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Point of View
Engineers understood how slide rules operated
By Carl Heintze
Some of my best friends are engineers. I don't suppose that's unusual. Santa Clara County is crawling (well, I'm not sure they are crawling, perhaps walking is a better word) with engineers, both retired and working.
That's because since the end of World War II, engineers and not prune pickers have been an important part of the valley's economy. First there were the civil and mechanical engineers who helped build the new and burgeoning valley, then came the aerospace industry and finally the electronics and computer boom.
So there are a lot of engineers about and it's not unusual to have some as friends. Even before that, though, I knew something about engineers because my father was one.
He helped construct the Panama Canal and built bridges and highways in half a dozen mainland states and Hawaii. I suppose he may have wished I'd become an engineer. I know my mother did. But when the crunch came, it was clear I had no engineering talent whatsoever.
I mooned around in college in the liberal arts. Even there I had engineer friends even though they spoke a language alien to my ears, carried slide rules in cases--to this day I have only a vague understanding of how a slide rule operates--and understood things like calculus and physics. (Calculus was an even bigger mystery than the slide rule and all I remember about physics was balls of different weights dropped at the same time reached the ground at the same time. I never understood why, though.)
Some of my engineer friends were, I suppose, the nerds of their day, or so we political science and journalism majors thought. They thought we liberal arts types were the real nerds.
Engineers were organized, we weren't. They studied a fixed curriculum with almost no electives. We liberal arts majors wandered through picking what we wanted to study, from Victorian poetry to how dictatorships operate.
It was the division about which the late C.P. Snow, who was both a scientist and a novelist, wrote--two different universes.
In time I became a newspaperman. Newspapermen tend to cluster together, both at work and socially, to tell stories and to try to write books.
A good part of my adult life was spent in the company of newsmen (and women), a loose kind of life (not morally, mind you, but intellectually.)
Meeting engineers again after all these years has reawakened my interest in the difference between those who work with machines and those who work with words.
I've found that engineers are precise, addicted--even compulsive some would say--about order and, especially those trained before the advent of computers, wonderful at lettering.
I know this because I still possess some of the drawings my father rendered. He could print as neatly as a computer. Each letter is as clear as a typewritten character.
My handwriting is terrible. I got red 4's in penmanship in grammar school, the equivalent of a D-minus. Things have not improved since. Fortunately, I can type, so others know what I am trying to say.
Furthermore, unlike most engineers, I'm disorderly. My method of filing is to make piles.
My engineer friends aren't like this. They know where everything is. They can find it with a minimum of delay. I just search.
One is so compulsive he checks all the books on his bookshelf every day, making sure all the bindings are exactly in line. He has dimmer switches on his living room lights and he knows exactly the level at which the light should be. This entails a lot of adjustment. Engineers generally seem to like to adjust and fine-tune things. I think that's because engineers understand, even love machines.
Engineers also are careful. When assembling a new piece of equipment, they unpack it carefully, read the directions at least twice and then step by step put the thing together.
My inclination is to dump out all the pieces, ignore the printed instructions and use intuition to put it together. Intuition, of course, seldom works. Then one has to go back to the instructions and read them.
I blame this on the gestalt theory. A gestalt is a lot of things seen as one. After all, if a thing is supposed to be a thing, like a bicycle, for instance, that's what it ought to be, a single thing, and not a collection of individual parts that when fitted together properly will do something.
I'm not sure why all this happened to me or to my engineer friends. Clearly, it was the way we were put together in our formative years. I like to think this is because journalists deal in a lot of variables, that intuition and sudden insight play a part in gathering, interpreting and writing facts, that each story is different and that working with words is as precise as putting a rocket together.
Still I'd like to think I'm as precise with words as engineers are with tools. It's just that the way I use them isn't the same. I'm, well, you know, creative.
I'm not sure my engineer friends think so, though.
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Saratoga, California Since 1975
