Engineering : The Industrial and Social Revolution

National Railway Museum - York, UK

It's Charles Dickens' anniversary, he the great novelist whose commentary on the social state in the industrial revolution, might have been interested to see how science and engineering turned out 112 years hence his famous novel about the industrial revolution.

With the huge development of the social networking jungle out their, I am pleased to see how engineers worldwide are adapting professional discussion groups to maintain a healthy interest in the development of Engineering Standards. How engineering itself has changed since its first real convocation during the Industrial Revolution where locomotives are named after the King, through to the Social Revolution.....







I am in Foxboro, MA at the moment, home of the New England Patriots, who all those around me, except my Giant's hosts on Super bowl night are hopeful for a massive win against the Giants down in Indianapolis. I will be wearing a Patriot's shirt for good countermeasure.[ps:footnote 2]

I had to spend some time in the few weeks before arriving in the UK on business with Invensys, and managed to find some spare time on the weekend to visit the historic town of York.

I learnt that York was home to the UK National Railway Museum.  On a visit to that museum I got to realize the enormity of not only the range of invention of the locomotives housed there, but the rapidity that they developed from James Watt's basic steam engine to the amazing King George V locomotive of the Great Western Railway [GWR].  I recommend this kind of place to gain an appreciation for the extent and raw beauty of the engineering that had taken place to create them.[Footnote 1].

Science Departments, typewriters, photography, electric light and power, and the telegraph became the basic tools of engineering during the industrial revolution [ Industrial Revolution Timeline ]. These basics, now commodities enabled many country people to study and to join teams of professional engineers who worked in the large cities to create new and bigger works. The industrial revolution itself created major engineering communities in the large cities of the world.

Whereas the rapid advancement of science taking place in universities and laboratories around the world could create relations and connections with materials and mathematics, it is Engineering that enables these great advances to be socialized and made accessible for the benefit of the public at large. But in order to be acceptable to the public, to look good, to be safe, to be efficient, engineers need to take into account many scientific and non-scientific factors in order to be sure that their next big creation will not fail or fall down.  The development of engineering standards has enabled engineers to confidently extend the socialization of new science by the application of new ideas within the frameworks of existing and newly developing standards.

Now 200 years hence a new revolution is happening in engineering. The more progressive use of social networks has enabled engineering to re-invent itself. This transformation is exciting and has not yet reached full maturity.

In 2002 linkedin started to allow professionals of many walks of life to post a profile, and more importantly form and join groups of individuals. I joined linkedin in the early days, but it is not until recently that its connectivity among engineers has reached critical mass and taken on almost a life of it's own. Two key engineering communities are now in abundance on linked in.  These are ISA and IEE and represented as discussion groups. I have joined both groups and encourage others to do the same.

These groups benefit engineering at large by providing the following key benefits:-

• Reach : Social networking reaches engineers from most countries at all hours of the day.
• Collaboration : Social networking supports the development of forums and discussion groups centred on the understanding, and more importantly connectivity with standards committee members.
• Central Repository : Social networking provides an excellent feedback mechanism for the understanding of which standard applies in any situation, and also the relevance and age of the standard.
• Time Zone: Nowadays with advances in science and technical ability advancing daily, engineering can struggle to keep up. Social networking allows for people to interact in different time zones and with out of sync sleep patterns to continue to further the goal of a better working framework.

Social networking is still developing.  The use of Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, Google, Wikipedia and other sites are a start, but I believe that it is the conjunction of these with the engineering standards groups which could accelerate the development of new ways of doing and collaborating for the engineering of plant systems of the future.

The IEC is heavily involved in the definition of standards in SCADA systems in particular one of the more recent standards, IEC 61850; IEC 60870-5-101/103/104.

International Electrotechnical Commission IEC 

The ISA Instrument Society of America is heavily involved in the definition of standards and their application in the world of automation. In particular Batch, Process, Manufacturing and SCADA automation. Critical standards now under development are ISA 95 and ISA 106.

The Instrument Society of America ISA

 On the anniversary of Charles Dickens 200th birthday, we can call to mind his famous quotation:-

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
English novelist (1812 - 1870)

Invensys itself has taken on board the collaborative nature of social networks to connect its very widespread internal groups.  This has resulted in a new, dare I say more positive, interaction between members of the community.  Working for any international, global engineering firm can be tough, however I continually marvel at the cooperative nature of the people who work around me in this company.  I am sure that social networks, both intranet and external can only help assist in this.

Chris Smith,  Foxboro, USA 5 Feb 2012.

Footnotes
1. An English second cousin of mine, let me know that my great grandfather had actually worked in London in the Engineering dept. of the GWR, not as an engineer mind, but as Chief Clerk, no doubt occupied with the myriad supply chain requirements of managing engineering on a railway back in the early 1900s.
2. Although the game was close, subsequently the Giant's won and I feel commiserations for all the Patriot's fans in the area.