When I was about five years old, I lived with my parents and sister in snowy upstate New York. It was the 1980s, and one day I sat in front of my favorite large rectangular lunch box, emblazoned with a picture of the Muppets on the front. This contained my huge collection of crayons: long, short, thick, thin, in every shade available. Like most kids, I was always curious and wanted to “find out” what was inside my crayons. So I removed the paper that wrapped them, then held them one at a time against the sharp edge of the open box and tore them in two. My great anticipation was somewhat dampened to find, well, just more crayons inside. However, I persisted.
When I was a bit older and started to write words on paper with pencils, I would twist them inside a pencil sharpener to see if the gray rod that marked my paper would go all the way through her body. She did it. From there, I moved on to pens: A far cry from the underwhelming crayons of my early childhood, the insides of fountain pens and ballpoint pens contained thin cartridges and coil springs, attached with a top that threaded, like a screw, into the rest of the pen.
Growing up in India, I watched my television being taken apart to reveal amazing innards that only made sense when I got a degree in physics. In fact, the reason I chose to study physics was because I wanted to understand the building blocks of our universe.
Towards the end of my school years, I had become fascinated with atomic and particle physics, captivated by the idea that the atom itself, once thought to be indivisible, was revealed to be composed of electrons, protons, and neutrons, and that these, after having their turn on the podium of the “fundamental building blocks of matter”, were supplanted by quarks. Whether I understood it or not at the time, I was on a mission to understand how things worked.
This search began in practical terms, with an engineering degree. I spent six years as part of the team that designed the Shard. Between the lack of women and people of color in my profession and my passion for my work, I have given hundreds of engineering presentations around the world, leading to the publication of two books on iconic structures and how they are built.
After exploring the big in my writing, I decided to turn to the small. Whether it’s the matter that makes up our universe, living biological creatures, or the human-made objects we invent, complex compositions are made of smaller, simpler things, well.
Within all the human-made things around us are fundamental building blocks without which our complex machinery would not exist. At first glance, they may seem uninteresting. Often small and sometimes hidden, the truth is that each of these items is an extraordinary feat of engineering with fascinating histories stretching back hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
It is this idea that inspired my book where I select what I believe to be seven elements that form the basis of the modern world: the nail, the wheel, the spring, the magnet, the lens, the pump, and the string. Together they encompass a wide range of innovations in terms of their underlying scientific principles, the engineering fields they touch, and the scale of the objects they have enabled. They are also design marvels that have gone through many different iterations and forms, and continue to do so. As they evolved, combined in different ways, the complexity of the machines we could build increased in a cascading butterfly effect of invention and innovation. Each of these objects has touched us: they have created and changed our technology, of course, but they have also had a radical impact on our history, society, political and power structures, biology, communication, transportation, arts, and culture.
I selected these seven objects during the first lockdown of 2020. Stuck at home, I let my mind wander free, looking at my possessions and mentally (or sometimes physically) deconstructing them to see what was inside. I revisited the pen and saw a spring, a screw, and a rotating sphere. The blender I used to make my baby food was based on gears, which in turn couldn’t exist without the wheel. Before that, when I was breastfeeding, a breast pump allowed my husband to feed our daughter as well. The IVF process I went through relied on a lens to see things on a cellular scale. The protective masks we wore during our short walks, and which kept the doctors safe, were made up of countless fibers intertwined to make cloth. The speaker on my phone through which I could hear the voices of family and friends relied on a magnet.
Even while thinking about larger and more complex objects (excavators, skyscrapers, factories, tunnels, power grids, cars, satellites, etc.), over and over again he returned to the same seven fundamental innovations. We unite things: the nail. We need something that turns or spins – the wheel. We need energy and technology that can store it: batteries, sure, but more fundamentally, the spring. Magnetism (and electricity) allow us to manipulate things at a distance; the lens allows us to play with the path of light. String gives us a strong material that is also flexible. To move water and stay alive, we make bombs.
The invention or discovery of each of these seven pieces of engineering involved a process of failure and iteration: of having a need, then trying different materials, shapes, and forms, until something worked. For example, buildings, bridges, factories, tractors, cars, telephones, locks, watches, and washing machines (in fact, most things that need metal parts to be attached to each other) have nails, screws, rivets, and bolts holding them together. together. The nail was originally used to join pieces of wood together, to create sturdier boats and furniture. Later, the screw greatly improved the holding power of the nail, although it was much more difficult to manufacture. Then, when thin sheets of metal could be made cheaply, neither the nail nor the screw served its purpose, and the rivet came along. Small rivets on cookware gave way to larger, stronger rivets for attaching metal planes, boats, and bridges, before engineers invented the bolt, a combination rivet and screw that was stronger and easier to remove. install. The tallest skyscrapers, the longest bridges, and the deepest tunnels remain stable and robust with these bolts.
However, all this evolution does not mean that the original nail is obsolete. In fact, nails, and their many incarnations, are being used in parallel with screws, rivets, and bolts, each serving its best-suited purpose. And this is how design changes: sometimes we use the same technology for centuries before inventing a new material or process, or realizing that we need to adapt existing technology to fit. Other times, it’s the other way around: we invent a new technology, like the incredibly strong fiber Kevlar, and then we find purposes for it, in this case, bulletproof vests. Some of these inventions were developed independently in different parts of the world with very similar designs, like the wheel, but others, like the pump, looked very different. And so these inventions were born, then changed and evolved in their own ways, often having unexpected applications and implications far beyond their original purpose.
While we think of engineering as a field littered with inanimate objects and complex pieces of technology that often feel alien or beyond our understanding, at the heart of engineering are people: those who create it, those who need it, and those who use it. , who sometimes inadvertently make a contribution to it.
When I think of ropes, I think of the seamstresses in Delaware who watched the moon landings worrying about the attachment of Neil Armstrong’s brace. Magnetism formed the basis of a colonial telegraph system, designed by a physician who passed electrical current through his hands. An Islamic scholar finally discovered how we see and revolutionized our understanding of optical physics, centuries before Newton left his mark.
And so, engineering is the meeting of science, design and history. It’s about human need and creativity, about finding problems and creating solutions to them in ways that haven’t been tried before. It’s about trying to improve our lives, but knowing that instead our inventions can have a devastating impact on society when not used responsibly. In its most fundamental form, it is inextricably linked to everyday life and humanity. Look around and ask questions about what you see – reignite that childish curiosity. Hopefully that will inspire you to investigate the increasingly complicated world of engineering and lead you to a better understanding of the building blocks of our world.
Nuts and Bolts: Seven Little Inventions That Changed the World (Big Way) by Roma Agrawal (Hodder, £22), is available at guardianbookshop.com for £14.78