The Existential Pleasures of Engineering

Author: Samuel C. Florman
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466842369
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Book Description
A classic examination of how engineers think and feel about their profession and its philosophy. “A useful read for engineers given to self-scrutiny, and a stimulating one for the layman interested in the ancient schism between machines and men’s souls.” —Time Humans have always sought to change their environment, building houses, monuments, temples, and roads. In the process, they have remade the fabric of the world into newly functional objects that are also works of art to be admired. Now as engineering plays an increasingly important role in the world while coming under attack for all manner of sins, one must wonder about the nature of the engineering experience in our time. In this, the second edition of his popular Existential Pleasures of Engineering, Samuel Florman perceptively explores how engineers think and feel about their profession. Dispelling the myth that engineering is cold and passionless, Florman celebrates it as something vital and alive. He views engineering as a response to some of our deepest impulses, rich in spiritual and sensual rewards. Opposing the “antitechnology” stance, Florman brilliantly emerges with a more practical, creative, and fun philosophy of engineering that boasts pride in his craft. First published in 1976, this classic book is essential reading for anyone curious about what wonders we have wrought. “Gracefully written . . . refreshing and highly infectious enthusiasm . . . imaginatively engineered.” —The New York Times Book Review

The Existential Pleasures of Engineering

Author: Samuel C. Florman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780312275457
Category : Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description

The Introspective Engineer

Author: Samuel C. Florman
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466853263
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Book Description
The profession of engineering is rarely the topic of serious public discussion. Multimedia, virtual reality, information superhighway-these are the buzzwords of the day. But real engineers, the people who conceive of computers and oversee their manufacture, the people who design and build information systems, cars, bridges, and airplanes, labor in obscurity. There are no engineering heroes, and we as a society are poorer for this. Like Florman's landmark book, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, The Introspective Engineer is a clarion call to society. We must awaken to the reality that the quality of human life depends on increasingly creative technological solutions to the problems we face. We need cleaner, more economical engines, faster computers, more power, and a healthier planet if we are to survive. It is engineers who will lead us to this future.

Good Guys, Wiseguys, and Putting Up Buildings

Author: Samuel C. Florman
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1429941081
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
Good Guys, Wiseguys, and Putting Up Buildings is an engaging memoir about one man's career in construction--rising to the top of an industry renowned for crime, corruption, violence, physical danger, and the chronic risk of financial catastrophe. Starting in the Navy Seabees at the end of WWII, Samuel C. Florman made his way as a general contractor in New York City through the period of explosive development, private exuberance and the historic growth of publicly supported housing--all amidst the rise of the notorious Mafia families, and evolution of the Civil Rights Movement. His storied career brought him into contact with a variety of personalities: politicians and civil servants, developers and technocrats, saintly do-gooders and corrupt rapscallions. Along with the rousing adventures there were satisfactions of a different sort: the enchantment of seeing architecture made real; the pride of creating housing, hospitals, schools, places of worship--shelter for the body and nourishment for the spirit.

Environmental Ethics For Engineers

Author: Alastair S Gunn
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1351088661
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 163

Book Description
We have used this book, manuscript form, as supplemental reading in our environmental engineering classes at Duke University. The discussion of ethics is usually reserved for the final few days of class, when the students should start asking ‘so what? about course material. We respond to this question by covering the principles of ethics in one lecture and spending two or more sessions discussing various readings. Engineering students who have spent four years learning how to crunch numbers and to solve technical problems to three significant figures admit that the study of environmental ethics introduces new and exciting concepts into their professional thinking, and provides a perspective which otherwise would be missing from their education.

Meaning in Technology

Author: Arnold Pacey
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262661201
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
A thoughtful meditation on the role of meaning and purpose in the development of technology.

The Civilized Engineer

Author: Samuel C. Florman
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466868570
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
Civil engineer Samuel C. Florman's The Civilized Engineer is aimed at both those observing and commenting externally on engineering, and the practicing engineer—to reveal something of the art behind great engineering achievements, and to stimulate debate upon the author's hypothesis that "in its moment of ascendance, engineering is faced with the trivialization of its purpose and the debasement of its practice."

Inventing Modern

Author: John H. Lienhard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199882886
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
Modern is a word much used, but hard to pin down. In Inventing Modern, John H. Lienhard uses that word to capture the furious rush of newness in the first half of 20th-century America. An unexpected world emerges from under the more familiar Modern. Beyond the airplanes, radios, art deco, skyscrapers, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Buck Rogers, the culture of the open road--Burma Shave, Kerouac, and White Castles--lie driving forces that set this account of Modern apart. One force, says Lienhard, was a new concept of boyhood--the risk-taking, hands-on savage inventor. Driven by an admiration of recklessness, America developed its technological empire with stunning speed. Bringing the airplane to fruition in so short a time, for example, were people such as Katherine Stinson, Lincoln Beachey, Amelia Earhart, and Charles Lindbergh. The rediscovery of mystery powerfully drove Modern as well. X-Rays, quantum mechanics, and relativity theory had followed electricity and radium. Here we read how, with reality seemingly altered, hope seemed limitless. Lienhard blends these forces with his childhood in the brave new world. The result is perceptive, engaging, and filled with surprise. Whether he talks about Alexander Calder (an engineer whose sculptures were exercises in materials science) or that wacky paean to flight, Flying Down to Rio, unexpected detail emerges from every tile of this large mosaic. Inventing Modern is a personal book that displays, rather than defines, an age that ended before most of us were born. It is an engineer's homage to a time before the bomb and our terrible loss of confidence--a time that might yet rise again out of its own postmodern ashes.

Engineering and the Mind's Eye

Author: Eugene S. Ferguson
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262560788
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Book Description
In this insightful and incisive essay, Eugene Ferguson demonstrates that good engineering is as much a matter of intuition and nonverbal thinking as of equations and computation. He argues that a system of engineering education that ignores nonverbal thinking will produce engineers who are dangerously ignorant of the many ways in which the real world differs from the mathematical models constructed in academic minds.

The Aftermath

Author: Samuel C. Florman
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1429973935
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Book Description
The year is 2010 and the world as we know it has come to an end. A huge comet has smashed into the earth off the coast of California, vaporizing and generating a fiery rain that engulfs the globe in a destructive holocaust. But at the opposite pole of the planet, there is a "safe zone" encompassing part of the southeast African shore and the southern tip of Madagascar where the damage is extensive but not total. Spared from destruction is a luxury cruise ship, the Queen of Africa, which carries 600 of the world's leading engineers. These outstanding technologists, traveling with their immediate families, are engaged in a seminar dedicated to finding solutions to humanity's eternal needs-shelter, food, energy, environmental preservation, and the like. But when the impact of the comet sends shock waves around the world, the passengers' first priority is to abandon ship for terra firma. Thus they head for the South African coast to begin the task of "starting over." In KwaZulu Natal the passengers find a surviving community of about 25,000, including many experienced agricultural and industrial workers. These people have been cast back, physically, to the Stone Age, but intellectually they are at the forefront of technological progress in the 21st century, and they have at their disposal the natural resources needed to embark on an industrial revolution. So begins an epic adventure of rebuilding the world from scratch, but in an unpredictable, and sometimes hostile, environment, survival itself may be the real challenge. The Aftermath is a provocative adventure story that provides a scientifically sound blueprint for surviving Armageddon.