Creativity in Engineering

Ask any child what an engineer does and it is highly likely that his or her response will have something to do with driving trains, repairing machines, or construction. Although the term engineer has been part of the English vocabulary for thousands of years, the profession is still poorly understood by the general public. A search for the origin of the word engineer will generate several different theories, but they all lead back to the Latin words ingenium (innate character, talent, nature); ingeniosus (full of intellect, superior in mind, able, intellectual, clever, ingenious); and ingeniator (ingenious, to devise in the sense of construct, or craftsmanship). The early ingeniators (engineers) advanced their knowledge through trial and error or by tinkering with a device to make it ...