The Existential Pleasures of Engineering

By Samuel C. Florman

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. In this second edition of his popular Existential Pleasures of Engineering, Samuel Florman explores how engineers think and feel about their profession.

A deeply insightful and refreshingly unique text, this book corrects the myth that engineering is cold and passionless. Indeed, Florman celebrates engineering not only crucial and fundamental but also vital and alive; he views it as a response to some of our deepest impulses, an endeavor rich in spiritual and sensual rewards. Opposing the "anti-technology" stance, Florman gives readers a practical, creative, and even amusing philosophy of engineering that boasts of pride in his craft.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Feb 15, 1996
• ISBN: 9781466842366

Samuel C. Florman

Sam Florman is a writer as well as a practicing engineer and vice-president of Kreisler Borg Florman Construction Company. Florman was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1995, he is also a fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers and the New York Academy of Sciences.

Book preview

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

Socrates said that the unconsidered life is not worth living. If the statement is valid, as I believe it is, then those of us who are engineers in the final quarter of the twentieth century are confronted with certain questions of compelling interest. What is the nature of the engineering experience in our time? What is it like to be an engineer at the moment that the profession has achieved unprecedented successes, and simultaneously is being accused of having brought our civilization to the brink of ruin?

Having posed these questions, it occurs to me that the answers are not without interest to all of us—engineers, would-be engineers, and concerned citizens in a world where engineering, for better or for worse, plays an increasingly important role.

This speculative essay is an attempt to find answers to these questions, and, as it turns out, to challenge some of the conventional answers that are being given by others both within the profession and without.

What I have written is brief enough to speak for itself and does not require any formal introduction. But I do think that it would be helpful to make a few comments in advance about three key words which will be recurring in what is to follow. The words are engineering, technology, and existentialism.

Engineers and writers about engineering are constantly lamenting the confusion that is supposed to prevail in the public mind about the meaning of the word engineering. I believe that such confusion is much less widespread than it used to be. For example, it is hardly necessary to be forever explaining that professional engineers do not wear striped caps and drive locomotives. It is generally recognized, I think, that engineering is the art or science of making practical application of the knowledge of pure sciences. In other words, although engineers are not scientists, they study the sciences and use them to solve problems of practical interest, most typically by the process that we call creative design. Engineers are not mechanics, nor are they technicians. They are members of a profession. Although this profession has its roots in the earliest development of the human species, it only achieved recognition as a learned profession in the mid-nineteenth century, when scientific principles were first applied systematically to engineering problems, and when engineering schools and societies began to be established. In this book I have not attempted to describe in any detail what engineers do. Rather, my interest is in how engineers think and feel about what they do, and in the more general aspects of what it means to be an engineer.

Technology, like engineering, is a word that is constantly being defined and redefined. However, it is a word of such wide use and common understanding that I have chosen to take it pretty much as I find it, without bothering about linguistic or grammatical subtleties. Technology is a broader and more comprehensive term than engineering. Yet there is little question that engineers are the educated professionals who play a dominant role in technological development. Clearly the growing intellectual movement of antitechnology directs its hostility against the engineer as the archetypical technologist. Where I thought it appropriate, I have not hesitated to use the words technologist and engineer interchangeably.

Existentialism is a word that hardly anyone had heard of before it came into vogue after World War II. In this sense, existentialism is the newest of philosophies. Paradoxically, it is also the oldest of philosophies. This is so because its basic tenet is that existential thought precedes all formal philosophical deliberation. The existentialist is man saying to himself, "I exist! The way I feel about this existence of mine means more to me than any theory in the world." Existentialism, as a philosophy, has been argued and embellished by the many different thinkers who have been characterized as existentialists. But I have restricted the use of the term to its most essential meaning, which I take to have two aspects: (1) rejection of dogma—particularly scientific dogma; and (2) reliance on the passions, impulses, urges, and intuitions that are the basic ground of our personal existence.

At first glance, engineering and existentialism appear to have nothing to do with each other. The engineer uses the logic of science to achieve practical results. The existentialist is guided by the promptings of his heart, which, as Pascal said, has its reasons that reason cannot know. The existentialist most typically sees the engineer as an antagonist whose analytical methods and pragmatic approach to life are said to be desensitizing and soul deadening—in a word, antiexistential. To show that this adversary relationship is based on a misapprehension of the nature of the engineering experience is—as can be surmised from the title—a principal objective of this book.

INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION

Although this book was published in 1976, its origins date back to 1968. One evening in the fall of that year I received a telephone call inviting me to address a meeting at the New York Academy of Sciences. The monthly gatherings of the Academy’s Engineering Division are usually devoted to technical topics. On this occasion, however, the program director—seeking to add variety and a touch of spice—asked if I would be willing to consider engineering from a philosophical point of view. Somewhat impetuously I agreed to try.

This would have been a challenging assignment in the best of circumstances, but it was particularly daunting at that moment in our national history. War was raging in Vietnam, and American college campuses were being wracked by student demonstrations. The protests were directed mainly at the war, but also more generally at a heartless materialism that was said to have taken hold. Technology had become a word with evil implication, identified with weaponry, greed, and environmental degradation. The soft songs of the flower children blended with the wrathful chants of campus militants, making for an atmosphere in which engineers could not help feeling uneasy. I was sympathetic with much that the students were saying, and troubled by the failings of the industrial establishment with which most engineers—myself included—were in some way affiliated.

Yet, as I set to work on my speech, guilt and misgiving yielded to a completely different state of mind. What is achieved, I wondered, by blind and angry protest? Surely folksinging and dropping out are not adequate responses to life’s challenges. Paradoxically, under the pressure of reproach I began to conceive a new regard for the profession of engineering.

When the designated evening arrived, my thoughts were still not fully formed, but I had written them down with such clarity as I could muster. My main theme was summed up in the title I chose: The Existential Pleasures of Engineering. This phrase seemed to tickle the audience’s fancy; the speech itself was received with friendly bemusement. And that for the moment was that.

When, the following year, my remarks were reprinted in the Academy’s Transactions, I began to receive communiqués from all over the world. Yes, engineers told me, we, too, have strong, positive philosophical feelings about the work we do. Encouraged by that response, and animated by my own evolving interests, I resolved to explore the speech’s ideas at greater length.

By the time I got around to writing this book and seeing it through to publication, the year was 1976, and Gerald Ford was about to lose the presidency to Jimmy Carter. Although the 1960s were history, the counterculture challenge to technology was still very much alive. Even later, when the inevitable conservative reaction of the 1980s set in, the debates surrounding engineering and technology remained intense. Indeed, the questions raised during the 1960s go to the heart of the human condition. They are the necessary backdrop against which engineers will always have to evaluate the quality of their days.

*   *   *

In 1976 I was thinking about what engineering would be like in the final quarter of the twentieth century. Today all eyes are on the next millennium. Yet, despite the passing years, I’m amazed to find how little I would say differently if I were to write the book afresh. The style would be more gender-neutral, of course—although, considering past custom and the traditionally male orientation of engineering, the text could have been a lot worse. And certainly there is no end to wishing one could express a thought more felicitously. But there is little of substance that I would want to change. I attribute this, not to any gift of foresight, but rather to the timelessness of the themes discussed. Luckily, this work did not concern itself with Eastern Europe, nuclear arms control, or federal technology policy!

*   *   *

Still, the engineering scene has changed since 1976, and it seems appropriate here to consider some of the changes that have occurred. Technically the profession has advanced, although incrementally rather than in any radical sense. The computer is a dominant presence, but it was already very important in 1976. New terms are bandied about: total quality management, information highway, statistical quality control, design for manufacturability, and so forth. But in most important ways engineering education and engineering practice have not been fundamentally transformed. In fact, one of the main characteristics of engineering since 1976 is that it has not changed as much as it should have changed.

The profession has always had its critics, internal as well as external; but as American technology progressed from one triumph to another, and as American industrial prowess became the marvel of the world, who could quarrel with success? Whatever our doubts and discontents, we were by far the richest nation that had ever been. We were living in the American century. Almost by definition, our engineers had to be the best in the world. Yet now, as the new millennium approaches, things look quite different. U.S. industry is having trouble competing in international markets. At the same time—and almost overnight, it seems—our traditional preeminence in research and development has eroded. American engineers are apparently not as able as we once thought.

As our economic problems worsen, and complaints about our technological failures intensify, criticism is increasingly focussed on the source of our technical talent—American engineering schools. The perceived faults of our graduating engineers are announced with increasing urgency: They lack aptitude for design, having concentrated too much on analysis and problem-solving; they don’t understand manufacturing; they are poor communicators, have little understanding of business and politics, and are uninformed about foreign cultures and world affairs. At a time when we need engineers who are leaders, and leaders who understand engineering, we are not producing either.

Equally ominous, at the very moment that more engineers are needed at every level of society, the number of young people entering engineering has plummeted. Since the peak year of 1986, the annual production of B.S. engineering degrees has declined more than 18 percent. Attrition between freshman and senior years is about one-third. For women and minorities (who are already terribly underrepresented at the entry level) attrition is considerably worse. Studies indicate that only a small part of this loss is attributable to academic failure. Some of it is related to economic recession and the end of the Cold War. But unemployment is much less of a problem for engineers than it is for the general workforce, and long-range career prospects for engineers are encouraging.

No, the main problem lies neither with academic difficulty nor fear of unemployment. Young people are dropping out of engineering school for the same reason they are shunning it in the first place: The program is laborious and in many respects disagreeable. The hands-on approach is largely gone, increasingly replaced by scientific theory. Research is in while teaching is out, a casualty of the way engineering education has been funded for several decades. Also, engineers of previous generations more willingly took the bad with the good; you paid your dues and got on with your career. But, for a variety of fairly obvious reasons, today’s brightest youngsters are less patient with a harsh regimen than were their parents, to say nothing of their grandparents.

Once the major problem has been identified, the solution seems stunningly obvious. We should stop looking at engineering school as a boot camp designed to eliminate all but the most dogged recruits. We should stop making the first two years the obstacle course they have become—consisting of calculus, physics, and chemistry. We should bring practical, creative, fun engineering into every year, particularly the first, and teach mathematics and the sciences as enabling complements to engineering rather than isolated afflictions to be endured. We should help young people perceive how important technology is in the scheme of things. We should advise and nurture the students at every step along the way, paying particular attention to the needs of women and underrepresented minorities. Thus will we attract talented young people to engineering, keep them from dropping out, and at the same time improve the quality of our graduates.

It all seems so simple, particularly the nurturing. But more than a century of Spartan tradition stands in the way. As a dean said to me recently, It is easy to say, ‘Change the culture!’ but so very hard to accomplish.

Yet there are reasons to hope that important transformations will occur. The mood of urgency is palpable and promises to remain for years to come. The National Science Foundation is supporting a variety of educational initiatives, and many engineering schools are experimenting with curriculum innovations.

One can even speculate that engineering might eventually become the education of choice for many of the nation’s brightest and best young men and women. This is the case in France, for example, where the polytechnicians, graduates of les grandes écoles, are leaders in both the public and private sectors. A third of French engineers go into government, finance, marketing, banking, and insurance. In other leading nations, including Japan and Germany, engineers are found in positions of authority throughout the social order. The United States, in stark contrast, is dominated by lawyers and MBAs. Obviously, we cannot attribute all our problems to this circumstance, but neither can we deem it satisfactory.

There are many splendid young Americans entering engineering today. There has been improvement from the constricted interests found in the studies referred to in Chapter 7. A 1985 National Research Council report found that engineering students have a richer educational and cultural background and are more confident, more assertive than engineering students of years past.¹ Yet, if truth be told, the changes are at the margins. Too few youths of promise—entrepreneurs, idealists, and potential leaders—see engineering as an attractive option. At the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of the National Academy of Engineering in 1989, Simon Ramo called for the coming of a greater engineering. This dream is very far from being realized.

We need more engineers, better engineers, and greater engineers. (In my 1987 book, I called for the coming of The Civilized Engineer.) However, the beneficial changes that so many well-intentioned people would like to see—and which relate to the survival of our society, to say nothing of its greatness and esprit—depend in large measure upon the way our citizens feel about engineering. I believe that this explains in part such continuing public interest as this book has enjoyed. It is one reason why I am pleased to see the book reissued at this time.

*   *   *

A word about numbers. In the original text I note that there were in the 1970s approximately one million American engineers, with some studies anticipating up to 1.5 million in 1980, Now, in the mid 1990s, one is likely to hear that there are about 2.5 million, seemingly an incredible leap. There was quite an uproar in 1989 when the Bureau of Labor Statistics published a figure of 1,331,747 at the same time that the National Science Foundation issued a figure of 2,634,900, almost twice as large. A reconciliation prepared by the American Association of Engineering Societies showed that the NSF figure included more than 800,000 engineering graduates working but not in engineering jobs, plus about 200,000 engineering graduates retired or otherwise out of the workforce, and more than 260,000 recipients of two-year technology degrees engaged in engineering-type jobs.

People have a way of becoming agitated when they start to calculate how many engineers there are, and how many are needed. The aerospace engineer in California, newly unemployed, feels differently about the numbers than does a statistician at the National Science Foundation. The debates would be less acrimonious if engineering were viewed—as I have suggested above—as a solid preparation for a large variety of careers.

*   *   *

Although, since 1976, enthusiasm for engineering may not have flourished as I would have wished, I do believe that hostility toward engineering has somewhat abated. This is probably linked to worsening economic conditions and apprehension about worldwide competition. Most people now feel that our hard-pressed society can ill afford to forego the benefits of modern technology. Concern for the environment remains a powerful force, but this is seen as a matter of protecting health and conserving resources rather than rejecting the work of engineers.

Yet the concept of antitechnology, as examined in chapters Four, Five, and Six, still plays an important part in public discourse. The writers who I discuss in those chapters are not as widely read as they once were; but their works are a fascinating part of social and intellectual history. And their heritage is very much alive.

I pick up The New York Times Book Review and find an essayist lamenting that romance is not what it used to be, and that science and technology are to blame: Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that you don’t have to experience it.² In The New York Review of Books, a writer appraising the papers of Thomas Edison speaks of engineering as an alien power, crippling the sense of freedom that it was intended to serve.³ In his introduction to an anthology of contemporary American poetry, Andrei Codrescu writes that the making of community against antisocial technology is the chief object of the poetry gathered here.⁴ Dread of technological change is voiced in such elegiac books as Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature and Wendell Berry’s What Are People For? The quincentennial celebration of Columbus’s first journey to America saw an outpouring of speeches, articles, and books lamenting the disappearance of primitive arcadias and the rise of Western civilization.

This philosophical view has continuing force. Its advocates pose important questions. They also have a propensity for obscuring hard truths and increasing angst throughout the land. I am pleased to restate today the ideas I set forth on this topic in 1976.

*   *   *

This book is presented as originally written; the text has not been changed. However, with the publisher’s encouragement and consent, I have added four additional chapters: two from Blaming Technology (1981) and two from The Civilized Engineer (1987). They round out the work with some of the thoughts that occupied me in the decade after Existential was published. If they induce the reader to seek out those other two works I will certainly be pleased. If, as seems likely, this book outlives the others, then I like the thought of these particular chapters being joined to it.

*   *   *

Recently a reader asked me if I wasn’t getting a little cantankerous as the years go by. Existential, he said, was a celebration of engineering, while in much of my subsequent writing I have exhorted engineers to be better and to do more. Well, no, I replied, I don’t think that my disposition has changed nor my enthusiasm waned. Those of us who are engineers today are the heirs of a great profession. It is up to us to celebrate it indeed; also to defend it against wrong-minded critics; and—certainly not least—to do what we can to enhance it.

PART 1

1.

WHAT WAS TROY TO THIS?

In May 1902 the fifty-year-old American Society of Civil Engineers held its annual convention in Washington, D.C. Robert Moore, the newly elected president, gave a welcoming address entitled, The Engineer of the Twentieth Century. He began by eulogizing the engineers of the past for making human life not only longer, but richer and better worth living. Then he acclaimed the achievements of his contemporaries and fellow members. Finally he warmed to his chosen topic, the engineer of the coming era:

And in the future, even more than in the present, will the secrets of power be in his keeping, and more and more will he be a leader and benefactor of men. That his place in the esteem of his fellows and of the world will keep pace with his growing capacity and widening achievement is as certain as that effect will follow cause.

What a flush of pleasure they must have felt, those engineers of 1902, to hear themselves described as benefactors of mankind. What a quickening of the pulse there must have been as they listened to their leader predict success and glory for them in the years ahead. Doubtless they sat quietly, looking solemn in their starched collars and frock coats, the way we see them in faded photographs. But beneath those sedate façades they could not have helped but feel the stirrings of a fierce

Reviews for The Existential Pleasures of Engineering

[cnunciato_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

As an engineer myself -- and one with a soft spot for the liberal arts -- I really wanted to like this book. I'd purchased a copy for my father, a mechanical engineer, a few years back, and was curious as to why he still hadn't read it, since it looked like the kind of thing we both might enjoy. Now I know.It's basically the sort of book that can be summed up in a single paragraph -- a paragraph, in this case, that isn't revealed until around page 150 or so -- and is otherwise crammed with wordy paraphrasings and reiterations of that very same paragraph, with dozens of references thrown in for good scholarship. By the time I finally reached that paragraph, I'd pretty much checked out, having plodded for hours through Florman's ravings against what he calls "the antitechnologists" (haters of technology, essentially -- those broadly opposed to technological progress), apparently having forgotten that his primary audience -- engineers -- would need little convincing on this particular this point. I went in looking for an explanation of why engineering is so much fun; I came out (left early, actually) having found little more than a long-winded rant against the tree-huggers.

[mr7lewis · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A rare defense of masculinity, and a brilliantly compiled ethos.

[all4metals_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is an excellent book that explains why engineers do their job. It is a must for anyone interested in understanding the human nature of engineers.

[lorin_40 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Florman defends engineering as a fulfilling and worthwhile endeavour. Alas, he's probably preaching to the choir, as only an engineer would pick up a book with this title.