Walter Vincenti

Walter G. Vincenti has received the 1997 Engineer-Historian Award for his book What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytic Studies from Aeronautical History (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1990). Something every engineering student should read, said guest panelists at the anniversary History and Heritage panel discussion in 1996. When accepting the award November 15, at the 1997 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exhibition, Vincenti called it a labor of love.

Understanding the complexity of engineering knowledge and its sources is crucial to how we view the process of technological evolution and change. Using five case studies in the technological development of early aeronautics, Vincenti focuses on the generation of new knowledge that designers initially lack. He offers a model that attempts to define a theory of engineering epistemology, which he admits is "subject to controversy." The five engineering problems he traces are:

• The Davis wing and the problem of airfoil design 1908-45: what shape airfoil to use for the long-range airplanes at Consolidated Aircraft in the late 1930s and how to design airfoils for airplanes generally.
• Flying-quality specifications for American aircraft 1918-43: what engineering requirements to design for to obtain flying qualities satisfactory to pilots.
• Control-volume analysis 1912-53: how to think about and analyze flow situations in mechanical design generally.
• The air-propeller tests of W.F. Durand and E.P. Leslie, 1916-26: what propeller to select in an airplane design.
• The innovation of flush riveting in American airplanes, 1930-50: how to design and produce flush-riveted joints for aircraft.

Vincenti's model "helps make sense of the historical process," he says in the concluding chapters. "I think I understand better now what was going on intellectually in the various happenings and how much they share despite their great surface dissimilarities. It strikes me as remarkable, for example, how much alike in structure, though with admitted differences in detail, were the underlying variation-selection processes for the Davis wing, flying-quality specifications, and flush riveting . . . . This commonality exists despite marked dissimilarity in the engineering problems and historical circumstances. It tells me, among other things that the differences, epistemologically speaking, between design, research, and production are not as fundamental as I had thought. In the control-volume and the Davis-wing and propeller-data cases, the model also brings out the similarly vicarious role that theoretical tools and wind-tunnel testing play in the epistemological scheme. These are among many insights. Though no theoretical model for the growth of knowledge is likely to satisfy everyone, the one here may be useful."