WIE_F2015_06

Jerry's been putting this on about marvels of engineering on the Stellar website. We're not going to read it in detail, but it does. The current, or the last chapter that I hadn't gone over, was about bridges. And there's five different basic types of bridges, and they're huge bridges. Like the Brooklyn Bridge was a marvel of engineering in its day. Here's the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, which is 17 miles long across the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. There were iron bridges that were famous.

The Brooklyn Bridge is actually very interesting, if someone wanted, was looking for a project, to talk about building of the Brooklyn Bridge. Although this wasn't the first time they did it, but the foundation of the Brooklyn Bridge — they started out with essentially putting some stone on the floor of the river, and then they had little locks where people could go down, they ran compressed air, so the people would be working in digging out and taking the dirt out, and the caisson, which was the foundation, would just sink further and further into the mud as they dug out underneath it. But as it got deeper and deeper, they had to go up in pressure with the compressed air, until they actually got to pressures where, when they were breathing air — which is in the 1880s or whatever when they were building this — they would, when they came back up, they would get the bends.

You know, anybody know what the bends are? You're a scuba diver, you get nitrogen dissolved in your blood, and if you come up too fast it nucleates out, and your blood turns to foam and you die, okay. So divers, scuba divers, have to stop midway up. If they go on a 200-foot dive, they have to stop part way up. I'm not a scuba diver, but something, you know maybe a hundred feet, and just stay there for about five minutes to let the nitrogen get out of their blood, so they don't come all the way up. And turns out the guy who was in charge, the engineer who was in charge of this, actually ended up getting the bends. He didn't die from it, but he was ill for the next 30 years from it.

Anyway, there's a lot of interesting bridges. This looks sort of like the Bunker Hill Bridge, but it's not. It's a bigger cable-stayed bridge. Just talking about any one of those bridge designs, the cable-stayed bridges is an interesting design. I got a tour of the Big Dig back in 2001, and they have to basically pull those strands within about a quarter of an inch of being all at the same length, otherwise you have too much stress on one of them. One of the strands of the wire rope and the others, you know, it snaps, and another one snaps.

Then the next chapter on all that stuff is about railroads. These are large-scale engineering tasks that people have done for a number of years going all the way back to the pyramids, three or four thousand years ago, the Great Wall of China, okay, the Chinese canal — things going back thousands of years. But a lot more things, more rapidly, we're having more engineering feats of great complexity.

Just one of my favorite quotes from Oppenheimer: that the optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds, the pessimist fears that it's true. And so sometimes people look at all these great marvels of engineering that we do and they think this is wonderful, we sent someone to the moon — the scientists take credit for it, was actually the engineers who did it. Now they had to know a lot of science to do it, but the engineers actually built the rocket and things like that. The pessimist looks at these things and they're not so sure these are all good things. So that's one of the conflicts, or the externalities.

Summary from last time: MIT exerts great leadership within engineering. As MIT so goes, so goes the nation in engineering. I kind of showed you how MIT in 1865, when it started, helped define mechanical engineering, and then electrical engineering, and then metallurgy, and then chemical engineering, and then nuclear engineering — different disciplines of engineering where they actually defined mechanical engineering, because before that there was only civil and military engineering.

But even today, although no other school would really admit it, what MIT does sort of defines what other universities will do. I can give you a personal example. When I became department head in 1995, we were supposed to — on the list, over the department strategy, we were supposed to hire someone in biomedical engineering. Well at that time biomedical engineering meant what I call the hip Kuroda. My thesis advisor, and his thesis advisor, had been hip Kurodas. The hip Kuroda is, you know, metal hip, artificial hip you put in. And they would corrode, and they might fail within six months or a year or three years. I mean when they first started putting them in people, they were staying with steel and they were failing in six months. Well, you have an operation that you don't get off the crutches for six months and the thing fails and you need another operation, you know, that wasn't very good. And I saw, in my career as an undergraduate and then a graduate student, it go from about a one-year or two-year or three-year lifetime to where they were starting to put artificial hips in children 10 years old and expecting them hopefully to last 30 years, okay.

Student: [question about how artificial hips work in growing children — inaudible]

Oh yeah, they'd have to — well, they have to do — well, I don't know exactly how they did it, but I remember it was a big deal when they started, when they thought they had enough longevity to do it. Okay, I don't know that they had to change size. That's a good question, I never thought about that. Ask Bob Rose. But I remember what happened. The other, in fact we used to — I didn't do it, but people I was working with in the lab, they — we'd put a live rabbit on a little — okay, and it was just a little lazy Susan that would go around, rabbit would be strapped in there, and just pound on his hip, pound on his foot, to put an impact load on his hip. And then they — one of the graduate students in the same office with me — he would then kill the rabbit, dissect the bone, and look at how the molecular structure, the mechanical structure of the cellular bone had changed due to the impact loading, okay. So beating on rabbits' feet, okay, live rabbits' feet.

Anyway, so when I became a department head, I thought, this — I don't need another hip Kuroda. They've been doing that for 30 years. And so I met with Doug Lauffenburger, who's now head of the department of biomedical engineering, which we didn't have at the time. And he had just come from Illinois, and we went to lunch, and I said, what's interesting? By a biomedical engineer, I don't just want someone who looks at corrosion of metals in the human body. We've started that for years. And he started telling me about soft tissue engineering, and I decided I wanted to hire a soft tissue engineer as our biomedical engineer. And it was not a traditional area of material science anywhere in the country. And in fact the faculty in the department fought me for two years. I would bring in people who were in that area from other departments, not material science department. Where are you bringing this person in for a faculty interview? I said, look, you got an interview on the fringes of the department, you don't just want to clone what you've already got. So we had that debate, but anyway. Now biomedical engineering is a third of the department, okay. And in fact, within two or three years after, other schools, after we hired our first couple of people — this is 20, 17, 18 years ago — other departments in the country in material science, oh, MIT did that, we should do that, okay. And I could go through other examples, but what we do influences other people.

In fact, I'll give you another example. And that, 10 years ago, 12 years ago, we hired Chris Schuh, who called himself a metallurgist. Well, at the time everybody else at MIT was saying, oh we don't — metallurgy is dead. Ned Thomas, who was the last department head, Ned, allergic — he was saying 15 years ago metallurgy was dead. It's because he's a polymer person, because he was stupid, okay. I can't help — them, I mean — metallurgy, if you take my material selection course, metals are sold in much larger volume than anything else, okay. May not be — well, take the thing I explained, why profitability in the metals industry was bad, because productivity was going up very rapidly. That doesn't mean it's dead. But anyway, so when we hired a metallurgist, all of a sudden within two or three years other schools started hiring metallurgists, okay. 'Cause everyone else would say, oh metallurgy is dead, okay. So, and I could give you examples for MIT as a whole too.

But anyway, the 20 greatest engineering achievements of the 20th century — the National Academy of Engineering came up with these 20 areas. And if you look at them, we've — electrification, home appliances, the internet — they greatly changed the way of life from what it was a hundred years ago. The 21st century challenges will have similar dramatic effects. That's things like making solar power economical. Anyway, we've handed it out so far as that goes.

So, we talked about what is engineering. We're going to continue. We've talked about what the difference is between science, engineering. We can give you some more on that today, so far as that goes. Now, we talked about large-scale engineering, pyramid projects like the pyramids. When you ask a scientific question you sometimes come up with interesting answers.

For example, when I first took over as an assistant professor here, the little short — or 8-137, you should walk around the corner, that was my office, I shared it with a graduate student who was working on the fracture toughness of granite. This is a fracture toughness specimen, you can pass it around. [Tom hands the granite sample around the class.] But no one had really kind of looked at fracture toughness of granite. Why was he looking at it? Professor Backofen, who was the mechanical behavior person, taught mechanical properties of materials in course 3, was interested because if you actually looked at, and did some calculations on estimating the toughness of granite and other stones and stuff, there was no way to raise the Egyptian obelisk, okay. One of the engineering marvels in here is the Washington Monument, okay, which they actually built going straight up. But it had always been assumed that the Egyptians carved the stone, because their obelisks were one monolithic piece of stone. Washington Monument's bunch of bricks, okay. But if you did the calculation you would predict that the bending load would break the obelisk in two when you started to lift it up, okay.

Student: [question about uniform support — inaudible]

Well, but how do you do that without, you know, how do you get uniform support? And would it be — yeah, you probably could, I mean, but the thing's pretty heavy, and you know, they didn't have huge cranes. Well, it turns out — no, the fracture mechanics of 1970, the best we knew about the details of fracture of materials in stone said that you couldn't raise Egyptian obelisks. So granite is a three-phase composite — silica, feldspar, and something else, you can look it up, I can't remember what the three types of rock are, but you can see the three colors okay, it's speckled. So when, the week — Wilkening — Levi W. Wilkening, W something, W before W, at something else — did his thesis, and that's one of his samples that he didn't test that I recovered. And he found that you get microcracks at the tip of the crack, which gives significant toughening to composite stone composites, like a factor of five or ten higher toughness than everyone, anyone ever thought. So all of a sudden we can now understand how they lifted the Egyptian obelisks. They did just lift them up with a great big pulley and rope and everything. But the science of fracture mechanics hadn't progressed. And then by the 1980s the ceramists were saying, oh, we can make tough ceramics. And so they were going to make ceramic engines and all this other stuff. But it came out of kind of our back-of-the-ovens question of, well, how did they raise the obelisk, okay, which is a scientific question, okay, but it explained some engineering things.

So you can start, if you can start an engineering, and you can talk about the huge-scale projects like the Egyptian pyramids and things, but you can also start with very simple things, and that's — has everyone got into one of these bags? [Tom distributes bags of paper clips.] Anyway, not gotten one? Okay, you want to pass — that's just one person, okay. So here's, you know, how — well, you can pull it out, but people have written whole books, and posted will be 26 pages from this book on this Evolution of Useful Things by Henry Petroski. Petroski is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, he was professor at Duke University, and he liked to write about the history of engineering. And, you don't have to pull this out now but you're welcome to, there's all kinds of paper clips. What I looked on Google, I had 400 pages — you know, some of you come up to get one — anyway, else — okay, had 400 pages on paper clips, okay.

So I bought some, and I bought you some paper, these note cards, and what I'd like you to do — I mean there are big paper clips, they're big and small, this one's got a little smiley face on it, okay, so these are different designs. This one's got a little spring, this one is — uh, this is just a little kind of like the spring one with the auto arms on it, and you're going to have a hard time figuring out how to insert that, we'll talk about that, you're missing a piece, but that's the way they sell it. There's an — it has to have an application tool, and we might talk about it. But I'd like you to go home and look at these things. Some were made of plastic, some were made of metal. And you can ask yourself whatever question you want, but I would like you to think about what makes paper clips — what makes a paper clip design a good design or a bad design? They come in all sizes, and lots of shapes. There are a lot — mine here is a dollar sign — some people probably have some music symbols that are paper clips. And ask yourself — you can try clipping some paper together and see how well it works, okay. What are the mechanical properties of a paper clip that make it a good paper clip? It shouldn't be that hard for most of you to figure out, okay, if you had some undergraduate mechanics course of some sort, okay.

Student: [comment about a particular clip — inaudible]

Huh? That one, that one doesn't have all the pieces, you have to have an application tool, okay. Well, yeah, but you'll tear the paper, okay. How many pieces of paper can you put in that one or in this one, or whatever? I mean, you're trying to clamp things together. It turns out, if you read the history — and it will be the chapter in here will be posted, if you want to read 26 pages on paper clips, the history of paper clips. It turns out, it says, "From Pins to Paper Clips," and there's 26 pages on it, and some of the designs come, go back over a hundred years, about 150 years. Why didn't we have paper clips before 150 years ago? Now we had paper, the Egyptians had paper, papyrus and stuff, but it was — saying one thing that we didn't have, you're right — steel. We didn't have cheap steel. In the old days, like 400 years ago, if you used steel nails to put together a barn or a house, when the house got old and the wood was rotten, you would burn the house down and sift through the ashes to recover the nails, because the nails were so valuable, okay. Well now we don't worry about the cost of nails, right? And that gives you some idea of how we've increased the productivity of steel. It was Henry Bessemer in 1856 who taught us how to make steel economically, and then Andrew Carnegie became the richest man in the world doing it. And the railroads came about because all said, we had steel at a reasonable price. They had railroads before that, but is all cast iron rails, and you couldn't put anything very heavy on a cast iron rail because it would break, okay. Steel wasn't as fragile.

So I'd like you, and if you want — it's not something you'll be graded on — but if you'd like to make some notes of what do you think the parameters were. They did have — if you read the title that I put up there, that chapter 4, "From Pins to Clips" — they did have steel pins, needles, okay, but that was just a short piece of steel because steel was so valuable. And they got to the point where now had steel — a ductile material — a lot of the pins, I mean, Professor Hosler will show you pins that the Incas made, or the Mexicans made, you know, five or six thousand years ago, out of metal, and they would clip — they would pin things together. Anybody ever tried to pin a couple of pieces of paper together with the safety — well, not a safety pin, but a straight pin? Yeah, kind of getting blood, okay. I mean, pretty easy to stick yourself, right? And when you read the patents for the paper clips in the 1860s, you're going to find oh, this was one of the advantages, you wouldn't, you know — that was why it was patentable, to do something as simple as a paper clip.

So you can go from the pyramids to the paper clips in all kinds of different degrees of complexity. And there are thousands of designs of paper clips today, some of which have almost no paper-clipping utility but are more for art, okay. Well that brings up the question, what is the purpose of the design? Are you trying to be artistic? Here's a little bunny rabbit, okay. You want a bunny rabbit? There you go, there's a bunny rabbit for you, okay. But you can look at these things and say, well, what is it about the design? And I may ask the class, what are the two fundamental mechanical properties that are necessary for making a functional paper clip?

Student: Stiffness, or modulus.

I love that, huh? Stiffness or modulus, yes — to you. I was going to ask the class. And let — that's okay, that's one of them. What's the other one? You might know.

Student: Strength.

Strength, okay. You gotta have both strength and stiffness. If you look at the formula for bending of a — the beam, which is basically a paper clip is doing — actually, it might be three, but it's basically — strength — it's the modulus times the moment of inertia, E times I. If you ever had a mechanics class — and you can have some constant over here and stuff, but your ability to have bending strength is the modulus E, Young's modulus, times I the moment of inertia. I got some mechanical engineers shaking their head over there like I'm right. At least you're not going back and forth, okay. Those are two fundamental properties. Now, the moment of inertia will have in it — can have in it the yield strength of the material. So you want to have ductility, that's why you want steel rather than cast iron. But you also want to have strength, and so some of these are heat treated for strength, plus steel can give you a tremendous strength, okay. So that increases the cost. What's the Achilles heel of steel? If you take my material selection — it's corrosion. So some of them are plated with zinc so they won't corrode. The first paper clips would get the paper rusty, okay. So there's lots of things to consider in design, even in small-scale design.

Petroski made his reputation in the beginning with a book, a whole book about the pencil, okay, and the history of making pencils. He goes back hundreds of years, and whole chapters on making the lead. But I think someone — I didn't read the book, I'm like, I'm gonna spend time reading a whole book on pencil, okay. But he became famous, okay, as a professor of civil engineering writing a book about the history of pencils. And there's some interesting engineering aspects as you go through the history to see how things happen. But Petroski also wrote — heard a book — that this book, all right, the one that got him elected to the National Academy of Engineering, okay, because he was sort of a historian of engineering. It wasn't because he was a great civil engineer or — he was a historian, a spokesman for engineering. This is To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design. I think I've said before that engineering is design, okay. Design is a fundamental component of the field of engineering.

And Petroski wrote this around 1990 or early '90s, saying that, well, we progress because we make something bigger, or faster, or lighter, or cheaper, and we all of a sudden have a major failure, okay. Anybody know the story of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge? Most people have seen Galloping Gertie, the bridge that kind of twisted, and everything. I mean, not everybody had a camera there back in the 1940s, take a picture of this thing. But Galloping Gertie was a bridge, and they basically didn't have enough stiffness. They made a long suspension bridge that was very slender. This would be the roadway, okay, you got a suspension bridge with the cables up here holding this thing. And if you go look up on Google to Tacoma Narrows Bridge, you can see that 1940s movie, and this was very thin. You go look at that and compare it to any other bridge like the Golden Gate Bridge, or the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. One of the things they did after this — was actually the second failure — they basically put some stiffening webs underneath to increase the bending strength, so they wouldn't get into the resonance.

And there's all kinds of stories about why exactly did the Tacoma Narrows Bridge fail. And even today, I'm not sure there's any consensus, whether it was resonant vibrations, or whether it's just stiffness. Certainly stiffness — stiffening it — solved the problem. But what really induced it? They had high winds coming up this channel of the river and stuff. That would, could be a topic, of why did the Tacoma Narrows Bridge fail, asking a little bit deeper question than just the simple "it wasn't stiff enough."

So any questions on that? So engineering can be the design of some of the simplest things like paper clips, to some of the most complex things, and things that involve millions of slaves, or laborers, or whatever, certainly million today — millions of hours of labor costing billions of dollars, very complex things to very simple things. Now I want to go to explore — if you don't have any questions, no question — that's our nascent — very many question, yes — this kind of jumpy —

Student: [question about the developed and developing world, steelmaking — inaudible]

Oh, the development countries are not — the developing countries are, and the development countries are not making as much steel. Well, the simple answer is labor rates. Gordon Forward, who actually is a graduate of this department, who was — he was CEO of a mini-mill, he's retired now, he's a Canadian but he's living in Southern California — he looked at it, and he said, he looked at the Koreans, and they were making steel in the 1970s, and the Chinese, the Japanese were, but they had higher labor rates. But the Koreans were the low-cost steel producer at the time in the 1970s. And it costs $30 a ton to ship steel across the ocean, steel or anything else, okay. The labor rate to go across the Pacific Ocean or the Atlantic Ocean is approximately $30 a ton, okay. So Gordon used to say, if he could get the labor costs to making steel in the United States below $30 a ton, he didn't care if they made the steel — you know, if they paid their laborers nothing, he could still compete in selling steel in the United States.

Let's face it, the United States is still thirty percent of the world's economy, and this is where everybody wants to dump their automobiles, everything, okay, appliances, you name it. This is — if you can't sell to the United States, you're not going to become a world beater in terms of sales. You can be a nation beater in your own nation, but you got to be able to market in the United States, where the big — where the 800-pound gorilla market — so. And you have to remember, that in 1974 when I started, Bethlehem Steel, forty, forty-five percent of the cost of a ton of steel was the raw materials, the coal, the iron ore, and the limestone, to make the steel, and then all the energy went into it to process it. Forty-five percent was labor rates in the United States, and ten percent was profit. By the 1980s, it was down to probably eighty percent for raw materials, and thirty percent for labor, and minus ten percent for profit. And that's why people like Ned Thomas said, oh, metallurgy is dead, okay, because the steel companies were losing money in 1980.

By 1990, though, the steel companies were starting to make money, except for the — well, what they'd done is they had doubled their productivity. If you look at the U.S. steel employment, the employment in steelmaking in the United States was half a million people in 1980. In 1990 it was 250,000. But the consumption was constant, a hundred million tons. Well guess what, if consumption is constant and productivity — and employment goes down by a factor of two, what happens to productivity? It goes up by a factor of two. And so in fact the problem in the steel industry and the metals industry in general in the 1980s, is productivity was going way ahead of anything else. Nationwide productivity increase in the 1980s was one or two percent a year. In the metals business it was four to five percent a year. There was one other industry that beat the metals industry in the 1980s — mining. And you think Ned Thomas thinks much of mining? I mean, that's the same as household gardening, you know, you go out and plant tomatoes. As far — well, he can't tell the difference, okay. So the thing is those industries —

I've been giving you the long-winded answer, which is actually in one of my other modules, okay, but who cares, little — you ask the question, so answer. What happened is in the 1960s and the 1970s, well, we developed two processes. One is, was an improvement on the old, a basic open hearth — and this is which lecture would this be — it probably is in my material selection lecture, okay, so I set of lectures. But the basic open hearth, it took 24 hours to make 400 tons of steel by blowing air over to oxidize away the carbon, okay. Listen, guys in Austria — yeah, yep, yeah. So the LD firm in Austria in the 1950s said, hey, why don't we blow pure oxygen on this steel rather than air, and we can oxidize it faster. Well they got the time down from 24 hours to one hour, and now it's down to about 20 minutes to make 300 tons of steel as opposed to the old open hearths' 24 hours. U.S. Steel built a huge open hearth in the 1970s with 450 tons. Everybody else was going to the basic oxygen process, which was pure oxygen. Well that was a tremendous increase in productivity.

The other thing was continuous casting. When you make an ingot — or pour an ingot of steel — it's usually slightly V-shaped. Anybody know why? The mold is slightly V-shaped so you can get it out as it shrinks on solidification. You end up with a gap here, and turn it over or lift it with a crane, and you can take it out. You put it in straight-sided walls, you're liable to just — you just made a composite, okay, of cast iron and steel. So they have sloping walls. But anyway, you pour the steel in up to here, but as it shrinks on solidification, you get what we call piping defect. It's just a — shrinkage on solidification, you could throw away one-third of your steel and just remelted because of the solidification piping. Well, what people learned to do — the Japanese primarily, took a while to do it, you have to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to do it — they basically developed a continuous casting technology, so you're constantly feeding liquid in here. And they have had continuous casters — these things about ten stories tall — you pour the steel in at the top, you have these copper molds that take the heat out, and they're about 10 feet high. And you just let the thing drop, okay, pull it down, and the steel is soft enough — and if you got seven stories to go, you can actually turn that 10-inch-thick slab of steel sideways, horizontally, you can cut it off as the whole thing is moving, and a few centimeters a minute, okay, it's not moving that fast. And the Japanese have cast continuously for several years on one machine. Now if you have a breakout — which is if the liquid coming out the bottom — actually the liquid, you still got liquid in the center of these little shell of solid steel, if that breaks and fractures, you dumped behind, only not 300 tons, you dumped a couple hundred tons of steel on top of your $100 million or billion dollar facility, and it shuts you down for a few weeks, which is pretty expensive. So breakouts are important.

But that — we basically went from sixty-five percent yield, pounds of steel poured to pounds of steel sold, when I started at Bethlehem Steel ingot technology was sixty-five percent, continuous casting technology was over ninety percent. Wow, what an increase in productivity, right? Well, because the BOF and continuous casting, steel productivity went through the roof in the 1980s. And all of a sudden when you have that much productivity increase — the world's using more steel, but they're not using — when you're going up at four or five percent and the growth rate of steel is only two percent, you now have an excess capacity. And if you have excess capacity in all your plants, what happens to your price? Okay.

So all of a sudden the steel companies were losing money. Wall Street thought steel was a dog, just like Ned Thomas. The people on Wall Street are just as stupid as Ned, okay. They can't look at what the cause is, they just look at the effect and say, that's a bad effect, okay, they're losing money. Why were they losing money? There was Lakshmi Mittal in India who was smart, and he knew there was a value in steel, and he started buying up steel companies around the world, okay, cheap, like ten cents on the dollar. And finally in the 1990s, or actually around 2000, the worldwide steel excess capacity got consumed by increased consumption, tearing apart old plants that were unprofitable. And all of a sudden by 2005, Lakshmi Mittal is now making a fortune, because he knew, and anyone who had a half a brain would have known, that the world needs a billion tons of steel a year. That's a lot of market. And when you don't have excess capacity, and you have high productivity today —

Actually, part of my lecture on some of this stuff is, I estimate that when they had Saugus Ironworks up here in 1600 — up here in Saugus, Massachusetts, is interesting story on all of that, how they had one of the — energy cried — every — crisis in Britain was they were running out of wood, but they discovered North America, and we had lots of wood in 1600. And so they sent their iron making over here because you had to have wood. And I estimated it took four thousand person-hours — okay, or two thousand or 4,000, I remember — to make a ton of steel. Today it takes 15 minutes to make a ton of steel, person-hours, okay. Well, how many industries can you name where you had that kind of productivity gain, okay? So productivity is everything. Well, actually Paul Krugman says productivity isn't everything but it's nearly everything, okay. Exchange rates and other things either there too. So that answer your question? See, if you ask a question I'll give you an answer, only took 10 minutes.

What was the quiet — the question is, why did the developing world — oh, actually I didn't get to that part of this question, why did the developing world do all the steelmaking. That's another interesting story. The last — the world's last integrated steel mill, actually — anybody ever heard the book The Innovator's Dilemma? Oh, Clayton Christensen up at Harvard Business School, 10 or 12 years ago published this book called The Innovator's Dilemma, where he looked at technology advancements. And one of them was the steel industry. And my daughter, who was — I guess she was either in high school or she was in college — but she worked for Clayton one summer as a researcher, and she was working on the steel chapter for him. And he wanted to know what it costs to build an integrated steel mill. Integrated steel mill is one that has basic oxygen furnaces and blast furnaces and coke ovens — turns out five or ten million tons of steel a year, which is times three or four hundred dollars a ton, times 5 million, and you get a fairly large number in terms of sales out of that one plant.

And Rebecca came home one day and said, dad, I can't find the cost anywhere. I've looked all over, can't find anywhere where it tells me how much to build, to make, build an integrated steel plant. I said, I got that data, I got a slide on, Rebecca. And so I brought, came in, got my slide, made a copy of it, gave it to Rebecca. And I had estimated 15 billion dollars. Now I estimated this sitting in an airport, Saginaw, Michigan, with one of my graduate students, and we compared the cost of mini-mills and integrated steel mills. And there was a new type of thing that Gordon Forward was promoting called micro mills that wouldn't buy so many huge lumps, like 5 or 10 million tons. And it turns out, the last company in the world to build an integrated steel plant was Bethlehem Steel, company I worked for in 1965. They built the Burns Harbor in Indiana plant for 5 billion dollars, okay. And they almost went bankrupt, because 5 billion dollars in 1965 was a huge sum, it'd be like 15 or 20 billion dollars today. An investment like that can bankrupt the company, it almost did for Bethlehem Steel. By 1974 they were making more money than they ever had, because they now had a modern facility.

Same thing for Intel — what's it cost to build a silicon fab? 15 or 20 billion dollars. What's it cost Boeing to design a new aircraft? 15 or 20 billion dollars. What does it cost Pratt & Whitney or General Electric to develop a new jet engine? 10 or 15 billion. These are bet-your-company investments. And so very few companies in the world can, or are willing to, do that. All the new steel mills since 1965 — there have been not a lot of integrated steel mills built, but they were built by countries, not by companies, okay. The Koreans built — they became the world's largest steel company, okay. I was the POSCO professor, I went over there 1999, had to give lectures to them about the steel industry. They had surpassed U.S. Steel. U.S. Steel sold them the technology, they built it. But it was the Korean government that was financing it, okay. Who's the largest steel company in the world today? Nope, ah, Steel Bao, the Chinese. Again, who finances that? The Chinese government. Lakshmi Mittal, I think, is number two. But Lakshmi Mittal is a conglomerate of like 15 of the companies that existed in 1970. Lakshmi Mittal was smart enough to go around and buy them up. I don't know who gave him the money, but he went around and bought them up, and he's a rich man because of it, okay.

So you got to look at what's fundamental. That decade's profitability — steel was losing money all over the country, all over the world in 1980s — and so all the highbrows in Wall Street and Ned Thomas among them — not to use of Wall Street — your highbrow, they determined that profitability was the answer to whether a material was business was a good business. Well, you know, you just have to get rid of the excess capacity. You have to look at the fundamentals of, are they productive. Anyway, there's more — you can't live by sound bites. You actually have to understand something about the business, okay. Answer that?

Now, I have answered that question, okay. And the labor rates are still an important part of some of that stuff. But really, it's the developing countries — no, steel is such a fundamental material, if they're going to grow big — they look at the example of Japan, had no steelmaking left at the end of World War II, we had bombed it all out. But the country helped build the steel companies again, and they had better steel technology than the United States by 1985. When I took my sabbatical over in Japan in 1985 to learn about Japanese steel technology, the U.S. Navy sent me over there because they wanted to build better ships, okay. And I visited steel plants to see how they were doing it. All they were doing was using the technology that had been developed at some of the American steel companies in the 1950s and the 1960s but never got commercialized, because those companies didn't have the foresight, okay, among them. And that's another story, about the management doing — okay, but that's in some of the other lectures.

Any other questions before I start on what I was — okay, I was going to talk about another definition that helps to define the difference between science and engineering. Science seeks to increase human knowledge, engineering seeks to improve the human condition. And I think if you go back to what we've been talking about last, for three or four lectures, you can kind of get those themes out of there. But with that in mind, there is an engineering code of ethics, okay. I've never heard of a — well, in medicine there's a code of ethics called the Hippocratic Oath, and what's the Hippocratic Oath? Do, no, first do no harm, right? In engineering there is a code of ethics, the National Society of Professional Engineers has the code of ethics. I guess if I give this info area where you can read it.

And if you start looking at this — engineers uphold and advance the integrity, honor, and dignity of the engineering profession by, first, using their knowledge and skill for enhancement of human welfare; being honest and impartial; striving to increase the confidence and prestige of the profession — so we'll make more money, okay; supporting the professional and technical societies of their discipline — so now let's support all the people who fund us. But I have never heard of a scientists' code of ethics or mantra like "do no harm," for the medical doctors. But scientists have the attitude that they are doing something fundamental, and everything is based on what they're doing, and society should fund them no matter what they want to do.

So, for example — actually this was an engineering person instead — this — I was giving a talk to some MIT alumni, and another professor who's rose fairly high up into the administrative ranks at MIT — she was, I think she was a junior faculty member at the time, this is 25 years ago — and she was talking about going to Mars, okay, she was Aero and Astro professor. And she said, the United States spends 20 billion dollars a year on computer potato chips, and we estimate going to Mars will only cost 20 billion dollars. Well, whenever you first hear about the cost of some new material, okay, or some new project — 20 billion dollars, they couldn't go to Mars in 20 years at 20 billion a year, okay, give me a break. But I leaned over to the person next to me, I said, if you ask the American people whether they'd rather give up their potato chips in order to go to Mars, I'll bet you, if you had a vote, we'd still have potato chips, okay. And that's the difference in the attitude of the scientist. I've seen it for years, they say, you need to give us more money. But what are they going to do with it? And you hear this debate all the time, and sometimes the politicians come and say, what are we getting for our money? And the scientist says, oh, we're getting new knowledge. Oh good, what am I going to do with that, okay.

The fundamental canons of engineering: our engineers hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public, in the performance of their duties. If I'm working for a company and I find they're doing something that could be dangerous, I have, as a professional engineer, a duty to blow the whistle, okay, on something that's unsafe, okay. Engineers shall perform services only in the area of their competence — well that would be good if they would do that. Engineers shall issue public statements only in an objective and truthful manner — don't talk to the media. Engineers shall act in professional manner, blah blah blah, you'll get all this. These are the seven fundamental canons — or yeah, seven — shall continue their professional development throughout their continuing education, okay. This will be posted, so far as that goes. I actually did have — think — oh, cherry-wood man. So anyway, I'll leave that up.

Anyway, so there's, if you read what the engineers say about what their responsibilities are, it's to serve the public. I don't see the scientists saying our duty is to serve the public. Their duty is to increase knowledge, if you read the definitions of the scientists, okay.

So let's took a look at some of the undergraduate degrees in the country or the world. The United States — this is undergraduate degrees 1997, or most recent — discuss the National Science Foundation did a study in about 1999, so where this data came from. The United States produced 1.2 million undergraduate degrees, which was one-third of the 24-year-old population, okay. India, five percent. Japan, twenty-eight percent. You go down through here. And so we have a lot of educated students, but are they being educated in engineering — not necessarily — in the United States. This is about — anyway let's look at this first before I go to the engineering. Canada actually has the largest percentage of 24-year-olds getting a degree, college degree. Australia, then the United States, okay. And you go down a look at that.

Now if you look at engineering degrees — this is at a time Congress was pushing the NSF to have a national engineering foundation, okay, not a National Science Foundation. Undergraduate bachelor's degrees in engineering worldwide, 866,000 a year, 13.8% of all the bachelor's degrees. So one in seven bachelor students is getting some sort of engineering degree. China, forty-five percent of all the bachelor students in China are doing engineering, okay. The United States, five percent. One out of twenty — the United — one out of ten, okay. If you look at the actual percentages of who does the most, the United States is not even on the main list, okay, with our five percent. Most other countries, engineering is a larger fraction of the bachelor's degrees. Why is that?

Student: Yeah, well, I think culturally — I only think about China — it's workable like — more people — almost everyone in our generation goes to college, and a lot of those people get business degree, arts, or English, right? And that's more socially acceptable.

Yeah, I don't know if that's part of the answer, yes — that's actually the main part of it, yes.

Student: We're not a country to do manufacturing anymore.

Yeah, but a lot of the design engineering is done here in this country. But a lot of the designers are people that we imported from other countries, right? So Donald Trump, when you want to cut off all the immigration without — he didn't say what — if cut off all of it — some of the best engineering in this country is done by people who immigrated to this country from other countries, okay. Look around the room, okay. It's not all white Anglo-Saxon Protestants or whatever anymore.

Where are they going? Well, you could think of it in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. We have a country, it's one of the richest in the world, and many people — many of our parents went to college. You go to Mexico, not very many of the parents went to college. You go to India, not very many of the parents went to college. MIT, when they compare themselves to Harvard, say, we are — or Princeton, or Yale — we have a larger fraction of our undergraduates that are first-generation college educated. And that's because engineering is sort of an egalitarian major, where you can — if you're willing to work hard, and engineering has a reputation at most universities as being a hard discipline, okay — if you're willing to work hard you can get through it, become one of first ones in your family to be educated. Whereas if your parents went to college, they may want — they have enough money to send you to college and they may want you to become a music major, okay. Not me — I wanted my kids not to be music majors. I said they could do that as an application.

What happens at the master's level? Well, you can go on and get a master's degree in engineering, or you can get an MBA. Both of them take two years. One of them you have to go get some work experience usually. You get out of the MBA with 60 or 70 — this is a few years ago, more like a hundred thousand dollars in debt, or 150,000 depending on school you'll get. And again, this is older, 55,000 or 75 to 100 thousand starting salary, which helps pay off the debt. What are your responsibilities? You're going to be working — for an MBA — and they'll be making the decisions whether they know anything about technology or not, okay.

So we have, because of our affluence, we don't have as many of our American-born-raised parents who had college education. We go off to the arts and sciences because we're up on the higher end of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. We got enough food, we got enough security, okay. People come from other countries who don't have those things — they want to go into engineering, in part because they want to go back and help their country procure those things. Whereas, if you've got enough of these things, or you can buy them, or you can hire other people in India to do the software development or whatever, okay, you can goof off and work in the arts and sciences, okay. But engineers are interested in doing something, and usually it applies at the lower level of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, okay.

Simone will be in here tomorrow, and I'll be here on Wednesday. Life is this.