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Asked by eloise to Alex, Chris, Mohamed, Rik, Victoria on 6 Mar 2015.
Question: who is your favourite engineer
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Rik Allen answered on 6 Mar 2015:
Hi.
I’ve always admired Ismbard Brunel for his sense of scale and the range of the projects he worked on.Ada Lovelace seems to have had a fascinating life, as the Countess daughter of the poet Byron who was a bit of a rogue. She was probably the first ever computer programmer when she wrote about the Charles Babbage’s mechanical computers. She was the first person to see that computers could be more than just number crunchers.
The others have mentioned Tesla and Turing – both of whom were on my list – I need to go read up on Shannon. It’s bending the word “Engineer” a bit too far, but if you’ve not come across Richard Feynman you might find him worth looking up as well.
Rik
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Alex Shenfield answered on 7 Mar 2015:
Nikola Tesla! Whilst Thomas Edison is widely credited as being the father of the electrical age, Nikola Tesla was a prolific inventor who doesn’t really get enough credit. He was responsible for many advances in electricity generation and also the Tesla Coil which is just very very cool!
🙂
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Chris Waters answered on 8 Mar 2015:
Nikolai Tesla doesn’t get the credit he deserves, but Alex has already picked him and shown what amazing stuff he’s done so I’ll pick Claude Shannon. He was an Engineer at Bell Labs in America who developed equipment for their telephone system, a bit like we have BT here. Shannon was involved in the codebreaking efforts of Alan Turing at Bletchley Park, then when he came home after the war revolutionised the field of Information Theory with his paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, which we still apply to communications systems today! He was also a joker and inventor, making many silly contraptions including the first wearable computer which he used to cheat at roulette.
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