How do they make stuff?

[anglolawyer]

Take a bridge. How do you make a bridge, over water. It is obviously impossible to build anything under water so that's the first thing. And if you're talking about a suspension bridge I can almost see how it stays up but not how it gets up.

Car tyres. Or tires. Also impossible to make. Presumably the idea is you pour rubber into a mould and wait for it to set. But rubber is a solid, you have to know how to make a mould to a very precise specification and it must also be possible to get the tyre out of the mould and also possible to do all this by the thousand or the million.

To the non-engineer the world is basically incomprehensible. Yes, yes, I know my TV is powered by electricity but if I went back the Middle Ages to explain all our cool, modern things and they said, OK smartass, let's see you make one of these TeeVee things of which you speak.

What else is basically impossible yet all around? How come nobody outside the crazy world of engineers knows any engineers? Why aren't these people the most famous superstars in society?

 

[MikeG]

Jeez, AL........come and visit my workshop. I'll help you with the physical world. It really isn't as complex as you seem to think.

 

[elgarak]

Take a bridge. How do you make a bridge, over water. It is obviously impossible to build anything under water so that's the first thing. And if you're talking about a suspension bridge I can almost see how it stays up but not how it gets up.

Car tyres. Or tires. Also impossible to make. Presumably the idea is you pour rubber into a mould and wait for it to set. But rubber is a solid, you have to know how to make a mould to a very precise specification and it must also be possible to get the tyre out of the mould and also possible to do all this by the thousand or the million.

To the non-engineer the world is basically incomprehensible. Yes, yes, I know my TV is powered by electricity but if I went back the Middle Ages to explain all our cool, modern things and they said, OK smartass, let's see you make one of these TeeVee things of which you speak.

What else is basically impossible yet all around? How come nobody outside the crazy world of engineers knows any engineers? Why aren't these people the most famous superstars in society!
To the non-3

I'm still wondering how they make Apple remotes, and I know how engineering works and how most things around me are made. But Apple remotes are one machined solid block of Aluminium, and the openings do not appear large enough to allow the magical innards to pass in. And not only that: I know how most machining tools work, and I have no idea how they machine the Aluminium block of the remote. It's a thing of beauty.

 

[anglolawyer]

Jeez, AL........come and visit my workshop. I'll help you with the physical world. It really isn't as complex as you seem to think.

Can you build a bridge? Can you build one of the piles(?) under water? How? The water is going to wash the concrete away while you pour it and the construction workers will all drown.

Please use Roman era technology in your reply

ETA I have seen a workshop. My father had one. Utterly incomprehensible and I steered clear of it as much as I could.

 

[Jrrarglblarg]

Sandwiches. There the bread sits, in the bag, with sliced faces hidden. How the heck do people get the peanut butter in there?

 

[fishbob]

Take a bridge. How do you make a bridge, over water. It is obviously impossible to build anything under water so that's the first thing. And if you're talking about a suspension bridge I can almost see how it stays up but not how it gets up.

Car tyres. Or tires. Also impossible to make. Presumably the idea is you pour rubber into a mould and wait for it to set. But rubber is a solid, you have to know how to make a mould to a very precise specification and it must also be possible to get the tyre out of the mould and also possible to do all this by the thousand or the million.

To the non-engineer the world is basically incomprehensible. Yes, yes, I know my TV is powered by electricity but if I went back the Middle Ages to explain all our cool, modern things and they said, OK smartass, let's see you make one of these TeeVee things of which you speak.

What else is basically impossible yet all around? How come nobody outside the crazy world of engineers knows any engineers? Why aren't these people the most famous superstars in society?

http://www.sciencechannel.com/tv-shows/how-its-made

Watch this for awhile and all will be revealed. Be aware that your brain may turn to mush before long and you won't care anymore. In either case, your curiosity will be assuaged.

 

[MikeG]

Can you build a bridge? Can you build one of the piles(?) under water? How? The water is going to wash the concrete away while you pour it and the construction workers will all drown.

Please use Roman era technology in your reply

ETA I have seen a workshop. My father had one. Utterly incomprehensible and I steered clear of it as much as I could.

Building a bridge is fundamentally easy. The difficulty is that some of the pieces of stuff are big. Concrete sets underwater........as every DIYer who has ever chucked a shovel used for mixing concrete into a waterbutt with the promise of coming back to clean it up later knows only too well. But they don't rely on that to build bridges. They float a caisson (a big box without a bottom) into place when they want to put in the foundation, sink it to the sea/ river bed, and pump the water out (the top of the box is above water-level). They can then work in the orthodox way, digging and boring, pouring concrete, fixing steel......and when they've finished they let the water back in and tow the big box away.

 

[Beelzebuddy]

What else is basically impossible yet all around?

Microchips. These days no one designs them by hand; they build the tools that interface with the libraries which optimally place the actual circuit elements. Said circuit elements are smaller than photons and are created with laser interference patterns (the "speckles" you see when you see laser light), taking into account bits of quantum mechanics which get in the way, like electrons losing track of which wire they're on.

How come nobody outside the crazy world of engineers knows any engineers? Why aren't these people the most famous superstars in society?

Engineers, especially the best engineers, the engineers that other engineers look to when they think about colleagues worth emulating, are not what you'd call people persons. You don't want a bridge designed by a social butterfly who networked his way into the job with his winning smile alone. You want the anal-retentive hardass who cares, deeply and passionately, about the tolerance of the screws that are being used for the most minor element of the project which he's lived and breathed for years, and frankly doesn't give a damn what color you paint it afterwards.

Such people are not superstar material, because our media at the moment doesn't value hard work and deliberate consideration of a matter at hand half as much as the ability to squirt out witty soundbites and an inability to admit to being wrong.

 

[Pup]

When I worked in a print shop long ago, I delivered some scratchpads printed with the company name at the top of each sheet, the kind where you write a note, then tear off the top sheet and hand it to someone.

The fellow who received them asked a question that had apparently been puzzling him for years. How did we print the company name at the top of each sheet like that, so close to where the paper was glued together? There was hardly room to insert anything without cracking the glue binding, let alone to fit whatever part of a printing press would need to fit.

I explained that we printed the loose sheets first, then glued them together by painting liquid rubber glue on the back.

 

[Ron Swanson]

I hardly amazed at how things are made, but I've worked in over a hundred factories of almost every type, and helped assemble and repair them

 

[Toke]

...... Why aren't these people the most famous superstars in society?

They were, as some point.
I am not sure when, 50-100 years ago?

 

[Olowkow]

I have enjoyed this program for a long time.

http://www.sciencechannel.com/tv-shows/how-do-they-do-it

What else is basically impossible yet all around? How come nobody outside the crazy world of engineers knows any engineers? Why aren't these people the most famous superstars in society?

I think that impression is due to the fact the their technical language is often foreign to the layman, and their explanations too arcane for most people to understand, so they avoid such discussions. I seldom talk about my work outside the company of engineers or technicians. Our education system has failed many high school graduates.

 

[I Ratant]

Microchips. These days no one designs them by hand; they build the tools that interface with the libraries which optimally place the actual circuit elements. Said circuit elements are smaller than photons and are created with laser interference patterns (the "speckles" you see when you see laser light), taking into account bits of quantum mechanics which get in the way, like electrons losing track of which wire they're on.


Engineers, especially the best engineers, the engineers that other engineers look to when they think about colleagues worth emulating, are not what you'd call people persons. You don't want a bridge designed by a social butterfly who networked his way into the job with his winning smile alone. You want the anal-retentive hardass who cares, deeply and passionately, about the tolerance of the screws that are being used for the most minor element of the project which he's lived and breathed for years, and frankly doesn't give a damn what color you paint it afterwards.

Such people are not superstar material, because our media at the moment doesn't value hard work and deliberate consideration of a matter at hand half as much as the ability to squirt out witty soundbites and an inability to admit to being wrong.

.
That's me. That anal-retentive is a bit harsh though. Not retaining much any more.

 

[I Ratant]

They were, as some point.
I am not sure when, 50-100 years ago?

.
We don't have memorable names.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel..." built dockyards, the Great Western Railway, a series of steamships including the first propeller-driven transatlantic steamship and numerous important bridges and tunnels."
Buffy Smith.. meh!

 

[Toke]

....I explained that we printed the loose sheets first, then glued them together by painting liquid rubber glue on the back.

I sometimes get that sensation when trying to explain to one of the bridge officers what is/were broken.

As a humble electrician there are plenty of things I don' t know how are made, but at least I can often make a guess. Or just accept it as unknown.
(bit of a bugger when it is something I am the one that gets assigned to fixing it.)

 

[theprestige]

Can you build a bridge? Can you build one of the piles(?) under water? How? The water is going to wash the concrete away while you pour it and the construction workers will all drown.

Cofferdam. A picture of a cofferdam built to protect the foundation works of one of the Golden Gate Bridge piles during construction:

http://www.sfmuseum.net/assoc/bridge03.html

As far as suspension goes, first you build the suspension towers, then you hang the main cable between them in its beautiful and characteristic catenary arc. Then you dangle the individual suspension cables from the main cable. Then you work your way across the span, suspending each section of roadway from its allotted set of cables, until the entire span is... spanned. Probably you use some temporary support structures along the way, and remove them once the entire span is in place and the load is properly distributed along the main cable.

My grandad had a fantastic book that documented in words and photographs the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. A book like that could make for fascinating reading, if you want to see how projects like that actually get done.

 

[theprestige]

When I worked in a print shop long ago, I delivered some scratchpads printed with the company name at the top of each sheet, the kind where you write a note, then tear off the top sheet and hand it to someone.

The fellow who received them asked a question that had apparently been puzzling him for years. How did we print the company name at the top of each sheet like that, so close to where the paper was glued together? There was hardly room to insert anything without cracking the glue binding, let alone to fit whatever part of a printing press would need to fit.

I explained that we printed the loose sheets first, then glued them together by painting liquid rubber glue on the back.

My grandfather (again!) used to give his kids their allowance that way. He'd go down to the bank, withdraw a stack of crisp clean ones, take it over to the printer's shop, and have them gum up the edge. Then my mom and her brothers could swan about town, whipping out their pad of dollar bills and peeling one off for a soda or a candy bar or what have you.

 

[Newtons Bit]

Can you build a bridge? Can you build one of the piles(?) under water? How? The water is going to wash the concrete away while you pour it and the construction workers will all drown.

Please use Roman era technology in your reply

ETA I have seen a workshop. My father had one. Utterly incomprehensible and I steered clear of it as much as I could.

Build a barge with a pile driver on it and drive whole trees into the ground under water. Span your timbers between the piles.

For a stone bridge, drive drive a elliptical shape (point with direction of water) of piles into the ground. Place wooden slats between the piles the fill the hole with rubble to form base for stone bridge to sit on. Use additional piles to help form the falsework required to build stone arches as necessary.

 

[MikeG]

.......Isambard Kingdom Brunel..." built dockyards, the Great Western Railway, a series of steamships including the first propeller-driven transatlantic steamship and numerous important bridges and tunnels.".....

I'd personally put him in the top 5 British architects of all time, too. Absolute genius.

 

[jimbob]

Microchips. These days no one designs them by hand; they build the tools that interface with the libraries which optimally place the actual circuit elements. Said circuit elements are smaller than photons and are created with laser interference patterns (the "speckles" you see when you see laser light), taking into account bits of quantum mechanics which get in the way, like electrons losing track of which wire they're on.

As an aside, a now-retired colleague used to have a set of rubylith layers hanging above his desk. They were for (one of?) the first microprocessors in the UK, that he had laid out before I was born.

Engineers, especially the best engineers, the engineers that other engineers look to when they think about colleagues worth emulating, are not what you'd call people persons. You don't want a bridge designed by a social butterfly who networked his way into the job with his winning smile alone. You want the anal-retentive hardass who cares, deeply and passionately, about the tolerance of the screws that are being used for the most minor element of the project which he's lived and breathed for years, and frankly doesn't give a damn what color you paint it afterwards.

There are enough clashes of culture between conservative and gung-ho engineers anyway. Discussing what acceptable risk is can be quite heated.

Such people are not superstar material, because our media at the moment doesn't value hard work and deliberate consideration of a matter at hand half as much as the ability to squirt out witty soundbites and an inability to admit to being wrong.

When National Semiconductor was independent, the (last?) CEO used to point out that some of the star analog designers in the company were on a higher salary than him.

ETA: but yes in gerneral.

Some are that way inclined though, Tony Stark Elon Musk springs to mind.