Today I'm coming to you from the Engineering Quadrangle on the Rice University Campus. Behind me, are the three sculptures known as 45, 90, and 180. In my classroom version of this course, when we talk about the engineer of 2020, I'd like to do a classroom demonstration that I will replicate here for you today. [MUSIC] Here I've replicated the timeline that you heard described earlier in the Kennedy speech, when he compared the technology timeline to a 50 year period of human history. Here I've created the timeline where each foot of this timeline represents 200 years of recorded history. I begin with what is arguably one of the most significant technological advances of ancient man, and that is the development of the wheel, roughly 5,500 years ago. It's worth noting on this scale, the last Ice Age in North America, occurred 100 feet that direction. Homo Sapiens as a species, has been around for about 200,000 years, or about 1,000 feet in that direction. The dinosaurs disappeared from the face of the earth, 62 miles away, or roughly a 100 kilometers. And finally the origin of the earth itself, somewhat over four billion years ago, but would be 4,000 miles away. So lets progress along the timeline to see how technology has changed over the years. I've marked here the times of Julius Caesar, roughly 2,050 years ago, when Rome was at its height in terms of technology and architecture. I've marked here the invasion of England by the Normans in 1066, as a precursor to the Renaissance, and clearly by the time of Christopher Columbus in 1492. His journeys to North America to open up the continent to further exploration. This was clearly at the time of the Renaissance. I would suggest that one of the greatest technological advances, following the Renaissance was the invention of the steam engine. The steam engine itself enabled human endeavors to be automated in ways that were unprecedented. Certainly, by the time of Robert Fulton in 1804, the invention of the steamboat allowed rapid transportation to develop, that was subsequently followed by the railroad. Just as transportation was experiencing advances in technology, so were communications. We have the invention of the telegraph by Samuel Morison in1833. Now we are able to communicate over longer distances, much more rapidly. That was followed, not too much later in 1876, with voice communication through the telephone, the invention by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. Arguably one of the most significant advances, enabling man not to be limited to daylight hours, to be able to work 24 hours a day if needed. To operate that period anyway, was the invention of the light bulb by Thomas Edison in 1879. Coming not too far after that, was the first manned space flight. Or manned flight by the Wright brothers in 1903, leading to the first manned space flight less than 60 years later. The jet engine, invented in 1944, a significant step forward in speeding up the way man can move across large distances. The first programmable computers came in 1945, and the advances in electronics were speeded up by the invention by the transistor, in 1947. We have the first manned space flight in 1961, followed less than nine years later by putting the first man on the moon. One of the early personal computers was the Commodore PET, it appeared in 1977, followed by the Apple Mac in 1984. All in the space of the knot at the end of this rope, lie technology advances in how we store information, that we use in our computing. Early in the use of personal computers, came the five and a quarter of floppy disk, this is mid 1980s technology. It held an astounding 360 kilobytes of data. It was followed, roughly around 1990, by the three and a half inch floppy, which multiplied the ability to store by a factor of three. By the year 2000, we were able to use larger storage devices that achieved 100 megabytes in this zip drive. Where today we now store on flash drives in excess of 100 gigabytes. That amazing growth in the ability to store information, matches and mirrors the acceleration of technology on this timeline. As another indicator, I like to show my students how I did my calculations when I was an undergraduate. I completed my engineering studies using this slide rule as my personal computer. What should be obvious to you, as you look at the pace of change, is that it is accelerating at an astounding rate. So the challenge to you, as you face being not only an engineer but a leader in this environment of change, is how will you keep up? How will you adapt? And what new ways of working will you use to deal with this kind of change?
