I would note that the way in which the candidate achievements were defined helped to determine the results. For example, the list includes radio and television, computers, telephone, and the Internet. If one instead defined the global information infrastruture, combining all four of those categories, the magnitude of the engineering accomplishment might be even more impressive. Today well have many billions of devices connected in a globe-spanning network that could not have been imagined at the start of the century.
Similarly, the global multimodal transportational system is a transcendental engineering achievement of the 20th century, as is the global energy infrastucture which combines electrification and petroleum systems and their components such as hydro-electric dams, nuclear power instalations, oil pipelines, supertankers, and docking facilities, deep ocean drilling rigs, and a global automated control system.
In the same can be said of the global urban infrastructure. At the end of the 20th century most people in the world lived in cities, a situation that probably could not have been imagined at the beginning of the century. Cities such as New York, Tokyo and Mexico had not only built buildings to house millions of people, but had also developed hugely complex infrastructures to bring people, energy, information, food, water and supplies into the cities and to remove the wastes. Not only were a few cities built, but thousands organized into a global complex network of urban centers of graduated sizes.
I find that as impressive as are the individual engineering technologies, the huge engineered networks are even more impressive aspects of the accomplishments of engineers in the last century.
1 comment:
Thanks for the helpful information. Hope to hear more from you.
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