The Things We Make summary

Ordinary tools and tasks must be produced and performed in ways that provide the best value. So how does an engineer decide what’s ideal?

Consider Henry Dreyfuss, the industrial designer who transformed homes and offices with everything from clocks, telephones, thermostats, pens, and other practical appliances.

A senior official who traded wine in Carchemish, a city-state around the Turkey-Syria border in the seventeenth century BCE, received an order of 18,000 bottles of wine from the neighboring king of Mari.

If delivered, he’d make three times his cost. Using a conventional boat down the rough  Euphrates River to Mari was out of the question, but a road caravan would leave them at the mercy of armed bandits.

When Navy ships lined up for official review at Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, they weren't ready for Charles Parsons. He’d made his way into the lineup through some high-level connections – a risky bet, but when it came down to it, his ship came from behind to beat the most formidable Navy ships of the day.

So how did Parsons’s steam turbine engine become the standard? And why do we still use it to generate most of the electricity we consume today from coal, gas, and nuclear plants?

One of the greatest rivalries in tech happened between Thomas Edison and Hiram Maxim. Of course, Edison eventually came out on top, he’s the one whose name you remember. But it wasn’t that simple.

Thomas Edison had invested time, men, and the financial resources from his investors into making an electric light bulb. He succeeded, but his incandescent bulbs would shine only for a few minutes before sputtering out. Every time the filament would burn out.

The microwave oven has an even more complex story. During World War II, the British developed a high-frequency short-wave emitter called a magnetron to improve the detection of Nazi fighter planes. The advanced magnetron was portable, and it was clear it would change the course of the war if mass-produced. But the British hadn’t found a way to mass produce them, and even if they could, they lacked the raw materials. The Nazi blockade around the British Isles meant raw materials couldn’t be received at the rate that they’d need them.

So the British found a way to smuggle their model across the Atlantic to America, where Percy Spencer, a scientist and engineer, found an affordable way to mass-produce the magnetron with cheaper materials. Percy Spencer, an employee at Raytheon, a radio and vacuum tube production company, started working on the project in 1940.

People with a depth of knowledge in their field can push boundaries when they apply creative solutions to current problems. To tackle these problems, they can use available resources and wade through uncertainty and error to discover what the best possible outcomes should be.

But remember, the “best” possible outcomes don’t always work for everyone. Engineers always subconsciously carry their motivations and the influence of their culture with them, but luckily a good understanding of the history and contributions of people from different backgrounds helps them appreciate the tools they use.