Celebrating National Engineers Week

It’s National Engineers Week (Feb. 18-24) which gives me the chance to reflect on the opportunity I’m afforded to work with so many talented fellow engineers.

Photo by Gazette Review 2018

As vice chairman of AGMA’s vehicle gearing committee, it’s cool when great minds come together to talk shop while crafting industry standards.  And in my daily consulting work, I get to help my clients, leading-edge manufacturers in the United States and around the world, with gear and gearbox design and analysis. Finding innovative solutions for my clients never gets old. 

So, this week, and as I did last year, I applaud the talented professionals I’m lucky to work with ― engineers who contribute to society in so many ways.

The Amphicar: A boat or a car?

During a visit with family to Disney Springs at Walt Disney World in Orlando, I happened upon a one-of-a-kind attraction – a vintage Amphicar ride. In a wanderlust sense of creativity, this vehicle drives on land as easily as it can propel through water. 

In a seemingly outrageous idea that combines two totally separate entities - a car and a boat, the Amphicar performed neither function well. It was not a good car nor a good boat.

The novelty of it even caught the attention of President Lyndon B. Johnson who owned an Amphicar. President Johnson was known to prank his unsuspecting passengers as he drove the Amphicar straight into a lake, much to their shock. 

The Amphicar was produced in West Germany and sold in the U.S. from 1961 to 1967. It was commercially unsuccessful as well, selling less than 4,000 units total.  Some 50 years later, eight perfectly restored Amphicars delight passengers and onlookers alike, with land/water tours launching from Disney Springs’ Boathouse.

By most standards, the Amphicar was a technical failure and was commercially unsuccessful, but failure has lessons for us all.

• Try something new and unconventional. Sometimes it will work out and sometimes it won’t, but don’t be afraid to try.
• Think outside the box by combining different functions in the same device. For example, in the Dick Tracy comic strip from decades ago, Tracy had a wrist watch that performed the functions of a two-way radio, telephone and TV all in one. And today, we have the iPhone and Apple Watch that perform these functions.

Some ideas, concepts and devices are not technically feasible at the time of their invention, or are not commercially successful, at least not yet. Sometimes failure is the necessity of innovation. As an inventor, you just have to dream big, time it right and make it happen.  

Innovation for every generation

It’s National Engineers Week (Feb. 21-27) and there’s plenty to celebrate. Engineers have been making our world a better place since the beginning of time. 

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The first ‘engineer’ was God who, in the beginning, created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1) and then marveled at his design. And from that day forward, inventive minds have propelled us out of the Neanderthal era of living in caves to 4,000 B.C. China and when the first evidence of wheeled vehicles were used in rice farming.

Inventors like Nikola Tesla and Henry Ford challenged norms and changed the way we live. And today, iconic creative minds like Steve Jobs, Dean Kamen, Elon Musk and Burt Rutan continue to dream big and make it happen.

As always, engineers are solving society’s technical problems by applying scientific principles to advance civilization forward.  

For those of us who make our living as engineers in a career identified as a “hot job” and those who benefit from our inventions past, present and future, happy National Engineers Week.