• Question: Who's your favourite icon or role model in engineering??? ;)

    Asked by Louise Farragher to Catherine, John G, Laura, Ray on 19 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: John Ging

      John Ging answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      Nicole Tesla. 99 parts genius, 1 part nutter.
      He tried to build a tower to transmit telecommunications and electricity across the Atlantic. Wireless power transfer still hasn’t really materialised but this guy was determined to do it in 1900. I wouldn’t like to be the bird flying through that beam!

      See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla

      Also, the coolest car on the planet is named after him.

    • Photo: Laura Tobin

      Laura Tobin answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      I too like Tesla, I’ve read a few books on him and he really was a genius. I think this cartoon from The Oatmeal sums him up pretty well http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla

      Marie Curie is pretty inspirational too. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the first & only person to win two Nobel prizes in two different areas, physics and chemistry. If I could attend any conference, it’d be the Fifth Solvay International Conference – there’s a very iconic photograph of all the famous scientists from our science & maths text books; Bohr, Heisenberg, Curie, Schrodinger, Einstein, Dirac etc.. Marie Curie is the only women. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvay_Conference

    • Photo: Ray Alcorn

      Ray Alcorn answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      Isimbard Kingdom Brunel.. just because he couple engineering, pioneering, vision and business accumin. I also like Michael Faraday, the father of electrical engineering… although due to a oddity he would not be eligible to join the IET as an electrical engineer (he was a chemist)

    • Photo: Catherine Conaghan

      Catherine Conaghan answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      It has to be Tesla too – just Google him and inventions and you will see that he had a huge influence on so many things we use today, and for historical reasons never got the same credit for his discoveries as Thomas Edison. Tesla was probably the greatest electrical engineer there ever was.

      Leonardo da Vinci was just awesome as well, He drew design for helicopters, bridges, parachutes and so much more that didn’t exist at the time and he never even got to build, but he designs have been proven to work since – that guy just understood how the world worked!

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