Why Was This Generation of Engineers Special?

After this rather long prelude, I want to talk about 10 years of engineering students, those from roughly 1960 to 1970. I entered engineering school (The Cooper Union) in 1962 and graduated with a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering in 1966, so I consider myself a representative of this group. After lots of high school preparation, I entered college almost exactly five years after Sputnik went up. I was going to be an engineer.

I also want to talk about engineers, not scientists. I did my graduate work in physics and earned my doctorate in experimental high-energy particle physics in 1972, so I can claim and consider myself both an engineer and a physicist. But while the physics and other sciences saw relatively little change during this decade, the engineering profession and engineering schools saw a lot of radical change.

I might also remark in passing that this may have been the last great wave of American-born engineering students. Once this group of people passed through the system, we reverted to not pushing kids into engineering. The vacuum was then filled by students from overseas.

This generation of engineering students was on the cusp. We were the last to undergo some of the classical disciplines of engineering. This may have varied from school to school (Cooper was on the conservative side), but before 1960 things were one way, and after 1970 they were another way. During the sixties it was a mix; depending on which school you attended, you got a slightly different mix.

For example, my freshman class was one of the last classes to receive formal training in engineering drafting and projective geometry. Drafting meant using dividers and straightedges to do professional-quality engineering drawings. Today, you might know one subclass of these as blueprints. We had to understand top view and side view, and how to generate views at any arbitrary angle given these two. And my own special hell: We couldn't pass the course until we had done at least one India ink drawing on vellum paper.^[5] This was all part of the tradition of the engineer being just down the hall from the machine shop. You needed to be able to complete drawings that communicated something meaningful to a machinist. It was the part of engineering that was "sleeves rolled up, loosen your tie." To be part of the team, you had to understand and be able to do engineering drawings, even though you wore a white shirt and tie and the machinist wore a blue-collar shirt and apron. In some sense, you were going to be peers (at least for awhile), and learning to draw was part of the apprenticeship. The idea that you could become an engineer without being able to do "mechanical drawing" was a non-starter. They laugh when I tell these stories today. But it was dead serious stuff back then. Imagine being able to ace calculus because you can do integration by parts to beat the band, but are in mortal fear of flunking out because that damn ink always runs underneath the straightedge before you can finish the bloody drawing.

^[5] Strictly speaking, vellum is not paper. It is not parchment, either; it is made from calfskin. But if I didn't say "vellum paper," no one would know what I was talking about.