May 2006 Mechanical Engineering: Editorial

editorial

meeting of the minds

By
John G. Falcioni,
Editor-in-Chief

Happy birthday, Isambard Kingdom Brunel! You remain as important to your profession today, 200 years after your birth, as you did during your heyday.

If you're familiar with Brunel's work, you might be one of those who believe he is one of the greatest of all engineers. And it's not simply what he accomplished or the lasting value of his work that makes him so special; it is also the legacy of the processes he employed and the foresight of his thinking.

Brunel's accomplishments in the 19th century, when he played a pivotal role in the transport revolution, especially in the building of the Great Western Railway, left a lasting mark on the British landscape. But Brunel, and some of his fellow Victorian-age engineers, also took ideas from one sector and applied them to another—not so much a form of technology transfer, per se, as a move of entire ways of thinking.

Brunel built railways, he built bridges, and he built ships. And he believed that different engineering disciplines such as mechanical and civil, which were emerging at the time, ought to be seamless. He also believed that engineering infrastructures should be interconnected. Brunel's lasting testament to engineering thus can be summed up as: interdisciplinary astuteness.

Few manufacturers have made as concerted an effort toward automation and cost containment as the automobile industry (which, despite Detroit's recent woes, by 2020 will have one billion cars and light trucks on the road throughout the world). Yet taking ideas from one industry and applying them to another is the type of smart thinking Brunel encouraged and which doesn't occur today with as much frequency as
it should.

Forty-five years ago this month, President John F. Kennedy called on the people of the United States to have a single-minded, interconnected pursuit "... of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth." His call inspired and unified scientists and engineers of all disciplines to work together to reach a common goal. Brunel would have been proud.

In an article in this issue, John F. Connolly, the pre-project manager of the new lunar lander program at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, tells us about the United States' latest lunar goal, spurred by President George W. Bush, "... to return to the moon by 2020, as the launching point for missions beyond."

Members of the new lunar team are a new generation of explorers, "the kids who gazed wide-eyed into our televisions as grainy images of Armstrong, Aldrin, and the rest loped across the lunar surface," Connolly writes. But they share their predecessors' goal and their dream, and their penchant for working as a unified team.

Back on Earth, as oil prices soar to around $70 per barrel, Associate Editor Jeffrey Winters, in this issue's Power Window, reminds us that the rising economies of China and India will be vying with the rest of the world for the same dwindling supply of petroleum, thus "escalating resource wars between a United States trying to sustain a gas-guzzling lifestyle and a China trying to attain one."

It is naïve to expect competing economies to develop a joint solution to solve the world's energy problems. But it is not ill-conceived to imagine engineers from around the world coalescing to develop alternative fuels and systems that will place less demand on fossil fuels. This, too, would make Brunel proud.