Lost engineering skills

I agree that skills are not necessarily lost, but can be rediscovered when there is need.

In the 1990’s I was volunteering at a steam museum (kemptonsteam.org ) restoring a 1920’s Thames Water pumping station.  It originally had mercury arc rectifiers that were destroyed when the building was decommissioned.  I had recovered a pair of 1930’s mercury arc rectifiers being scrapped, in poor condition and needing refurbishing, but I could find no one who had any experience of them.

The IET library loaned me three books (1920’s vintage) that detailed mercury arc theory and practice, and using those, other internet sources and our engineering acumen, I and a colleague regained  the skills and knowledge and refurbished the rectifiers. They were put into service and can now be seem operating on public steaming days at the Kempton Steam Museum.

Interestingly, once the word spread we had many enquiries for help on other rectifiers including from abroad  (“ no one here knows anything about them, they just sit in the cabinets and work, but…..”).

This made me wonder what other engineering skills have largely been lost in the UK - or even worldwide - over the past few decades?

I guess the 'currently useful' skill set is always evolving - my Dad had all kinds of skills and knowledge that I still lack and can't imagine ever having, but then my Dad would have been completely lost given an Arduino or even the inside of a CU.

On the positive side I don't think skills are every truly lost - collectively we might forget them for a while, but even in the worst case we should be able to re-discover them. Skills aren't created by passing them on from one generation to the next or from master to apprentice - they're only perpetuated in that way. Originally each skill had to be worked out from scratch - and well still have the same ability to invent new as we always did.

    - Andy.

Personally I feel a lack of UK Government support killed Sirius Minerals, the project is going ahead, but is now owned and controlled by an international company rather than a UK company.

https://www.northyorkmoors.org.uk/planning/Sirius-Minerals-Polyhalite-Mine-Woodsmith-Mine

There’s the ongoing saga of the Atlantic Super Connector:

Entrepreneur Edi Truell has threatened to scrap plans to build a £200m cable factory in northeast England and site it in Germany instead if he fails to win state support. The tycoon wants to build the factory on Teesside, creating 800 jobs, as part of his plan to lay a power cable between Iceland and the UK.8 Sept 2019

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/edi-truell-threatens-to-pull-plug-on-teessides-atlantic-superconnection-cable-factory-3ftn6snml

It seems it’s beyond the capabilities of the UK to do it without international companies sorting it out for us.

I believe that there are many engineering professions which are slowly dying with the advent of automation systems and lack of succession planning strategy. Young engineers are having difficulties to cope in regards to existing engineering systems.

For example, in Kenya they have discovered oil which is a great thing, but lacking the engineering expertise for its extraction, they had to hire the services of foreign experts.

Are you sure you are referring to an electrician?

I received information from an engineering manager that mains powered equipment was fitted with 1A plug fuses for extra safety whilst failing to realise that the plug fuse protects the mains lead, not the equipment itself. The manager only had O Level education and had almost no further education or training on anything electrical.

One lost skill is the ability for the UK to design and manufacture high speed trains without significant foreign help. The Intercity 225 is a marvel of technology that was built within my own lifetime, but the UK no longer has the ability to design and manufacture such a machine nowadays, so had to rely on companies like Hitachi (which just so happens to have almost vanished from consumer electronics).

From a viewpoint of many foreigners, it could be argued that the British have some fetish for (or even an obsession with) steam trains. Interest and desire is effective at keeping skills alive.

Arran Cameron said:

I'm doubtful that younger people will take an interest in wood cabinet TVs from the 1960s and 70s

One of these days I must show my granddaughters their great-great grandmother's old telly, which sits in the attic. I don't see why it shouldn't still work - it was working when it was inherited.

In olden days there were television repair men/women who would come round and fix televisions (or take them back to their workshop). Nowadays if you are lucky, somebody might replace a board.

I'm not so sure, I tend to think it's just the nature of working in technology - it moves on and develops. So skills moved on from repairing wooden waggons to repairing cars to rechipping cars. I think the curiosity and tinkering is still there, but just as when I was starting engineering in the late 70s mechanical engineers were dismayed that we were curious about electronics rather than mechanics, now it has moved on again to curiosity within a virtual world. 

I'd also a bit take issue with Mike about steam railway engineering, from what I see of the preservation movement (including mainline running), I'd wouldn't be surprised if there's actually more expertise there now in the UK than there was maybe 30 years ago. (The company I work for, which is a very hard nosed engineering consultancy division, includes a mainline steam loco certification business for the UK.) Similarly with valve audio, it's very much alive and well, and again probably if anything more active than when I left the audio industry in the early 90's - it got a big boost when the iron curtain fell and we had access to eastern European valve plants.

Personally I think it's very rare that we really lose engineering skills, to the point where it's actually almost impossible to recover them. I believe getting the colours in medieval stained glass is one that was lost (a few hundred years ago). My father's area was the manufacture of coal gas (town gas), there are probably some skills that have been lost there. but I suspect the underlying knowledge is still recorded. Personally I've lost the skill of servicing motor uniselectors but that's good - that was a skill I never wanted in the first place and hope never to need again

And there are positive things those of us with experience can do in these interconnected days. I hang around on a couple of pro-audio forums and give people nudges regarding analogue audio design. But that said, I think they'd probably get there without me, I can just save a bit of time - and occasionally debunk myths about how we used to design things! Audio is a particularly strong field for having a fabled "golden age" of engineering that never really existed - those of us who were in it are often credited with having far more skill and knowledge than we actually had, and sadly many late career / retired engineers don't do as much as they could to dispel that "black art" aura. So I think overall that's my feeling about this, if you genuinely have a "dying" skill that's useful then there's often opportunities now - which didn't exist 30-40 years ago - to support people who want to learn it. But if no-one's interested, maybe it's just time to learn something new. Which can be personally tough admitting that a hard earned skill is maybe not that useful any more. (Which is why I now only do analogue audio design for my own enjoyment, not as a day job. Admittedly it is also much more fun doing it just for myself!)

Cheers,

Andy

It has been joked that real plumbers (yes, plumber is a Latin term for a worker of lead) are virtually extinct because lead pipework is rarely used nowadays, and what remains is being replaced - mostly with plastic.

A delta mask CRT is an electronic Rubik's cube. The people who knew how to set one up were TV factory workers and repairmen more so than electronic engineers. There are still a few vintage TV enthusiasts who know how to set one up in less time than it takes to solve a Rubik's cube, but I'm doubtful that younger people will take an interest in wood cabinet TVs from the 1960s and 70s although there is a small but thriving market for good quality 4:3 CRT TVs from the 1980s and 90s for retro gaming.

Designing sophisticated circuits around discrete transistors is something that a large number of electronic engineers were adept at in the 1960s and 70s, but it's definitely one of the most prominent lost engineering skills of the past few decades. There is still demand for such skills designing linear and mixed signal ICs. Do many universities in the UK teach this subject effectively?

These strange inversions are intriguing. I once watched a documentary about flint knapping, where modern day attempts to make replicas of ancient high quality flint tools took so much skill and practice that the conclusion was a toolmaker must have been a full time job. I also read about an engineer who designed and manufactured balance bikes for young children only using materials and techniques available centuries ago, and concluded that they could theoretically have existed in the Roman times and earlier, even if they were just a plaything for children rather than a serious form of transport.

I was a Sirius Minerals investor; I believe I am correct in saying that the company was undertaking staff training which started with the teaching of basic literacy, because their potential work force could not read, write or do basic arithmetic. 

If you don't know what I am talking about, you should!