Rudi R. Volti

Presents a history of the automobile and its influence on American culture, covering technological changes in car production and its effect on government regulations, highway and labor legislation, oil production, and social mobility.

Engineering represents an ordered activity of creative design and inventive manufacture of ingenious devices. Its practitioners have thereby stimulated individuals, enlivened communities, enriched civilizations, and contributed to the shaping of cultures. The authors of this innovative text develop a systematic framework for engineering in time, making extensive use of adaptive heterogeneous progressions. When combined with considerations of feedback, feedforward, recursion, and branching, an evolving and comprehensive characterization of engineering becomes evident. It is in this blending of chronology, emerging theory, and professional practice that engineering finds its foundational role in innovative design, device reliability, intellectual property, technology risks, public safety, professional ethics, material accounting, and other recurring themes relevant to contemporary engineering. Engineering clearly emerges as a complex and increasingly important profession. The authors introduce concepts and methods — including a critical definition of engineering -and selectively adapt symbolic-mathematical relations. The technical level of analysis is suitable for the undergraduate curriculum commonly encountered in colleges of engineering.

Surveying more than two millennia, The Engineer in History presents the story of the designers and builders of aqueducts, cathedrals, clocks, machine tools, bridges, railroads, and airplanes. It examines their social origins, educations, working methods, relationships with employers, influences on management theory and practices, and many other topics. Throughout, the narrative focuses on particular engineers whose working lives exemplify the themes presented.