Metatools for Information Engineering Design

Abstract

An examination of the professional practice of engineers in many disciplines reveals a history of engineers developing highly sophisticated tools to eliminate the need to ‘do mathematics’ in the conventional sense. This chapter will build upon the previous one by Dillon to consider further aspects of the history of a number of what I shall call mathematical ‘meta-tools’ in the fields of electronics, telecommunications and control engineering. In common with Dillon I argue that, for most engineers, ‘doing mathematics’ has become something categorically different from the mathematics of physical scientists or mathematicians. The chapter concentrates on the origins and changing fortunes of a number of classic information engineering meta-tools that appeared in the period just before or after the Second World War: Bode plots (late 1930s); the Smith chart (1939); the Nichols chart (1947); phasor, spectral and signal constellation models (throughout the period); and the root-locus technique (1948). The 1950s and 1960s saw an increasing mathematicisation of engineering education, linked to the rise of the notion of ‘engineering science’ that was driven to a large extent by the legacy of WW2 research and development and the post-war funding environment in the USA and elsewhere. Such changes, and the arrival of digital computers, meant that the utility of the earlier diagrammatic tools was often played down or questioned. In recent years, however, such tools have been incorporated into powerful engineering software, where their function now is not to avoid computation, but to mediate between the user and the machine carrying out the computation.

Earlier versions of parts of this chapter appeared as (1) Mathematical ‘meta tools’ in 20^th century information engineering, in Hevelius, 2, 2004, pp. 11-21 and (2) Models and “black boxes”: Mathematics as an enabling technology in the history of communications and control engineering, in Revue d’histoire des sciences, 57(2) juillet-décembre 2004, pp. 305-338. (Bissell 2004a, b).