Engineering Daze

This week at engineeringdaze, we are going to follow the exploits of the first engineer, the caveman named Tork. Tork was so advanced for his era, being an engineer, that he was frequently shunned by other cavemen. But that is another story. For now, we look at how Tork engineered hunting.

It was common for cavemen to get food by luring a tasty animal under a cliff and drop a rock on it. Unfortunatley, if they did not kill the animal, the animal would try to kill them, but, that was life as a caveman. It was Tork that worked out the relationship between how high the cliff was, and how effective it was at killing the animal, the food. He measured height (how hi) in Torks, essentially his own height. He then looked at the effect of the rock he dropped. When the animal (Fud) was not hurt, or not hurt much, the consequences to Tork were bad. When the Fud was hurt bad, Tork could either drop another rock on it, or hit it many times with a club. He worked out how many times later. Tork came up with the table below, thus engineering how to hunt for food, or Fud. It did not take him long to find out that he would only ever drop a rock on an animal from a cliff three times his height, and preferably, five times his height. Later, he would add a factor of safety and only ever drop the rock from 8 Torks high, but Tork hadn’t worked through that Factor of Safety issue, as engineers these days are so comfortable with.

Unfortunately, scientific and engineering journals were not yet invented and his findings were slow to catch on, which was OK, because his spelling was terrible.