[BC] It's not just Engineers....

[RichardBJohnson at comcast.net]

First a bit of history
When I was growing up in the late forties and fifties,
there were two factories in town. One was called the
rubber shop, Quaboag Rubber, and the other was
called the asbestos shop, the Aztec Company.

The town had a population of about 2,000 and most
everybody worked either on the farm or in these two
factories. The state had just passed a law that prevented
schoolboys from quitting after having obtained only an
education to the school’s eight grade, the previous
requirement. Now a boy would have to stay in school
until his sixteenth birthday. This meant that most
everybody, including those who intended to stay
on their family farm had to attend high school.
Many found ways to obtain scholarships and even
enter colleges and universities.

This change meant that many high school graduates
did not stay on the farm. They moved off to the cities
as the farms were cut up into condominiums and
the towns became bedroom communities.

In Massachusetts, after the floods of the fifties,
industry did not rebuild. Instead, the factory jobs were
moved, first to inexpensive labor states in the South,
and then eventually overseas. The ultimate result
is that we are a country of educated people with
little or no employment opportunity.

Radio and eventually television weathered this
change quite well because it was an industry of
specialists. The specialization provided an opportunity
for those who could take a slightly different career path
than the norm. Soon, technology, developed by those
who had left the farms to take the jobs in the cities,
eventually removed the specialization of the radio and
television industry. Now anybody could run a radio or
television station. They became profit centers just
like Wall Mart and Home Despot (sic), traded on
the big boards.

The first well established radio automation equipment
I remember was developed and supplied by Shaffer
although many radio engineers built their own. There
were racks of reel-to-reel tape machines and stacks
of cartridge playback units, all sequenced from an
electromechanical contraption that required periodic
maintenance. Even though disc jockeys could now
be replaced by the “mister motto” machine, radio
engineers didn’t complain because they were still
needed to oil mister motto, clean the transmitter,
toilets, and repair the owner’s car. Their jobs were
secure.

Then the NAB stepped in and declared that radio
engineers were not engineers at all, merely
technicians that could be replaced by the local
TV repair guy. They pushed their agenda through
the FCC and the result was that there was no
longer any work for the radio wizards who had
been maintaining a well oiled industry. Soon,
even the TV repairmen went out-of-business as
we became a throw-away society.

The engineer discussion
There was a discussion on this board about what
an engineer is. I prefer the definition given by the
American Engineers' Council for Professional
Development, now known as ABET. “Engineering
is the creative application of scientific principles
to design or develop structures, machines,
apparatus, or manufacturing processes, or works
utilizing them singly or in combination; or to
construct or operate the same with full cognizance
of their design; or to forecast their behavior
under specific operating conditions; all as
respects an intended function, economics of
operation and safety to life and property.”

The U.S Department of labor gives this definition;
“Engineers apply the principles of science and
mathematics to develop economical solutions to
technical problems. Their work is the link between
scientific discoveries and the commercial
applications that meet societal and consumer
needs.”

College and engineering
With due respect for college training, I have worked
with many engineers who were self-trained. Often
they were the ones who created inventions because
their lack of formal education did not prevent them from
accomplishing what better trained engineers might
deem impossible. Many of the early electronics
inventors did not have a formal engineering education,
such as Thomas Edison, Lee Deforest, Philo Farnsworth
and Vladimir Zworykin. They did not have a college level
engineering education although Lee Deforest did
attend college to become a schoolteacher. Therefore,
a college education is often of secondary importance,
although in recent times it is often used as a filter by
human resources departments to isolate potential
employment candidates.

Personally, I would much rather work with an engineer
who lacked the formal education that would teach him
that our goals were impossible, than to work with the
nay-sayers cranked out of many of our nation’s top
engineering colleges –those who will “prove” that I
can’t extract a signal that has a negative S/N ratio
out of the mud, or those who think they can model
a design so well that they don’t need to build a
prototype.

I do note, however, that many physicists do not have
the same kind of “you can’t do it” attitude, possibly
because their training teaches them that they will
not have completed their education –ever.

Clearly the radio and television industry as many of
us knew it is obsolete. We don’t need to consume
a half-megawatt at a transmitter site to push fifty
kilowatts into the “ether.” Nowadays, you just set up
a dedicated computer and a T1 link. Soon, all the
automobiles will have radios that use spread-
spectrum scatter communications or something
like that, which ultimately comes from an Internet
link. Even satellite communications will become
obsolete.

In the meantime, there is still room for engineering.
We need to get the country off from fossil fuel. We
need to improve the efficiency of most all of the
remaining manufacturing processes, and we need
to go back to water-power (the most efficient solar
power) by building new power stations on the existing
dams which were abandoned when the nuclear power
industry was born.

Most of the current crop of engineering schools need
to be reformed to change from esoteric engineering to
practical engineering courses. Several universities have
already done that, such as Gordon Institute of the Tufts
University School of Engineering,
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tufts_University_School_of_Engineering,
 started by one of my mentors, Bernie Gordon,
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Gordon.

 Another such college is Worcester Polytechnic Institute,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester_Polytechnic_Institute.
Until he retired at the age of 81, that school’s engineering
department was headed up by Professor Emeritus, Donald
Howe. He was one of my early mentors although I never
attended his school. In the Northeast, he is considered the
father of directional antennas for broadcast use. Two of
his early arrays, designed the “hard” way (no computers),
were WARE, then WRMS, and WORC. Of course, his
students helped. They even learned how to measure base
impedances using a General Radio Bridge, plus some
practical tricks like hooking it up backwards to obtain
a sharper null. Yes, that was radio engineering in the
golden olden days of radio.


--
Cheers,
Richard B. Johnson
Read about my book
http://www.LymanSchool.org

 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "Golchert, Michael A." <MichaelGolchert at clearchannel.com>
>     In looking through the trades of the last couple of days, it's not
> just the engineers that are lacking (as has been discussed on this
> list).
[Snipped...]
>     
>     To me, it appears that Engineers are not the only ones "not getting
> enough respect".  I'm wondering if broadcasting as a entity "does not
> get enough respect".  Consider the reduction in "analysts" that the
> brokerage firms are assigning to watch the media. 

[Snipped]