Engineering History in Latin America: A Review of Spanish-Language Books.

This review essay examines five Spanish-language books published in Latin America on the emergence of engineering in the region. Focusing on a period from roughly 1850 to 1970, these works share themes of foreigners and foreign education, nation-state construction, and social conceptions of prestige. This research suggests that throughout Latin America foreign educators and models were prominent in early engineering programs and enterprises. However, many historians associate the growth of engineering, especially civil engineering, with increasing state consolidation and economic intervention. As social perceptions of the value of professional engineering changed, domestic engineers increasingly became important planners and mediators. Some engineers became state leaders. By contextualizing these works with other scholarship on the history of engineering, this review essay highlights new insights while suggesting the need for greater attention to gender, race, and labor; comparisons between developments in Latin America, Africa, and Asia; and more research on private-sector engineers.

Water, Wealth, and Engineering Wisdom: Shaping Tucumán's Agricultural Future, 1890-1910.

Focusing on Argentina's sugarcane province of Tucumán from 1870 to 1910, this article examines the processes of engineering professionalization in Argentina and its application to pressing environmental problems. Engineers were central to the processes through which elites in Latin America sought to attract foreign investment in agriculture, integrate their countries into the global economy, and provide expertise that enabled states to advance a techno-scientific imaginary based on liberal economic progress. Progressive bureaucrats and engineers, such as civil engineer Carlos Wauters, believed that they could use hydraulic infrastructure to transform Tucumán from an agricultural monoculture to a polyculture; others believed that infrastructure should be used to support a sugar monoculture. In exploring this issue, this article bridges the fields of engineering history, agricultural history, and environmental history. It also incorporates Latin America into global scholarship on the emergence and evolution of professional engineering.

The Launch of a Political Satellite: Constructing the Ming Tombs Reservoir and "Mass Engineering" in Communist China.

Archives and oral histories show that the Ming Tombs Reservoir was a showcase project in Communist China directed by and involving the country's top leaders. This was one of the first projects to rely on the mobilization of physical labor rather than specialized machinery, driven by a belief in self-reliance and the use of local resources. It argues that the focus on the "masses," rather than engineers or scientists, challenged established engineering procedures and technical traditions. Historical evidence suggests that adopting a "build while being designed" mindset and mobilizing the "masses," projects could be completed, but often in ways that ultimately proved less than optimal. The case study suggests that innovations fail when local enthusiasm and technical knowledge are not balanced. By focusing on the role of the "masses" in shaping a novel technological landscape, this article highlights "mass engineering" to better understand this model of native innovations and economic autarky.

Fixing the Huai River: Technology of Labor Formation in Maoist China, 1950-53.

This article contributes to the large-scale engineering scholarship by revealing the labor practices involved and the state's role in shaping them. It provides a history of labor formation through earthwork technology in China's 1950s Huai River Control Project. The Communist Party's approach to engineering and labor differed from its Nationalist predecessor's. The party mobilized millions of peasants to dig and move an astronomical amount of soil in a few years. This herculean feat was made possible by promoting "work methods" to encourage peasants' self-Taylorization. The campaign aimed to cultivate a habit to work efficiently in mass-scale collaboration under external instructions. Through promoting work methods, state-appointed cadres assumed a tutelage role that allowed them to replace labor foremen. A hierarchical cadre-laborer relationship emerged from the same labor process that changed the nation's landscape.

'The very term mensuration sounds engineer-like': measurement and engineering authority in nineteenth-century river management.

Measurement was vital to nineteenth-century engineering. Focusing on the work of the Stevenson engineering firm in Scotland, this paper explores the processes by which engineers made their measurements credible and explains how measurement, as both a product and a practice, informed engineering decisions and supported claims to engineering authority. By examining attempts made to quantify, measure and map dynamic river spaces, the paper analyses the relationship between engineering experience and judgement and the generation of data that engineers considered to be 'tolerably correct'. While measurement created an abstract and simplified version of the river that accommodated prediction, this abstraction had to be connected to and made meaningful in real river space despite acknowledged limitations to measuring practice. In response, engineers drew on experience gained through the measuring process to support claims to authoritative knowledge. This combination of quantification and experience was then used to support interventions in debates over the proper use and management of rivers. This paper argues that measurement in nineteenth-century engineering served a dual function, producing both data and expertise, which were both significant in underpinning engineering authority and facilitating engineers' intervention in decision making for river management.

The Accumulated Knowledge of a Thousand Generations: U.S. Mining Engineers as Public Intellectuals, 1885-1920.

American mining engineers operated around the world at the turn of the twentieth century when the United States poised itself as a global power. The article examines three prominent engineers-Hennen Jennings, John Hays Hammond, and Herbert Hoover, later the thirty-first president of the United States-and how they leveraged their expertise and wealth into international renown. Through the writings, speeches, and associations of these three engineers, they became public intellectuals whose discourse addressed the history of their profession; efficiency and conservation practices; professional standards and ethics; and racialist hierarchy. As Americans, they amplified a teleological discourse of Western industrial civilization as dominant and proper: they positioned mining as a fundamental aspect of Western civilization. Epitomizing American elites' ideals in the prewar period, they envisioned racialized technological and social progress through efficiency, management, and empire. This article contributes to U.S. history, transnational history, and the intellectual history of engineering and technology.

Pragmatism and Care in Engineering Ethics.

Engineering is a practice that must function in an environment of incomplete and uncertain knowledge. This environment has become even more difficult in an increasingly complex world. Engineering ethics has to be framed and taught in a way that addresses these realities. This paper proposes a combination of the philosophy of pragmatism and the ethic of care as a possible framework for the practice of engineering ethics that can provide flexibility and openness to address engineering ethics problems more realistically within the ethos and culture of engineering. Embedding values into practice, pragmatism and care provide a broad, reflective, and corrective framework for engineering ethics that can accommodate the realities in which engineering operates. It is shown that these two approaches are more consonant with design methodologies and have a natural fit with design thinking, so they mesh well with what engineers do and with the complexities of their work today. As humans more and more try to alter the socio-techno-natural world, e.g., the earth's climate, the combination of pragmatism and care will allow enhanced ethical behavior. Alterations to complex adaptive systems will produce highly uncertain results that require engineers to have a mindset that allows them to act with humility in the face of significant uncertainty and potential catastrophic failures.

The Past and Future of Clinical Biomechanics: Time to deliver on the legacy of pioneers such as Professor John P. Paul (1927-2013).

This editorial pays tribute to the work of Professor John P. Paul and his team at the University of Strathclyde in the 1960s and '70s, and subsequently by the Strathclyde Rehabilitation Engineering Group, as featured in the journal Medical Engineering & Physics. It also includes a consideration of the nature of full biomechanical analysis of movement and how it can be mathematically modelled and physically recorded, the different approaches taken by Paul's and Winter's groups, respectively, and what a full biomechanical model should include in the future. The article also attempts to signpost the reader to future developments in the field, and how the techniques pioneered by Paul in the 1960s may influence Clinical Biomechanics and Rehabilitation in the years to come.

"Back to the Future": Time for a Renaissance of Public Health Engineering.

Public health has always been, and remains, an interdisciplinary field, and engineering was closely aligned with public health for many years. Indeed, the branch of engineering that has been known at various times as sanitary engineering, public health engineering, or environmental engineering was integral to the emergence of public health as a distinct discipline. However, in the United States (U.S.) during the 20th century, the academic preparation and practice of this branch of engineering became largely separated from public health. Various factors contributed to this separation, including an evolution in leadership roles within public health; increasing specialization within public health; and the emerging environmental movement, which led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), with its emphasis on the natural environment. In this paper, we consider these factors in turn. We also present a case study example of public health engineering in current practice in the U.S. that has had large-scale positive health impacts through improving water and sanitation services in Native American and Alaska Native communities. We also consider briefly how to educate engineers to work in public health in the modern world, and the benefits and challenges associated with that process. We close by discussing the global implications of public health engineering and the need to re-integrate engineering into public health practice and strengthen the connection between the two fields.

Vistas fotográficas das ferrovias: a produção de registros de obra pública no Brasil do século XIX / Photographic views of railroads: recording public works in nineteenth-century Brazil

Resumo O artigo analisa como a engenharia ferroviária articulou-se com a produção de fotografias no Brasil em meados do século XIX. A hipótese é a de que as exigências crescentes na execução de obras e o novo conhecimento cartográfico demandaram mais registros visuais, o que foi suprido e potencializado com o surgimento das técnicas fotográficas. Levantaram-se informações sobre registros fotográficos das estradas de ferro produzidos no Brasil após a década de 1850, a fim de analisar as características dessas imagens. A análise foi aprofundada numa série de fotografias de Marc Ferrez, por ter o maior volume de vistas ferroviárias atualmente acessível, o que possibilitou o reconhecimento de padrões nessas imagens a ponto de identificá-las como "registro fotográfico de obra".

Abstract This article analyzes how railway engineering was connected to the production of photographs in mid-nineteenth-century Brazil. The hypothesis is that growing demands related to the execution of projects and new cartographic knowledge required more visual records, which was supplied and leveraged with the emergence of photographic techniques. Data was collected on photographic records of railroads taken in Brazil after the 1850s to analyze the characteristics of these images. This analysis was further extended in a series of photographs by Marc Ferrez, since this collection contains the most views of railways currently accessible, permitting the recognition of patterns in these images to identify them as "photographic project records."

Entre a engenharia militar e a arquitetura médica: representações de Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira sobre a cidade de Belém no final do século XVIII / Between military engineering and medical architecture: representations by Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira about the city of Belém in the late eighteenth century

Resumo O artigo analisa as concepções de Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira sobre a urbanização de Belém, fundamentadas na história natural e na medicina social, sintetizadas na obra de Antônio Nunes Ribeiro Sanches. Primeiramente, destaca-se a influência da engenharia militar na constituição do núcleo seiscentista da cidade e na irradiação da cidade-fortaleza, ressaltando as críticas de Ferreira à centralidade geoestratégica na constituição urbana. Num segundo momento, as reformas urbanas setecentistas realizadas sob preceitos da arquitetura médica, como a construção do Hospital Real Militar e os projetos de abastecimento de água. Por fim, é pensado um conceito de cidade-civilidade, expresso nas reformas urbanas com a construção de símbolos de poder estatal e de áreas de lazer e sociabilidade, incluindo as observações sobre as moradias.

Abstract This paper discusses Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira's conceptions about the urbanization of Belém, rooted in natural history and social medicine, as expressed in the work of Antônio Nunes Ribeiro Sanches. The influence of military engineering on its constitution in the 1600s and the spread of this fortress town are investigated, emphasizing Ferreira's criticisms of the geostrategic centrality in the development of the city. The urban reforms of the 1700s under the precepts of medical architecture are then presented, such as the building of the Royal Military Hospital and the water supply system. The concept of the civil city is presented, as expressed in the urban redevelopments, with the building of symbols of state power, areas for leisure and conviviality, and housing.

Early-career researchers: an interview with Kakani Katija.

Kakani Katija is a Principal Engineer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, USA, where she designs and builds instrumentation to study marine invertebrate ecomechanics. She received her Bachelor's degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the University of Washington, USA, before moving to the California Institute of Technology, USA, for her Master's degree in Aeronautics with Morteza Gharib and PhD in Bioengineering in the laboratory of John Dabiri, completed in 2010. Katija was recognised as a National Geographic Emerging Explorer in 2011 and has given presentations at TEDYouth and TEDWomen.

Nikola Tesla: Why was he so much resisted and forgotten? [Retrospectroscope].

Recently, during the Christmas season, a friend of mine visited me and, sneaking a look at my bookshelves, found two rather old Nikola Tesla biographies, which I had used to prepare a "Retrospectroscope" column for the then-named IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine when our dear friend Alvin Wald was its editor-inchief [2]. Eighteen years have elapsed since then; soon, the idea came up of revamping the article. Cynthia Weber, the magazine's current associate editor, considered it acceptable, and here is the new note divided in two parts: that is, a slightly revised version of the original article followed by new material, including some quite interesting information regarding Tesla's homes and laboratories. On top of this, Tesla is not devoid of a science fiction touch, as mentioned at the end.