Many of the things I showed you were things that were built from parts, that’s a good description. What makes it different from science? Science can be hands-on, you might be down at the lake picking up algae and studying them or something that would be hands-on. But what’s different, what would make you an engineer? Yeah? You design. Scientists observe and try to describe and engineers try to design.
They take those descriptions and the scientist that is known and they try to design new things, and so if you look at a dictionary, it has words like this that you’re doing designing things or another way to say that is that you’re trying to apply science, you’re looking at applications. We’re trying to take scientific information and make something new. The other thing about it is that you could make lots of things that are new but generally you think of engineers as making things that are not just new but they’re useful, that they do something that needs to be done and they do something that improves life, the quality of life of people.
So, here is a brief and very biased history of engineering. It’s short. Engineering became a discipline in about the middle of the 1800s. Lots of universities started teaching engineering as a discipline including Yale. In 1852, around that time, this might have been the first course that was offered in engineering in the country. It was taught at Yale in civil engineering in 1852 and even Yale students don’t know this. What a long distinguished history of engineering that their own institution has. In fact, the first PhD degree in engineering was awarded to a fellow named J. Willard Gibbs at Yale in 1863 for a thesis he did on how gears work or something, I forgot exactly what the details are, but have you heard of Gibbs? Is it a name that rings a bell? Where did you hear about Gibbs from? Yeah, G, Gibbs free energy, that annoying concept that you had to try to master in chemistry at some point, but Gibbs is really the father of modern physical chemistry and was one of the most famous scientists of the nineteenth century and got the first PhD in engineering here at Yale.
Then from these beginnings, engineers transformed life in the twentieth century. So, a lot of things started in the twentieth century and became common place.
Biomedical Engineering Defined Pt 8
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