Engineering

From Vacuum to Engine: Savery, Newcomen, Smeaton and Watt

Five milestones across eighty years that turn a laboratory observation about atmospheric pressure into a general source of industrial power.

Mechanical13 Aug 2026 · 6 min read

Generation Without Fuel: Photovoltaics and the Modern Wind Turbine

Two milestones whose importance lies in decades of accumulated process improvement rather than in a breakthrough, and in what a zero marginal fuel cost does to a power system.

Heat into Work: The Gas Turbine and the Fission Reactor

Two technologies with a straightforward efficiency argument that says run hotter, and one shared constraint: both are limited by what the hot parts are made of, not by thermodyn…

Helical Spring Design and Selection

Designing and selecting helical compression and extension springs: spring rate and pre-load, spring index, allowable stress by duty, the Wahl factor, active coils, free length w…

High Pressure and the Portable Engine: Trevithick and Evans

Three milestones that made the engine small enough to move, by doing the one thing James Watt refused to do.

History of Engineering: Complete Collection Index

Master index to a six-series reference collection covering the history of engineering from the first engineered cities to 2020, with every page listed by series and order.

Mechanical13 Aug 2026 · 13 min read

History of Engineering: From the First Cities to the Age of Steam

A structured reference series covering fifty-eight engineering milestones from the first engineered cities to the Rainhill trials, organised by engineering problem rather than b…

History of Engineering: Milestones of the Modern Era 1845-1910

A structured reference series covering twenty-six engineering milestones between 1845 and 1910, organised by engineering problem rather than by date.

History of Engineering: Milestones of the Modern Era 1911-1969

A structured reference series covering thirty-five engineering milestones between 1911 and 1969, organised by engineering problem rather than by date.

History of Engineering: Milestones of the Modern Era 1970-2020

A structured reference series covering forty-one engineering milestones between 1970 and 2020, organised by engineering problem rather than by date.

Hot Rolled Steel Section Selection

Selecting hot rolled steel sections for machine frames and supports: available grades and strengths, section families, and beam selection by section modulus including the self-w…

Iron at Scale: Coke Smelting, Puddling and the Boring Mill

Four milestones in metallurgy and machine tools without which the steam engine would have remained a curiosity, one of them driven by an environmental crisis.

Journal and Porous Bronze Bearing Selection

Selection of plain and porous bronze journal bearings using bearing pressure, surface velocity, the pv factor and the bearing modulus, with the boundary, thin-film and thick-fil…

Civil & Structural13 Aug 2026 · 8 min read

Learning from Catastrophe: Seven Investigations That Changed Practice

Seven formal investigations between 1979 and 2010 that changed engineering practice across industries. In every one, the physical mechanism was known or knowable beforehand.

Electrical13 Aug 2026 · 8 min read

Light and the Central Station: Electricity Finds a Mass Market

Six milestones in which electricity acquired its first mass market, and in which the decisive engineering turned out to be system design rather than lamp design.

Civil & Structural13 Aug 2026 · 7 min read

Long Spans and Hard Lessons: Sydney Harbour, Golden Gate and Tacoma Narrows

Two celebrated bridges and one destroyed one. The collapse taught the profession more than either success, and the mechanism is still widely taught wrongly.

Machine Element Design and Selection: Series Overview

A fifteen-part mechanical design reference covering bearings, belt and chain drives, couplings, gearboxes, gears, motors, shafts, springs, bolted and welded joints, power screws…

Machine Element Design by Proportion and Analysis

Designing machine elements from good proportions and verifying by strength of materials: rigid coupling proportions, knuckle joint geometry and complete stress analysis, and lev…

Electrical13 Aug 2026 · 6 min read

Machines That Sustain Life: Dialysis, the Heart-Lung Machine and the Pacemaker

Three devices that take over the function of an organ, under constraints unlike anything else in engineering: the load cannot be reduced and there is no safe shutdown state.

Making Things Differently: Additive Manufacturing and Composite Primary Structure

Three milestones that broke the link between geometric complexity and cost, and then took three decades each to reach certified service.

Civil & Structural13 Aug 2026 · 11 min read

Manufacturing Drinking Water: Seawater Reverse Osmosis and Supply Security

Australian metropolitan desalination turned urban water supply from a hydrological problem into an energy and membrane one, and produced an asset with an unusual duty profile.

Mechanical13 Aug 2026 · 9 min read

Materials for a Harder Duty: Stainless Steel, Light Alloys and Synthetic Polymers

Five materials milestones that each removed a constraint designers had treated as fixed: corrosion, weight, fibre supply, glazing cost and the stiffness penalty of mass.

Mechanical13 Aug 2026 · 9 min read

Materials That Built the Modern World: Steel, Plastics and Engineered Timber

How the Bessemer converter, the first synthetic polymers and engineered wood products replaced found material properties with specified, warranted ones.

Measurement and Method: Instruments, Mathematics and Experimental Science

Seven milestones in roughly a century, after which an engineer could calculate in advance what had previously only been learned by building.

Civil & Structural13 Aug 2026 · 7 min read

Modern Civil Works: Base Isolation, the Channel Tunnel, Cable-Stayed Spans and Supertall Towers

Four milestones showing what changed in civil engineering once dynamic behaviour could be analysed properly and construction method became the primary design driver.

Moving People and Goods: Transport Engineering 1845-1950

A structured reference series covering nineteen milestones in marine, road and rail engineering over the century in which transport became a question of running economically and…

Electrical13 Aug 2026 · 7 min read

Networks and Protocols: Ethernet, Public-Key Cryptography, TCP/IP and the Web

Four milestones that connected machines in a building, secured communication between strangers, joined dissimilar networks into one, and put a usable interface on top.

Civil & Structural13 Aug 2026 · 6 min read

Networks of Movement: Transcontinental Rail, Cable Traction and the Great Wheel

Three projects, three constraints, one lesson: at civil scale the hard engineering is in measurement, power distribution and load path, not in the visible structure.

Power Screw Design

Designing power and translation screws: thread forms and proportions, helix and friction angles, raising and lowering torque, self-locking and overhauling, efficiency, collar fr…

Power to the Water: Screw Propulsion, Expansion Engines and Oil Firing

Four milestones in which marine propulsion moved from consuming most of the ship to leaving room for the cargo that paid for it.

Pressure, Speed and Escape: Jet Airliners, Supersonic Flight and Spaceflight

Four milestones from a two-second rocket flight to a lunar landing, and one fatigue failure that changed how every aircraft since has been certified.

Mechanical13 Aug 2026 · 11 min read

Prime Movers: The Internal Combustion Engine and Diesel-Electric Traction

Spark ignition against compression ignition, why compression ratio governs efficiency, and how diesel-electric traction solved the transmission problem by deleting it.

Civil & Structural13 Aug 2026 · 6 min read

Roads and Canals: Brindley, Tresaguet, Telford and the Erie

Four milestones in moving goods overland, and a reminder that for bulk freight before the railway, water beat road every time.

Mechanical13 Aug 2026 · 6 min read

Roller Chain Drive Selection

Selecting a precision roller chain drive: sprocket tooth counts, application and tooth factors, selection power, rating chart failure modes, chain length in pitches and exact ce…

Rolling Element Bearing Selection

How to size deep groove ball, self-aligning ball, cylindrical roller and spherical roller bearings using ISO basic rating life, equivalent dynamic load, and the minimum load and…

Civil & Structural13 Aug 2026 · 7 min read

Rome: Pozzolanic Concrete, the Aqueduct and the Engineered Road

Four milestones from the civilisation that industrialised construction: a cement that sets under water, gravity supply at metropolitan scale, roads specified to their duty, and …

Civil & Structural13 Aug 2026 · 11 min read

Sanitary Engineering Matures: Filtration, Disinfection and the Long Aqueduct

Four milestones in which urban water and waste became one system, and in which the profession learned that a treatment barrier can appear to succeed for sixty years.

Electrical13 Aug 2026 · 11 min read

Seeing Inside: Computed Tomography, Magnetic Resonance Imaging and the Genome

Three milestones that made the interior of the body, and then the sequence of its instructions, into computable data.

Shaft Coupling Selection

Selecting rigid and flexible shaft couplings: the four misalignment conditions, load classification, service and start factors, equivalent selection power at the reference speed…

Mechanical13 Aug 2026 · 6 min read

Shafts, Keys, Circlips and Seals

Standard bright steel shaft and key sizes, shaft materials, key and keyway stress rules, circlip types and thrust limits, and the selection of rotary shaft seals.

Electrical13 Aug 2026 · 11 min read

Signals and Standard Time: The Telephone Network and the Great Clock

A clock that keeps a city's time and a network that carries a city's voice are the same kind of engineering: both distribute a shared reference that nobody owns and everybody de…

Electrical13 Aug 2026 · 7 min read

Signals Without Wires: Broadcasting, Television and Radar

Three uses of the same physics that each forced a different discipline into existence: spectrum management, bandwidth engineering and the statistical theory of detection in noise.

Computing & Software13 Aug 2026 · 9 min read

SolidWorks Add-ins: Structure, Registration and Deployment

How a SOLIDWORKS add-in is structured: the connect and disconnect contract, the add-in cookie, command groups and callbacks, COM registration and registry entries, clean removal…

Mechanical13 Aug 2026 · 25 min read

SOLIDWORKS Administration in Practice

A practical reference for administering a SOLIDWORKS environment — platform requirements, deployment images, licence management, PDM architecture, standards governance, upgrade …

Computing & Software13 Aug 2026 · 9 min read

SolidWorks API Macro Fundamentals: Recording, Reading and Writing

How the SOLIDWORKS macro recorder works, what it omits, how to read recorded code, and how to write a reliable macro from scratch with proper references, guards and error handling.

Computing & Software13 Aug 2026 · 10 min read

SolidWorks API Programming and Automation: Series Overview

A nine-part engineering reference to the SOLIDWORKS API: the object model, macros, .NET clients, selections, PropertyManager pages, traversal, custom properties, drawing automat…

Computing & Software13 Aug 2026 · 8 min read

SolidWorks API: Add-in Architecture and the Integration Model

A practitioner's account of SolidWorks add-in architecture: the ISwAddin contract, COM registration, the connect and disconnect lifecycle, callback cookies and disciplined relea…