I recently received and email message form an old friend. He and I go back for a few decades, where we both worked for some Semiconductor manufacturers. His message was a bit of a poser in that he had what is ostensibly a list of the greatest engineering achievements, but they are all civil engineering accomplishments…Since we both have more than a passing familiarity with Electrical Engineering, a few obvious questions were engendered…
First off, here is the list he sent me…my best guess is that this might be from something like a Discovery Channel piece on this topic, and that the top ten is populated by what had the most stock video coverage… The fact is, these are all quite telegenic topics, and the net result of this list would be to feel proud of the global character of humankind’s efforts… This is a nice sentiment, here is the list:
The Top 10 Human Engineering Achievements:
10.Three Gorges Dam
9. Hagia Sophia
8. Florence Cathedral
7. Burj Khalifa
6. Millau Viaduct
5. The Large Hadron Collider
4.The Coliseum
3.The International Space Station
2.The Pyramids
1. The Great Wall of China
As I stated before, this list seems to be strangely correlated with the words ‘big’ and ‘photogenic’, and obviously with civil engineering… I can imagine that even this list is more than a bit arguable as a list of civil engineering projects, but I am now interested in some less ‘photogenic’ lists…
What would be a list of the 10 greatest achievements in Electrical engineering? There are plenty of objects, ideas, and concepts which could deserve sitting on a list like this. Right of the top of my head, I could see some of the obvious candidates, such as (in no particular order…) The vacuum tube, or even a simple diode, the Transistor or BJT, (semiconductors in general), integrated circuits, the Internet, and there are plenty of old school communications devices and inventions out there worth looking at (Armstrong’s FM radio, super heterodyning, etc.).
If you consider how much of modern life is predicated upon these devices, it is amazing how few people know about most of these, in anything other than an extremely superficial or just a cursory manner…
