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Making a World of Difference: Engineering Ideas into Reality

A book celebrating engineering’s significance to our health, happiness, and safety, as well as its promise for meeting the society’s challenges in the years to come.

This book is a brief account of the origins and the first twenty-five years of existence of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). It is in no sense a formal history, much less a complete one. Rather, it records the principal imperatives, themes, and objectives that brought the Academy into being and the events and people that cast it into its present form and role. Much of the story is told through the recollections of Academy officers, councillors, members, and staff who took part in particularly significant events and activities that influenced the evolution of the Academy structure and defined its role on the national and international scenes.

The twenty-five years since the founding of the NAE has been a period during which the central importance of engineering and technology for the economic progress, general welfare, and the quality of life grew ever more evident to governments in all nations. During this period, the NAE has emerged as a principal focus of engineering leadership at the national level, drawing into its membership ranks outstanding engineers from the entire range of engineering activities in industry, academia, government, and other sectors of society. The engineering leadership of the NAE has come to play a major role, in parallel with the primarily academic and scientific leadership of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), and in concert with the medical leadership of the Institute of Medicine, in advising the federal government on the major scientific and technological issues of our age. This is exemplified by the jointly governed institutional mechanisms of what has come to be known as the Academy complex, of which the National Research Council (NRC) is the central and largest component.

The story of the NAE as it unfolds in this book is thus as much an account of the evolving relationships among science, engineering, governments, and the public as it is a record of the building of the NAE as an institution capable of playing increasingly important roles in those relationships, national and international The major program activities reported are not only those carried out by the NAE independently but also those of particular engineering interest and importance in the Academy complex, especially for the more recent years since the NAE assumed its present role as full partner with the NAS in the NRC and most other activities of the complex.
In a work of this sort, only the highlights of the many diverse circumstances, events, and people that contributed to the origins and twentyfive-year development of the Academy can be included. The selection of these highlights was inevitably a matter of judgment. The people and events cited in this book are at best a representative cross section of all that contributed to the making of the Academy as we know it today.

The author and editors wish to express their gratitude to the many NAE members and staff and others in the Academy complex who assisted them by providing documents and personal recollections. Without their assistance, a work of this kind could not have been written. Equally, they wish to express their apologies to the many individuals whose important activities and contributions to the work of the NAE and its institutional development could not be included or may not have been given as much weight as they might have warranted. Finally, although extensive efforts were made to ensure the accuracy of the statements made and the reports of events in this book by consulting with many of the people involved, crosschecking the documentary record, and having the manuscript independently reviewed, the author and editors take full responsibility for any inaccuracies that may remain.

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The Making of the NAE - The First 25 Years