Ancient era

7

The Pharos of Alexandria, the pyramids in Egypt, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Acropolis and the Parthenon in Greece, the Roman aqueducts, the Colosseum, the cities and pyramids of the Mayan, Inca and Aztec Empires, the Great Wall of China, among many others, stand as a testament to the ingenuity and skill of the ancient civil and military engineers.

8

The earliest civil engineer known by name is Imhotep. As one of the officials of the Pharaoh, Djosèr, he probably designed and supervised the construction of the Pyramid of Djoser (the Step Pyramid) Egypt around 2630-2611 BC. He may also have been responsible for the first known use of columns in architecture.

9

Ancient Greece developed machines in both the civilian and military domains. The antikythera mechanism, the first known mechanical computer, and the mechanical inventions of Archimedes are examples of early mechanical engineering. Some of Archimedes' inventions as well as the antikythera mechanism required sophisticated knowledge of differential gearing or epicyclic gearing, two key principles in machine theory that helped design the gear trains of the Industrial revolution, and are still widely used today in diverse fields such as robotics and automotive engineering.

10

Chinese, Greek and Roman armies employed complex military machines and inventions such as artillery which was developed by the Greeks around the 4th century B.C., the trireme, the ballista and the catapult.

11

The first electrical engineer is considered to be William Gilbert, with his 1600 publication of De Magnete, who was the originator of the term "electricity". The first steam engine was built in 1698 by mechanical engineer Thomas Savery. The development of this device gave rise to the industrial revolution in the coming decades, allowing for the beginnings of mass production.

12

With the rise of engineering as a profession in the eighteenth century, the term became more narrowly applied to fields in which mathematics and science were applied. Similarly, in addition to military and civil engineering the fields then known as the mechanic arts became incorporated into engineering.

13

Electrical engineering can trace its origins in the experiments of Alessandro Volta in the 1800s, the experiments of Michael Faraday, Georg Ohm and others and the invention of the electric motor in 1872. The work of James Maxwell and Heinrich Hertz in the late 19th century gave rise to the field of Electronics. The later inventions of the vacuum tube and the transistor further accelerated the development of electronics to such an extent that electrical and electronics engineers currently outnumber their colleagues of any other engineering specialty.

14

The inventions of Thomas Savery and the Scottish engineer James Watt gave rise to modern Mechanical Engineering. The development of specialized machines and their maintenance tools during the industrial revolution led to the rapid growth of Mechanical Engineering both in its birthplace Britain and abroad.

15

Chemical Engineering, like Mechanical Engineering, developed in the nineteenth century during the Industrial Revolution. Industrial manufacturing demanded new materials and new processes and by 1880 the need for large scale production of chemicals was such that a new industry was created, dedicated to the development and large scale manufacturing of chemicals in new industrial plants. The role of the chemical engineer was the design of these chemical plants and processes.

16

Aeronautical Engineering deals with aircraft design while Aerospace Engineering is a more modern term including spacecraft design. Its origins can be traced back to the aviation pioneers around the turn of the century from the 19th century to the 20th. Early knowledge of aeronautical engineering was largely empirical with some concepts and skills imported from other branches of engineering. Only a decade after the successful flights by the Wright brothers, there was extensive development of aeronautical engineering through development of military aircraft that were used in World War I. Meanwhile, research to provide fundamental background science continued by combining theoretical physics with experiments.

17

In 1990, with the rise of computer technology, one started to speak about computer engineering, also called computer systems engineering. It is a discipline that integrates several fields of electrical engineering and computer science required to develop computer systems. Computer engineers usually have training in electronic engineering, software design, and hardware-software integration instead of only software engineering or electronic engineering. Computer engineers are involved in many hardware and software aspects of computing, from the design of individual microprocessors, personal computers, and supercomputers, to circuit design. This field of engineering not only focuses on how computer systems themselves work, but also how they integrate into the larger picture.

After you have read

Unit 5

TOPIC PRESENTATION

Outstanding inventions

Match the date and invention

SKILLS

Reading

Before you read

What inventions of the millennium do you consider the most important? Why?

Which of the inventions are of the Russian origin?

While you read

Read the text (study reading). Choose one word or phrase that best keeps the meaning of the original sentence if substituted for the word in bold type

LANDMARK INVENTIONS OF THE MILLENNIUM

The last 1,000 years have produced an (1) incredible number and variety of scientific and technological (2) breakthroughs – but which of these were the most important? Narrowing a list of the thousands of inventions to the ten greatest requires some (3) exact criteria. The qualifying inventions either provided (4) radically new ways to do an important job, or they made possible tasks that were previously unimagined. Their (5) impact was felt, if not (6) right away then (7) eventually, by a large portion of humanity. These developments have (8) enabled significant new technological innovations and scientific discoveries. And finally, they have had an (9) enduring effect on the world.

The inventions that meet these criteria, in (10) chronological order, are the compass, the mechanical clock, the glass lens, the printing press, the steam engine, the telegraph, electric power, wireless communication, antibiotics, and the transistor.

Missing from this list are many extremely significant technological advances, including the airplane, telephone, automobile, and computer. In many cases these inventions were (11) omitted because they are based on earlier developments and breakthroughs.

In considering the ten most significant inventions of the past 1,000 years, a (12) subtle distinction must be made. The difference between “invention” and “discovery” is not as (13) clear as one might think. A discovery can be as simple as the observation of a (14) previously unnoticed phenomenon, while an invention is human-devised machine, tool, or apparatus that did not previously exist. For example, ancient people discovered that drops of water and certain gemstones distorted light in a predictable way. (15) However, it was not until medieval times that others tried to reproduce this effect by applying new glass-shaping technology to the formation of lenses – the (16) basic elements of spectacles, microscopes, telescopes and cameras. (17) Similarly, people knew about and studied electricity as a force of nature for thousands of years, but it was the technological (18) leap of mass-producing electricity and (19) delivering it to homes and factories in the early 20-th century that (20) transformed the world.

After you have read

Do you agree with the list of inventions mentioned in the text?

Can you fill in the table?

Unit 6

TOPIC PRESENTATION

Outstanding engineers

Who said it?

1. Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.

2. Imagination is more important than knowledge.

3. You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him discover it in himself.

4. An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

5. An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.

6. A true friend is one soul in two bodies.

7. Make a habit of two things: to help or at least to do no harm.

_________________________________________________________

a) Benjamin Franklin; b) Albert Einstein; c) Charles Darwin; d) Galileo

e) Aristotle; f) Thomas Alva Edison; g) Hippocrates

SKILLS

Reading

Text 1

Before you read

What do you know about James Watt?

While you read

Read the text (average / skimming reading) and fill in the profile

JAMES WATT

James Watt was a  Scottish  inventor  and  mechanical engineer  whose improvements to the  Newcomen steam engine  were fundamental to the changes brought by the  Industrial Revolution  in both his native  Great Britain  and the rest of the world.

James Watt was born on 19 January 1736 in Greenock, Scotland.  His father was a shipwright, ship owner and contractor, while his mother, Agnes Muirhead, came from a distinguished family and was well educated. Watt's grandfather, Thomas Watt, was a mathematics teacher.

Watt did not attend school regularly; initially he was mostly schooled at home by his mother but later he attended Greenock grammar school. He exhibited great manual dexterity, engineering skills and an aptitude for mathematics, while Latin and Greek failed to interest him.

When he was eighteen, his mother died and his father's health began to fail. Watt travelled to London to study instrument-making for a year, then returned to Scotland, settling in the major commercial city of Glasgow intent on setting up his own instrument-making business. He made and repaired brass reflecting quadrants, parallel rulers, scales, parts for telescopes, and barometers, among other things. Because he had not served at least seven years as an apprentice, the Glasgow  Guild  of Hammermen (which had jurisdiction over any artisans using hammers) blocked his application, despite there being no other mathematical instrument makers in Scotland.

Watt was saved from this impasse by the arrival of astronomical instruments to the University of Glasgow that required expert attention. Watt restored them to working order and was remunerated. These instruments were eventually installed in the Macfarlane Observatory. Subsequently three professors offered him the opportunity to set up a small workshop within the university. It was initiated in 1757 and one of the professors, the physicist and chemist Joseph Black, became Watt's friend.

At first he worked on maintaining and repairing scientific instruments used in the university, helping with demonstrations, and expanding the production of quadrants. In 1759 he formed a partnership with John Craig, an architect and businessman, to manufacture and sell a line of products including musical instruments and toys. This partnership lasted for the next six years, and employed up to sixteen workers. Craig died in 1765. One employee, Alex Gardner, eventually took over the business, which lasted into the twentieth century.

While working as an instrument maker at the University of Glasgow, Watt became interested in the technology of steam engines. He realised that contemporary engine designs wasted a great deal of energy by repeatedly cooling and re-heating the cylinder. Watt introduced a design enhancement, the separate condenser, which avoided this waste of energy and radically improved the power, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of steam engines. He developed the concept of horsepower. The SI unit of power, the watt, was named after him.

In 1764, Watt married his cousin Margaret Miller, with whom he had five children, two of whom lived to adulthood. His wife died in childbirth in 1772. In 1777 he married again, to Ann MacGregor, daughter of a Glasgow dye-maker, with whom he had two children. Watt died in 1819 at the age of 83.

After you have read

What facts are not included in the profile?

Text 2

Before you read

What is Edison famous for?

While you read

Read the text (average reading)

Find the appropriate place in the text for the phrases

1) These talents eventually led him to found 14 companies, including General Electric, which is still in existence as one of the largest publicly traded companies in the world.

2) His first patent was for the electric vote recorder, (U.S. Patent 90,646), which was granted on June 1, 1869.

3) The next morning Edison was fired.

4) His mother homeschooled him. 

5) Edison considered himself to be of Dutch ancestry.

6) These included a stock ticker, a mechanical vote recorder, a battery for an electric car, electrical power, recorded music and motion pictures.

7) Jimmie's father, station agent J.U. MacKenzie of Mount Clemens, Michigan, was so grateful that he trained Edison as a telegraph operator.

8) He sold candy and newspapers on trains running from Port Huron to Detroit, and he sold vegetables to supplement his income.

THOMAS ALVA EDISON

Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. He was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production and large teamwork to the process of invention, and therefore is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory.

Thomas Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, and grew up in Port Huron, Michigan. He was the seventh and last child of Samuel Ogden Edison, Jr. His father had to escape from Canada because he took part in the unsuccessful Mackenzie Rebellion of 1837.  (1) _______ .

In school, the young Edison's mind often wandered, and his teacher was overheard calling him "addled". This ended Edison's three months of official schooling. Edison recalled later, "My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me; and I felt I had something to live for, someone I must not disappoint." (2) ______ . Much of his education came from reading R.G. Parker's School of Natural Philosophy and The Cooper Union.

Edison developed hearing problems at an early age. The cause of his deafness has been attributed to a bout of scarlet fever during childhood and recurring untreated middle-ear infections.

Edison's family was forced to move to Port Huron, Michigan, when the railroad bypassed Milan in 1854, but his life there was bittersweet. (3) _____ . He also studied qualitative analysis, and conducted chemical experiments on the train until an accident caused the prohibition of further work of the kind.

He obtained the exclusive right of selling newspapers on the road, and, with the aid of four assistants, he set in type and printed the Grand Trunk Herald, which he sold with his other papers. This began Edison's long streak of entrepreneurial ventures as he discovered his talents as a businessman. (4) _____ .

Edison became a telegraph operator after he saved three-year-old Jimmie MacKenzie from being struck by a runaway train. (5) _____ . Edison's first telegraphy job away from Port Huron was at Stratford Junction, Ontario, on the Grand Trunk Railway.

In 1866, at the age of 19, Thomas Edison moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where, as an employee of Western Union, he worked the Associated Press bureau news wire. Edison requested the night shift, which allowed him plenty of time to spend at his two favorite pastimes - reading and experimenting. Eventually, the latter pre-occupation cost him his job. One night in 1867, he was working with a lead-acid battery when he spilled sulfuric acid onto the floor. It ran between the floorboards and onto his boss's desk below. (6) _____ .

One of his mentors during those early years was a fellow telegrapher and inventor named Franklin Leonard Pope, who allowed the impoverished youth to live and work in the basement of his Elizabeth, New Jersey home. Some of Edison's earliest inventions were related to telegraphy, including a stock ticker. (7) ______ .

On December 25, 1871, Edison married 16-year-old Mary Stilwell, whom he had met two months earlier as she was an employee at one of his shops. They had three children. Mary Edison died on August 9, 1884.

On February 24, 1886, at the age of thirty nine, Edison married 20-year-old Mina Miller in Akron, Ohio. She was the daughter of inventor Lewis Miller, co-founder of the Chautauqua Institution and a benefactor of  Methodist charities. They also had three children. Mina outlived Thomas Edison, dying on August 24, 1947.

Edison is the fourth most prolific inventor in history, holding 1,093 US patents in his name, as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. He is credited with numerous inventions that contributed to mass communication and, in particular, telecommunications. (8) ____ .

After you have read

Speak about Edison using his profile

Born – February 11, 1847

Died – October 18, 1931

Nationality – American

Education – homeschooled

Occupations – inventor, scientist, businessman

Spouse – Mary Stilwell (m. 1871-1884), Mina Miller (m. 1886-1931)

Religion – Deist

Known for – inventing the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb; creating the first industrial research laboratory. He was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production and large teamwork to the process of invention.

Text 3

Before you read

Would you like to make personal acquaintance with Tim Berners-Lee? Why?

What questions would you like to ask him?

While you read

Read the text (average reading) and say whether it contains information you are interested in

TIM BERNERS-LEE

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, also known as "TimBL", is a British computer scientist, MIT professor and the inventor of the World Wide Web. He made a proposal for an information management system in March 1989 and on 25 December 1990, with the help of Robert Cailliau and a young student at CERN, he implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet.

Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the Web's continued development. He is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, and is a senior researcher and holder of the 3Com Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He is a director of The Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), and a member of the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.

In 2004, Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his pioneering work. In April 2009, he was elected a foreign associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences, based in Washington, D.C.

Early life

Tim Berners-Lee was born in southwest London, England, on 8 June 1955, the son of Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods. His parents worked on the first commercially built computer, the Ferranti Mark 1. One of four children, he attended Sheen Mount primary school, and then went on to Emanuel School in London, from 1969 to 1973. He studied at The Queen's College, Oxford, from 1973 to 1976, where he received a first-class degree in Physics.

Career

While being an independent contractor at CERN from June to December 1980, Berners-Lee proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers. While there, he built a prototype system named ENQUIRE.

After leaving CERN in 1980, he went to work at John Poole's Image Computer Systems, Ltd, in Bournemouth, England. The project he worked on was a real-time remote procedure call which gave him experience in computer networking. In 1984 he returned to CERN as a fellow.

In 1989, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe, and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to join hypertext with the Internet: "I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and the World Wide Web." “Creating the web was really an act of desperation, because the situation without it was very difficult when I was working at CERN later. Most of the technology involved in the web, like the hypertext, like the Internet, multifont text objects, had all been designed already. I just had to put them together. It was a step of generalising, going to a higher level of abstraction, thinking about all the documentation systems out there as being possibly part of a larger imaginary documentation system.” He wrote his initial proposal in March 1989, and in 1990, with the help of Robert Cailliau (with whom he shared the 1995 ACM Software System Award), produced a revision which was accepted by his manager, Mike Sendall. He used similar ideas to those underlying the ENQUIRE system to create the World Wide Web, for which he designed and built the first Web browser, which also functioned as an editor (WorldWideWeb, running on the NeXTSTEP operating system), and the first Web server, CERN HTTPd (short for Hypertext Transfer Protocol daemon).

The first web site built was at CERN, and was first put online on 6 August 1991. It provided an explanation of what the World Wide Web was, and how one could use a browser and set up a web server.

In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT. It comprised various companies that were willing to create standards and recommendations to improve the quality of the Web. Berners-Lee made his idea available freely, with no patent and no royalties due.

In December 2004, he accepted a chair in Computer Science at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, England, to work on his new project, the Semantic Web.

Current work

In June 2009 then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced Berners-Lee would work with the UK Government to help make data more open and accessible on the Web.

Berners-Lee is one of the pioneer voices in favour of Net Neutrality, and has expressed the view that ISPs should supply "connectivity with no strings attached," and should neither control nor monitor customers' browsing activities without their expressed consent. He advocates the idea that net neutrality is a kind of human network right.

Personal life

Berners-Lee had a religious upbringing, but left the Church of England as a teenager, just after being confirmed and told how essential it was to believe in all kinds of unbelievable things. He and his family eventually joined a Unitarian Universalist church while they were living in Boston. They now live in Lexington, Massachusetts.

After you have read

Translate the following questions into English and answer them

1) Кто такой Бернерз-Ли?

2) Что произошло 25 декабря 1990 года?

3) Чем занимается Бернерз-Ли в настоящее время?

4) За что он был возведен в рыцарское звание Елизаветой II?

5) Где и когда родился Тим?

6) Кто его родители?

7) Какое образование он получил?

8) Каковы основные вехи его карьеры?

9) Где был создан первый веб-сайт?

10) Когда он вступил в действие?

11) Какая информация содержалась на этом сайте?

12) С какой целью был создан W3C?

13) Почему Бернерз-Ли возглавил кафедру университета в Саутгемптоне в декабре 2004 года?

14) Какую религию исповедует Бернерз-Ли?

15) Где он живет в настоящее время?

Speaking

Topics to discuss

1. “You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.”

Marie Curie

• 2. “I am one of those who think like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries.”

Marie Curie

• 3. “A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, - a mere heart of stone.”

Charles Darwin

• 4. “Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world. Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence.”

Louis Pasture

Topics for reports / presentations

1. The history of the most important inventions that we widely use today.

2. The coming advances of the 21 century.

3. The inventions bearing the names of their inventors.

4. The most prominent scientists in the field of computers / transport / electricity / architecture, etc.

KEYS

Unit 1

Task 3

1 – doctor, 2 – workman, 3 – architect, 4 – cook, 5 – tailor, 6 – shoemaker

Task 4

1. Let each tailor mend his own coat.

2. Every man is an architect of his own fortune.

3. The shoemaker’s son always goes barefoot.

4. An apple a day keeps the doctor away.

5. Every cook praises his own broth.

6. A bad workman always blames his tools.

Task 7

1– career, 2 – job, 3 – occupation, 4 – profession,

5 – job, 6 – profession, 7 – career, 8 – jobs

Unit 2

Unit 3

Task 9

While you read (p.15)

They were asked: “What was the most important or biggest change in the engineering profession over the past 80 years?”

1-6

2-4

3-8

4-1

5-3

6-7

7-2

8-6

1D

2C

3C

4B

5D

6A

7A

8A

9B

10C

11D

12A

13B

14D

15C

16A

17D

18B

19C

20A

1-f

2-b

3-d

4-a

5-c

6-e

7-g

1-5

2-4

3-8

4-1

5-7

6-3

7-2

8-6