Engineers

A History of Engineering and Structural Design

Matthew Wells

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781134343249
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This innovative new book presents the vast historical sweep of engineering innovation and technological change to describe and illustrate engineering design and what conditions, events, cultural climates and personalities have brought it to its present state.

Matthew Wells covers topics based on an examination of paradigm shifts, the contribution of individuals, important structures and influential disasters to show approaches to the modern concept of structure. By demonstrating the historical context of engineering, Wells has created a guide to design like no other, inspirational for both students and practitioners working in the fields of architecture and engineering.

Chapter 1
Prehistory and ancient times

The archaeological record is not the only place where one finds the traces of ancient builders. As technologies have proliferated and means and ends have multiplied, a handful of ideas that humans use to alter nature remain unchanged. Without calculation or computing science, structures have always reached a common level of complexity and maintained a consistent proximity to society. Good engineering transcends both time and place. In the following collection of people and projects, all those referred to would recognise one another’s actions whatever their separation, and this recognition, the ‘continual present’ in engineering, is the subject of this book.

Myths to organise thought

Older conventions have special importance, their invisibility seeming to be in direct proportion to their ubiquity. Ancient societies made up creation myths—‘back stories’ serving to impose coherence, sense and value upon their present. They usually involved the generation of the universe, cosmogony, followed by the maintenance of a status quo. Some higher power knows how to order things, and it became accepted that things could be ordered. The will to survive transmutes into a desire to understand the environment and a separate but parallel urge to control it. Human consciousness seems to have evolved out of a two-way process, responding to its surroundings, creating and reflecting social patterns, building on subconscious foundations, making the world around itself as it was itself being shaped.

Our physiologies reflect the influence of our development of tools. And perhaps our minds are made to match those particular mental processes with which we have chosen to apprehend and manipulate the world’s potential. Man’s ascendancy is based on control, social control and the conquest of nature: politics for the first, technology for the second. These two aspects of civilisation seem inextricable. The ancient Greek word cosmos stems from a collective noun for a group of men, the minimum needed for a task, later coming to represent an abstract unit. It immediately sets up a frame of reference, a limitation on action. The first thing an engineer always does is delimit his sphere of operation and his consequent responsibilities.

Technological apartheid

The earliest times have been subdivided according to their technologies, particularly the materials used: stone, bronze, iron.¹ The time spans of prehistory, however, produced an apartheid, with different stages of development co-existing, and these anomalies challenge the notion of a neat progression. All the effort of these times was to conserve; thus innovation acquired its subversive component. Bronze was little sharper than flint and developed to support social display. This pre-adaptation as ornament, in ceremonial swords and shields, then permitted metallurgy to evolve practical metal weaponry coincident with the urge towards the first militarism.

Prehistoric technology

The late Neolithic of northern Europe preserved some stamp of prehistoric societies as urbanism meanwhile slowly took over in Bronze Age Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, imposing restrictive infrastructure and organisational requirements. Alexander Thom’s book Megalithic Lunar Observatories opens with the comment: ‘Ancient man’s geometric knowledge will never be fathomed but that he was an engineer is not in doubt.’² The author’s conclusions are drawn from painstaking surveys of Hebridean stone rings, which he sees as practical tools for safe navigation. Their builders had reached a fundamental conclusion about the repetitiveness of nature. Permanence resided in the heavens; the moon rises in a pattern, and that pattern can be abstracted and recorded in a scattering of stones. They modelled a nature concealed, making observations of one thing to predict the behaviour of another. In navigating the tidal races of the islands, they had coupled the lunar phases to the movement of the water. The first engineering used physical measurements to overcome an inability to measure time. The notion of linking measurements of space and time is even older, dating to the domestication of the horse, a day’s walk differing in distance from a day’s ride.

Other researchers have found geometric concepts embedded within Neolithic sites—proportional systems such as the Golden Section, which made the proposal of a standard unit unnecessary.³ Thom’s point about geometry is, however, well made. Once the method of siting using foresight and backsight had been hit upon, the layouts were self-generating. In examining artefacts ten times older than the use of writing, it is impossible to be sure whether an ellipse or any other abstract form had indeed been recognised at all, but a way of using physical space had been established.

Many influences on Neolithic building technology can be inferred from the rings (figure 1.1). Their form recalls the simplest henge, the circular space defined by the maximum clearing for a given effort, a timber then stone enclosure realising concepts of separation and then reconnection with a larger universe. The component

1.1 The Bluestones, Avebury Rings, 2000 BC

These stones from the Welsh hills travelled 100 kilometres by sea, river and overland. Weighing 30 tonnes each, they have a minimum of squaring and are embedded just enough, given ground conditions, to survive thousand-year storm events. The builders kept to a minimum of means.

stones reflect their geology: ‘doggers’ or loose stones eroded from a base, erratic boulders carried by ice. The limits of workability, bruising softer stone with harder to give shape, enforce a harsh hierarchy of finishing quality. The spigot connection between the uprights and lintels of Stonehenge, beaten from the parent stone instead of formed with an inserted key, are an astonishing profligacy of effort for an invisible and seemingly irrelevant improvement to the joints. Overall scale seems to have been capped by transportability: that is, determined by the manual effort that could be concentrated to manoeuvre dolmens on log rollers and mud slides, perhaps a team of twenty, pulling a weight of about five or six tonnes—a modern-day truckload— without significant inefficiency.

Primitiveness only resides in the means that ancient man had to hand; the development and refinement of the available technologies was complete. Stone tools, mined in a centralised industry, pre-finished and then distributed across a vast trading area of Europe and Scandinavia, were worked up into beautiful implements with an anthropomorphic quality lost to modern production.

Building in ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt’s social structure developed around the exploitation of the Nile’s flood cycle, and agriculture required large-scale organisation to exploit the annual renewal. Out of the abundance came a centralised economy, with population concentrated in the river valley, and from this conformity an army could be drawn to defend and expand the empire. Such an institution in turn sought monuments, an iconography of permanence to bolster its prospects, and the period of inundation allowed the entire population, otherwise idle, to be mobilised in building projects.

Their creation myth tapped directly into experience: the rising of a primeval hill from the waters. Joyce Tyldesley charts how the forms of simple funeral mounds developed into stone mastabas, then stepped pyramids, finally becoming geometric prisms to meet eternity.⁴

Pyramids diversity in their construction

The construction of the Old Kingdom Pyramids has been the subject of wide-ranging speculation shading off into the mysticism of ‘pyramidology’. Two notions worth examining are firstly, that their construction techniques evolved only very gradually in surroundings of almost immutable conservatism, hidebound by tradition; and second, that they were carried out at an almost superhuman scale and accuracy.

In fact the static systems needed to raise man-made mountains with deeply embedded artificial caves was worked out across only three generations.⁵ The archaeological record includes, however, enough failures to show that structural experimentation was continuous and diverse. The large number of unfinished projects, some with brick cores, mortar, sand fills, corner dovetails and other innovations, and a succession of mistakes and failures littering the desert reflect the frantic pursuit of refinement and economy as the kingdoms came under pressure in their respective declines.

The Pharaoh Djoser’s stepped pyramid at Saqquara is held up as the transitional example between mound and prism, and successively smaller versions lie embedded within the finished pile. The architect Imhotep extended his startling originality in pyramid design to other equally innovative elements of the surrounding complex, but precisely why there was such an abrupt departure from tradition remains shrouded. Written references to building works per se are sparse. Parkinson notes that urbanism and technology were not reflected in the ancient Egyptian literary tradition because at the time they were recognised as complete and parallel discourses in their own right,⁶ but it increasingly appears that cross currents from political, theological and even agricultural development interacted strongly with the campaigns of monumental building.

The structure of the stepped pyramid comprises sloping leaves of masonry laid against a core, like the layers of an onion.⁷ This is not ideal. A modern engineer analysing the likelihood of the slope’s collapse might imagine virtual slip surfaces in such locations when trying to work out the balance of stability, so introducing planes of weakness isn’t helpful. On the other hand, the settlement of the whole mass on its plinth of rock or sand can be much better controlled during construction, and each layer, being a small proportion of the whole, can be realigned as work proceeds. Practical considerations took precedent over structural effectiveness.

Graffiti indicate that Imhotep went on to serve the next pharaoh, but two subsequent stepped projects went unfinished before Pharaoh Snefru appeared to preside over some hard-fought-for departures from convention. He inherited a period of prosperity and commenced a stepped pyramid at Meidum, but after fifteen years the site was abandoned and a true pyramid was started nearer to his capital. The silty ground at the new location was a poor foundation, and improved quarrying, bringing bigger blocks, faster aggravated settlements. The work too advanced to start again, the builders instead adjusted their angle of slope and the result was the bent pyramid of Dashur. In their building...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustration credits
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Prehistory and ancient times
• Chapter 2 Rome and the East (220 BC–AD 533)
• Chapter 3 Byzantium and the European Dark Ages (476–1000)
• Chapter 4 Light (1000–1600)
• Chapter 5 Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)
• Chapter 6 Early modern engineering (1580–1789)
• Chapter 7 Encyclopaedia (1750–1860)
• Chapter 8 The American reconstruction (1860–1890)
• Chapter 9 Classical analysis and reinforced concrete (1890–1920)
• Chapter 10 Flight and the World Wars (1900–1950)
• Chapter 11 Early contemporaries (1945–1960)
• Chapter 12 The continual present (1950–2000)
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index