alt Hacker NewsCool to see how much engineering relied on intuition and improvisation before modern tools existed. These methods look primitive now, but they worked because people understood materials so well. Makes me wonder how much of that hands-on knowledge we’re losing today.
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jjmarr • today at 4:00 PM
It's crazy how much relies on intuition and improvisation now.
Standard advice is build a huge safety factor.
It was often neither intuition nor improvisation, but rules. Bill Hammack's "The Things We Make" goes into a number of examples.
For a slightly more modern example, take European Gothic Cathedrals. People weren't guessing, they weren't improvising, and they weren't relying on intuition - if they did most of them would have collapsed long ago.
These structures were made without blueprints, and often many of the head masons may have been illiterate, but a knowledge of forms and rules such as "the thickness of the wall of an arch should be a bit more than a fifth the span of the arch" allowed for reliably producing stable structures.
These rules were less precise than modern engineering math and mean that many of the structures are overengineered / have higher margins of error than are considered necessary in modern construction, but they are not based on intuition or guessing.