Open Questions

Open Industrial Engineering

Why It Is Open Time study and motion study were developed independently and stood in philosophical tension; the disagreement between Taylor and the Gilbreths became a personal rift that, after Taylor died, turned into an open feud between the Gilbreths and the Taylor camp, and the documented record states that friction over questions of history and intellectual property still remains even after Lillian Gilbreth attempted to heal the rift.

What Would Settle It A settled historical account, backed by primary correspondence or patent records, establishing whose methodological contribution founded industrial engineering as a discipline and how the intellectual property dispute between the two camps was actually resolved.

Expertise Needed History of Technology

Question posed in Frank Bunker Gilbreth (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors, Wikipedia, Frank Bunker Gilbreth, section Scientific management.

Open Nuclear Engineering

Why It Is Open Szilard originated and patented the theoretical concept of a nuclear chain reaction years before any working device existed, while Fermi led the team that turned the concept into the first working reactor at Chicago Pile One in 1942 and later jointly held a nuclear reactor patent together with Szilard; historical accounts differ on which contribution defines the founding of the discipline, and Fermi has separately been called the architect of the nuclear age.

What Would Settle It A settled historiographical consensus, or a definitive patent and priority record, on whether conceptual origination or first successful engineering achievement carries primary founding credit.

Expertise Needed History of Technology

Question posed in Leo Szilard (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors, Wikipedia, Leo Szilard, lead section.

Open Robotics Engineering

Why It Is Open Karel Capek popularized robot in R.U.R. and is popularly credited with coining it, but in a 1933 letter responding to an Oxford English Dictionary etymology inquiry, Karel himself stated that his brother Josef suggested the word, derived from the Czech word robota, meaning forced labor.

What Would Settle It Corroborating primary correspondence or contemporaneous documentation, beyond the account Karel gave later, confirming the specific nature of the contribution Josef made.

Expertise Needed History of Technology

Question posed in Robot (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors, Wikipedia, Robot, Etymology section.

Open Petroleum Engineering

Why It Is Open Drake is credited as the first American to successfully drill for oil, and the well he drilled launched the modern petroleum industry, but documented claims of prior art for oil drilling exist from Bóbrka, Poland in 1854, Wietze, Germany in 1857, and Oil Springs, Ontario in 1858, each predating the Drake well.

What Would Settle It An agreed definition of what counts as a genuine oil well, mechanically drilled rather than dug, and commercially significant rather than experimental, against which the historical record could be measured.

Expertise Needed History of Technology

Question posed in Edwin Drake (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors, Wikipedia, Edwin Drake, Career section.

Open Metallurgical Engineering

Why It Is Open Kelly experimented with injecting air into molten iron in the early 1850s, before Bessemer patented a similar process in 1855; after a financial panic in 1857, a company that had already licensed the Bessemer process purchased the Kelly patents outright and licensed both under the Bessemer name, and the documented record states that the role Kelly played in the invention has remained far less known.

What Would Settle It A settled historical account weighing the timing of independent invention against the commercial and patent outcomes that decided which name attached to the process.

Expertise Needed History of Technology

Question posed in William Kelly (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors, Wikipedia, William Kelly (inventor), lead section.

Open Nanotechnology

Why It Is Open The talk Feynman gave is widely cited as the conceptual origin of nanotechnology, but many early nanotechnology researchers say it did not influence their own work and had not read it until much later; Taniguchi was the first to actually use the term nano technology, in 1974; and Drexler used the term again in 1981 without knowing of the earlier Taniguchi use, then went on to popularize it. Historians describe the status given to Feynman in the field as retroactively attached, to give nanotechnology a packaged history.

What Would Settle It A settled disciplinary consensus on whether founding credit belongs to conceptual precedent, to terminological coinage, or to later independent popularization.

Expertise Needed History of Technology

Question posed in History of Nanotechnology (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors, Wikipedia, History of nanotechnology, Norio Taniguchi section.

Open Mechanical Engineering

Why It Is Open Alphonse Beau de Rochas, a French engineer, patented the theoretical concept of the four-stroke engine cycle in 1862 but never built a working engine. Nikolaus Otto built and commercialized the first successful four-stroke engine in 1876, unaware of the Rochas patent, and only lost part of his own German patent years later when Gottlieb Daimler's lawyer discovered Rochas's earlier description while searching for a way around royalty payments.

What Would Settle It A settled historiographical consensus on whether conceiving and patenting an unbuilt idea, or independently engineering and commercializing the same idea, carries the primary credit for founding the discipline; historians of technology continue to credit both figures for different reasons.

Expertise Needed History of Technology

Question posed in Nikolaus Otto (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors, Earlier patents section.

Open Marine Engineering

Why It Is Open Francis Pettit Smith and John Ericsson began working on the marine screw propeller separately in Britain in 1835. Smith filed the first patent, on 31 May, while Ericsson, working independently, filed his own patent about six weeks later; each went on to build and demonstrate a working screw-propelled boat within the following two years.

What Would Settle It The historical record itself credits both men as independent parallel inventors rather than settling one point of priority; a documented consensus on whose contribution founded the technology, first patent versus first proven working demonstration, does not exist.

Expertise Needed History of Technology

Question posed in Propeller (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors, Screw propellers section.

Open Biomedical Engineering

Why It Is Open The first clinical implantation of a fully implantable pacemaker took place in Sweden on 8 October 1958, using a device designed by Rune Elmqvist and surgeon Åke Senning, but it failed within three hours and needed rapid replacement. Wilson Greatbatch's independently engineered implantable pacemaker, using a mercury-battery design, entered use in the United States in April 1960 and proved durable enough for his patient to live a further eighteen months.

What Would Settle It Whether the first, short-lived implant or the first durable design founded modern implantable pacemaker engineering is treated differently by different national and disciplinary histories, and no single source resolves which contribution carries primary credit.

Expertise Needed History of Technology

Question posed in Artificial Cardiac Pacemaker (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors, Implantable section.

Open Energy Engineering

Why It Is Open In July 1887, Scottish academic James Blyth built and installed a battery-charging wind machine to light his own holiday home in Marykirk, Scotland. Months later, American inventor Charles F. Brush built what sources describe as the first automatically operated wind turbine for electricity production in the United States, after peer review of his design with local university professors.

What Would Settle It Whether Blyth's earlier but non-automatic machine or Brush's later but automatically operating turbine deserves credit as the first true wind turbine depends on which criterion, chronological priority or technical completeness, is taken as decisive, and sources do not agree on which should govern.

Expertise Needed History of Technology

Question posed in Wind Turbine (Wikipedia), History section, early wind turbines paragraph.

Open Agricultural Engineering

Why It Is Open Obed Hussey patented a mechanical reaper in Ohio in 1833. Robert McCormick's son Cyrus McCormick patented a competing reaper design in 1834, and Cyrus McCormick himself later claimed the machine was actually invented in 1831, which would predate Hussey's patent. The two designs competed in the marketplace for decades and were the subject of several lawsuits.

What Would Settle It A verified, independently documented date for the McCormick reaper's true first working version would settle whether Hussey's filed 1833 patent or McCormick's disputed 1831 claim has real chronological priority; no such independent record has been produced.

Expertise Needed History of Technology

Question posed in Reaper (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors, Mechanical reapers in the U.S. section.

Open Mining Engineering

Why It Is Open Humphry Davy presented his safety lamp design to the Royal Society in London on 9 November 1815 and was awarded the society's Rumford Medal and two thousand pounds worth of silver. Engine-wright George Stephenson demonstrated his own, independently devised safety lamp down Killingworth Colliery a month before Davy's presentation, but his lamp was not developed and publicly credited until after Davy's paper, leading Davy to accuse him of theft.

What Would Settle It An 1833 House of Commons committee found that Stephenson had an equal claim to inventing the safety lamp, yet Davy went to his grave insisting Stephenson had stolen his idea; no single verdict has ever definitively settled priority between the two men.

Expertise Needed History of Technology

Question posed in Davy Lamp (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors, History section, Stephenson priority dispute paragraph.

Open Ocean Engineering

Why It Is Open Historians credit Grand Lake St. Marys in Ohio with the first submerged oil wells around 1891, drilled from platforms on piles into fresh water, five years before the Summerland field in Santa Barbara County, California drilled the first submerged wells in salt water in 1896. Whether ocean engineering should date the first true offshore well to the earlier freshwater lake wells or reserve the title for the first saltwater, open-ocean wells is a definitional choice historians have not settled.

What Would Settle It A documented contemporary industry or engineering definition of offshore drilling from the 1890s that explicitly includes or excludes freshwater lake wells would settle whether Grand Lake St. Marys or Summerland holds true priority.

Expertise Needed History of petroleum and ocean engineering

Question posed in Offshore Drilling (Wikipedia), History section, opening sentences.

Open Biological Engineering

Why It Is Open Peter Lobban first proposed the idea of recombinant DNA as a Stanford graduate student, Paul Berg's laboratory produced the first recombinant DNA molecule around 1971-72 and Berg later won a Nobel Prize partly for this work, yet the 1974 United States patent on recombinant DNA technology names only Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer as inventors, for a related but distinct gene-cloning technique published in 1973.

What Would Settle It A settled historical or legal consensus on whether patent inventorship (Cohen and Boyer's cloning technique) or first scientific priority (Lobban's proposal and Berg's molecule) is the correct measure of who invented recombinant DNA would resolve the dispute.

Expertise Needed History of biotechnology and biological engineering

Question posed in Recombinant DNA (Wikipedia), History section, first paragraph.

Open Mechatronics Engineering

Why It Is Open John T. Parsons holds the 1958 patent for numerical control and was the sole inductee, without his own chief engineer Frank Stulen, into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for the invention, yet the MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory transformed his original plunge-cutting concept into the three-axis continuous-path control and the programming language that made numerical control practical, and historians differ on how much of the credit belongs to Parsons alone.

What Would Settle It A detailed technical comparison of Parsons' original 1949 proposal against MIT's delivered 1952 servomechanism system, establishing how much of the patented invention originated with Parsons versus MIT's own engineers, would settle the credit question.

Expertise Needed History of mechatronics and control engineering

Question posed in John T. Parsons (Wikipedia), final paragraph, awards and honors.

Open Military Engineering

Why It Is Open Lancelot de Mole submitted a tracked armoured vehicle design to the British War Office in 1912, four years before tanks first saw combat, and a 1919 Royal Commission found his invention had anticipated and in some respects surpassed the design actually used in 1916, yet awarded the official credit and payment to William Tritton and Walter Wilson because de Mole's rejected design had no proven causal influence on their independent development.

What Would Settle It Documentary proof that de Mole's 1912 or 1914 submissions were actually seen and used by the Landships Committee or by Tritton and Wilson would overturn the Royal Commission's finding of no causal connection.

Expertise Needed History of military engineering

Question posed in Lancelot de Mole (Wikipedia), Royal Commission on Awards to Inventors section, quoting the 1919 Report.

Open Architectural Engineering

Why It Is Open French builder François Coignet built the first iron-reinforced concrete structure in 1853-55, English builder William Wilkinson reinforced concrete with a documented understanding of tensile stress in 1854, and French gardener Joseph Monier patented reinforcing techniques from 1867 onward that became the ones most widely licensed and developed afterward, so historians differ on whether priority belongs to the earliest build, the earliest tensile understanding, or the most influential patent.

What Would Settle It A surviving technical record proving which of Coignet, Wilkinson or Monier first understood and deliberately exploited concrete's tensile weakness, rather than simply embedding metal for another reason, would settle whose work counts as the true invention.

Expertise Needed History of structural and architectural engineering

Question posed in Reinforced Concrete (Wikipedia), History section, opening paragraphs.

Open Acoustical Engineering

Why It Is Open Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville patented the phonautograph in 1857 and recorded the human voice as early as 1857-1860, nearly two decades before Thomas Edison's 1877 phonograph, but Scott's device could not play back what it recorded, while Edison's could both record and reproduce sound, so historians differ on whether true invention of sound recording belongs to the first to capture sound at all or the first to make it audible again.

What Would Settle It A settled definition of sound recording from the acoustical engineering discipline itself, stating whether playback capability is a defining requirement, would resolve which of the two deserves the title.

Expertise Needed History of acoustical engineering

Question posed in Phonautograph (Wikipedia), Rediscovery section.