“This was my first conscious exposure to engineering. My parents had a very disorganised, rather drunken party when I was young, very small. And my boring uncle--who’s an engineer--who was just my boring uncle, that’s all I ever thought about him, he came to the party. They served food, and ran out of plates and bowls, and then they served a fruit salad. There were no bowls, so everyone was like, ‘how do we have salads if there are no bowls?’ So my uncle drunk his wine, took the fruit salad, and put it in his wine glass. I was like, ‘wow!’ And he said, ‘well, I’m an engineer.’ That was the first time I consciously thought, ‘woah, respect, boring uncle! An engineer!’ And so that made me think, engineers think naturally, they take what they got, they solve problems, they eat their fruit salads.”
“The idea was, ‘let’s find a propeller that has great thrust. We don’t really understand how these things work the way we should, but we need to deliver airplanes, so let’s try to find a great propeller.’ So, they just built a bunch of propellers with different shapes and tested them.” Explore more >>
“It poses a sense of, ‘alright, we are taking all of these natural things but we are going to make sure that we can control what we put out even if we can’t control what we put in.’” Explore more >>
“When I got asked to say something that represented engineering, my first reaction was to go for the image of a mine, because my dad was a mining engineer and I spent a lot of my very early childhood playing in sandpits next to mines, which was nice.” Explore more >>