Science News reviews Roma Agrawal's book, which updates the classic list of simple machines and reveals the heart and soul of engineering.
What do you get when you pose a challenge, weave in a cast of characters driven by hunger, frustration, curiosity, compassion or maybe even a little spite, and throw in a few twists and turns? A book about engineering., structural engineer Roma Agrawal offers an updated twist on the list of six basic machines — the lever, wheel and axle, pulley, inclined plane, wedge and screw — that Renaissance scientists and engineers identified as fundamental to that era’s technology.
After reviewing how each invention bears, balances and leverages the physical forces and fields acting on it, Agrawal places the seven elements within the various technologies they facilitate, from planes and bridges to instruments, guns and television. With these tales of invention come familiar characters, like Alexander Graham Bell, but also pioneers largely forgotten by posterity, including “the often hidden or unacknowledged contribution of minoritized people in engineering.
The key character bringing all these stories together is Agrawal herself, whether she’s recounting her efforts at a blacksmith’s forge or on a potter’s wheel or describing the IVF she underwent and the microscope lenses the embryologist used when joining her daughter’s first two cells together. We see Agrawal the professional engineer, as well as Agrawal the inquisitive child, teenage classical Indian dancer, student and mom.
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