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Leonardo, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 127-132, 1983 Printed in Great Britain 0024-094X/83%3.00+0.00 Pergamon Press Ltd. ENGINEERING PHILOSOPHY-THE THIRD CULTURE?* Douglas Lewin** The London Times for 29 May 1867 carried on its correspondence pages letters from Earl Granville and Lord Taunton warning of the decline of British manufacturing industry and the need to establish industrial (technical) education along the lines of the Grandes Ecoles already established in France and on the Continent generally. Since that time, over a century ago, we have progressed through countless inquiries into ‘industrial education’. Notwithstanding, we still have the same problems and continually propose much the same solutions! Why should this apathetic attitude to engineering education, endemic it would seem to the British, have become entrenched in our society? One explanation could be the lack ofawareness and sympathy for engineering and technology on the part of both science and arts graduates which fuels the prejudice they undoubtedly have for engineering and the manufacturing industries.The existence of this form of intellectual Clitism is demonstrated by C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures argument [I], a concept which could only have been accepted and debated so strongly in the Englishspeaking world. On the Continent and particularly in Germany, there are not just two cultures but three-Kunst (fine art), Wissenschaft (science) and Technik (design of artefacts), so the culture gap argument of Snow would have little relevance. Unfortunately the Two Cultures argument has not only perpetuated the gap between science and the humanities but has also polarized the views of both groups against the world of manufacturing and engineering, which is held to be mundane and devoid of intellectual challenge and creativity. Who can doubt that this feeling exists when the character of Lewis Elliott in the novel The New Men [2] ‘is made to reflect “The engineers ...the people who make the hardware, who used existing knowledge to make somethinggo,were in nine cases out of ten conservatives in politics, acceptant of any regime in which they found themselves, interested in making their machine work, indifferent to long-term social guesses. Whereas the physicists, whose whole intellectual lifewas spent in seekingnew truths, found it uncongenial to stop seeking when they had a look at society.” What bright idealistic young person would want to become an engineer after reading that diatribe? But it has not always been that way. The ‘Golden Age of Engineering’ occurred between 1850 and 1950, a century in which the profession was established and flourished. Society lauded engineers as heroes, a r61e in which they frequently appeared in novels, short stories and poetry of the time [3]. During this period engineers were confident of their ability and place in society and felt they were improving the world, not only by their deeds, but also by their way o f thinking [4]. Unfortunately, though many of our greatest engineering achievements have occurred since 1950, this period has also coincided with an increasing disenchantment and open hostility towards engineering and technology. Writers such as Jacques *Based on a paper of the same title given to the Royal Societyof Arts **Professor of electronics, School of Mathematics and Physics, in April 1981. University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ. U.K. Ellul [5], Lewis Mumford [6], Charles Reich [7],Vance Packard [8], to name but a few, have all voiced the same anti-technology message. The engineering profession, through no fault of its own, excepting perhaps for idealistically obeying the behests of society, has had to bear the brunt of this attack. Thus engineering has been made to appear as a mundane academic subject with undesirable anti-social overtones. How is it that this view has become accepted in our society? Why is it that engineering is seen to lack both social and intellectual respectability? In this paper the author postulates that this is due to a lack of understanding of what constitutes engineering, the confusion between engineeringand science, but more specifically the lack of an identifiable engineering philosophy. Whilst engineering is seen simply as a confluence of science and industrial practices, a view still strongly held in schools and universities, engineers will always be considered as second-rate...

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