Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771
ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM
Monday, November 5, 2012 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium
Robert Friedel
"The Inventor's Pencil: Leonardo, Edison, and the Sketching Engineer"
ABSTRACT -- For generations of engineers, the drafting table, laboratory notebook, and handy sketchpad have been essential aspects of their professional identity – material testimony to the key role of visual representation in technical thinking and creativity. These visual representations, however, are not simply designs and images, but they are key elements of the thought processes of creative engineering. By going back and looking at the sort of record to be found in the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, we can see this process of "thinking by drawing" at work. The continuous significance of this can be illustrated by looking at the much more recent (and even more voluminous) graphic record left by Thomas Edison. This exploration seeks to go beyond the historical exploration, however, and attempts to provoke thinking about how this kind of creative thinking – so crucial in past invention – fares in an age in which engineering education and design largely abandon pencil and paper, substituting computers and machines. What are we losing?
SPEAKER -- Robert Friedel is professor of history at the University of Maryland, where he has taught the history of technology and science and environmental history for almost three decades. He holds degrees in the history of science and of technology from Brown, Imperial College, and Johns Hopkins. Before coming to College Park he was a historian at the Smithsonian Institution and the founding director of the IEEE Center for the History of Electrical Engineering. Most of his scholarship deals with the processes and consequences of invention, and his books include studies of the first plastics, Edison’s development of the electric light, and the introduction of the zipper. His most recent book is A Culture of Improvement; Technology and the Western Millennium, from MIT Press.