Nuts and Bolts
Roma Agrawal
W.W. Norton & Co., $29.99
What do you get while you pose a problem, weave in a forged of characters pushed by starvation, frustration, curiosity, compassion or perhaps even just a little spite, and throw in a number of twists and turns? A ebook about engineering.
In Nuts and Bolts, structural engineer Roma Agrawal presents an up to date twist on the listing of six primary machines — the lever, wheel and axle, pulley, inclined aircraft, wedge and screw — that Renaissance scientists and engineers recognized as elementary to that period’s expertise. Seven components, Agrawal argues, “kind the idea of the fashionable world”: the nail, wheel, spring, magnet, lens, string and pump (SN: 4/26/22). If the objects included in — or excluded from — the listing are hotly debated amongst skilled engineers and laypeople alike, Agrawal might not thoughts. A key message of the ebook is that engineering is for folks of all kinds.
Every factor will get its personal chapter. Exact but easy descriptions of every object’s working ideas, plus useful hand-drawn diagrams, make the ebook accessible to the uninitiated. Agrawal’s zeal for engineering jumps off the web page by her vivid descriptions. That is somebody who describes the ticking of mechanical watches as “soothing” — a soul nourished by invention and craftsmanship.
After reviewing how every invention bears, balances and leverages the bodily forces and fields performing on it, Agrawal locations the seven components throughout the numerous applied sciences they facilitate, from planes and bridges to devices, weapons and tv. With these tales of invention come acquainted characters, like Alexander Graham Bell, but in addition pioneers largely forgotten by posterity, together with “the customarily hidden or unacknowledged contribution of minoritized folks in engineering.”
There are the Mongolian archers who finessed the spring of their bows by combining supplies with totally different advantages, and the eleventh century Arab polymath Ibn al-Haytham who established lots of the optics ideas important for designing lenses (SN: 2/24/15). A nineteenth century American housewife makes an look — her frustration with workers breaking her fancy dishes drove her to invent an automated dishwasher based mostly on cogs (that are derived from wheels) — as does a spiteful undertaker. In 1892, he patented a mechanical “girl-less, cuss-less, out-of-order-less, wait-less” (his phrases not Agrawal’s) phone alternate utilizing magnets to take the job of phone operators. These employees, sometimes ladies, had linked the wires for the caller with these of the individual they had been calling, and it seems one in every of them had been redirecting the undertaker’s potential shoppers to her husband.
The important thing character bringing all these tales collectively is Agrawal herself, whether or not she’s recounting her efforts at a blacksmith’s forge or on a potter’s wheel (sure, in accordance with Agrawal, the wheel has been reinvented many, many occasions) or describing the IVF she underwent and the microscope lenses the embryologist used when becoming a member of her daughter’s first two cells collectively. We see Agrawal the skilled engineer, in addition to Agrawal the inquisitive youngster, teenage classical Indian dancer, scholar and mother. The online result’s extra touching than you would possibly count on from an engineering ebook.
Agrawal ends with the pump. To reveal how this mechanical software strikes fluids, Agrawal focuses on breast pumps. A automotive engine may appear a extra apparent exemplar, however the story of the breast pump illustrates the significance of user-oriented engineering. “I felt like a farm animal amid the assorted contraptions connected to my breast,” Agrawal writes of her personal expertise with conventional breast pumps, apparently “no coincidence, because the inspiration for an early breast pump got here from milking cows.”
These clunky, sluggish, usually operated by hand pumps could be awkward to make use of wherever however at house or in a rest room, in contrast to the not too long ago developed Elvie breast pump, which inserts in a lady’s bra and pumps routinely and discreetly whereas she will get on together with her life. It’s refreshing to listen to somebody describe so frankly the exhaustion and the ache many ladies expertise whereas breastfeeding.
The Elvie breast pump exhibits how essential it’s for engineers to have an intensive understanding of the wants of the individuals who will use the gadget and why engineering wants folks from all kinds of backgrounds.
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