The short story i’ve heard it explained was that prior to the 1960’s when logarithm tables were the only option, if what you were calculating was not in the table, you rounded the measurements up so that the material or whatever was stronger, and you knew it would really hold the weight to be certain. Depending on how much rounding up happened during the design, this created lots of redundancy and strength, but was more expensive since you generally had to use more materials. With CAD, you could more easily model and calculate all the loads and optimize the design and material costs for the expected lifetime of the product, building, or whatever. This saved money and was preferred by bean counters, and resulted in designs lasting just enough, rather than older designs which sometimes seemed indestructible.
tate@lemmy.sdf.org 4 days ago
I don’t think more difficult is correct, just different. Take cars as an example (because I don’t know anything about the engineering of large buildings): In the 1930’s and 40’s it would have been completely impossible to design and build a 2020’s car. But the cars that they did build then were not “more difficult” to design and build.
Engineers don’t work harder when they get new tools, they just make different things.
bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I don’t know, I think more difficult is accurate.
Look at any major building project from a hundred years ago. How many man hours would it take from concept to completion? A similar project today could probably be finished in less than a quarter of the time with half as many people. Sure, they are doing it differently, but the tools make it easier so we can make more of them faster.
Referring back to your example, today’s cars were impossible to make then because making a basic car was too damn hard to begin with, once that task got easier, they could focus on making slightly more difficult ones.
gramie@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
They also took into account that a certain number of the workers would die from accidents and disease (see: the Panama Canal) and they were okay with that.
Alsjemenou@lemy.nl 3 days ago
The processes in manufacturing largely remained the same. Doing things faster makes things easier not more difficult.
Look at the Eiffel tower for example, immensely complicated, wild design and largely pointless (compared to modern standards).
Or compare old wooden windmills to one of the most modern structures, large open water windmills. hundreds of meters tall, simple tubular construction.
The ability that CAD and computer power in general gave us was the ability to simplify and not use more than necessary. The ability to model strength, rigidity and whatever forces necessary, that’s where the real power lies.
and i think that we can’t really speak about more or less difficult. The structures and designs clearly have a very high level of complexity, while most modern constructions deliberately eliminate complexity. But we can’t do that without computers.
Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 3 days ago
It sounds like you’re arguing, but every one of those statements support the idea that “we have made these things easier to make”.