An alternative Top 10

Originally published 8 January 1990

The Nation­al Acad­e­my of Engi­neer­ing has announced the ten great­est engi­neer­ing achieve­ments of the past 25 years. To draw pub­lic atten­tion to the excite­ment of engi­neer­ing, the Acad­e­my sort­ed through 340 pos­si­bil­i­ties and chose the following:

• The moon landing.
• Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and infor­ma­tion-gath­er­ing satellites.
• The micro­proces­sor.
• Com­put­er-aid­ed design and manufacturing.
• The com­put­er­ized axi­al tomog­ra­phy (CAT) scan.
• Advanced com­pos­ite materials.
• The jum­bo jet.
• Lasers.
• Fiber optic communication.
• The appli­ca­tion of genet­ic engi­neer­ing to pro­duce new phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals and crops.

Ho hum.

The trou­ble with this list is it’s too gen­er­al, too grandiose, too abstract. Oh sure, there are things here that have con­tributed to qual­i­ty of life, but not much to excite the pub­lic. Gen­er­al­ly, this is a list that could only make big cor­po­ra­tions happy.

Take the jum­bo jet. If ever there was an engi­neer­ing achieve­ment that we could live with­out, it’s the jum­bo jet. A colos­sal tin can for human sar­dines. Not a jum­bo air­plane, but a jum­bo cash register.

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion satel­lites? Thanks to these orbit­ing relays we now get 62 tele­vi­sion chan­nels. Big deal! Three was too many.

The micro­proces­sor? We have micro­proces­sors call­ing up at din­ner­time to sell us mag­a­zine sub­scrip­tions. Com­put­ers on a chip have poten­tial for enor­mous harm.

The same goes for the rest of the these mega-technologies.

So how about a list of engi­neer­ing achieve­ments that real­ly con­nects with qual­i­ty of life. Engi­neer­ing on a human scale. Here’s my per­son­al list. Not the moon land­ing, but…

• Plucky lit­tle Voy­ager 2, the pock­et space­craft of the cen­tu­ry. A 12-year grand tour of the out­er plan­ets, work­ing bet­ter all the time. Send­ing back pic­tures of exquis­ite beau­ty. Dis­tant, mag­i­cal worlds. A real-life Star Trek to bog­gle the imagination.
• The com­pact disc. Sev­en­ty min­utes of Mozart with­out leav­ing the chair. No hiss. No scratch­es. Pure, repeat­able, per­fect sound. A con­cert orches­tra in the palm of your hand.
• The Sony Dis­c­man. No wider than a CD and only 20 times thick­er. Recharge­able. Add a good set of head­phones for bliss in a box. This is what lasers were made for.
• The light-weight 12-speed bicy­cle, a Fuji Ace for exam­ple, the most sub­lime form of trans­porta­tion since the inven­tion of the foot. A metal­lic zephyr. Lis­ten to the ball bear­ings whir in their races. The music of the spheres.
• The Mac­in­tosh Portable com­put­er. Crisp, light­ning-fast screen. Forty megabyte inter­nal hard disk. 2400 bit per sec­ond modem. State-of-the-art word-pro­cess­ing soft­ware with dic­tio­nary. Let the purists have their quill pens; this is tech­nol­o­gy in the ser­vice of art.
• The auto­mat­ic teller machine. No more are we held hostage to bankers’ hours. It’s our mon­ey, and if we want it on Sat­ur­day night or at an air­port in Tope­ka, Kansas, then tech­nol­o­gy can be there to pro­vide it — in crisp $20 bills.
• The New York Sun­day Times. From for­est to front stoop, this is sure­ly the biggest tech­no­log­i­cal bar­gain on Earth. Tree-har­vest­ing machin­ery, newsprint fac­to­ries, rail­roads, elec­tron­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tions, com­put­er type­set­ting, high-speed press­es. The state of the world for $1.50.
• The recharge­able pow­er screw­driv­er and mul­ti-use dry-wall screws. If tech­nol­o­gy is there to take the blis­ters out of life, then this com­bi­na­tion does it.
• The Gillette Micro­Trac dis­pos­able razor and aerosol shav­ing cream. If tech­nol­o­gy is there to take the nicks out of life, then this com­bi­na­tion does it.
• The solar-pow­ered cal­cu­la­tor. Thir­teen years ago I bought a Texas Instru­ments SR-40 sci­en­tif­ic cal­cu­la­tor for $35. (In those not-so-long-ago days cal­cu­la­tors were still called elec­tron­ic slide rules.) I have just replaced it with a TI-36 SOLAR cal­cu­la­tor, half the size, twice the com­pu­ta­tion­al pow­er, for half the cost. I sus­pect if Johannes Kepler, Blaise Pas­cal or Isaac New­ton came back today, no oth­er tech­no­log­i­cal achieve­ment would so impress them. Com­pu­ta­tions that once took pro­fes­sion­al math­e­mati­cians life­times to per­form are now instant­ly avail­able to every sci­en­tist and engi­neer. No bat­ter­ies to replace, main­te­nance-free, and vir­tu­al­ly inde­struc­tible. The hand­held solar-pow­ered sci­en­tif­ic cal­cu­la­tor may be the ulti­mate sym­bol of late-20th cen­tu­ry tech­no­log­i­cal prowess.