I experienced my first exposure to engineering when I joined the Royal Navy as a cadet in 1939. We were required to keep a “Midshipman’s Journal” in which we recorded our daily activities from our instructional courses to life at sea. My journal includes several engineering drawings — which shows that I must have been paying attention.
The Navy has its own professional engineers to look after the complicated propulsion, weapons and domestic machinery in a warship. Without the engines, and all the other machinery, a warship would not be able to fulfil its duties.
This applies just as much to the nation as a whole. The complete infrastructure of national life is in the hands of engineers. When you come to think of it, the contribution of British engineers, particularly from the 18th century onwards, is quite remarkable: mines, canals, dams, railways, bridges, sewage works and the very earliest machine-driven ships. Not only in this country but all over what was the British Empire, and in many other countries around the world; much of this was achieved by self-taught engineers.
In 1965 I was invited to become president of the new Council of Engineering Institutions (CEI) created to tackle the problem of establishing appropriate qualifications to be recognised as a chartered engineer. At about this time the status of engineers in society became a lively topic. The suggestion was that engineers did not enjoy the same respect as scientists, academics and other professions.
Today within the engineering industries, there appears to be growing anxiety about the recruitment and training of apprentices. It has been suggested that the decline in apprenticeships may be down to the conversion of so many technical colleges into polytechnics and universities. However, it is also possible that the decline is related to the consequent huge growth of university places, the pressure on young people to seek places in universities, and the great variety of less demanding subjects offered.
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A generation ago, only 8 per cent of school-leavers went to universities. The figure today is 42 per cent. The result is that, out of a school-leaving population of some five million, only about 20,800 engineering apprentices completed their training in 2007-08, while the very modest total of 15,000 advanced apprentices completed their training in 2006-07.
Yet engineering remains the driving force behind all technological advances, and plays an immensely important part in the improvement in social conditions. Furthermore, it is probably the greatest wealth creator in our whole society. But I suspect that while our present system of training engineers is fine for those who may have a burning ambition to become professional engineers, it may not attract those who enjoy using their manual skills to make things, or even just to repair things.
Many of our pioneering engineers started without any formal training but had a passion, and a talent, for invention and development. The system does not seem to be able to cope with the “hands-on” enthusiast, who has no immediate interest in academic qualifications. The challenge is to entice them on to the ladder of professional advancement.
I think that a classic example of such a native genius is John Harrison. Born in 1693, the son of a carpenter, he became a self-taught clockmaker, who, by 1762, had designed and built such an accurate marine chronometer that it could be used by ships to determine, for the first time, their longitude on long ocean passages.
The same sort of initiative is alive today. In 1969 Ronald Hickman wrote to tell me that he had designed and built an “all-purpose workshop bench” which he called a “Workmate”. His problem was that he could not find anyone to manufacture it. We eventually persuaded Black & Decker to take it on and it was launched in 1973. It immediately gained a Design Council award and it has remained a bestseller since.
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This year, 30 years after he patented the original concept, the winner of the 2009 Prince Philip Designers Prize is Andrew Ritchie for his, almost single-handed, design and manufacture of the Brompton Folding Bicycle.
There are also distinguished engineers who have climbed the professional ladder and made a distinguished contribution without a university education. Doug Oakervee, FREng, who recently retired as executive chairman of Crossrail, and is a past president of the Institution of Civil Engineers started as an apprentice joiner in 1957.
Through night school and day release he obtained an HNC and HND. He has been responsible for great engineering works, including Hong Kong’s new Chek Lap Kok airport. His career illustrates how valuable a combination of academic and practical skills can be.
As the ever-growing human population consumes more and more of the Earth’s natural resources, it is going to take all the ingenuity of inventors, engineers and designers to maintain the rate of improvements in developed societies and to bring better standards of living to more and more people in the less prosperous countries of the world. If this is to be achieved in the 21st century, the challenge will be to make sure that bright young people, whatever their background, who aspire to do something creative and fulfilling with their lives, can achieve their ambition through engineering.
This is an abridged version of an article published today in Ingenia, the magazine of the Royal Academy of Engineering of which His Royal Highness is the Senior Fellow