Man Behind the Models

FRANZ REULEAUX was neither an inventor nor a pure scientist. Rather, "he personified a new figure in the industrial age, the engineer-scientist," writes Cornell mechanical engineering professor Francis C. Moon in Applied Mechanics Reviews. "Unlike the craftsman-engineer who believed in trial and error, hands-on education, the engineer-scientist believed that machines could be created and designed using scientific principles guided by rigorous mathematics,"

Machines were in Reuleaux's blood, so to speak; both his father and grandfather were machine builders. Reuleaux's study of the scientific principles that underlie machines earned him an international reputation and the moniker "the father of modern kinematics." Reuleaux was born in 1829, a time when most people regarded machines with awe. "He who best understands the machine, who is best acquainted with its essential nature, will be able to accomplish the most by its means," he wrote.

But to describe Reuleaux as a professor and kinematic theorist alone gives an incomplete picture of the man. His extensive writings include the engineering books The Kinematics of Machines and The Constructor as well as a German translation of Longfellow's Hiawatha. -B.H.

Copyright American Society for Engineering Education Summer 2004
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