The best books to inspire a love for mechanical engineering

This is not an engineering book per se, but one written by an engineer/fighter pilot in WW2. His aircraft was a Hawker Tempest, one of the last and fastest piston-engined fighters. The following quote describes his final flight before demobilization and shows his deep love for the engineering marvel that he flew:

“And in that narrow cockpit I wept, as I shall never weep again, when I felt the concrete brush against his wheels and, with I great sweep of the wrist, dropped him on the ground like a cut flower. 

As always, I carefully cleared the engine, turned off all the switches one by one, removed the straps, the wires and the tubes which tied me to him, like a child to his mother. And when my waiting pilots and my mechanics saw my downcast eyes and my shaking shoulders, they understood and returned to the Dispersal in silence.”

It is well written, exciting, and describes the way men and machines interact with emotion and dedication. For example, the author describes his aircraft with the pronoun “he” rather than “it.” This is actually quite common – although English is not a gender-based language, certain man-made objects are given gender, e.g., ships are always “she.”

As the title suggests, an engineer’s biography. But Nevil Shute was more than an engineer. He was an entrepreneur, starting his own aircraft manufacturing company, and a famous novelist, still in print today. But Slide Rule remains for me his masterwork, describing as it does the design and building of airships in the 1930s. 

It is a fascinating book about a technology that no longer exists. The design challenge was in creating a vehicle that, although made of metal, had to float in the air. This was achieved by making it very big, displacing the air inside it with a lighter-than-air gas, so that it could lift those pieces which had to be made of metal as well as a payload of persons or freight.

The design challenges were awesome. The metal parts, particularly the huge metal rings that formed the outline of the ship, had to be optimised for both strength and lightness. There were no computers or computer programs to help in those days. It sometimes took weeks of trial-and-error calculations using young math-savvy girls with desk calculators to optimise a design. When a ring had been optimised, it as an occasion for joy and relief.

This is another motivational book, once again about aircraft, this time about research into supersonic flight when this was still a dangerous undertaking in the 1950s. The following quotation shows once again, as in the case of Clostermann’s book, that engineering has an emotional side. Here the pilot Bridgeman talks about the engineers who analyse the flight data that he brings back after every flight: 

“The engineers and men in the Skyrocket programme viewed the plane with some kind of undefinable emotion: they not only took their work seriously – they lived it. Every murmur from the ship was cause for their undivided attention and interest. It was a form of dedication I have rarely seen – a devotion to work that was almost akin to love; and to feel this devotion unconsciously tapped an intuitive understanding within me. It intensified the ever-growing feeling of responsibility not only toward myself and the ship in this manner, but also toward the men whom this day I suddenly seemed to know.”

Here is a genuine Engineering Textbook. Thermodynamics was my favourite subject as an undergraduate and the only subject in which I excelled, coming first in class in my final year in Thermo, as we students called it. Thermodynamics deals with Heat as a form of energy and its uses in the creation of engines, turbines, rockets, and the like. Without it and its twin technology, electricity, the modern world could not exist. Before the Industrial Revolution, the only power sources were wind, water, animals, and men (as slaves). Then came the quantum leap of Steam and the world has never been the same.

This was the book that set me on the path to becoming a Reliability Engineering specialist. (Reliability Engineering being a subset of Mechanical Engineering). This book was my first exposure to reliability engineering lore, covering subjects such as the Weibull Distribution and the probabilistic approach to engineering reliability. To design and manufacture an engineering system is one thing – how to make it reliable enough to last for its projected lifetime is another. More emphasis is now being placed on these aspects of the engineering life cycle – the operation, maintenance, and divestment phases. This approach has sometimes delivered systems an order of magnitude more reliable than their 20th Century forebears.