CAD History and Engineers

Another interesting article from this month's Mechanical Engineering magazine:

<a href="http://www.memagazine.org/contents/current/features/mastery/mastery.html">http://www.memagazine.org/contents/current/features/mastery/mastery.html</a>

Excerpt below:

<<It would take two decades after the inception of 3-D modeling before personal computers would be strong enough and cheap enough for companies to reasonably purchase one for every employee. Even today, many smaller shops work in 2-D, albeit with more advanced software than those first 2-D oscilloscopes.

The 2-D holdouts have no real reason to shift to the third dimension. For their basic design, 2-D does the job just fine, and their customers don't complain, Bettig said. Autodesk Inc. was started in 1982 by 13 men who set up shop in Marin County, Calif., and the company continues today as the largest supplier of 2-D CAD software.

What Does an Engineer Do?

Before the software's widespread adoption, engineering students learned in school the formal language of drafting: how to specify design dimensions, how to draw line thicknesses to denote specific design aspects, and when to include notes that would give special instructions to manufacturers or engineers down the line, Baker said.

That language disappeared with the advent of design software. So did the emphasis on certain manual skills that, years ago, separated the best engineers from the rest. When engineers' main medium was pencil and paper, they needed to possess rigorous hand-eye coordination, much as a visual artist does, Orr said. If you couldn't make a drawing that the next guy could read, you were done because the art and science of engineering depended on those paper drawings as the sole means of communication.

Now that an engineer works mainly with software, drafting prowess is barely considered necessary to the job.

"That sounds like a small thing, but it's a big thing because it
expanded the population of who could be a designer," Orr said.

In fact, the job of draftsman is obsolete. Just as there is now no such person as a typist, so too does a draftsman walk with dinosaurs. With any extinction, some things are invariably lost. And missed.

"We've lost a little of the art of the drawing, which is a shame to some
extent," Baker said. "We've lost a little bit of the apprenticeship aspect, where you work with a master. But when the typewriter replaced the written word, the advantage was being able to read typed writing rather than cursive writing—the unambiguity of that. You lose some skills, but the value of the end product has improved."

So has CAD affected the way engineers think? Probably not. Design is still design. After all, engineers still need to account for the laws of physics, which don't change no matter how far and how fast software advances. A shaft that broke 100 years ago will break today if designed and built in the same way. But 100 years ago, the engineer would have had to wait for the shaft to break to discover a design flaw. Today's engineers can run a series of virtual prototypes to see that they've picked the wrong-size shaft for their design.>> Received on Thu Sep 27 23:05:00 2007