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Take a look around the room you’re in. An electric light probably illuminates the space, and you may be looking at a chair or a desk.
Perhaps there’s a laptop or tablet in view, too. If you’re in the kitchen, you may see a box of juice on the counter. If the TV is on, you might see images and hear voices or music. These are things most of us take for granted, but every single one of them is the solution to a problem and the end product of the engineering process.
The evolution of light bulbs shows the design process at work. First came the incandescent bulb, an electrical engineering answer to candles and kerosene lamps. Incandescent bulbs gave off lots of light, but they also used lots of energy. In response, engineers developed fluorescent bulbs, which lasted a long time and used less energy. But they gave off a bluish light, which people didn’t like. Then engineers came up with a whole new technology — light-emitting diodes. LED bulbs give off a warm light. They’re also energy efficient and long lasting. Problem solved. ▼
Incandescent Bulb Fluorescent Bulb LED Bulb
◀ Milk that lasts 10 or more days. Frozen vegetables that keep their look, taste, and nutritional value after they’re cooked. An unopened box of juice that stays fresh without being refrigerated. Foods with added vitamins and minerals. All these products are solutions chemical engineers have come up with as they worked to solve problems in the food industry.
Meet ENIAC. That’s short for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. ENIAC was the first large-scale computer in the United States. The size of a huge room, it was built between 1943 and 1945. Today, all the software written for it would fit on a chip smaller than the palm of your hand. Six women were the engineers who wrote that software. ▶
Think Piece!
What do you think will be the next development in computers?
◀ It’s called the motherboard. It functions like the central nervous system of a computer or cell phone. Designing and building motherboards as well as keyboards, routers, and printers is the work of hardware engineers. How can we make the hardware lighter, smaller, faster, smarter? These are a few of the questions that keep developers hard at work.
Software engineers design and create computer programs. These engineers test and revise their work many times. Often, they get help from computer users. For example, operating systems may change a lot. Some of them have numbers after their name, such as 10.14. In this example, 10 refers to the number of different versions of the operating system and 14 refers to the number of changes in that version of the system. ▶
Kids Discover talked with Elvis Herbert, an audio engineer in love with sound.
KD: How would you describe your work?
Herbert: I like to think of it as creating a world of color with sound.
KD: How do you, as an audio engineer, make that happen?
Herbert: I work with all technical aspects of sound during the process of recording, mixing, and reproducing. For example, I adjust the intensity and volume of the different sounds, like the sound of the room, the sound of each singer and each instrument. That’s what mixing is. I also work with record and TV producers, and writers and musicians. There, my role is to help give their work or their project the sound they want.
KD: What kind of projects have you done?
Herbert: I’ve worked on projects with well-known musicians. I’ve also worked on jingles and on dubbing advertisements from Japanese to English and Spanish to English.
KD: What is something most people probably don’t know about your work?
Herbert: That you don’t have to love the music you’re working on to do a great job. You do need to be open to the music and not judge it.
