• Question: Who is your favourite engineer apart from yourself?

    Asked by Ade B to Andrew, Lizzie, Nick, Sonia on 14 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by Tom.
    • Photo: Elizabeth Kapasa

      Elizabeth Kapasa answered on 14 Jun 2015:

      Oo interesting question. I’ve always love Leonardo Da Vinci, I just think it’s amazing that he designed so many things which were before his time that we know are possible today! Plus I love his combination of creative arts, medicine and engineering. What a legend!

    • Photo: Andrew Phillips

      Andrew Phillips answered on 14 Jun 2015:

      Great question, my two choices might not be always described as engineers, although I’m sure that they should be! Frei Otto (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frei_Otto) and Antoni Gaudi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoni_Gaud%C3%AD). Both of them designed amazing structures, inspired by nature. I think the structures they designed are beautiful, simple and honest (they carry forces the way they look like they carry forces).

      In early days of biomechanics engineers and anatomists worked together, and I’m always inspired by the work of Culmann and von Meyer who first described and explained bone as a structure (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3183195/).

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 14 Jun 2015:

      Unusually it is a married couple. Ingeborg Hochmair-Desoyer and Erwin Hochmair both electronic engineer who were a number of pioneers of the cochlear implant who took a device out of the university laboratories in Vienna and step up a company (Med–El GmbH based in Innsbruck) and made it to a commercial medical product it is today as a treatment for profound deafness. In the early days there were many technical difficulties, as the product matured there were also many cultural difficulties which had to be overcome.

    • Photo: Nicholas Hitchins

      Nicholas Hitchins answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      I think that I would have to say Nikola Tesla (http://tinyurl.com/oa27ogb) because the list of things that he worked on was endless. He was a quiet man who let his inventions speak for themselves and he was not afraid to champion technology even when people tried to discredit it. He was a perfect example of an engineer who let his work speak for its self and his most famous legacy was inventing the alternating current method of transmitting electricity (the one we use everywhere today) a comic called the oatmeal did a very good job of listing his accompliments and some of the hurdles he dealt with along the way. http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla

Comments