"The engineer must be able not only to design, but to execute. A draftsman may be able to design, but unless he is able to execute his designs to successful operation he cannot be classed as an engineer. The production engineer must be able to execute his work as he has planned it. This requires two qualifications in addition to technical engineering ability: He must know men, and he must have creative ability in applying good statistical, accounting, and 'system' methods to any particular production work he may undertake." (Hugo Diemer, "Industrial Engineering", 1905)
"In fact 'engineering' now often signifies a new system of thought, a fresh method of attack upon the world’s problems the antithesis of traditionalism, with its precedents and dogmas. (Alfred D Flinn, "Leadership in Economic Progress", Civil Engineering Vol. 2 (4), 1932)
"There may be said to be two kinds of engineering, that which is essentially creative, and that which is practiced in pursuit of known methods." (William L Emmet, "The Autobiography of an Engineer", 1940)
"Science acquires knowledge but has no interest in its practical applications. The applications are the work of engineers." (Edwin P Hubble, "The Nature of Science and Other Lectures", 1954)
"An engineering science aims to organize the design principles used in engineering practice into a discipline and thus to exhibit the similarities between different areas of engineering practice and to emphasize the power of fundamental concepts. In short, an engineering science is predominated by theoretical analysis and very often uses the tool of advanced mathematics." (Qian Xuesen, "Engineering cybernetics", 1954)
"The characteristic feature of our age results from the wedding of science and engineering. It is the working together of disciplined curiosity and purposeful ingenuity to create new materials, new forces, and new opportunities which powerfully affect our manner of living and ways of thinking." (Karl T Compton, "A Scientist Speaks: Excerpts from Addresses by Karl Taylor Compton - During the Years 1930-1949", 1955)
"Doing engineering is practicing the art of the organized forcing of technological change." (George Spencer-Brown, Electronics, Vol. 32 (47), 1959)
"Science aims at the discovery, verification, and organization of fact and information [...] engineering is fundamentally committed to the translation of scientific facts and information to concrete machines, structures, materials, processes, and the like that can be used by men." (Eric A Walker, "Engineers and/or Scientists", Journal of Engineering Education Vol. 51, 1961)
"What, then, is science according to common opinion? Science is what scientists do. Science is knowledge, a body of information about the external world. Science is the ability to predict. Science is power, it is engineering. Science explains, or gives causes and reasons." (John Bremer "What Is Science?" [in "Notes on the Nature of Science"], 1962)
"Engineering is the art of skillful approximation; the practice of gamesmanship in the highest form. In the end it is a method broad enough to tame the unknown, a means of combing disciplined judgment with intuition, courage with responsibility, and scientific competence within the practical aspects of time, of cost, and of talent. This is the exciting view of modern-day engineering that a vigorous profession can insist be the theme for education and training of its youth. It is an outlook that generates its strength and its grandeur not in the discovery of facts but in their application; not in receiving, but in giving. It is an outlook that requires many tools of science and the ability to manipulate them intelligently In the end, it is a welding of theory and practice to build an early, strong, and useful result. Except as a valuable discipline of the mind, a formal education in technology is sterile until it is applied." (Ronald B Smith, "Professional Responsibility of Engineering", Mechanical Engineering Vol. 86 (1), 1964)
"Engineering is a method and a philosophy for coping with that which is uncertain at the earliest possible moment and to the ultimate service to mankind. It is not a science struggling for a place in the sun. Engineering is extrapolation from existing knowledge rather than interpolation between known points. Because engineering is science in action - the practice of decision making at the earliest moment - it has been defined as the art of skillful approximation. No situation in engineering is simple enough to be solved precisely, and none worth evaluating is solved exactly. Never are there sufficient facts, sufficient time, or sufficient money for an exact solution, for if by chance there were, the answer would be of academic and not economic interest to society. These are the circumstances that make engineering so vital and so creative." (Ronald B Smith, "Engineering Is…", Mechanical Engineering Vol. 86 (5), 1964)
"Engineering is knowledge work. That is, although the goal of engineering may be to produce useful objects, engineers do not construct such object themselves. Rather they aim to generate knowledge that will allow such objects to be built." (Dorothy A Winsor, "Writing Like an Engineer: A Rhetorical Education", 1966)
"Engineering is a profession, an art of action and synthesis and not simply a body of knowledge. Its highest calling is to invent and innovate." (Daniel V DeSimone & Hardy Cross, "Education for Innovation", 1968)
"Technological invention and innovation are the business of engineering. They are embodied in engineering change." (Daniel V DeSimone & Hardy Cross, "Education for Innovation", 1968)
"[...] it is rather more difficult to recapture directness and simplicity than to advance in the direction of ever more sophistication and complexity. Any third-rate engineer or researcher can increase complexity; but it takes a certain flair of real insight to make things simple again." (Ernst F Schumacher, "Small Is Beautiful", 1973)
"Engineering is superficial only to those who view it superficially. At the heart of engineering lies existential joy." (Samuel C Florman, "The Existential Pleasures of Engineering", 1976)
"From the point of view of modern science, design is nothing, but from the point of view of engineering, design is everything. It represents the purposive adaptation of means to reach a preconceived end, the very essence of engineering." (Edwin T Layton Jr., "American Ideologies of Science and Engineering", Technology and Culture No. 4, 1976)
"[An engineer's] invention causes things to come into existence from ideas, makes world conform to thought; whereas science, by deriving ideas from observation, makes thought conform to existence." (Carl Mitcham, "Types of Technology", Research in Philosophy & Technology Vol. 1, 1978)
"A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering." (Freeman Dyson, "Disturbing the Universe", 1979)
"Engineering or Technology is the making of things that did not previously exist, whereas science is the discovering of things that have long existed. Technological results are forms that exist only because people want to make them, whereas scientific results are formulations of what exists independently of human intentions." (David Billington, "The Tower and the Bridge: The New Art of Structural Engineering", 1983)
"As engineering becomes increasingly central to the shaping of society, it is ever more important that engineers become introspective. Rather than merely revel in our technical successes, we should intensify our efforts to explore, define, and improve the philosophical foundations of our professions." (Samuel C Florman, "The Civilized Engineer", 1985)
"Engineering, like poetry, is an attempt to approach perfection. And engineers, like poets, are seldom completely satisfied with their creations. They notice, even if no one else does, the word that is not quite 'le mot juste' or the hairline crack that blemishes the structure." (Henry Petroski, "To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design", 1985)
"[...] without imagination, heightened awareness, moral sense, and some reference to the general culture, the engineering experience becomes less meaningful, less fulfilling than it should be." (Samuel C Florman, "The Civilized Engineer", 1985)
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world." (Isaac Asimov, "Isaac Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations", 1988)
"Engineering knowledge reflects the fact that design does not take place for its own sake and in isolation." (Walter G Vincenti, "What Engineers Know and How They Know It", 1990)
"Engineers use knowledge primarily to design, produce, and operate artifacts. [...] Scientists, by contrast, use knowledge primarily to generate more knowledge." (Walter Vincenti, What Engineers Know and How They Know It, 1990)
"All of engineering involves some creativity to cover the parts not known, and almost all of science includes some practical engineering to translate the abstractions into practice." (Richard W Hamming, "The Art of Probability for Scientists and Engineers", 1991)
"In science if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it. In engineering if you do not know what you are doing you should not be doing it. Of course, you seldom, if ever, see either pure state." (Richard W Hamming, "The Art of Probability for Scientists and Engineers", 1991)
"No matter how vigorously a 'science' of design may be pushed, the successful design of real things in a contingent world will always be based more on art than on science. Unquantifiable judgments and choices are the elements that determine the way a design comes together. Engineering design is simply that kind of process. It always has been; it always will be. (Eugene S Ferguson , "Engineering and the Mind’s Eye", 1992)
"Good engineering is not a matter of creativity or centering or grounding or inspiration or lateral thinking, as useful as those might be, but of decoding the clever, even witty, messages the solution space carves on the corpses of the ideas in which you believed with all your heart, and then building the road to the next message." (Fred Hapgood, "Up the infinite Corridor: MIT and the Technical Imagination", 1993)
"Engineering is the application of scientific principles toward practical ends. If the engineering isn't practical, it's bad engineering." (Steve McConnell, "After the Gold Rush: Creating a True Profession of Software Engineering", 1999)
"Engineering is quite different from science. Scientists try to understand nature. Engineers try to make things that do not exist in nature. Engineers stress invention. To embody an invention the engineer must put his idea in concrete terms, and design something that people can use. That something can be a device, a gadget, a material, a method, a computing program, an innovative experiment, a new solution to a problem, or an improvement on what is existing. Since a design has to be concrete, it must have its geometry, dimensions, and characteristic numbers. Almost all engineers working on new designs find that they do not have all the needed information. Most often, they are limited by insufficient scientific knowledge. Thus they study mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and mechanics. Often they have to add to the sciences relevant to their profession. Thus engineering sciences are born." (Yuan-Cheng Fung & Pin Tong, "Classical and Computational Solid Mechanics", 2001)
"Engineering isn't about perfect solutions; it's about doing the best you can with limited resources." (Randy Pausch, "The Last Lecture", 2008)
"The central activity of engineering, as distinguished from science, is the design of new devices, processes and systems." (Myron Tribus, "Rational Descriptions, Decisions and Designs", 2016)
"Designers need to be part engineer. Good design only exists in concert with engineering. That is because form has to follow function, so you focus on function and then give the object a shape to make it appealing." (Ferdinand A Porsche)
"Engineering is a living branch of human activity and its frontiers are by no means exhausted." (Igor I Sikorsky)
"Engineering is an art of simplification, and the rules - when and how to simplify - are a matter of experience and intuition." (Olle I Elgerd)
"Engineering is not merely knowing and being knowledgeable, like a walking encyclopedia; engineering is not merely analysis; engineering is not merely the possession of the capacity to get elegant solutions to non-existent engineering problems; engineering is practicing the art of the organizing forces of technological change. [...] Engineers operate at the interface between science and society." (Gordon S Brown)
"Engineering is the conscious application of science to the problems of economic production." (Halbert P Gillette)
"Engineering is the art or science of utilizing, directing or instructing others in the utilization of the principles, forces, properties and substances of nature in the production, manufacture, construction, operation and use of things [...] or of means, methods, machines, devices and structures [...]" (Alfred W Kiddle)
"Engineering is the professional and systematic application of science to the efficient utilization of natural resources to produce wealth." (T J Hoover & J C L Fish)
"Indeed, the most important part of engineering work - and also of other scientific work - is the determination of the method of attacking the problem, whatever it may be." (Charles P Steinmetz)
"The essence of engineering consists not so much in the mere construction of the spectacular layouts or developments, but in the invention required - the analysis of the problem, the design, the solution by the mind which directs it all." (William Hood)
"The scientist describes what is; the engineer creates what never was." (Theodore von Kármán)
