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Emily Warren Roebling
Keeping work moving on the Brooklyn Bridge
When chief engineer Washington Roebling could no longer work regularly on site, Emily took on much of the communication between him and the people building the bridge. She learned the technical details well enough to carry decisions through. Read her story for the part of engineering that happens between a drawing, a superintendent, and a crew.
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Hertha Ayrton
Born
Explaining why an electric arc hissed
Ayrton traced the hiss in carbon arc lamps to oxygen reaching the crater in the carbon. The sound and the change in the arc’s appearance were clues to what was happening at the electrode. Her work makes a good starting point if you want to see how a seemingly minor quirk can reveal how a device operates.
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Edith Clarke
Born
Simplifying calculations for power lines
Clarke’s graphical calculator let engineers work out electrical quantities for long transmission lines with less calculation by hand. Look up the device to see how a diagram could help people design a power system before digital computation. Clarke was making an established problem easier to solve over and over again.
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Elsie MacGill
Born
Turning an aircraft design into a production job
At Canadian Car and Foundry, MacGill helped prepare the plant to manufacture the Hawker Hurricane in quantity. She also worked on adaptations for cold-weather flying. Her story is about what happens after a basic design exists, when a factory has to build it reliably and the aircraft has to work in the conditions where it will fly.
More about Elsie MacGill5
Grace Hopper
Born
Making reusable code easier to call up
Hopper’s A-0 system for UNIVAC let a programmer identify routines the machine could retrieve and put to work. The useful idea was that you could describe the job at one level while the system handled more of the details underneath. That is a good place to start if you want to understand why a compiler changes who can write software and how they do it.
More about Grace Hopper6
Mary Jackson (engineer)
Born
Measuring airflow at supersonic speeds
Jackson and Kazimierz Czarnecki used a pressure tunnel at Langley to study how airflow changed over cones with different nose angles at supersonic speeds. Their report puts her engineering work in view. Start there to see how a deliberately simple test shape can help isolate what changes when you vary its shape or the speed of the air.
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Beatrice Hicks
Sensing the density of gas
At Newark Controls, Hicks developed a device for sensing gas density in equipment that used gas as a fuel or an insulator. That is a less visible kind of engineering than designing the equipment itself. Her contribution is a reminder that a system can depend on a small device being able to tell whether the conditions inside it have changed.
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Stephanie Kwolek
Born
Making a strong, lightweight fiber
Kwolek’s work on para-aramid fibers led to Kevlar. You can trace the usefulness of the discovery through applications as different as mooring ropes, canoe hulls, and fiber-optic cables. Put those examples side by side and the value becomes clearer: strength matters in all three, and excess weight creates a different problem in each.
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Frances Northcutt
Born
Working out a route home from the Moon
Northcutt helped develop return-to-Earth trajectories for Apollo and worked with the team supporting Apollo 8. The mission is often remembered for getting to lunar orbit. Her work brings the return into focus and shows why mission planners had to prepare for getting the crew home before they knew how the flight would unfold.
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Raye Montague
Born
Bringing computers into preliminary ship design
Montague and her team used a computer to produce a preliminary design for a U.S. Navy frigate. The part worth looking at is the early draft, when a design team has to put information from different specialists together and keep track of how choices affect one another. Using a computer changed how quickly the team could get to that point.
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Lynn Conway
Born
Giving more people a way to design chips
At Xerox PARC, Conway developed scalable rules for designing chips with very large numbers of components. She taught the method at MIT and helped develop a way for designers to get prototypes made. Put the rules and the prototype service together and you can see why her work mattered to people outside the companies that owned fabrication facilities.
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Radia Perlman
Keeping a larger Ethernet network manageable
Perlman’s Spanning Tree Protocol let interconnected Ethernet equipment settle on a path structure without loops. It helped networks grow beyond small installations. Start here if you are interested in the kind of engineering that makes a network handle some changes on its own instead of depending on someone to redraw its connections each time.
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Frances Arnold
Born
Finding enzymes that work in new settings
Arnold pioneered the use of directed evolution to develop enzymes for practical tasks. Work in this area has led to applications in chemical manufacturing and renewable fuels. Her contribution belongs here because it changed how engineers could approach the design problem when they knew what a useful result should do but had no straightforward way to build it from scratch.
More about Frances Arnold14
Marian Croak
Born
Making it practical to carry voice over the internet
Croak helped advance voice over internet protocol, which carries a call as digital data instead of sending it over a dedicated telephone circuit. Her work at AT&T makes a useful case study in adoption. Sending a voice over a network is one problem, and persuading a telephone company to build dependable service around that idea is another.
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