#engineers week

Link here.

I had been meaning to share this since last week but time got away from me.

Events include:

The National Society of Professional Engineers has been sponsoring Engineers Week every February since 1951 as a means of calling attention to engineers’ contributions to society and advocating for the importance of education in math, science, and technical skills.

Today’s Engineers Week theme is Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day, so we’re sharing this December 1949 photograph of Florence Naum (1922-2006) testing a generator regular quality control machine at the Ford Motor Company’s plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The device tested regulators for 1950 Fords under simulated road conditions.

Naum was a resident of Farmington, Michigan. She began her career at Ford as a stock handler in 1939 after graduating high school and, by 1949, was the only woman electrical technician at the company and one of only two women enrolled at the University of Detroit in pursuit of an engineering degree. She eventually earned an electrical engineering degree from the University of Michigan and later became the first female electrical engineer employed at the company.

The week of February 18-24 is National Engineers Week, during which we honor the contributions engineers have made to our society.  The following photographs are from the series National Park Road Project Records, 1926-1959, created by the Phoenix (Arizona) Division Office.  

These photographs show the various stages of construction of Lee’s Ferry Bridge (also known as Grand Canyon Bridge and later, Navajo Bridge) in Coconino County, Arizona.  Construction was completed in 1929 and, at that time, the bridge was the highest steel arch bridge in America.

St. Patrick arrives at the University of Missouri campus by airship in 1906! Engineering students at Mizzou have been celebrating St. Patrick as an engineer since 1903.

Source – University Archives, Collection C:0/47/3 - http://muarchives.missouri.edu/c-rg0-s28.html

For Engineers Week 2023, we're honoring Hedy Lamarr - the glamorous movie star from the black-and-white era of film who co-invented a device that helped make possible the development of GPS, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi technology!

Born in Austria in 1914, the mathematically talented Lamarr moved to the US in 1937 to start a Hollywood career. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, she was considered one of cinema's leading ladies and made numerous films; however, her passion for engineering is far less known today. Her interest in inventing was such that she set up an engineering room in her house complete with a drafting table and wall of engineering reference books. With the outbreak of World War II, Lamarr wanted to apply her skills to helping the war effort and, motivated by reports of German U-boats sinking ships in the Atlantic, she began investigating ways to improve torpedo technology.

After Lamar met composer George Antheil, who had been experimenting with automated control of musical instruments, together they hit on the idea of "frequency hopping." At the time, radio-controlled torpedoes could easily be detected and jammed by broadcasting interference at the frequency of the control signal, thereby causing the torpedo to go off course. Frequency hopping essentially served to encrypt the control signal because it was impossible for a target to scan and jam all of the frequencies.

Lamarr and Antheil were granted a patent for their invention on August 11, 1942, but the US Navy wasn't interested in applying their groundbreaking technology until twenty years later when it was used on military ships during a blockade of Cuba in 1962. Lamarr and Antheil's frequency-hopping concept serves as a basis for the spread-spectrum communication technology used in GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices. Unfortunately, Lamarr's part in its development has been largely overlooked and her efforts weren't recognized until 1997, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave her an award for her technological contributions. Hedy Lamarr passed away in 2000 at the age of 85 and, in 2014, she was as long last inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for her invention of a "Secret Communication System" many years ago.