Perspectives
Railways and the steam engine. Few inventions better symbolize England’s role as the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. The country’s first railroad opened in 1825, using Robert Stephenson’s steam locomotive, the Locomotion No. 1, along...
Perspectives Recent Articles
Many engineers have stories of meetings getting off to a rocky start. For Victoria Fillingham, one began with being mistaken for the coffee server. “I’ve seen a big change,” she says, “but I can tell you stories about being the...
Railways and the steam engine. Few inventions better symbolize England’s role as the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. The country’s first railroad opened in 1825, using Robert Stephenson’s steam locomotive, the Locomotion No. 1, along the 25-mile (40-kilometer) Stockton and...
Clarity is invaluable for a project as staggeringly complex as the international fusion experiment. The project, also known as the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), is being built in France and is one of the most ambitious scientific collaborations in...
If Joe Carr’s life were a Fighting Fantasy book—the well-thumbed Choose Your Own Adventure series that lines his bookshelves—it might begin like this: Before you lies a branching path. Every step a challenge, every choice a puzzle. Do you reason...
I recently had the pleasure and privilege of sharing my thoughts on AI’s role in infrastructure with readers of AEC Magazine. (Martyn, thank you for the invitation!) In the piece, I explain why the massive amount of data generated during...
Open standards are the invisible glue that hold the digital world together. They are everywhere—Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and HTML have become household names—and they enable software, hardware and data to seamlessly work together, ensuring that innovation isn’t stifled by incompatible proprietary...
When Tom Walski was growing up in northeast Pennsylvania, air pollution and contaminated water were evident all around. “It was a poor coal-mining area that had just about every type of environmental problem you can imagine,” he says. Spurred to...
In 2024, we turned over the pen — or, rather, the keyboard — to Bentley Systems executives and other insightful voices to tell us about the future of infrastructure engineering. They discussed how AI will change the sector, why we...
With hundreds of bridges crossing valleys, railroads and the three major rivers that meet downtown, Pittsburgh embodies its nickname as the City of Bridges. These bridges are more than infrastructure—they’re proud symbols of connection and community. That pride was on...