Dr Lucy Rogers has been both a contestant and a judge on BBC2’s Robot Wars. In this episode she talks to Jason about creativity, engineering, and how to smash a robot…
Jason Kingsley 0:04
Throughout the 19th century, Britain’s engineering was considered to be the envy of the world. From the Industrial Revolution through Isambard Kingdom Brunel, we made things that powered the world. But as we move into what’s been called the Fourth Industrial Revolution, does Britain have the engineers it needs and what can be done to promote creativity in engineering? Joining me today is Professor Lucy Rogers. She’s a maker and an engineer. And you might recognise her from one of my favourite TV shows, BBC 2’s Robot Wars, and we’ll talk about that a lot. She’s currently the visiting professor of engineering, creativity and communication at Brunel. And it’s great to be able to chat to her today. Lucy’s is going to help me answer all sorts of questions to do with engineering. Lucy, thank you so much for coming along. Instead of me introducing you to our listeners, do you want to sort of introduce yourself?
Professor Lucy Rogers 0:54
I’ll start with I’m an inventor with a sense of fun. That’s the kind of work I do: anything that’s fun. I’m an engineer by training, a mechanical engineer. But nowadays, I am now tinkering with electronics and computing, and all sorts of making, any kind of problem solving. I’ll put it together and solve that.
Jason Kingsley 1:15
Would you say what it is that sort of more of a sort of physical engineering as opposed to the, sort of, the electronic engineering and that kind of stuff?
Professor Lucy Rogers 1:22
I’m definitely hands on. So imagine Rube Goldberg or Heath Robinson, things that look like they’ve been made in a shed? Generally, I have made them in a shed.
Jason Kingsley 1:33
Fantastic. Great. So is there anything that you want to tell me about that you’re most proud of? A ny of your engineering triumphs that people ought to hear about?
Professor Lucy Rogers 1:44
Well, I’m currently a Visiting Professor of Engineering, Creativity and Communication at Brunel University. And so now all the tips and tricks that I basically picked up along the way on how to explain what I’m doing, but also how to think creatively, rather than just in the you must follow these rules type thing, beginning to teach that to students.
Jason Kingsley 2:09
Well, that’s really interesting, because the idea that engineering is sort of po-faced following instructions and isn’t creative is absurd, because engineering is about solving problems, is about creative solutions. I mean, back in the day, I’m particularly fascinated by the mediaeval period. Obviously, there were a lot of mechanical engineers, then.
Professor Lucy Rogers 2:27
Not much health and safety, though.
Jason Kingsley 2:28
Well, no, no, absolutely. If you look at some of the illustrations, we have of mediaeval sites where they’re working on cathedrals and things like that, and you go hot and cold. But of course, people did die doing that. But engineering goes back much, much further. In fact, would you say that engineering is a fundamental part of being human, do you think?
Professor Lucy Rogers 2:48
Yeah, engineering is problem solving. So we always solve problems with the thing that differentiates us from 99, or something percent of the other animals on the planet, that we use tools, we use tools to solve problems. And so making those tools, designing them, making them work, and actually using them, that’s what humans do.
Jason Kingsley 3:13
And I suppose the engineering process is also iterative in that, you make something you see that it doesn’t quite work as well as you’d like. And then you have another go. So the idea of one-and-done in engineering is not how it works. You sort of get a solution, and then you try and improve on it.
Professor Lucy Rogers 3:28
Yeah, there’s the prototype stage. Understanding the problem is a huge stage. And a lot of it is actually the theoretical stuff. Before you pick up a spanner or wield a hammer or anything. You’ve got the the thought process of, can I do it this way? Is that way better? What’s involved? Am I going to break laws of physics if I try and do that? And then you actually start progressing on to: Okay, let’s make a prototype. Will it work? Okay, it probably will. Let’s get bigger and better.
Jason Kingsley 3:59
I suppose materials make a big difference. So understanding how materials work. So wood works in a certain way and has – as I understand it, and correct me if I’m wrong -wood has a dimensional stability in one direction, and not in another and hence, plywood was invented to try to overcome the particular way wood breaks or doesn’t break and I think is wood strong in compression and not strong in tension? I can’t remember which way round it is. Concrete is strong in compression.
Professor Lucy Rogers 4:27
Yeah, definitely.
Jason Kingsley 4:28
And reinforcement. And steel is quite good in tension. Is that right? And so reinforced concrete combines the two materials in a in a beautiful, fairly cost effective way.
Professor Lucy Rogers 4:38
Yeah.
Jason Kingsley 4:38
It must be interesting for you being an engineer at this stage of history, and looking at all the different kinds of materials that are available. We talked about Robot Wars and obviously, with Robot Wars, absolutely fascinating, a kind of almost an entry-level and a way of knowing about engineering for an audience. And maybe a way that would would get lots of young people excited about engineering, which is hugely important. They could see it entertaining, they could see solutions and, and quite frankly, saying things busted up is kind of also kind of quite satisfying in a way. But has material science completely changed engineering in the last few years?
Professor Lucy Rogers 5:20
There’s been a few things. More recently, one of the metals that’s used in Robot Wars is something called hardox, which is a steel that is very, very hard.
Jason Kingsley 5:31
Hardox.
Professor Lucy Rogers 5:32
Yeah, it’s very hard to machine. So actually, to get it into the shape of your robot is hard, to drill holes in it is hard. But then, to smack it open is hard.
Jason Kingsley 5:44
So you’ve got a great material, but the engineering complexities are increased.
Professor Lucy Rogers 5:51
But there’s also HDPE, which is kitchen breadboard, you know the white kitchen breadboard. And that you hit that and it just bounces. And so some of the robots have got that on as well to protect them.
Jason Kingsley 6:04
So that’s got different mechanical properties from this super-steel.
Professor Lucy Rogers 6:06
It’s a plastic-type material.
Jason Kingsley 6:06
So it will absorb the impacts. So it’s from an engineering solution. I suppose if you’re putting armour on a man or a horse or a robot, there’s no one perfect solution, is there? You could have a very large amount of fairly low density material, but it would absorb the impact. And then you could have a small amount of very hard stuff, but you’ve got quite a lot of complexities about brittleness and stiffness and deformation, I’m going back to my A-Level physics, trying to remember…
Professor Lucy Rogers 6:30
You’re thinking about armour, aren’t you?
Jason Kingsley 6:31
Yes, I am. I’m sorry.
Professor Lucy Rogers 6:32
If something hits me, is it gonna penetrate, is it gonna bounce off?
Jason Kingsley 6:43
Yes. Does it absorb the impact as well, because mediaeval armour, a lot of the surfaces are deflecting surfaces. What you want to do is try and minimise injuries. And I guess that’s exactly the same for Robot Wars, you are going to get hit in Robot Wars and it’s what the hit does to you.
Professor Lucy Rogers 6:58
Yeah. What kind of hit it is. So there’s, there’s different types of spinners. There’s horizontal ones and the vertical ones. So if you’re going to be sideswiped from a horizontal spinner, you want protection sideways. But it’s not just your shell that needs protection, it’s all the internals.
Jason Kingsley 7:17
Because of shock waves. Because they will go through armour effectively and then…
Professor Lucy Rogers 7:20
And everything will just shift inside. And if you have your cables, your motors, your batteries shifting the wrong way you can break cables and and then your robot’s not working.
Jason Kingsley 7:31
Which is exactly the same in mediaeval armour, because your helmet might be shaped to deflect the blows. But a big enough blow might not actually break your skull, but it’ll move the engineering components inside your brain…
Professor Lucy Rogers 7:44
Your microprocessor.
Jason Kingsley 7:47
Yeah, exactly. And you’ll be knocked out. That’s what boxing is all about, you know, people get knocked out because not because their brain’s been destroyed, but it’s been dislodged and moved around. Broken bones are one thing, but you can do a lot of damage to the inside of a person. And the armour can actually be intact. So that’s sort of interesting. So do they use any kind of of the anti ballistic kind of technologies that might be used for modern human body armour, are any of those ceramics or anything like that used?
Professor Lucy Rogers 7:49
I’ve not seen any of the ceramics, the Kevlar, there’s nothing like that. I think a lot of those are one hit wonders. They’ll protect you once from one bullet, or whatever. Wh ereas in an arena, you’re likely to get smacked and smacked and smacked possibly in the same place…
Jason Kingsley 8:39
Until the whistle blows.
Professor Lucy Rogers 8:40
Until the whistle blows or you surrender. Or you fight back?
Jason Kingsley 8:43
That’s really interesting. So in fact, you could argue that the evolution that’s happening with weapons and the protective mechanisms in Robot Wars, actually mirrors the natural world. It mirrors human endeavour, that kind of stuff. Have you been involved with Robot Wars for a while?
Professor Lucy Rogers 9:05
Well, I was a judge on the latest three series that came out, but now I’m in a team, a fighting robot team itself. So I yeah, I missed it too much. So now, gamekeeper turned poacher.
Jason Kingsley 9:17
Right? So rather than watching on the sidelines, you’re in the arena.
Professor Lucy Rogers 9:20
I’m in the pits, and I’ve actually got a hammer in my head.
Jason Kingsley 9:23
So have you as a competitor then and a judge noticed a kind of an evolution of technologies and solutions? And then somebody comes up with a radical new thing, perhaps…
Professor Lucy Rogers 9:32
Not in the most recent series. Originally, there was a self-righting mechanism that was novel. So if you’ve got knocked over or upside down, or your wheels were dangling in the air, then then you couldn’t do much about it until this self-righting mechanism was designed. And it’s like, oh, yeah, and so a lot of people copied that. More recently, not so much in the early series, there were some robots made out of wood because it’s really easy to prototype and make and really easy to get smashed up.
Jason Kingsley 10:05
I mean, wood works in shields and stuff, but it depends on the type of weapons you’ve got against you. So I presume wood was okay at the beginning and because the weapons were not as developed, and, you know, they learned very quickly that it can be smashed up.
Professor Lucy Rogers 10:18
And and the ones with really high intricate electronics sensing mechanisms which say: Oh, I’m going near the pit, I’ll back off. Humans are currently still quicker than the sensors.
Jason Kingsley 10:30
Right? So the human factors are important. So whilst we talk about these as robots, they’re kind of more remote vehicles under the
Professor Lucy Rogers 10:37
They’re remote control. So there’s always somebody with remote controls driving it, there might be two people: one doing the weapons and one doing the steering.
Jason Kingsley 10:45
And one of the things about Robot Wars that I particularly like, and I didn’t realise until we spoke about it was just how big the robots are. Now, do you want to go into that, because it, it sounds like I’ve got it wrong, basically?
Professor Lucy Rogers 10:59
They are much larger than they look on the telly. They’re about a metre, which is if you think of the height of your washing machine, it’s probably it’s probably about the size of a washing machine, some of these robots. They’re 110 kilos. Now the bag of cement that you can buy a bag of rubble that you can buy down the DIY shop is 25 kilos. So and I think that’s, you know, as much as one person is allowed to carry,
Jason Kingsley 11:27
Yes, with Health and Safety, that’s the maximum.
Professor Lucy Rogers 11:30
These are hundred and ten kilos. So it’s taking two or three or four people to actually lift these robots. And then you see them just throwing other robots around and you thinking it took four of us to lift that thing into the arena. And now it’s just tossing the other one around like it’s nothing.
Jason Kingsley 11:48
So the arena itself has to be very protected, because you’ve got people around it and bits will be flying off at high speed. So I presume what we see there is actually not just for show, it’s actually for effect, because you got to protect the audience.
Professor Lucy Rogers 12:04
Yes, yeah. During the TV series, they had two shields. So they had an inner and an outer. And because of that, and they had a roof on top as well, they could take the speeds of the spinners up much higher, because that increased the kinetic energy. But even so one of them exploded, smashed something off, and still managed to cut through and stick out through the perspex.
Jason Kingsley 12:31
Because people are pushing the envelope all the time. The whole point of engineering is to push the envelope is to see what you can get away with and how you can solve that problem. That’s fascinating.
Professor Lucy Rogers 12:40
These are the guidelines, these are the rules. And so you can only do certain things. But what can we do to improve that? Can we use a brushless motor instead of a normal motor? What kind of weapon can we put on there? How fast can we get it going?
Jason Kingsley 12:56
And I suppose part of the the fact that Robot Wars keeps coming back is this brilliant thing that maybe your robot got defeated in the last one with a certain weakness? So how do you then bolster that weakness? And engineering is kind of like that. So I’m thinking about things like the Ironbridge – the first major bridge made of cast iron – was really, really innovative. It’s still there, it’s looked after by English Heritage, I believe. I believe a lot of people didn’t think it would stand up because iron is heavy. So it’s a really dumb material to make a bridge out of. And people have these notions of what things should be. Some bridges are made of stone. That makes sense. Other bridges are made of wood. That makes sense. But making a bridge of iron is absurd. And I imagine that the engineers probably came up against pushback from people saying that’s a really silly material to make something out of. Yeah, possibly like ships as well. I don’t know whether when they first made…
Professor Lucy Rogers 13:51
The first iron ships were really frowned upon. “How on earth will that float?”
Jason Kingsley 13:55
And there was a period, I think, in history when they weren’t convinced. So for example, steam engines came in on ships. But there was a period in history where they kind of hedged their bets a little bit, where they sort of made, they made sail powered warships, which also had engines in case the engines failed and stuff, because there just wasn’t the confidence. And I think that’s quite interesting from an engineering perspective that you stand on the shoulders of others. And once somebody has proven it can be done, you can then take it and go further.
Professor Lucy Rogers 14:25
Yeah, as soon as you’ve seen something, it’s so much easier to copy. “Oh, you know, I don’t know how they did it. But it’s been done. Therefore, it’s possible.”
Jason Kingsley 14:34
So that’s kind of interesting. So because we have a system that protects inventions as well in the UK in the patent system, and there’s copyright, all that kind of stuff, and they they interact kind of interestingly, do you think the patent system actually is a broadly good thing or do you think it gets in the way and do you think innovation would be faster if people couldn’t stop people? Bit of a leading question, I’m sorry.
Professor Lucy Rogers 14:58
I’m completely independent. So I work for myself, I don’t have a big corporation behind me that would pay for a patent, and will pay to actually protect it. So I could have a patent now, and a big company could come and infringe it. And unless I fought it, they could walk all over me. But I might not have the cash to fight. Or it may be a foreign country where we haven’t got any jurisdiction, and they could copy it. So for me, I much prefer the open source community, where we share stuff. Most of my designs have been patched together with other people’s ideas. I’m very good at taking an idea from way over one side, picking up another idea from way over another, bringing them together in a way that hasn’t been thought of before and saying, “Look that here’s a thing,” but on the way, I know I’ve had a lot of help. And so I’ll write these up in How Tos. Generally what I do is make a thing and then write it up. But publish it so that anyone else can copy it. And the people who’ve helped me won’t have to go over that same work again, I’ll get people saying, “Lucy, we did that project. Yeah, how did we do it again?” Or “Oh, someone else has just asked me that same question. What was your write up, please?” And so effectively my lab notes are online in open, collaborative way. Now, that’s not great for me making a fortune out of some great idea I’ve had. But my ideas are more flippant.
Jason Kingsley 15:26
So I do wonder whether in the sum of human endeavour, whether something like the the patent system has actually been a net benefit or a net disadvantage? I bet you we could have a long discussion about that. But I suppose people might argue you need to protect innovation. But I would think things like toilet roll holders seem a little weird to protect, but maybe? I don’t know. It’s an interesting one.
Professor Lucy Rogers 16:54
It is, because you’ve got the: If this is going to take 100 researchers 100 days to design it, develop it. But as soon as it’s developed, everyone else can copy it. Well, why am I going to spend 100 designers 100 days worth of effort actually making it in the first place? When I could just wait for someone else to design it and then copy theirs.
Jason Kingsley 17:27
So there is open source in engineering? In physical engineering?
Professor Lucy Rogers 17:32
I’m really only aware of the open source in computing.
Jason Kingsley 17:35
That’s what I was gonna say yes, I’m aware of it in software and it’s quite a strong community.
Professor Lucy Rogers 17:42
I 3d printed some eight inch mannequins for a dressmaker, she makes bespoke dresses. And she wanted to take small dresses to the shows, so that she didn’t have to take full sized dresses. So she made some but they looked flat. And anything that was eight inches tall – not Barbie doll or whatever – in quite human proportions.
Jason Kingsley 18:08
Yeah, they’re not human proportions are they? They’re absurdly changed.
Professor Lucy Rogers 18:12
So I designed them on the computer.
Jason Kingsley 18:14
Scaled to human scale?
Professor Lucy Rogers 18:17
And made these mock mannequins. Well, that design I’ve put up on online, so anyone can use those. Because I don’t need it again, you know, I’m not precious about it, I’m not gonna make a million of them. They take about eight hours to print. So if anyone wants to print one, we ll go ahead. They take a while,
Jason Kingsley 18:36
That’s interesting, because obviously, in software, there’s a big open source community, then you’ve got sort of different styles of open source as well. You’ve got open source, do what you want with it. Then you’ve got open source, make sure you give me a credit. And then you’ve got you can use this but you can’t change it. So there are quite a lot of different rules…
Professor Lucy Rogers 18:52
Or you can use this but not for commercial gain.
Jason Kingsley 18:53
Exactly. So there’s a lot of different people have a lot of different opinions about what they can do with their ideas. There’s a chap I got to know in my Youtube channel on Modern History TV called Jorg Sprava who runs what’s called the Slingshot Channel, and he sent me a device that could have been made in mediaeval times, which would allow me to put six shots on my longbow. Basically it’s not not even springloaded, it’s made of wood, and it acts as a magazine for longbow, which is really interesting. And we’ve had quite a lot of online discussions about why wasn’t this invented back in the day because there’s nothing in it, no electronics. I mean, he used some really nice plywood and stuff, but plywood was available. We know the for example, the Roman scutum were made of a form of plywood, well, they were made into plywood because they use thin strips of wood and glue them together. So with Viking shields, actually they used plywood to cross the grain and literally laminated them so people knew about that stuff. And and I wonder whether sometimes society is too conservative for an idea. And the idea is sometimes not there. Have you ever encountered that in engineering?
Professor Lucy Rogers 20:08
I keep thinking of what will happen? What will happen when the apocalypse happens? This is one of my I’m driving along slightly daydreaming: what will happen? And what would people reinvent that would be useful? And would you go back completely to Bronze Age or whatever. But apart from we’ve probably mined all the easily accessible ores out, so we probably would have to recycle, we wouldn’t be able to go from scratch again. The things like the bicycle, you know, that is such a great design: human powered. If we can make a chain, then we’ve got a bicycle, even with wooden tires or whatever, it’s, it’s such a good way of transporting goods.
Jason Kingsley 20:56
I suppose you could do a bicycle with this direct drive, you’d actually put the pedals like a kid’s bike, you put the pedals on the front wheel.
Professor Lucy Rogers 21:02
It would be a pennyfarthing, then.
Jason Kingsley 21:04
Presumably, that’s also an efficient use of energy, because you’re not lifting things up and down repeatedly, where when you walk or carry something, I think there’s a lot of up and down movement, which is obviously wasting a lot of energy. With a bicycle, you’re using your human power to keep your centre of gravity even. But using your musculature to push you along. So the apocalypse is interesting. Obviously, I love my post apocalyptic fiction. And of course, being somebody who has horses and kind of likes old tech. I don’t think society would ever go back to something like the mediaeval period, because the mediaeval period that I’m talking about sort of high mediaeval periods is a particular political arrangement as well, we had feudalism. And I don’t think, well, maybe we would go back to feudalism. But of course, the engineers back then were blacksmiths, armour smiths, the goldsmith, silversmith, all of these kind of people who were very, very hands on. And I think the idea they would call themselves engineers, they just wouldn’t they just made stuff. Yeah. And in my experience of living and working on a farm, a lot of farmers don’t call themselves engineers, but they’re always doing engineering, which is wonderful.
Professor Lucy Rogers 22:19
And they’re probably doing more hands on engineering than a lot of qualified engineers who are sitting at computer.
Jason Kingsley 22:26
Yes, absolutely. Because if you’re out in the middle of the field, and your combine harvester, stops combine harvesting, what do you do? I suppose you can call an engineer, if it’s particularly bad, and somebody who’s a specialist will come along. But in the meantime, you’ll probably hopefully switch the engine off, make it safe, and then start to have a look and fix it.
Professor Lucy Rogers 22:46
This is one of the problems we have with engineering as a career. It can mean so many different things to so many different people. When I went to university, I was hoping to learn how to use the lathes and how to make things. I wanted to design things. I wanted to make things. And then by the time I got to university, they’re like, “Oh, no, we sold all those lathes. We’ve got five now, you know, instead of roomfuls, because you do it all on computer.”
Jason Kingsley 23:12
So it’s all simulated engineering?
Professor Lucy Rogers 23:14
Yeah. And you send your drawings out to be made. And so the actual amount of people nowadays who do the design, the manufacture, the whole lot, is very rare.
Jason Kingsley 23:28
That’s interesting. Why do you think that is that seems to be like the sort of made engineering kind of an academic exercise, much more than a practical exercise. That seems a great shame because engineering is all been about Hannibal saying to his engineers, how do we get elephants across the Alps or Caesar saying how do we get our soldiers across there, you know, to go and invade Albion and stuff.
Professor Lucy Rogers 23:50
Some of it’s to do with, particularly, civil engineering; so bridges, structures, buildings, they have to be built correctly. You can’t just you can’t just throw one together and cars are the same. So we need a set standard, a set standard of qualification. And like anything as soon as you start drilling down in the specialism, the broadness goes, and so you know, I might be an expert. I’ve written a book on rocket science a few years ago. It’s called It’s Only Rocket Science: An Introduction In Plain English.
Jason Kingsley 24:36
Fantastic.
Professor Lucy Rogers 24:36
And I wrote this because I knew an awful lot about the nozzles for one bit of the of the rocket engine. I had no idea how the rest of the rocket worked. And I said, Well, where’s the books? And I was given tonnes and tonnes of like, here’s a library of books on that bit, here’s a library of books on this bit, here’s a library of books on the other bit. I don’t really like the math. So I wrote the book with no maths and no formulae to basically say, okay, so if you started from here, this is how you choose your launch site. This is how a propulsion system works. This is how the navigation system works. And it was a very shallow look at the whole lot, rather than each book being an in depth look at one particular thing.
Jason Kingsley 25:24
In some ways that makes that incredible specialisation of engineers actually makes the system quite brittle. Because in your post apocalyptic setting, if half the engineers get eaten by zombies, or whatever the apocalypse is, half of the knowledge to how to make a rocket will just be lost. And I suppose unless it’s written down and stuff in places or if the computers don’t work. And in some ways, the idea of being a polymath has sort of declined, hasn’t it? Is that just because there’s too much for one brain to take in at once?
Professor Lucy Rogers 25:54
We’re not rewarded for it. We’re rewarded for specialism. And we’re rewarded for doing well in exams. So I remember play school and you had, you know, the paints in one corner and you had the big building blocks in the other. And you you’ve just learned by playing. And then as you got older, play time reduced. And then when you got to secondary school, you probably play proper sports, you might have played music, but any other kind of playing was really not encouraged. And that included making. So you weren’t playing and you weren’t making. And if you were academically good if you were good at answering exams, you weren’t allowed to do the practical subjects.
Jason Kingsley 26:41
Right? You were told: “Yeah, you shouldn’t go and do woodwork. woodwork is for the – dare I say it – for the less able, less academically inclined,” which is absurd, because some of the best minds in the world are good at making things physically as well. And it teaches you an appreciation that’s separate from book-learning. In a way, it’s a great shame that education policies have shaped people in that sort of direction. Because I would think we should encourage people to have a broad spectrum of knowledge. I mean, I did a zoology degree at Oxford. So I know quite a lot about animals in the animal kingdom and that kind of stuff. But I know very little about plants. Partly because they weren’t particularly of interest to me, there were a couple of modules I could have done, but but I focused on on animals. But that’s obviously quite a big subject. But I would have loved to have done art, I would have loved to have done some elements of engineering and some practical stuff. I looked after animals anyway, and horses and stuff at the same time. So I was hands on. But you’re definitely guided towards a slightly abstracted academic component. And it’s one of the things I look at all the time: What’s written down in the book is somebody’s idea. How do we test it out? Because engineering, science is all about testing, repeat, modify, move forward that way. It’s no good having an academic discussion about stuff, and not doing the actual practical testing. Academic stuff is great. But it is quite limited, I think it might have been Aristotle, he didn’t like the idea of testing things out. Well, there’s one of the Greek philosophers that said testing things was done for ordinary people, not for us philosophers. So we’ll just use thought experiment. And the trouble with thought experiment is it can go very wrong. An actual experiment is where it’s at. And that needs engineering skills.
Professor Lucy Rogers 28:36
Yes, definitely. We’re trained to be scared of failure. We’re trained that you know, from two plus two is four, it’s always four. You can’t make it anything else. And as you go through your exams are: Yes, that’s correct. No, it’s not correct. You’re often pointed in there is one solution to this problem. You get into real life, and I’ve been told that it takes graduate engineers three or four years to realise that there are multiple answers to this problem. And it’s your job to find the best, the most economic, the whatever, whatever the…
Jason Kingsley 29:16
Whatever the limiting parameters are…
Professor Lucy Rogers 29:18
And to justify it, but also to prove it and to fail. Failure of a bridge. Yes. That’s catastrophic. Failure in: will this design work? Oh, I’ll build a prototype. Oh, no, it doesn’t. Oh, okay. I’ve learned something. Why didn’t it work? What can I do to improve it?
Jason Kingsley 29:38
I think that’s really important because you’re absolutely right. Fear of failure or, you know something and therefore don’t bother testing it out means we don’t build on knowledge. If people hadn’t worked out that you combine copper and tin, we wouldn’t have had the Bronze Age. So somebody somewhere chucked some copper and tin together somehow – I don’t know, maybe by accident, maybe deliberately – and then there was the Bronze Age. But if everybody said: no, no, you mustn’t mix that, because nobody does that, we wouldn’t have advanced forward. Interestingly, gunpowder was used on the battlefield in Europe in about 1380. Or we know that because there’s a siege and we found a handgun, like a mini cannon under the rubble. And we know exactly when the siege happened. So we actually can date it very accurately. But it didn’t really revolutionise warfare for 100 years. And I wonder whether that’s the natural human condition of conservatism with a small c that that says: No, no, no, no, this is the way it’s done. So let’s keep doing it. And that’s where engineers have to push the boundaries.
Professor Lucy Rogers 30:43
Is this a similar thing where all my army must wear bright red because we want to be seen?
Jason Kingsley 30:47
Exactly. The sort of natural conservatism is almost the enemy of knowledge.
Professor Lucy Rogers 30:53
It’s really difficult because you’ve always got that, wouldn’t do it like that, nipper. Oh, no. Having that will we never don’t like that before. We tried that it didn’t work.
Jason Kingsley 31:01
Well, I suppose tried it. It didn’t work in these circumstances is fairly reasonable. But don’t try that because it’s just forbidden seems very negative.
Professor Lucy Rogers 31:11
Yes. But I think that’s how control is done.
Jason Kingsley 31:14
Right? So we get into the…
Professor Lucy Rogers 31:15
The rules and regs of control. We’ve said the two plus two is four at school. Even when you get into industry managers are there to make sure you do things to the book, that you don’t again, go off on the sidelines, because actually, you don’t want random employees saying, I think I can make this better. Oh, no, oh, I’ve just put tin in with…
Jason Kingsley 31:37
Right, I see what you mean. So there’s a controlling innovation or not controlling it. But managing the innovation is kind of an important. Yeah, you don’t want everybody just going off willy-nilly doing mad things. Maybe you do in some circumstances. I mean, innovation in times of war when it’s desperate, and people reduce health and safety parameters down quite a lot. innovation happens very fast in those circumstances.
Professor Lucy Rogers 31:59
Spitfire, bouncing bomb…
Jason Kingsley 32:00
Well, exactly. You know, have a go. We got three weeks, right? We were to get it right. We could keep talking about this for forever. Is there any way anybody could reach out to you? Are you on Twitter?
Professor Lucy Rogers 32:10
I’m on Twitter, as @drlucyrogers. I’ve got my website, http://www.lucyrogers.com and I have a couple of podcasts out. One is The Engineering Edge where I look at how companies and people are using everyday technology to give themselves an edge. And one’s a comedy podcast on engineering.
Jason Kingsley 32:32
You do comedy? Yeah. Oh, well, we haven’t got time to go into that. But that was absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time. I actually really enjoyed having this conversation and I could probably go on a lot more about mediaeval stuff and we could talk about the ancients and we could talk about Leonardo da Vinci. There’s so many fascinating things about engineering, but it shaped the world
Professor Lucy Rogers 32:53
It has.
Future Imperfect 