The Engineering Revolution

Over the past two million years that human species have inhabited the Planet Earth they have distinguished themselves by their ability to make and do things creatively to ensure their survival. From the beginning, therefore, they have been defined by their technology, and the history of technology is the history of the species. For most of this period, the development of human technical skills has been extremely slow and repetitive, limited to basic tools and weapons and the ability to control fire. The utilization of animal power and the invention of the means of harnessing the power of wind and falling water added gradually to their technical skills, but it was the discovery of ways of using power from heat engines a mere three hundred years ago that accelerated this process into a prodigious expansion of technical power that fundamentally transformed human societies . It is this development which deserves to be to be called The Engineering Revolution and provides the primary focus of this book.

Engineering the Revolution documents the forging of a new relationship between technology and politics in Revolutionary France, and the inauguration of a distinctively modern form of the “technological life.” Here, Ken Alder rewrites the history of the eighteenth century as the total history of one particular artifact—the gun—by offering a novel and historical account of how material artifacts emerge as the outcome of political struggle. By expanding the “political” to include conflict over material objects, this volume rethinks the nature of engineering rationality, the origins of mass production, the rise of meritocracy, and our interpretation of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

"Meet scientists who are on the verge of breakthroughs in biomedical engineering. From encouraging the body to regenerate damaged bone and muscle tissue to re-routing visual stimuli to the brain to help blind people see, these discoveries will change medicine radically."--

An up-to-date guide for using massive amounts of data and novel technologies to design, build, and maintain better systems engineering Systems Engineering in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Big Data, Novel Technologies, and Modern Systems Engineering offers a guide to the recent changes in systems engineering prompted by the current challenging and innovative industrial environment called the Fourth Industrial Revolution—INDUSTRY 4.0. This book contains advanced models, innovative practices, and state-of-the-art research findings on systems engineering. The contributors, an international panel of experts on the topic, explore the key elements in systems engineering that have shifted towards data collection and analytics, available and used in the design and development of systems and also in the later life-cycle stages of use and retirement. The contributors address the issues in a system in which the system involves data in its operation, contrasting with earlier approaches in which data, models, and algorithms were less involved in the function of the system. The book covers a wide range of topics including five systems engineering domains: systems engineering and systems thinking; systems software and process engineering; the digital factory; reliability and maintainability modeling and analytics; and organizational aspects of systems engineering. This important resource: Presents new and advanced approaches, methodologies, and tools for designing, testing, deploying, and maintaining advanced complex systems Explores effective evidence-based risk management practices Describes an integrated approach to safety, reliability, and cyber security based on system theory Discusses entrepreneurship as a multidisciplinary system Emphasizes technical merits of systems engineering concepts by providing technical models Written for systems engineers, Systems Engineering in the Fourth Industrial Revolution offers an up-to-date resource that contains the best practices and most recent research on the topic of systems engineering.

A study of French military engineers at a crucial point in the evolution of modern engineering.

An engagingly written account of textile engineering in its key northern centres, rich with historical narrative and analysis. The engineers who built the first generations of modern textile machines, between 1770 and 1850, pushed at the boundaries of possibility. This book investigates these pioneering machine-makers, almost all working within textile communities in northern England, and the industry they created. It probes their origins and skills, the sources of their inspiration and impetus, and how it was possible to develop a high-tech, factory-centred, world-leading marketin textile machinery virtually from scratch. The story of textile engineering defies classical assumptions about the driving forces behind the Industrial Revolution. The circumstances of its birth, and the personal affiliationsat work during periods of exceptional creativity, suggest that the potential to accelerate economic growth could be found within social assets and craft skills. Appreciating textile engineering within its own time and context challenges views inherited from Victorian thinkers, who tended to ascribe to it features of the fully fledged industry they saw before them. The Age of Machinery is an engagingly written account of the trade in its key northern centres, devoid of jargon and yet tightly argued, equally rich with historical narrative and analysis. It will be invaluable not only to students and scholars of British economic history and the Industrial Revolution but also tosocial scientists looking at human agency and its contribution to economic growth and innovation. GILLIAN COOKSON holds a DPhil in economic history and has been employed since 1995 in academic research and consultancy, including as county editor, Victoria County History of Durham.

Scientists are on the verge of a revolution in biomedical engineering that will forever change the way we think about medicine, even life itself. Cutting-edge researchers are working to build body organs and tissue in the lab. They are developing ways to encourage the body to regenerate damaged or diseased bone and muscle tissue. Scientists are striving to re-route visual stimuli to the brain to help blind people see. They may soon discover methods to enlist the trillions of microbes living in our bodies to help us fight disease. Learn about four strands of bioengineering—tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, neuroengineering, microbial science, and genetic engineering and synthetic biology—and meet scientists working in these fields.