Let us take a moment, while contemplating the sleek engineering of the quiet engine sonic inlet, to consider that tie. That man is not a model. He is, in all likelihood, an engineer. An actual rocket scientist. There are no horn-rim glasses, no pocket protectors and neither white coat nor jumpsuit. Perhaps… and I can find no higher resolution [...]
E.D. Leavitt, Massachusetts mechanical engineer, designed many huge machines in the 1870s.They moved things, macerated and mangled them, mined and melted them. Leavitt’s machines did things measured in the millions of gallons.
And his niece was one of the great women of astronomy, too.
[image via Old Book Illustrations]
This early ’60s vision of the future (in all likelihood, right now) was painted by visual futurist Syd Mead, who worked in industrial design as well as making films like Blade Runner, Aliens and Tron look like tomorrow.
I found it on Professor Michael Stoll’s Flickr account, where he describes how he found it:
Sometimes students [...]
Image from Wikimedia Commons.
These symbols show steps in various chemical processes – the things you can do to change substances. Well, the things chemical engineers can do, one step leading into the next.
The symbols represent:
fan/stirrer, pneumatic line, pneumatic line vertical, measurement, simple heat exchanger
simple heat exchanger vertical, alternative heat exchanger, alternative heat exchanger, fixed-sheet heat exchanger, [...]
A medieval hunt for the “brownfish, or baleen.” Centuries before we got our light and energy by burning petroleum, we got it from whales.
This illustration comes from a series of books considered “the basis of modern zoology,” despite having mermaids and the Beast of Revelation among the squid and whale-hunters.
A color plate from the BioDiversity Library’s edition of Our Freshwater Fish, first published in Leipzig in 1913.
Heinrich Harder, as well as illustrating natural history books, displayed landscape paintings in galleries in his home city of Berlin. He also painted dinosaurs. Lots of them. There’s something primordial about this catfish, isn’t there? I suppose [...]
This funny looking can with the tower on top was America’s first ride into space. Wasn’t very big. Didn’t have a lot of electronics. Not so many moving parts. But it worked.
Thanks, NASA.
If you click the picture, you’ll see the little squiggles on the photo are actually the autographs of the people who [...]
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