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Engineering Unchained at the RSA, London

At the request of the learned 250 year old Royal Society of Arts in London, Chris Wise and Ed McCann spoke freely about the Watershed in contemporary engineering life. Held in October 2001, the talk was chaired by Sir Christopher Frayling, of the Royal College of Arts. Click on download on the right of this page to read the whole talk.

In Chris Frayling's words, it was "More of a performance than a lecture". With its theme developed out of the question: "Why do we need engineers?", Ed began by noting that we'd all be in the poo if Joseph Bazalgette hadn't sorted out London's Victorian Great Stink, and things went from there.

They spoke about the principal of Dominant Uncertainty (the thing that is most likely to keep you awake at night). The dominant uncertainty might once have been "Will I catch the Black Death from the Ether?", while today's dominant uncertainty might be "What are we to do about global warming?". Of course engineers can play a great part in solving the technological problems of rising sea-levels, or over-dependence on fossil fuels, but traditionally they are too busy doing hard sums to take their heads up from their calculatiors and log tables. Nevertheless, in the digital age, they are potentially freed from the tyranny of mathematics, and can use their undoubted talents of logic, problem solving, and engagement with the natural world at a more fundamental level, if only they want to. This is the Unchained part of the title of the talk.

In amongst the mayhem, as a demonstration of the power of new technological tools, Chris ran a structural analysis of a 50 storey skyscraper in 3 seconds, something that wouldn't have been possible in the olden days.