The invisible engineer and the telecom fairy
While running kids to school this morning, I heard a commercial talking about new cell phone service and how it wasn’t due to magic, i.e. the Telecommunications Fairy. The commercial failed to tell us how this new service came to be: that is it was due, in part, to the work of engineers. This is probably a step back from the story one of my EE profs told me in grad school. He had just received his PhD in electrical engineering when a neighbor came over. The neighbor was complaining because his furnace was on the fritz, and he was hoping my prof could help him fix it. My prof responded that he hadn’t studied that model in school. It used to be that engineers were perceived to be fairly close to mechanics or electricians. During the space race, they were…