This might come across as a very strange question but is it uncommon to find engineers who did not enjoy school or think highly of the schools that they attended? I have encountered numerous computing and IT types over the years who did not enjoy school or had bad experiences at school but very few electrical or mechanical engineers.
I just had a chance to listen to the radio programme on the deaths of William Huskisson in 1830 and of Elaine Herzberg last month and I can share your concerns about how they report it. The idea that Huskisson's death, where people were completely unfamiliar with steam locomotives, is similar to Elaine Herzberg's death where she was familiar with automobiles and should have known to look for a hazard, is somewhat strange, particularly as Huskisson's death was a chain of errors (at least according to Wikipedia, but then they ascribe the Rocket to George Stephenson when it was actually his son Robert's engineering works 'Robert Stephenson and Company' who built it). I think that there is a lot of PR in the radio programme with driverless car developers wanting to demonstrate that they are on top of any problems and it won't happen again. What they really mean is they have mitigation in place against all the problems they foresee, which normally means that they haven't done a safety case with a structured risk assessment to identify less obvious potential hazards, else they would have said so.
The Rocket was not fitted with brakes as they said in the programme, but they didn't say that it could stop by reversing the drive, which proved to be insufficiently effective for William Huskisson. They pointed out that after this all locomotive engines were fitted with brakes with the implication that this prevented future deaths. What they didn't mention was that a few years later in Ireland a train full of passengers found the load (i.e. the weight of the passengers) was too great for it to get up a hill and it ended up stopped three quarters of the way up. They decided to uncouple half the carriages so they could take a half load to the top of the hill then come back for the other half of the carriages. Unfortunately the brakes were on the locomotive, not the carriages so as soon as they uncoupled the rear 50% of the carriages they started downhill at an increasing rate, and at the bottom of the hill met the next train coming at its full speed with consequences you can imagine. When I was told about this I was informed it still remained the worst rail tragedy in Britain. Possibly not what they want people to think about when the next stage after single driverless cars is convoys of driverless vehicles.
I just had a chance to listen to the radio programme on the deaths of William Huskisson in 1830 and of Elaine Herzberg last month and I can share your concerns about how they report it. The idea that Huskisson's death, where people were completely unfamiliar with steam locomotives, is similar to Elaine Herzberg's death where she was familiar with automobiles and should have known to look for a hazard, is somewhat strange, particularly as Huskisson's death was a chain of errors (at least according to Wikipedia, but then they ascribe the Rocket to George Stephenson when it was actually his son Robert's engineering works 'Robert Stephenson and Company' who built it). I think that there is a lot of PR in the radio programme with driverless car developers wanting to demonstrate that they are on top of any problems and it won't happen again. What they really mean is they have mitigation in place against all the problems they foresee, which normally means that they haven't done a safety case with a structured risk assessment to identify less obvious potential hazards, else they would have said so.
The Rocket was not fitted with brakes as they said in the programme, but they didn't say that it could stop by reversing the drive, which proved to be insufficiently effective for William Huskisson. They pointed out that after this all locomotive engines were fitted with brakes with the implication that this prevented future deaths. What they didn't mention was that a few years later in Ireland a train full of passengers found the load (i.e. the weight of the passengers) was too great for it to get up a hill and it ended up stopped three quarters of the way up. They decided to uncouple half the carriages so they could take a half load to the top of the hill then come back for the other half of the carriages. Unfortunately the brakes were on the locomotive, not the carriages so as soon as they uncoupled the rear 50% of the carriages they started downhill at an increasing rate, and at the bottom of the hill met the next train coming at its full speed with consequences you can imagine. When I was told about this I was informed it still remained the worst rail tragedy in Britain. Possibly not what they want people to think about when the next stage after single driverless cars is convoys of driverless vehicles.
