History and Creativity in Mechanical Engineering Education

In spite of its common perception as a static matter, the history of mechanical engineering is always a surprisingly rich source of ideas and constructive solutions. In fact, a historical perspective leads to a deeper understanding of the reasons why some technical solutions are commonly adopted, and that may not emerge from a technical and economical analysis of the present situation. Moreover, the power of invention of a “creative engineer” is limited to what can actually be done and is useful; therefore his/her creativity relies on a wide and deep technical knowledge. These two apparently simple and obvious considerations are the starting points to establish a relationship between history and creativity in the mechanical engineering field. The introduction of the historical heritage in purposely developed courses to stimulate the creativity of young engineers is one of the beneficial effects of this association. The breadth of the historical heritage is the more evident difficulty of this approach. The proposed way to overcome this difficulty, making it more easily accessible especially for younger engineers, consists in organizing the historical heritage in archives and data-bases. Two strategies (named abstraction and evaluation) to develop new solutions starting from the results of the search in these data-bases are also presented and discussed. This approach has been introduced in the syllabus of the courses “History of mechanical engineering” and “Design Methods” that are comprised in the Master of Science in the Mechanical Engineering Programme of the Politecnico di Milano.