101 Things I Learned® in Engineering School

Don’t get distracted by all the other possibilities such that you forget to do the one thing you must do. But don’t become so focused on the one thing that you don’t do as much as you can.

A useful measure of a beam’s efficiency is the ratio between the distance it spans and the amount of material it uses.

remain stationary, move, or

Total load is transmitted to the building foundation, then to the earth. The load received by a given area of a footing cannot exceed the bearing capacity of the soil, or the footing will sink.

but resisting lateral loads from wind and

Most engineered systems rely on negative feedback. In some instances, such as when momentum is desired, a positive feedback loop may be sought.

sides and angles are interdependent: a change cannot be made to an angle without altering the length of at least one side, and vice versa. By comparison, a square can be deformed into a parallelogram without changing a side.

An air conditioner doesn’t create cold; it moves heat from a building interior to the exterior. It does this by exploiting a natural principle: substances absorb heat when moving from a liquid phase to a gas phase, and release heat when moving from gas to liquid.

Crack propagation in a material increases with the sharpness of the tip of the crack. Drilling a hole at the tip makes a crack less sharp and distributes stresses over a larger area and in more directions, discouraging the crack from lengthening. Rounding of corners in building products, machine parts, furniture, and even the windows of ships and a