(Tork, caveman engineer, the first engineer in history, make that pre-history, returns for this week on engineeringdaze.com, however, due to Tork’s lack of understanding of time, his escapades are spread over two weeks .)

Cavemen knew that to move a rock one could place a stick under the rock and a small rock under the stick somewhere and hang on the end of the stick. They knew the basic idea of a fulcrum. But for cavemen, sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.

Tork, caveman engineer, decided to help his clan out by running some calculations. That way they did not waste time trying to move a rock they couldn’t with the caveman-power they had, nor would they waste caveman-hours by getting a lot of cavemen together to move a rock that did not need the number of cavemen they collected to move the rock. Being an engineer, Tork loved efficiency.

Tork figured out the relationship with the length of the fulcrum, where the smaller rock was to be placed and the ratio of the weight of the rock to the weight needed on the other end. His calculations and “engineering” tables could be found on the wall of his cave.

The sad thing was that no one knew how much they weighed and Tork used his body’s weight as a standard and the variance was too great. So, when Tork calculated that they needed 6 cavemen to move a rock of a particular size, and they moved it with only 5 as they tried it while waiting for the 6th caveman to show up, then the cavemen society, fickle as they were, shunned Tork and his crazy ideas. What really got to Tork is that he realized his mistake and was never able to convince the other cavemen to retry his algorithm. Zonk and Klorn were heavyweights in the caveman community, so they not only messed up the experience, but also made sure that Tork’s crazy ideas about tables on walls (whatever that meant) would not be accepted by others. This alienated Tork to some extent, but, he was an engineer, so he got that. But seeing the inefficiency of his cavemen clan as they wasted valuable time moving rocks is what really frustrated him. Maybe, just maybe, one day, engineers will be accepted members of society. Or, at least, their ideas would be.