#mechanical engineering certification course

[finniestoncrane]

i have been thinking about the riddler a lot as i always do since i am in love with him and haven't gone a day in the past four years without thinking of him tbh and, since i also want him to suffer a complete ego fall i've been focused on his weaknesses, obvious and numerous as they are. and hear me out i think his main weakness, over most eddie's but particularly the arkhamverse riddler, is that he's not actually as smart as he says or thinks he is and worse than that he knows it all too well

rambling opinions and thoughts below, i just really like the idea of him being so fallible and so warped and so deluded, makes me want to smother him with love and/or pillows

this is maybe an observation that's been made, but i still mostly see people insisting that eddie is the smartest man in the world, a genius, unapproachable in his intelligence. i fell into that trap too because it's his language, and as a diehard loser groupie of his i would absolutely be hanging on his every word, knelt at his feet telling him of course he's the smartest person to ever exist. but he's... not? and outside of adoring fans i think everyone realises it. including himself. or he did at one point and is now past the point of being able to recognise it or admit for fear of the self-combustion that would happen

now you'll have to bear with me, because i'm not saying he's unintelligent. i'm saying though that where he is clever is not the way he thinks he is, and it's different for every iteration, really, or most of them. my own edward for example is an adept mathematician and engineer, he has dyscalculia and suspected dyslexia, he can't tell his right from his left, but none of that affects the areas where he is skilled and informed. despite what any given riddler insists, he has strengths and weaknesses

that's where eddie in the arkhamverse (specifically to me) comes into things. because he refuses to acknowledge that he has any weaknesses.at least not out loud. and maybe not even to himself if he wants to have a good day. obviously he's clever. obviously he has skills. he's a mechanical engineer. he reminds me of a close family member who once tried to explain quantum physics to me on a napkin in four minutes before i had to go to choir. BUT that's where the difference is!! eddie can do things, he can know things, but i don't think he could explain that knowledge. he couldn't pass it on to someone else. it almost just feels inherent to him. not earned, just there. which i think is where his imposter syndrome and need to prove himself and the resulting overcompensation comes from

much like in his youth where he cheated instead of actually bothering to learn, eddie either absorbs the information or doesn't, and when he doesn't it embarrasses him to a point where he can't admit it and has to lie. there are considerable gaps in his knowledge and his skillset and rather than fill them, he pretends they don't exist because to admit it would be to admit his falliable nature, his humanity (gross)

that sort of fits in with my idea that he's sort of fallen victim to the sunk cost fallacy of it all. i mean, in the arkham games he's a purveyor of puzzles more than riddles. admitting, however, that maybe he should have called himself something else or chosen a different shtick would be like admitting he was wrong. that does make me wonder why he chose to change from e.nigma as in arkham origins. perhaps it shows the change in his personality and intentions, maybe it felt to him like a progression, an evolution, rather than a discarding of a planned career that failed

another thing that points to this would be the fact that he doesn't have a doctorate, no mentioned degree either, but specifically amongst his peers a lack of a doctorate (for him) speaks volumes to me. and while obviously intelligence is not measured in what certifications you have (sorry doctors), it does offer up an interesting thing to consider with eddie who does value proof to his claims. he thinks he's better than batman and seeks to prove that. he claims he's intelligent but... doesn't need to prove that to people? i like to imagine him playing it off with a sort of "i don't have peers and therefore cannot be judged or reviewed by them in order to gain an accreditation of any sort" when asked or teased. and that could be true, but only in that it suggests he's scared of being proved wrong

i make a lot of comparisons in my head between eddie and derren brown who describes himself as a 'psychological illusionist' (and also hilariously as a mind bender, because he reads minds and is gay) because he performs feats of magic and mind control using perception tricks, memory skills, and subliminal suggestion. one of his sort of more famous 'tricks' is that he can say what word is on line 5, paragraph 4, page 127 in a book he has read, for example. it's something that wows people who don't possess those kinds of memory skills and i can't find a source but i am certain i have read him talk about how it's misinterpreted as him being very clever, as opposed to him just being really good at memorising things. he pretends he can read minds, but he can read facial cues. he can manipulate a pattern, rather than just predict one. i think this is the kind of skills eddie possesses

he can predict people's behaviours, which makes it easy to outsmart them. he confesses openly to having an eidetic memory. yeah, maybe you can recite pi to a thousand places, but that doesn't make you a genius

and he obviously has an above average intelligence, but he bases a lot of that on his own assumptions and on outdated methods of measuring intelligence like iq levels. there are plenty of areas he is lacking in, and he'll never be able to become smarter or more learned because it's almost like he refuses to see where his flaws are

he's so deeply flawed, in fact, that he either doesn't realise it or he's aware and hiding it down so deep that he can't even trust or recognise his own intuitions anymore. only what he knows from experience and can therefore attempt to predict. that's why it bothers him so much when things don't go to plan, and why, for a genius, about 99% of the time things do. not. go. to. plan

people aren't all that predictable, and being able to recalculate on the fly and be flexible with your learning is what makes other incredibly smart characters (lex luthor, michael holt, bruce wayne) so different to eddie

he's in the middle. too smart for most, not smart enough for those he believes are closest to being his peers. he pushes people away for fear they'll see through him, but he's desperate for attention and to have the spotlight on him, for people to tell him he's good and smart and better than everyone else. he's so fucking complicated and annoying and tragic and i love him so much argh

[octuscle]

No more asshole

Georg Meier might have been a brilliant engineer, but as a person, he was an asshole. No one in the office liked the pedantic career climber who would trample anyone to get ahead. His colleague Karel could hardly believe his luck when he saw that Georg hadn’t locked his computer before heading to the meeting. And he was still logged in to LinkedIn. Jackpot!

Karel uploaded the Chronivac add-in to LinkedIn. Then he got to work tweaking Georg’s resume. His mechanical engineering degree from Munich, topped off with a DEng from Aachen, turned into a vocational training as an auto mechanic—completed top of his class, of course.

Meanwhile, Georg was at the flipchart, presenting Karel’s ideas on fuel injection optimization as if they were his own. Suddenly, his mind went blank. And why the hell was he wearing coveralls instead of a suit?

His elite high school diploma from Schloss Stein became a basic secondary school certificate from Feldmoching-Hasenbergl. Georg asked if he could sit down. The others in the working group stared at him in disbelief. Karel updated the date of the diploma to 2023. Georg had only recently finished his apprenticeship and was hoping to start his master technician training at Audi soon. He knew it would take a few years, but Georg was hard-working and ambitious—like many who grew up in underprivileged neighborhoods and were trying to make something of themselves. Still, he felt uncomfortable in the sleeveless shirt, with greasy hair. If only he had known he’d be interviewed today.

Karel also changed his place and year of birth: Mladá Boleslav, 2005. When he clicked “Save,” the Chronivac add-in automatically rewrote the rest of Jiří’s life. First a striker for the FK Mladá Boleslav youth team, then for SpVgg Feldmoching. After a move to Ingolstadt and a torn ACL, bodybuilding became his hobby instead. Native language: Czech. Fluent in German. Basic Russian and English.

Jiří breathed a sigh of relief when Karel entered the room. Karel had known his dad from the Škoda plant in Mladá Boleslav and had brought him to Audi. Karel was a mentor and advocate. And someone he could speak Czech with—though not right now, that wouldn’t look good.

He beamed from ear to ear when the meeting lead told him he could expect some good news. He looked just like his LinkedIn profile picture. If Jiří could get his master technician title by the time he turned 25, it would be a dream. Maybe he could even start an engineering degree through distance learning someday. That would make his parents proud. And Karel too, of course.

AI pic created by @pixellads

[c1qfxugcgy0]

adventures in aerospace

So I recently started working at Large Aircraft Manufacturer. (LAM) The plant I work at employs 30,000 people. The company as a whole employs 170,000. Usually you only hear about LAM when something goes wrong. But no matter how bumbling it seems from the outside, it's way worse on the inside.

Three months after my first day, I have been "graduated" from "training." In reality, I'm still completely worthless on the floor: the training center has given me a paltry subset of the production certificates I need to actually to do my assigned job. A commonly cited statistic at LAM is that a hundred men a day are retiring, each one representing decades of experience, walking out the door, forever. The training center is in the unenviable position of managing a generational replacement, and have resorted to shoveling heaps of zoomers through as fast as possible. (As one of the few people with a visible hairline and who is not wearing a Roblox graphic tee; I am frequently mistaken for an instructor, and asked where the bathroom is, what time the next class starts, etc)

In theory, the training center knows what shop I'm assigned to, and can simply assign me all the required classes. In practice, they do the absolute minimum amount of training in a desperate attempt to relive the crowding in their handful of computer labs and tell graduates to pick up their certs later.

Of course, the irresistible force of the schedule meets the immovable object of the FAA. If you don't have the required production certificate to perform a particular job, you don't touch the airplane. Full stop, end of story.

And so the curtain opens on the stage. It reveals a single senior mechanic, supervising a mechanic who finally received all the certs and is being qualified on this particular job, surrounded by another three trainees. Trainees are less than nothing, absolute scum. At best we can fetch and carry. Mostly we are expected to stay out of the way. And the senior mechanic is only senior in title. He is one of six assembler-installers who is certified to actually work on the plane, out of twenty people on the crew, and spends every day with a permanent audience. He is 23 years old.

("Mechanic"? If you think the jargon at your job is bad, try joining a company that's a century old. Assembler-installers are universally referred to as "mechanics", despite doing work that's nothing like what a car mechanic does, and who are generally paid far worse than FAA certified A&P mechanics. Mechanics are the 11 bravos of LAM, grunts, the single largest category of worker. The tip of the spear. Hooah!)

Large Aircraft Manufacturer is in a dilly of a pickle. All of its existing airframe designs are hilariously antiquated. It tried designing a brand new plane from a clean sheet, and lost billions of dollars to a decade-long integration hell. After that, to save money, it tried just tacking bigger engines on an older design without changing anything else, and the stupid things plowed into the ground in an excruciatingly public manner.

LAM is now trying a middle road. It is upgrading one of its designs that is merely middle aged, rather than ancient, and with proven, de-risked components built in-house, rather than scattering them to subcontractors across the world. And it's still blowing past deadlines and burning billions of dollars LAM really doesn't have to spare.

This is the program I've been assigned to.

Advanced Midbody - Carbon Wing has taken the bold step of just tacking on carbon fiber wings to a conventional aluminum fuselage. Shockingly, AMCW is now stuck in lightning strike testing, due to that troublesome join between conductive aluminum and conductive...ish carbon fiber. But LAM, confident as ever, or perhaps driven by complaints of its customers, has announced that full rate production will begin just next year. Thus the tide of newhires. According to the schedule, we're supposed to jerk from one wingset a month to one wingset a week. That's not going to happen, but, oh well, orders from above move down at the speed of thought, while reality only slowly trickles upwards.

"120 inch pounds? Really?"

I startle upright. I have observed one hundred pi bracket installs, and I will observe a hundred more before I can touch aircraft structure. This is the first disagreement I've witnessed. A more advanced trainee is questioning the torque spec on a fastener. It is not an entirely foolish question-- most sleeve bolts we use are in the 40 in-pounds range. Doubling it that is unusual. I cough the dust off my unused vocal cords and venture an opinion.

"Well hey I could look it up? I guess"

The lead mechanic glances at me, surprised that I'm still awake, then looks away. Excuse enough for me!

I unfold myself from the stool I've been sitting on for the last four hours then hobble over to the nearest Shared Production Workstation.

We do not get Ikea-style step by step instructions on how to put together the airplane. Like any company that's been around for long enough, LAM is a tangled wad of scar tissue, ancient responses to forgotten trauma. If you state a dimension twice, in two different places, then it is possible for an update to only change one of those dimensions, thereby making the engineering drawing ambiguous. Something real bad must have happened in the past as a result of that, so now an ironclad rule is that critical information is only stated once, in one place, a single source of truth.

As a result, the installation plan can be a little... vague. Step 040 might be something like "DRILL HOLE TO SIZE AND TORQUE FASTENERS TO SPEC". What hole size? What torque spec?

Well, they tell you. Eventually.

(Image from public Google search)

You are given an engineering drawing, and are expected to figure out how things go together yourself. (Or, more realistically, are told how it's done by coworkers) Step by step instructions aren't done because then dozens of illustrations would have to be updated with every change instead of just one, and drawings are updated surprisingly frequently.

Fasteners are denoted by a big plus sign, with a three letter fastener code on the left and the diameter on the right, like so: "XNJ + 8"

To get the actual part number, we go to the fastener callout table:

(Note the use of a trade name in the table above. There is nothing a mechanic loves more than a good trademark. Permanent straight shank fasteners are always called HI-LOKs™. It's not a cable tie, it's a Panduit™. It's not a wedgelock, it's a Cleco™. Hey man, pass me that offset drill. What, you mean a Zephyr™? Where'd the LAMlube™ go? This also means you have to learn the names of everything twice, one name on the installation plan, and one name it's referred to in conversation.)

We find XNJ on that table, and fill in the diameter: BACB30FM8A. Now we look up the spec table for that fastener:

The eagle eyed among you might note that there is no "diameter: 8" on that table. As a LAM mechanic, you are expected to simply know that "diameter" is measured in 32nds of an inch, which simplifies down to 1/4.

(LAM preserves many old-school skills like fraction reduction and memorizing decimal equivalents like this, like flies caught in amber. Not least is the universal use of Imperial units. Many American manufacturers have been browbeaten into adding parenthetical conversions. Not LAM! Any risk at all of a mechanic seeing a second number and using it by accident is too great, and anyway, it violates SSOT. Lengths are in inches and feet, weights are in pounds, volume is in gallons and if you don't like it then you can go eat shit!)

After 10 minutes of following references, I arrive at that table, print it off, highlight the correct row, and hand it off to my senior mechanic.

"Great, thanks."

Gratified that I have enhanced shareholder value, I sit back down, and immediately fall asleep. Another day living the dream.

(next post in this series)

[mississouppi]

hey guys im a uni student and it sucks gay balls so heres some school hcs

what is life without projection onto fictional characters

i think bowser would be the kinda guy to encourage his kids to pursue college. hes got them all employed bro he wants his children SUCCEEDING.

i imagine he helped them set up their businesses with his guidance at a pretty Young age. largely for leverage in the karting industry something something lots of money but Also he wants his kids to know how to make it in the world outside of being his generals.

in my universe, they're a little older than ive seen a lot of people do. larrys 14, mortons 15/16 i could go either way, wendys 16 or 17, iggys 18, roys 20, lemmys 21, and ludwigs 24 or 25.

the younger gang are still in highschool, some fancy private academy that bowser pays a zillion doll hairs a year for. juniors homeschooled by kamek. larry doesn't really know what he wants to do in the future, he shrugs off bowsers questioning and says he'll figure it out. he really hopes he does. he likes sports but he also likes music and he also likes streaming but he also- he genuinely doesn't know what to do and it KINDA stresses him out but he pretends it doesn't.

morton is a trade school guy. hes happy in the construction industry and would rather work with his hands than slog through paperwork all day. bowsers pretty proud of him. one day morty will oversee the construction of the entire kingdom, but for now he's just in tracks and shadowing the infrastructure department.

wendy is an aspiring fashionista. she yearns for fashion school in new donk city but bowser is Apprehensive about his little princess being so far away. he worries about her. i can see wendy as a designer, she loves designing and making clothes and its her dream to have her own runway collection. pirate COUTURE. i love her. wendy fans your post is coming. this is a woman that can SEW. she definitely helped cook up bowsers karting outfits. part of her also considers a career in investigative journalism

iggys a huge loser and skipped a grade in school. wouldve skipped another but roy wouldve lost his shit if his little brother was in his grade, and iggy lacks in social skills what he makes up for in intelligence. he's the kind of kooky nuts bananas freak to triple major. HE LOVES SCIENCE WHERE MY SCIENCE FANS AT. hed do some loser shit like mechanical engineering, chemistry, and physics. with a minor in biology. bro at the darklands institute of technology. he does Not sleep. hed focus on biology if he could but unfortunately biologists make 3 shillings a year and he has airships to build. the struggle is real as an aspiring marine microbiologist.

roy thinks college is a scam. he kinda right with these prices. he takes night courses in business management because this guy is an ENTREPRENEUR. nintendo thought i wouldnt catch the roy sunglasses sponsor in tennis fever but i DID. you cant out-autism the autism hut. the massive roy smooth sounds skyscraper?? this a man who means BUSINESS. bowsers real proud. he helps his siblings figure out business contracts and negotiate good supplier deals. roy in my mind is a very street smart guy, even if hes a little abrasive. i dont talk much about roy but i do enjoy him and his relationship with the people around him. bully koopa? this guy is a jackass but he Does care. he is just the least relaxed man alive.

lemmy went to clown college and has a schmachelor of "science" degree. yes its in quotation marks on his certificate. he doesnt know any science but he can make about six billion different kinds of balloon animal. he has balloon replicas of all his siblings and it freaks them out. except iggy he thinks its the funniest thing ever and has his own balloon lemmy. so theyre always together! twinmaxxing. i imagine he freelances for a career, something something graphic design. the tire company is supposed to be his main occupation but he kinda thinks its a little dull. hes the guy behind the cushion tires.

actually canon bro i looked it up for an image reference and they actually have his logo. god im so psychic. call me a prophet.

ludwig for all his straight lacery and general affinity for being boring and lame, has had quite the turbulent career. hes got a pretty decent age gap between him and his siblings so hes supposed to be their role model, so like any neurotic stressed homosexual he picked a career he didnt really want to do but felt was socially acceptable enough. this man OOZES law vibes. went to darkmouth, deans list, top of his class, and burnt out after graduation. took a sabbatical and decided to quit law altogether. painting and music is his dream. he and bowser definitely had a fight about it, he loves his kids but i think his best captain deciding to paint for a living is a little too woke for him. hes come around. lud is a great painter, i think hed do very traditional oil paintings. landscapes are his favourite but he does mostly portraits commissioned by other nobles. lowk have half a oneshot fic written about this.

lowk my whole family thinks im kinda nuts when i explain the koopalore but its fun because mummy soup noticed a larry jakks pacific in the toy store and thought of me!!! A LARRY!!! my parents are so cutie bro my dad remembered iggy is my favourite 🤸🏻‍♂️💚🤸🏻‍♂️

hes fucking watching me

[getvalentined]

Proper art of Prautag, my original Subnautica survivor. They're an Extreme Pressures Hardware Technician, meaning they have enough synthetic components to operate in vacuum or at the bottom of the ocean without the risk of severe bodily harm or the need for heavy protective equipment.

They don't actually leave 4546b, choosing not to deactivate the Quarantine Enforcement Platform in order to protect the Sea Emperor hatchlings and the planet as a whole from being stripped and gutted by Alterra. (This is detailed somewhat in Stay, the only Subnautica fic I've ever posted.)

Prau's current condition is the product of Alterra's so-called "salvage" program, which is a protocol I made up similar to a living will in which engineers and mechanics who experience traumatic accidents on the job are immediately sent for synthetic reconstruction by Alterra's top body mechanics. This not only helps to preserve their usefulness as technical staff, but also gives Alterra a supply of consensual test subjects for prototype synthetic components, while allowing critically injured patients a chance at survival—and an opportunity to skip the years-long waiting list for limb replacement or organ regeneration.

Of course, the synthetic parts do still need to be paid for, meaning "salvage" patients who don't want their body parts repossessed continue to work for Alterra until one of two things happens: either they earn enough money to pay off the debt, or they die. Whichever comes first.

Prau was a particularly complex salvage, requiring:

2 full pulmonary units (lungs)

1 auditory sensor (inner ear)

1 optical sensor (eye) and the requisite processor (optic nerve)

3 extremities (2 full, 1 partial)

67% replacement of the digestive system

59% replacement of the remaining skeletal structure

32% reconstruction of the heart and related vascular system

Thankfully, their education and certifications at the time made it worth the effort to the company—there aren't a lot of EPHtechs, since the amount of synthetic components necessary to make a person that sturdy is much higher than can be legally installed in a healthy individual, so it was actually a particularly good investment!

That was over a decade ago, and Prautag has been bouncing around the galaxy repairing phasegates and other specialty equipment ever since. The installation of the new phasegate in the Ariadne Arm was such an important mission that the company offered to wipe out Prautag's remaining debt if they signed on—so they did.

It didn't quite go as planned, but...well, they're never going back to Alterra, so it worked out eventually.

[anonymusbosch]

I'm not going to dunk the offending post in water (affirmations recited in a mirror) but I have been simmering all day about someone saying to another user on here ~"why the hell are you using AI for mechanical engineering? you're vibe-coding aerospace engineering! it's gonna kill someone! AI can be subtly wrong and you're using it to make engineering decisions??"

and setting aside that the use case at hand appeared to be "automating tasks that are done via a GUI to be done via the scripting interface instead," aka making a script to push some buttons for you in a FEM solver, and this is something which is both a completely straightforward use case for an LLM (coding!) and entirely verifiable (did the script work lol) - even setting that aside -

I am still split between a few things and almost all of them are "this is, like, irritatingly ignorant of how anything works."

1) Yes, AI can be subtly or unabashedly incorrect. As an engineer you will often be interacting with information that is incomplete, out of date, incorrect, or deliberately misleading or false, and you/your processes/your systems must be robust to that. That's why there are things like failure mode and effect analysis (how likely is it that a problem will occur? how severe are the consequences if it does?). That's why you check- and cross-check info; that's why you do basic calculations as bounds on simulations. That's why you don't blindly trust your finite element model solver when it predicts your part will distort into infinity (the mesh wasn't resolved enough! the node ended up in outer space! it's a computer problem, not a real one). That's why you do things like incoming shipment sampling or verification (the vendor sent a certificate of the material, but they straight-up falsified it and swapped for a cheaper material!) (the vendor fabricated inspection data and said the parts were great but they're not!) (the inspector just isn't very good at his job and measured the parts badly LMAO). Like, you prototype and test your designs and find out what works and what doesn't - what assumptions or approximations weren't valid, what unanticipated phenomena are at hand. Obviously you don't want to waste money on prototypes that catch stupid mistakes: you want to catch those on paper as much as you can before they're in the flesh, yknow. So you do your checks (and this includes, ideally, any info you're putting into your models/designs) and you do your tests, and you check that your shit actually does its job!! like that's... that's what engineering is! and I won't pretend that this process is perfect or that every engineer is a good engineer, but I will say that engineering writ large is built on robustness to imperfect information! And that if your system doesn't catch some subtle AI error,

2) it won't detect subtle human error either! goddamn! Humans are great at making errors!! Humans are making errors all the time! "AI can be subtly wrong" yes! it can! and so can the person who designed a part that some of my parts reference, who didn't update the reference planes and sketches that were specifically for me to base things on, and left things like 6mm off! but I caught the error because I was doing all my cross checks! So can the person who routed some tubing with the valve on the wrong side of a tee and OOPS bypassed the valve completely! So can the person who just entered the wrong number in a spreadsheet! So can the person who suggested some ideas that were just kinda dumb while brainstorming! So can the guy in the meeting today who said something the exact opposite of true because he hadn't paid attention to an update earlier this week! So can the inspection technician who set up the measurement coordinate system slightly wrong so a handful of dimensions are sliiightly off! I bought the wrong barbs earlier this week because I just messed up! And of course, as mentioned above, there are all of the deliberate falsehoods you have to prepare for: fabricated inspection data, incorrect material certs, test results someone cherry picked to save their own skin. Humans are full of mistakes and all systems have to be robust to that too!

3) lol and lmao even.

[perfectterf]

Woman of the Day Margaret Wilcox, born in 1838, was a mechanical engineer in all but name and the woman who invented what became the car heater, which she patented in 1893. It even supplied dual heating.

Margaret didn’t have a formal qualification. Degrees in mechanical engineering were closed to women in the USA anyway until 1894 when two women graduated that year from the University of California, Berkeley, and Ohio State University. They weren’t always barred outright, of course. They faced the invisible tariffs placed on women and only women: required to provide their own labs so their mere presence didn’t distract the men, or awarded certificates of proficiency instead of degrees for passing the same exams as men (which made it sound like they’d passed a cycling test). You know the script. Even so, it is quite clear from her two patents that she had a very good understanding of mechanical engineering.

Sometime in her twenties, she tackled the problem of unheated train carriages and developed a way to move air across the engine and channel it into the carriage so that passengers didn’t freeze and windows didn’t mist up or frost. There was a drawback though. The temperature couldn’t be regulated so travellers became too hot, especially over longer journeys. It needed more work to make it both safe and commercially viable.

In 1889, Margaret invented a combined clothes and dish washer with “a fixed semicircular tank or tub to receive the operating parts, and which may also be utilized for washing either clothes or dishes”. I’m not too sure how hygienic it would be to wash both in the same machine, which might explain why it didn’t take off commercially, but it was a detailed piece of work and she was granted patent no. 425,486 on 29 April 1890.

Sometime in 1892, Margaret, now 54, returned to her original idea for using engine heat to warm railway carriages and this time, she cracked it. She was so confident that her improved idea would work that she set up a company to market it, called Wilcox Water Heater Company, and submitted her detailed proposal with drawings to the US Patent Office on 9 August 1892. It was a good deal more sophisticated than her original idea and proposed “a combustion chamber suspended beneath or outside the car and circulating pipes for conducting the hot water to the desired points within the car.”

“The peculiar arrangement of my heater with a central vertical division allows of one side of a car being provided with a greater supply of heat on one side than on the other, as is frequently necessary where the wind is blowing strongly on one side of the car, as such side is frequently quite cold when the other side is comparatively warm. By supplying the fuel or heating material on the Windward side of the heater, the Water on that side will be kept the hotter and thus the car will be equably heated…By my arrangement, with a single heater I employ two distinct currents of water each driven by a distinct spiral conveyer or propelling device, whereby the both sides of the car are heated exactly alike, which is a great advantage over the plans heretofore proposed.”

The only cars then were railway cars - train carriages - but in 1917, automobile engineers began to follow Margaret’s design to develop ways to regulate the temperature in early cars.

Drivers then used a brick heated in the oven at home and placed in a container inside the passenger compartment, so a proper car heater was a step forward. So much so that it remained an optional extra (at additional cost, of course) until 1968 when new motor vehicle safety standards required a heating system to defrost windscreens. The only way to do that was by making car heaters standard.

Margaret didn’t live to see it - she died in 1912, aged about 73 - but she joins the long list of women who contributed to road safety.

[scotianostra]

24th December 1872 saw the death of William John Macquorn Rankine.

William was Regius Professor of Civil Engineering and Mechanics from 1855 to 1872. He has been described as “the father of engineering science in this country”, in recognition of his achievements as a theoretical scientist and as an educator.

Born in Edinburgh, Rankine was educated at that city’s University. He worked as a civil engineer and published papers on practical engineering subjects and then on molecular physics and thermodynamics. He moved to Glasgow in 1851 and was appointed to the University’s Chair of Civil Engineering and Mechanics four years later, proclaiming his intention to teach theory, practice and the application of theory to practice.

As Professor, Rankine worked closely with Glasgow shipbuilders on radical improvements to the design of vessels and their engines. He introduced the famous “sandwich courses” that required students to work with local engineering firms during their vacations, and he campaigned vigorously for the recognition of Engineering as a degree subject. Largely through his efforts, a Certificate of Proficiency in Engineering Science was introduced in 1863 and in 1872 the degree of BSc was offered for science subjects including Engineering.

Rankine conducted pioneering research in the fields of railway engineering, molecular physics and thermodynamics. He wrote more than 150 scientific papers and manuals as well as textbooks which became standard works of reference for students. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1853 and he was the first President of the Institution of Engineers in Scotland. Rankine was the co-founder and first President of the Institution of Engineers in Scotland, which later became the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland and is still in existence today.

The third pic is of The Rankine window in 39 Elmbank Crescent Glasgow, now the of Scottish Opera Headquarters where a Hall still bears his name.