The Greatest Engineers

I just read an article in EDN that listed the 5 greatest engineers of all time:
1: Nicola Tesla
2: The Wright Brothers
3: Achimedes
4: Leonardo da Vinci
5: Thomas Edison

Everyone on this list is certainly in the top dozen or so, but I disagree with the ranking a little.  Edison was less an engineer than an inventor.  His approach was far less systematic than his best contemporaries and relied heavily on brute force and large teams, and his rank certainly grows due to his gift for self-promotion.  But he was unquestionably a brilliant inventor.

The Wright Brothers also deserve a high ranking, and they are the contemporaries of Edison that show  how flawed Edison's methods were.  They were attacking a very hard problem and their highly systematic approach made their solutions remarkably effective: e.g.: the propellers of the original Wright Flyer were within a few % of the best that can be done with modern computational fluid dynamics.  They'd built wind tunnels and did lots of systematic experiments...and they got it right.  The materials they were working with: wood, fabric, primitive, very inefficient engines, made the problem very much harder than it would be today.

I'd rank Archimedes at the top of the list.  He was very much a mathematician and scientist as well as engineer.  His greatest achievement was not known until very recently: he'd worked out enough of the calculus to solve some problems that wouldn't be solvable again until the time of Leibniz and Newton. His solution was not quite complete, but he'd recognized the concept of the infinitesimal and infinite series.  Once he figured out a practical nomenclature for it (which he didn't) the rest would have been pretty obvious.   He'd worked out amazing geared mechanisms, probably including the Antikythera mechanism--again, ahead of any subsequent inventor until the time of Newton.  Had his discoveries been better understood by his Roman conquerors, world history would have taken a very different path.   He himself probably would not have gotten much farther than he did (he was 75 when he was murdered), but his students would probably have been able to do a real structural stress analysis.   Within a century or so, bridges and buildings would have been very different.

I'd add Isambard Kingdom Brunel to the list.  He's responsible for the adoption of the screw propeller, by devising a simple challenge that produced a result that was completely obvious to non-engineers.  He designed many of the railways and locomotives of England. Like Edison, he was a self-promoter, but also like Edison, he was a real genius.

Edwin Armstrong pretty much invented radio.  He wasn't first--Hertz and Marconi beat him--but their devices were crude and very inefficient and basically impractical.  Armstrong understood the necessary electronic circuits to make it work well, far in advance of anyone of his time.  Like Tesla, the Wrights, and Archimedes, he got his results by thinking hard and experimenting, and understanding what he was trying to do.  He had the bad luck to run afoul of RCA's David Sarnoff, who stole most of his life's work and drove him to suicide.

Like Brunel, James Watt didn't really invent anything, but he recognized what he'd seen and took it very much further.  His most important contribution was to make the steam engine practical, which was the transformative development that enabled the industrial revolution.  He also did important engineering of canals, especially canal locks, making it possible for boats to traverse elevation changes.

Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile or the assembly line, but he figured out how to make them practical and economical.  Perhaps his most important recognition was that by paying his workers well, he improved their morale and thereby their effectiveness, and forced other employers to pay their workers well too.  This resulted in everybody, including Ford, having a better life.

The digital computer has a lot of inventors, but Alan Turing is probably the most important.  He was more a mathematician than engineer, but he definitely was an engineer.  He too was driven to suicide.

Robert Noyce didn't invent the transistor (he started out working for Bill Shockley, who did), but his team invented lithographed planar transistors, which took them from costing a hundreds of dollars each, to a few cents.  They also invented the integrated circuit, the microprocessor and a zillion other things along the way.   Noyce didn't do all of it, but he was very much the inspirational leader, and they give him credit for most of it.

Newton, Einstein, Faraday, Szilard and several other scientists contributed as much to technology as most of these guys, and were probably more brilliant than all but Tesla, Leonardo and Archimedes.  But they weren't engineers.

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update 4 July 2013
Doug Englebart died July 2 and he may deserve to be on this list.  In the early '60s, he understood that computer networking had the potential of radically changing the way we interact with each other and information, and spent the remainder his life making this better in every way he could think of  The computer mouse was merely his most famous invention.  The researchers at Xerox PARC (which invented the windowing user interface and the ethernet) were strongly inspired by his vision.