) is the distance between the center of a cyclone and its band of strongest winds. It is a parameter in atmospheric dynamics and tropical cyclone forecasting. The highest rainfall rates occur near the RMW of tropical cyclones. The extent of a cyclone's storm surge and its maximum potential intensity can be determined using the RMW. As maximum sustained winds increase, the RMW decreases. Recently, RMW has been used in descriptions of tornadoes. When designing buildings to prevent against failure from atmospheric pressure change, RMW can be used in the calculations. (Full article...)
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In mathematical analysis, the Dirac delta function (or δ distribution), also known as the unit impulse, is a generalized function on the real numbers, whose value is zero everywhere except at zero, and whose integral over the entire real line is equal to one. Since there is no function having this property, modelling the delta "function" rigorously involves the use of limits or, as is common in mathematics, measure theory and the theory of distributions.
The delta function was introduced by physicist Paul Dirac, and has since been applied routinely in physics and engineering to model point masses and instantaneous impulses. It is called the delta function because it is a continuous analogue of the Kronecker delta function, which is usually defined on a discrete domain and takes values 0 and 1. The mathematical rigor of the delta function was disputed until Laurent Schwartz developed the theory of distributions, where it is defined as a linear form acting on functions. (Full article...)
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Fizeau–Foucault apparatus may refer to either of two nineteenth-century experiments to measure the speed of light:
ODB++ is a proprietary CAD-to-CAM data exchange format used in the design and manufacture of electronic devices. Its purpose is to exchange printed circuit board design information between design and manufacturing and between design tools from different EDA/ECAD vendors. It was originally developed by Valor Computerized Systems, Ltd. (acquired in 2010 by Mentor Graphics which was later acquired by Siemens in 2016) as the job description format for their CAM system.
ODB stands for open database, but its openness is disputed, as discussed below. The '++' suffix, evocative of C++, was added in 1997 with the addition of component descriptions. There are two versions of ODB++: the original (now controlled by Mentor) and an XML version called ODB++(X) that Valor developed and donated to the IPC organization in an attempt to merge GenCAM (IPC-2511) and ODB++ into Offspring (IPC-2581). (Full article...)
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Carl Edgar Myers (1842–1925) was an American aeronautical engineer. He was born at March 2, 1842 at Herkimer, New York, to Abram H. and Eliza Ann (Cristman) Myers. At various times in his life, he was employed as carpenter, mechanician, plumber, electrician and chemist, banker, and photographer. After 1978, he focused on aeronautical engineering. He became known as the inventor of new or improved systems for generating gases, and as the constructor of hydrogen balloons and airships, including the aerial velocipede, gas kite, sky-cycle and electrical aerial torpedo. He married Mary Breed Hawley on November 8, 1871.
Myers, after spending two years hiring professional balloonists to test his designs, Myers went up in a balloon himself. (Full article...)
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The Avrocar S/N 58-7055 (marked AV-7055) on its rollout.
The Avro Canada VZ-9 Avrocar was a VTOL aircraft developed by Avro Canada as part of a secret U.S. military project carried out in the early years of the Cold War. The Avrocar intended to exploit the Coandă effect to provide lift and thrust from a single "turborotor" blowing exhaust out of the rim of the disk-shaped aircraft. In the air, it would have resembled a flying saucer.
Originally designed as a fighter-like aircraft capable of very high speeds and altitudes, the project was repeatedly scaled back over time and the U.S. Air Force eventually abandoned it. Development was then taken up by the U.S. Army for a tactical combat aircraft requirement, a sort of high-performance helicopter. In flight testing, the Avrocar proved to have unresolved thrust and stability problems that limited it to a degraded, low-performance flight envelope; subsequently, the project was cancelled in September 1961. (Full article...)
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The Churchill Machine Tool Company Limited began as the manufacturing subsidiary of the machine tool importers Charles Churchill & Company Limited founded in the early 1900s by US-born Charles Churchill (1837–1916). Created out of the personal bankruptcy of Charles Churchill, the company developed to become one of the largest British importers of machine tools from the United States and a major manufacturer of such tools, initially under licence and later of its own development.
The original business importing American machine tools into Britain began with Charles Churchill as sole proprietor and later as a partnership with two others. It became a limited company in 1889. In 1906 a separate company, The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd, was established with the purpose of adapting tools imported by Charles Churchill & Co. The former expanded, producing American tools under licence and then manufactured tools of its own design, in particular precision surface grinders and similar engineering machinery. In 1918 The Churchill Machine Tool Co relocated its factories onto a single site at Broadheath, near Altrincham. (Full article...)
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Raymix during a 2018 interview
Edmundo Gómez Moreno (born 17 February 1991), better known by his stage name Raymix, is a Mexican musician and aerospace engineer. Nicknamed El Rey de la Electrocumbia ("The King of Electrocumbia"), Raymix started his music career in the early 2010s, when he joined a trance project called Light & Wave with two other Mexican musicians. Their song "Feeling the City" was featured on the Armin van Buuren radio show A State of Trance. In 2013, Raymix was invited to work in a NASA educative internship, where he helped to develop a satellite.
The Castaing machine is a device used to add lettering and decoration to the edge of a coin. Such lettering was necessitated by counterfeiting and edge clipping, which was a common problem resulting from the uneven and irregular hammered coinage. When Aubin Olivier introduced milled coinage to France, he also developed a method of marking the edges with lettering which would make it possible to detect if metal had been shaved from the edge. This method involved using a collar, into which the metal flowed from the pressure of the press. This technique was slower and more costly than later methods. France abandoned milled coinage in favour of hammering in 1585.
England experimented briefly with milled coinage, but it wasn't until Peter Blondeau brought his method of minting coins there in the mid-seventeenth century that such coinage began in earnest in that country. Blondeau also invented a different method of marking the edge, which was, according to him, faster and less costly than the method pioneered by Olivier. Though Blondeau's exact method was secretive, numismatists have asserted that it likely resembled the later device invented by Jean Castaing. Castaing's machine marked the edges by means of two steel rulers, which, when a coinage blank was forced between them, imprinted legends or designs on its edge. Castaing's device found favour in France, and it was eventually adopted in other nations, including Britain and the United States, but it was eventually phased out by mechanised minting techniques. (Full article...)
HDMI implements the ANSI/CTA-861 standard, which defines video formats and waveforms, transport of compressed and uncompressed LPCM audio, auxiliary data, and implementations of the VESA EDID. CEA-861 signals carried by HDMI are electrically compatible with the CEA-861 signals used by the Digital Visual Interface (DVI). No signal conversion is necessary, nor is there a loss of video quality when a DVI-to-HDMI adapter is used. The Consumer Electronics Control (CEC) capability allows HDMI devices to control each other when necessary and allows the user to operate multiple devices with one handheld remote control device. (Full article...)
The tubes were constructed using the shield method and are each 6,550 feet (2,000 m) long and 15.5 feet (4.7 m) wide. The interiors are lined with cast-iron "rings" formed with concrete. The tubes descend 91 to 95 feet (28 to 29 m) below the mean high water level of the East River, with a maximum gradient of 3.1 percent. During the tunnel's construction, a house at 58 Joralemon Street in Brooklyn was converted into a ventilation building and emergency exit. (Full article...)
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Overhead View of Tehachapi Energy Storage Project, Tehachapi, CA
The Tehachapi Energy Storage Project (TSP) is a 8MW/32MWhlithium-ion battery-based grid energy storage system at the Monolith Substation of Southern California Edison (SCE) in Tehachapi, California, sufficient to power between 1,600 and 2,400 homes for four hours. At the time of commissioning in 2014, it was the largest lithium-ion battery system operating in North America and one of the largest in the world. TSP is considered to be a modern-day energy storage pioneer with significant accomplishments that have proven the viability of utility-scale energy storage using lithium-ion technology. While originally envisioned as a research and development project, TSP operated as a distribution-level resource for SCE and for calendar year 2020, SCE reported that TSP operated in the wholesale energy market with revenue exceeding operating and maintenance costs. In 2021, SCE began the decommissioning of TSP, which was followed by formal decommissioning by state regulators in 2022. The physical dismantlement of TSP is expected to be completed by the end of 2022. (Full article...)
Image 11A drawing for a steam locomotive. Engineering is applied to design, with emphasis on function and the utilization of mathematics and science. (from Engineering)
Image 14The application of the steam engine allowed coke to be substituted for charcoal in iron making, lowering the cost of iron, which provided engineers with a new material for building bridges. This bridge was made of cast iron, which was soon displaced by less brittle wrought iron as a structural material. (from Engineering)
Image 26Design of a turbine requires collaboration of engineers from many fields, as the system involves mechanical, electro-magnetic and chemical processes. The blades, rotor and stator as well as the steam cycle all need to be carefully designed and optimized. (from Engineering)
Image 28Archimedes is regarded as one of the leading scientists in classical antiquity whose ideas have underpinned much of the practice of engineering. (from Engineer)
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