While searching for a top-notch engineering school, I looked at all the programs each college was able to offer. Only a few even mentioned rapid prototyping.

I understand the equipment is very expensive, but I would at least expect colleges to offer classes on the subject. After all, with the field growing dramatically, wouldn't most colleges want to teach their students the cutting edge of technology?

The concept of rapid prototyping intrigued me. I was amazed at what it could do: make visual models, functional models, patterns, and parts for direct tooling. Rapid prototyping significantly cuts down the time from conception to reality.

When I decided on a college, an important factor in my decision was whether or not the college was active in rapid prototyping. To me, involved colleges show that they keep up with the technology that best prepares engineers for the workplace.

You may wonder how I am making a connection between this article and the licensing issue.

My concern is that licensed rent-an-engineer experts are being used more and more to help support frivolous personal injury and product lawsuits.

The reader must read into the article about 23 paragraphs to get the basic parameters of the case. A 360-pound operator was sitting in the operator's seat of an excavator, and the seat fell only 3 inches and supposedly was the reason for a back injury.

I'm sure this could happen in his truck every day commuting to and from the job site. However, in this case, there was a corporation to place the blame on.

This is just the type of thing that discredits engineers who make an honest living, and the type of thing that puts well-meaning and conscientious manufacturers out of business and their employees out of work.

It would be interesting to know how many hours of safe operation this piece of machinery and similar ones had provided before this insignificant mishap occurred, and the health history of the large operator's already fatigued spine.

Licensing is still a noble goal, but its utilization should not be indifferent to the full case picture or its far-reaching impact beyond the courthouse doors.

I would think the next step in railroad development would be in the direction of wider gauges—much wider. We are constantly building new trains in our attempt at high speeds. Unfortunately, we are using a gauge that evolved or was picked when speeds were a whopping 5 mph, if that.

History might even tell us why the present "standard gauge" was developed. Probably because it was the gauge of some horse-drawn carriage of that time. Running new super-sophisticated trains on our present-gauge track is somewhat like putting a jet engine on a World War I biplane.

Maybe a little experimentation should be done on gauge widths. It's not as glamorous, but I'll bet there is more bang for our buck there than in using valuable energy to levitate a train in the air or using natural resources to lay the guts of an electric motor along hundreds of miles of railroad track.

I'm a miner, and I'll dig the copper or whatever conductor you want out of the ground, and charge.

The requirements for the P.E. appear to be rooted, if not stuck, in the early 20th century with the requirements for letters of recommendation from P.E.'s whom one has worked "under."

That was not how things worked in the early 1970s when I started, and it is much farther from reality today. The people for whom I worked were former engineers who became managers. Their coaching was on political issues, not on engineering practice. This I learned from my coworkers and colleagues.

Keeping track of people who could supply the requisite recommendation quickly became an impossible task. I experienced my first major reorganization/reduction-in-force 18 months out of school. I have quit counting at 15 since then.

The content of the examination for registration bears not even a passing resemblance to my practice. It appears to be written primarily for those engaged in HVAC issues. The one small area that comes closest to my experience, pump selection/sizing, is laughably, embarrassingly simplistic. Mechanical engineering practice has diversified remarkably since World War II. There is infinitely more to it than apparently fits in the philosophies of the designers of the P.E. exam's content.

I suggest that ASME institute a hard-eyed, fresh examination of registration and of advanced education. Judging from the unpopularity of registration and of advanced degrees, perhaps we need a new evaluation approach, maybe a more grassroots approach. As a starting point, I think that medicine provides a very good model for both registration and advanced education with a basic medical board examination and later certification in a specialty. It appears that we are trying to hammer 21st-century engineers into an early 20th-century mold.

An absence of grade crossings in France helps the TGV train to barrel along without impediments.

The March 2000 issue has an article about the coming of a TGV-like train but not exactly. Everything I have read in the past years mentions high speed, but nowhere do they talk about the most important facet of the problem—the elimination of all grade crossings along the route. Why can't the Amtrak executives go to France, get on a TGV and ride from Paris to Lyon or any other city? It will be obvious that the train barrels along because there are no grade crossings. And, by the way, this would also save numerous lives!

I hope that someone can institute this change, which we know works so well in France.

In Florida, in the late 1970s, there was a movement in the engineering societies to obtain state legislation mandating licensing of engineers in industry.

I was employed in a large system engineering company. It clearly made no sense to require the many engineering specialists on the staff to obtain licenses. In the first place, they never dealt with the public. In the second place, state board members were not competent to examine specialists; they were political appointees whose ability to pass the fundamentals test could be questioned. In the third place, the motives of the loudest advocates of extended licensing appeared to be somewhat less than purely altruistic.

I expressed these feelings in testimony before a special legislative committee, thereby earning the opprobrium of professors at a central Florida university who were making a good thing of P.E. exam preparatory courses. Arrival of the government-shrinking philosophy of the first Reagan administration killed the movement.

The superior way to protect the naive public from faulty engineering design of manufactured products is by certification of the products, not by certification of the designers. Government does that with civil aircraft, for example.

The product liability philosophy, which arose in the last half-century, is the greatest incentive to careful design and test. That incentive should not be weakened by so-called tort reform. Engineers should smile on large punitive damage awards; they keep everyone on their toes.

A recent letter followed the line that maybe the engineer doesn't need registration now, but if he is downsized or axed in a merger, then the registration will help him get a new job. If that is so, why do only three of the 35 "positions open" ads in the last issue of Mechanical Engineering mention registration as required or even desirable. Does anyone think that a prospective employer will opt for a 55-year-old good qualified P.E. and ASME member, if he can get instead a good 40-year-old with equal qualifications who is not registered or even an ASME member?

Incidentally, I am a P.E. registered as a "control systems engineer" in California. A registered mechanical engineer without specific control systems engineering training and experience is not qualified to do work in this specialized field. I have not needed to be registered in this field, nor have I needed to be an ASME member for 59 years. It is inside me that I want to be known as an expert engineer in my field. Paper credentials such as registration and my B.S.M.E. add a smidgen to my own self-image in that respect.

As a simple example: Pressure represents force per unit area. Many engineers in this world express pressure in kilograms per square centimeter; these are metric units, but this is not appropriate because the kilogram is a mass unit. Nevertheless, some specifications for pressure-containing equipment still use these units.

The SI unit for pressure, the Pascal, is so small that a multiplier of a power of 10 is required for most applications. Preferred powers are 3, 6, 9, etc., so we have kilopascals and megapascals. That's simple enough, but many engineers (particularly in western Europe) prefer the bar; the bar is claimed to be SI, because it is 10 to the power of five Pascals.

The kg per sq. cm (14.2 psi) and bar (14.5 psi) are difficult to eliminate, because they are so popular and similar to standard atmospheric pressure (14.7 psi). However, they can be confusing to engineers trained in SI units.

Consider the possibilities for confusion when a manufacturer accustomed to designing for pressure in pounds per square inch (psi) faces specifications for similar equipment with pressures specified in kg per sq. cm, bar, KPa, and MPa. This is not hypothetical; it happens.

The article, "Transporting People," in the now-defunct International Science and Technology (October 1965) focused on the problem of interfaces in the transport system.

The fascinating example used was for a trip from Morristown, N.J., to Cambridge, Mass., via car, bus, air (from Newark Airport) and then other public transportation in Massachusetts. The average speed of this 230-mile trip was 54 miles per hour. Flying at 500 mph was only one of 23 steps in the process.

The author of the article reported that, had he driven by auto, he would have taken a similar amount of time to get to his destination. The delays were at the interfaces; that is, waiting, transferring, walking, seeking information, etc. I suspect that a similar trip today (35 years later) would not get to the destination faster.

The primary question, related to your June article, is whether or not going faster, via high-speed rail, will get us to our destinations faster. I believe that we have a systems problem. The transportation system, not just the rail or air segment, needs to be revised.

Correction

The General Electric LM-2500+ gas turbines on Celebrity Cruises' Millennium ("Gas Turbine Cruise Ship Sets Sail," News & Notes, September) are aeroderivative. The editors apologize for an oversight, and assure readers that the ship's combined-cycle steam turbines have no counterparts on aircraft.

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