By Tom Davey
You have just seen the conference opened by a Town Crier ringing his bell and resplendent in the striking robes of his office. Town Criers were the news media of the era before the invention of the printing press led to widespread literacy and subsequently the half-penny newspapers. As we have just seen, even then, media types were a colourful lot.
Virtually all professions have developed striking artifacts to remind society of their status and value to society. Lawyers, judges, priests, military leaders and academics, all wear striking robes or uniforms. Even politicians begin their legislative sessions parading behind a regal mace as a symbol of their authority, with the speaker - always one of their own - clad in flowing robes. Political policies are proclaimed in Speeches From The Throne. Indeed, practically all these professions initiate their meetings with great solemnity, their ceremonies designed to remind us of the exalted status and importance of their role in society.
Engineers are different - very different, in fact. This is a profession which can design dazzlingly complex structures of great strength, beauty, and intricacy and durability. Engineers, scientists, physicists, astronomers, and others, ultimately put a man on the moon following Sputnik's beeping challenge.
We could not see how Captain Cook landed in Botany Bay, nor could we see Charles Darwin when The Beagle arrived in the Galapagos. And we can only wonder how the Ancient Britons accomplished their remarkable engineering feat with the tools of their era in building Stonehenge thousands of years ago.
Huge slabs of stone were quarried in Wales, them moved to Southern England to be erected, in a circular alignment to catch the sunrise on the summer solstice, the year's longest day. We can only speculate on how it was done to some complex mathematical plan some three millennia before the Romans built London.
By contrast, when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon - through a miracle of science and engineering - the world could watch the event live, thanks to mind-boggling precision engineering of the telemetry equipment. The Americans never like walking, even on the moon, so they took a car along with them. The Lunar Rover now occupies the most expensive parking space in our universe.
Ironically, Neil Armstrong went from outer space to a subterranean world when he used his scientific training to detect leaks in underground storage tanks. I met him in Toronto when he was a speaker on leakage detection at a conference.
In spite of all their achievements, engineers chose a simple artifact as the symbol of their calling - a ring of base metal, which legend says was cut from a failed bridge.
There's a humility in the engineering profession not found in any other. Take the Avro Arrow. The finest fighter plane prototype of its day - tragically and ironically shot down - not by an enemy of our government - but by the political bungling of the government of its day. Wouldn't it have been appropriate for these politicians to have worn aluminum rings to celebrate the destruction of a plane which might have catapulted Canada into the leading edge of the jet age?
Then take the legal profession. Lawyers who lose court cases don't have iron rings made from prison bars to commemorate lost cases, do they? And what should journalists wear when we mis-report science and technology? Our stock-in-trade being paper - a double ring of diapers perhaps - ideal for muck raking?
What about the infamous and oxymoronic BC 'Fast Ferries'. The only speed records they set were for rapidity in going over budget as well as their remarkable history of going from launching to retirement in record time. Another aluminum ring might be in order here.
But I say that the engineering profession has saved more lives, stayed more epidemics, enhanced more agricultural production, and, in countless ways, stemmed the flow of human misery better than virtually any other profession.
Technology to analyze the water for pathogens and provide effective treatment processes is available to keep our waters safe, but too often water is considered a 'free' commodity. Nor would it cost much to remediate, compared to other consumer costs. People willingly pay more per year on cable TV than on water and wastewater services. In physics, as well as economics, there can be no free lunch - or drinking water.
Abridged from his Keynote Address given at the Millennium Conference, Canadian Society for Civil Engineering, London, Ontario, June 8, 2000.
Copyright Tom Davey©, all rights reserved.