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