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Let's take a moment to think about your morning
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The alarm on your phone goes off at 7:03
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you drag yourself to the shower
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and blast yourself with perfectly warm water in an attempt to wake up.
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You smear your toothbrush with too much toothpaste
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and scrub yourself into a foamy mess of minty freshness.
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You're running late, so you skate downtown
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weaving through the commuters, dart across the road
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barely making the lights and jump on the train just before the doors beep shut.
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There's a couple of stops to go so you pull out your
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phone and play a few games of Angry Birds.
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alarms, trains, traffic lights
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video games, toothpaste.
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All these things were made possible by engineers.
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But what prompts an engineer to improve our world?
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Well, they solve problems.
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Problems are an engineer's inspiration
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and maths and science are the creative tools they use to solve them.
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Problems like making your alarm go off at the right time,
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or making sure your toothpaste is just the right balance of chemicals
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to give you that perfect smile.
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Or even making a game so addictive it's almost impossible to put down,
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if that really is a problem.
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Now let's head over to the airport and jump on an aeroplane.
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Ahh aeroplanes, they're so easy to take for granted.
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But don't forget, you can fly!
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Before aeroplanes, flying was quite a bit more challenging.
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Every bit of your plane has been touched by engineers.
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A mechanical engineer designed the engine,
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a mechatronics engineer devised the controls,
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the fuel? Extracted by mining engineers
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and refined by chemical engineers.
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The navigation systems?
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Electrical and software engineers created those.
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Yep, a whole team of engineers.
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Now we've landed in Dubai,
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home of the Burj Khalifa.
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It's the world's tallest building at 829.8 meters high.
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It's also in one of the world's hottest environments,
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reaching up to 50 degrees in summer.
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One of the difficulties of building the Burj
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was trying to figure out how to set forty-five thousand
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cubic meters of reinforced concrete in such extreme weather.
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The solution?
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A clever method of pumping iced liquid concrete
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into the 55,000 tonnes steel frame during the night.
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The result?
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A building that's vertically over 800 meters high,
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rather than horizontally all over the ground.
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Now let's jump into our time machine and go back to Saturday,
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Saturday March 1932.
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The Sydney Harbour Bridge is about to open.
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the bridge is a marvel of civil engineering,
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and a pretty cool place to set off some fireworks.
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Since 1815 people had been talking about building a bridge
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to connect the two sides of the Harbour.
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The problem was that the harbour was so incredibly wide,
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how could a bridge span such a width and support its own weight?
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The solution?
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The Romans!
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Well actually it was an idea they came up with.
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The arched bridge works by transferring the weight into horizontal forces,
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and bracing them at the ends of the arch.
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But what about the future?
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What problems will engineers solve next?
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Will we finally have affordable solar power?
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Or robots that can perform life-saving surgery,
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or a building that's so tall your view is of outer space.
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Or how about finally engineering a working hover board?
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Seriously, we've waited long enough.
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So what is engineering?
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It's solving problems.
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It's taking crazy, out there ideas
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and seeing if they're actually possible.
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And when they are, the idea is shared with the world to make all our lives better
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So, what problems do you want to solve?
