hello and welcome to technically speaking a podcast where scientists and engineers come together to chat about common interests share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity i'm Laura and in this in this episode i'm joined by Rwayda, Amina, Cara and Antonia to talk about how travel has changed with time and how it has been shaped by society and in turn changed our lives so to start off with, Rwayda, can you give us an example of how travel has shaped your life?
First i would say as a structural engineer i always fancy looking as historical structures precisely bridges bridges is one of the forms that changed traveling quite a bit during the history and i would give like another example on how traveling changed my life is i'm originally from iraq and i did my phd in manchester university so when i came over to manchester my flight took 10 hours and if i go back in time to the early 1900s so if i wanted to come to the uk by that time i
needed to use the train and there was a direct train line to london through berlin it's called berlin back that berlin line and that would would have have taken me a few days to reach so like between a few days to 10 hours it's a huge gap and traveling within the time so innovations and travel have been sort of a time saver yeah make life more efficient so you can focus on what's
really important. Amina what about you? So my father's side of the family is from pakistan and my mother's side of the family is from iran so my grandparents they migrated from iran to pakistan and they traveled by foot and that was quite some journey so i've heard some great stories which um my grandparents underwent and stuff and somewhere they were taking a train some places you know they were on foot for a large majority of area and they were sort of like
equipping themselves for days worth of travel and stuff and similarly and on my dad's side as well from my grandparents i've heard stories of them sort of traveling from one end to the other just to go visit someone or something like that and they were having to do the travel like on on foot and it's quite amazing like even nowadays to get from like one side of pakistan to get to the other side the most common form of transport is is rail and they still spend days um going from
one end to the other and stuff and then conversely i've been born here and for me i've looked at it a completely different way so whenever i've visited grandparents i've always gone on the aeroplane and that happens within a day so i guess i've always kind of been interested in in how it's evolved just because of the stories i've had in my family. Wow that's a... that's quite a good reason, yeah, how
it brought your family together essentially and what that means to you. Cara what about you,
what's your interest in travel and how it's changed our lives? Kind of similar to what Amina's just said like those stories you hear about people who've kind of traveled in different ways i come from ireland which is a small island so you have to travel to get anywhere with a lot of effort but i also had sailors in my family previously so i always heard all these stories growing up and i spent some time living in another country when i was a young young child so
always these stories about different places and so the place has always fascinated me but it was always about how do you get there and so i grew up looking at maps as being fascinated like you know looking at the maps to see the connections to different places and planning where you're going to go next i would always i still kind of fantasy travel a lot i have a real thing about trains so i like seeing where railways go and they go there for a reason because there was a reason they went
there before but they still go there because their tourist destinations and you know what people do you meet along the way so it's kind of that connection between a map shows you the physicality of what you're looking at but also like the people that you're going to find in different places so i studied civil engineering and people aren't always familiar with what civil engineering is but it's a real mix of different skill sets you have to learn and in civil engineering
actually you learn about map making as well as you learn about how to read maps to then shape what buildings and structures you're going to put there and where's the best place to put things so civil engineering is often like the kind of the big skill engineering you kind of think of things don't move but they have to be located in a place so i kind of from a young kind of mind but also like not from a professional point of view i still just love looking at a map because it tells you so
much about places and how you travel between them in terms of hardship my life but i guess i still kind of i still see a map when i still kind of i'm just like think of all the places you could go very cool yeah i really like maps as well i spend ages pouring over s maps and i still navigate from them where i live now rather than relying on gps oh dude okay you put me to shame though i just like them because they're pretty it's so much easier to work around a map if i put things in gps
like it i just get confused i literally i'm the same i'll open up a map a good old-fashioned way and i find different routes and stuff i think it's so much better yeah yeah google does not have that local knowledge it's definitely more helpful to know what the roads are like or enter that's true google might think uh as the crow flies but then you actually have to go up a massive gradient and maybe your car actually can't make it up that hill
yep many people have gotten stuck on a pass around here so i live near the lake district so we have lots of very steep windy narrow roads but antonia what's your interest in travel and how it's changed our lives like amina i was born here but my parents are from another country and i guess travel's really helped by i actually you know we have technology i could go on the internet and i could see where they were born what people are like you know according to the to internet and
stuff but it's not the same as when you physically go there so you know i've been lucky enough to actually grow up in a family that can afford to fly abroad you know maybe once or every two years going to where my parents grew up and actually experiencing the culture for myself so it's really nice to have that but also we've just gone for a global pandemic where we've had to find new ways to experience that and not travel as much and then there's also my professional side having
to manage wanting to travel and the necessity of travel but also the uh the environmental impact of travel you know there's sustainable tourism you know if we if we all go to the same place at the same time that it can't be sustainable it just just physically we can't all fit there there's um xkcd's spin-off what if where they said if what if everyone in the planet jumped at the same time and that you think about oh i yeah that's seven billion people jumping but the actual
sort of twist in it was then everyone getting from that point that they all got to and i think travel is is one of those things that it takes a lot of different different parts to make it work well and that's really interesting you're making me think of you know that um as a jeff goldblum he says we thought so hard about whether we could we didn't think about whether we should we've got to a point where we're saying it's great we can all travel so much but we're not
all very aware that um it is bad for the planet in a lot of ways so maybe i'm gonna maybe your family had it right maybe traveling by first the most environmentally friendly thing we should be doing i mean to be honest they didn't have many options did they that was the way that it it was and i think you learned from those kind of things so after that even though up until my grandparents were able to they would prefer to walk wherever they could just because that's what they were most
comfortable with like oh i take in the countryside i meet people along the way i see the birds i see the trees i really enjoy it so why would i do it any other way yeah i agree i like walking on foot but that's not what we're here to talk about we talk about the science and engineering yeah so i guess if we go back in time i suppose one of the things that might have sort of contributed to travel if we are talking about people walking around on foot is bridges and ruido this is your
fascination isn't it yes it is my obsession so if we go back in time i won't say the first bridge i will say that all this bridge is still a news and that in arcadico greek and the bridge is made in the greek bronze age and that's around 1600 bc relays when you look at that specific bridge it's an arch bridge and you could see all the science and engineering when to build that simple a bridge because the way the arc shape is hold on the weight and it's made out of a stone
which is a local material sustainability aspect to it so it's resilient it have survived quite a bit and is still functioning to our current days so what was that bridge going from and what was it going to i think it's just like a smaller bridge connecting to point locally but i think the the way they design it because it's small so it was sustained and survived that long time the interesting bit is survived and they used local materials and they did not have
any engineers but they had people who thinks like engineers and they managed to bullet up together in a nice engineering way that's still around so so good that it's lasted all these years yeah it's much better than many bridges i've seen falling apart so looking at the image i'm guessing it's i can't really tell from what's in the picture there's nothing for scale that has any meaning to me but is it just like it looks like a footbridge over a ditch yeah
taking away making a sound so uh basic laura i know that's how i roll i think i think that's how all sciences roll we make things simple so we can understand that in our heads right yeah do you just it's practicality isn't it i think that's that's where engineering has come from we need to do x action and not quite sure how to do it so you build a path of how to get there it's just that that's where engineering and sciences stand for yes i'll be like ignore
the fancy equation look at my roller yeah this is how you explain how bridges work with rulers that flex it talks about tension and compression yes and i think before i start grumbling about the bridges because i love them so much and i love the engineering behind them i'll stop myself i do wonder though so i live by the sea in one of um the uk's oldest historic ports it's called whitehaven it was a massive trade route in the 17th and 1800s so i wonder what came
first boats or bridges so uh well i'll be very technical and historical and sciency in here and say according to archaeological findings dugouts were the earliest form about 8 000 years ago the first documented the bridge is from ancient mesopotamia that's all area of iraq today and the bridge is about 4 000 years old so if we compare 8 000 to 4 000 so definitely you could say the boats come first from an archaeological point of view you might want to disagree though i don't know
but i'm not sure whether that's enough evidence for rita um as a scientist to back up your claim that you're making there not that i've evidenced either way i like the logic though it's a very scientific line of thought it is it is i would disagree with that bridges probably came before boats because if you think of like different terrains that every country has i mean they'll have a point and i don't know they'll have a river in the middle and they've got to get from
one point to the other and that might just be their day-to-day routine so to me i think that the development of a bridge would come before the boats in my head because just because of thinking of different terrains because you might live in a country where it's quite flat and everything's very well connected and stuff or you might be in some mountainous area where i was once as a child and we'd got to a point and we literally had to get from one point to the other point and there
was a river in the middle if we wanted to go by a car it would have taken us about four extra hours to like go loop around the mountain and get to the other side but just to get to the other side of the mountain where i could see there was this rope bridge and it would have taken me like five minutes to get from one to the other but man that was hard that was it was just a rope bridge and a huge drop over a river fast flowing that was scary that's a very valid point amina but your evidence
might have might have been decayed or burned at a point that's why we can't find it today the only reason we can see the bridge because it's made of uh clay bricks yeah sustainable stuff that that would last that would lie i mean yeah rope bridge like can you imagine what kind of quality rope it was used and like when's the last time it was quality checked how much load you can take i mean i'm supposed to go on this bridge there is one in ireland there is there is i think this is
the previous episode right we spoke more about bridges yeah so i think a lot of this connects with what i'm going to speak about next which is what i'm really passionate about is connections between things and that's like building physical connections as well as kind of metaphorical connections to joining the dots so it's like engineers like to simplify things i kind of accidentally complicate things in my head a lot more than i need to a lot of the time because i
i don't simplify things enough um but the debate you're just having there is like you know a boat or a bridge which came first you know how did you hot what was the easiest way to connect something or were using a router using a tree and this is all actually the like engineering design process that that's how i kind of see it as a bit different from the scientific process because you need to kind of define what your problem is and what's the best solution there's not only one way
to do it there's kind of like lots of different ways and it depends on what two places you want to connect um so yeah and i think an example we deny which is really easy like in modern day is you say okay we want a new road it's like okay well what places are you connecting and why how many people are going to travel between those places is a car the best way to travel and okay do we need a motorway or do we need a single truck route that's the kind of like
everyday life that people are living and you need to respond to what that need is that helps you design what the technical specifications are going to be so it's making those two connections so that's kind of how my brain works i think it's really interesting really you're talking about the engineering design process i love the beginning but you know kind of doing the big solutions what can we possibly be trying to solve here and then the end of it what impact is it going to have
i personally i'm not that involved anymore in the middle um technical design um i just kind of come at the beginning at the end to get all the glory and tell the interesting stories that's fancy yeah it's a bit i find really interesting definitely yeah i guess the big question for me is where are you trying to get to like why would you want to go somewhere where there aren't already people in which case aren't they already connected but maybe they're not
depends on whether you're trying to explore something new or are you just trying to connect with more people trying to find a new america so the area that i work in now is actually all about um building new communities and so this is within england and england's quite a small place but in other countries which are a lot bigger we've seen this like in other countries where they build a whole new city and england they build new villages and towns
and you have to build a road in the idea that some after you build a road people will come along with businesses and want to build houses but sometimes you build those roads and no one comes so you have to you know sometimes are you building the road to try and create a connection to open up a new place to people or is actually there is there a place existing already which it makes more sense to try and build the best connection to that to connect people who were previously there
so sometimes the technology that we have kind of responds to a need of people and sometimes the technology kind of is about opening up new opportunities and it depends which one comes first and as well that's kind of like you know what is it we're designing um and we're speaking about thinking about the cars that we drive in the uk and in europe definitely the cars tend to be quite small but that's because with a lot of smaller roads we have older cities which have narrower
roads that were built historically because they were the width of a horse door and carriage and that's what they needed to design for and so going forward you look at places like america which are a lot bigger and have a lot more space and the roads are wider they can build bigger car parking spaces they can build bigger driveways they have bigger cars because they don't need to respond to the smaller need that's changing somewhat in the uk in europe is that related to the design of
the infrastructure being newer in the u.s than the europe because europe is more historical cities yeah so partly because historically we kind of have cities which are very very old in the uk and europe and some places i guess in europe you see videos or photographs would you like in italy where cars don't even fit in the streets that's why in italy maybe they'll drive mopeds and scooters instead not just italy obviously lots of countries around the world
so it's partly that and also partly then deciding what you want to have going forwards if you do have more space for example you can just build bigger places and places which are more spread out yeah and i guess if we're talking about the history of the uk like there are certainly a lot of villages near me from like the 1800s and earlier that have got some really really narrow roads um you struggle to get a car down them easily but obviously before we had cars we
had the horse and car but we also had bicycles and i'm a big cyclist and i find so weird about historic cycling is that back in the 1800s people were riding penny farthings which to me just seemed like a really weird invention apparently they originated in 1870 and they had that huge front wheel connected directly to the pedals which meant it was called a direct drive and uh that meant that you got a lot of speed for little pedaling effort because obviously
your wheel rotates at the same speed but it's got a much bigger circumference but it still staggers me that people used to ride those things yeah speaking about bikes that's making me think of um so there's a field that i work in it's called like socio-technical studies and it's really understanding how social stuff and technical stuff comes together to shape each other and what is really really significant and bicycles are actually touted as like one of the things
which are most important for feminism because it gives women a right to be able to travel on their own and it's still something which is debated in some countries women shouldn't be cycling there are a lot of myths around why it was bad for women to cycle but then they went then went on to shape fashion so women were wearing these really long skirts and they couldn't ride penny farthings but whenever you got the bicycles were both the same size women could go on and skirts more
easily and then actually that's why they wanted to wear treasures because they were able to wear treasures to use these bikes so it's a bicycle's like there's a lot written about the bicycle in terms of how it's shaped people's lives in so so many ways but it's just especially as women around the world it really opened up a whole new world to people wow i didn't know that so modern
bikes were invented in 1985. they originally known as safety bikes presumably because you weren't as high up on a penny farther and you were a lot safer i always wondered how they used to get on it i mean what did they find like this certain wall that everyone climbs on top so that they can get onto their bikes some of the houses around here in some of the older villages they've still got those blocks at the front that you'd use to climb onto your horse
would be the same thing it's a mechanical horse i guess it's a logical progression and then people thought we can make these smaller and better so the smaller bikes these pedals aren't connected directly to the wheel they're connected via a chain so it's called a drive chain and it's the cogs that you use that dictate your speed so again you can select your speed more finely and i think i'll leave it there because i feel like this might be straying into territory on cars
which we were going to get to next something that's quite interesting because i drive a hybrid electric car is it's really quiet for one thing so it's not got an internal combustion engine but also changing gears is no longer a thing router are you starting to yes i did start to learn to drive and i passed my theory test few weeks ago and i find it really interesting lots of the theory tested question is about breaking in gears even though like science are moving towards
the automatic cars which i'm tempted to drive here oh ruida if you learn the manual then you can go anywhere and if you ever get a manual you'll never forget what but i need to to learn how to cycle that does actually help i think yes when you i i can try and explain gears but i'm so used to doing it on my bike that my fingers just do their thing to change the gear levers that's it and despite it being opposite of environmentally friendly learning to drive
manual in a diesel car is easier because you can hear the need to switch yeah again how do you weigh up your quality of life versus the environmental impact of learning to drive in a petrol or diesel car never thought you'd have to think about hmm what's the environmental impact of me learning to drive a manual car is it like which one is better for the environment though is it like the full automatic or is it the manual
oh that's cool they are good at the um automatic is because apparently it's better to drive in a higher gear as possible and people don't switch up gears quickly enough how does that depend on how the gearbox has been so yeah i don't know people will claim different things cause also you then can't coast should you be coasting you're not allowed to cause any question with the with the costing on the exam say i'm not costing um if you're going up the lights you can't coast
so there is also just regenerative braking as well which does come with electric cars because the way it works is you if you remember the old motor generator um cycle you have you could either put energy in and then generate an electric field so if you have your your wheels turning and you reverse the motor it will generate the current so you could be stored back in the battery but there is also the uh mechanical way of storing some energy so you can use a flywheel to store your
extra rotational energy when you're breaking and that actually is another way to store energy which hasn't been as favored it's only usually useful for larger vehicles but if we're talking about whether or not manual or automatic is more environmentally friendly i think what we should have is regenerative braking because that can save between 10 and 20 percent of your fuel consumption how do you ensure that a car actually has that i think it's a personal responsibility for us
to drive without harming the environment as a consumer can only can only purchase what is there on the market so uh on the market you know regenerative braking with mechanical uh storage is not really popular they've only really integrated regenerative braking and hybrid cars so again we go back to this episode we had on the environmental impact of batteries in cars we've talked a little bit about the evolution of the car right that we're moving
away from combustion engines to just using batteries essentially but there's a hell of a lot of development required there and i think what we're saying is it's down to the consumer to kind of make sure that they're buying something that's been made responsibly and they understand whether it's doing the best thing it should i think we also mentioned in a previous episode on electric cars that they're not new the first one was made over 100 years ago but the difference
in those hundred years is that the range and the speeds have improved dramatically which is down to advances in the technology a lot of people have worked really hard to make these improvements to make it a viable means of getting around and i guess the next logical progression is airplanes which also aren't a particularly new technology but i think there are some interesting things that merit further discussion so if you think about a traditional aeroplane we all think of a
standard shape and we think of round windows but actually that's an evolved design so previously in like the 1950s or originally when the aeroplane sort of came out we used to use square windows there were two major accidents in air in the 1950s early 1950s where the roof just exploded the top just came off so you know like a traditional aeroplane kind of became a convertible aeroplane and what they found through investigation was that because the windows were a square shape the stress
concentrations at the point of the windows was so high that it was creating a weakness and basically the pressures and everything that the aeroplane was being exposed to it just couldn't handle it and so that's why they had an explosion and so then they reformed the shapes and they looked into it this comes into material science they found out that if it was a rounded shape then actually you don't have a high stress concentration at any one point and so that way it became safer so
whenever you look at anything i mean if you think of your childhood cars to now if you think of your childhood airplanes too now the design is constantly evolving and sure enough most of it is to sort of like make it more economical make it more streamlined make it quicker but a lot of these changes have actually been driven from safety as well and that's just something important to keep in mind because it is there as a responsible industry it is there for everybody
yeah it requires quite a bit of iterations to get things as fancy as we have them today and i think in maybe 10 years or so what we think about us fancy design would be very old and not fashionable anymore definitely so there was this period where we were creating jumbo jets you know bigger and better and huge you know but actually they're not sustainable they they take up a huge amount of energy and they're not as quick as you know the smaller ones and stuff so if they're not
the common sight now are they and i think they're fashionable bit now is going to space isn't it yeah so um we're commercializing space travel now aren't we so the first virgin galactic has in july been they've gone into space and they're making space into like a touristic destination i say we're commercializing it as if we're just gonna jump on a rocket ship and go into space like we do with ryanair at the minute going to
spain it's not quite the same level it's like i have heard a lot of people and they're like oh if i could afford it i'd love to go into space i mean i get the pull i do like who wouldn't want to see earth like a little teeny itty bitty dog i think it's quite cool but like the question will come into the whole social side of things should we be doing these kind of things should we be i mean it's amazing that we can potentially think about these things i
think considering where we started off from and stuff like little just pods going into space but should we be doing that should we be mining on space which is the new plan sort of like use use space as like a mining place to do all of our dirty work and keep earth all pristine and stuff should we be doing that i'm also curious we all come from such different backgrounds and perspectives where we had to know what you think how do civil engineers have a role in space travel
if there's no roads or real ways to build we have to stay on earth and kind of just build a platform for them to land on that's a boring role for us i think we still contribute to this space city because we would need eventually if we keep on traveling there we need a city to be landing to true okay so somewhere and it would be totally different design because the large the weight and the construction will be it's just imagine pouring concrete into something and your
concrete will apply i read something about this what they're trying to do they're trying to do modular buildings so they're trying to make things here and then send it up and then to to sort of like um manage with the environment the extreme environments that they've got so like extremely cold the gravity all of those kind of things the corrosion the radiation everything is different yeah yeah so it's like modern methods of construction in my industry
people talk about this quite a lot because it's meant to be kind of more sustainable to have a pre-fabricated house and just go put it down somewhere so there's less disruption to the neighbors and i don't know there's lots of different discussion around how it's going to be better in lots of ways but i had not thought about the fact that you could pre-fabricate things to then send into space step by step so like even in a nuclear industry but that's what
they're doing they're doing modular building now so the new smrs which are coming through the small modular reactors that's the whole premise of it they'll do the modular building on a factory site and then go put it down and here's a good question for the width of the roads have you seen them for example whenever they were transporting the rocket which came back down and they had to go through all the buildings with like the wings kind of sideways if you ever drive on the motorway from
england up towards scotland sometimes you'll see a house in the back of the lorry and it is like two lanes of the motorway so like yeah you might not be able to fit that along all rooms or real ways to get to places yeah yeah it has to be taken into account and i know where the small modules that is something so when they were considering where to do the uh production of the modulars they were considering the route that they're going to have to take from said place to said
destination and can they actually even do it also now in civil engineering we have the 3d printing so they just can set up a 3d printing thing in the space and print the houses in there you say just like it's a that will be fine that's easy from what little i know 3d printing it needs to be pretty well refined if you're going to be building a house out of it it's going to last but has to survive extreme conditions as well and the 3d printer i used i mean obviously it was a sort
of benchtop thing but it definitely wasn't perfect there were lots of defects in there we're talking in 50 years yeah true it comes back to material science i guess that i'm going to mentioned with the windows and the plane that was all about the material science material science to me is essentially about how the different atoms interact with each other and it's how those atoms then aggregate on a larger scale to make engineering structures so you need to get down to your atoms
to understand how it would perform over the long term that's how i think it's a scientist anyway you love your atoms i do that's just incredible i i think on the scale of like a city and you think on the scale of an atom like that is so different yeah that's small for me you'll see like a steel bar right like just in that everyone will see just a normal steel bar but like we'll prep here and we'll sort of like pair it properly get it under the optical microscope you can see the
grades you can see how like the inclusions are all there and you can see what's stopping the stresses it's amazing now when i see a steel bar i'll think well that's good intention i feel like we're not talking about travel anymore we've just gone down the very fundamentals of how do you make steel maybe we should stop here cara mentioned this at least once we sort of came back to it again you said jeff goldblum said um we we were so intent on doing what we could we didn't
stop to think if we should yeah i think that's the quote from a jurassic park i think it is exactly so we've gone from talking about travel to material science to making dinosaurs what we're saying is that societies shape science and engineering just as much as science and engineering has shaped our lives there are historic decisions that affect what we do and a lot of decision making in engineering and it's also shaped by material science some of the
examples from the conversation were with uh planes and bikes we saw how innovation makes us safer and allowed women to do things which i didn't know and how cars can be changed to reduce our impact on the environment but allowing us to stay connected and as consumers we should also be looking into those technologies and making sure that they're produced in a way that resonates with our needs for environmental justice or whatever floats your boats a lot of the things we were talking
about seemed to originate from the industrial revolution and and that was quite a long time ago and it sounds like there are a lot of exciting industrial changes happening now like with the electric cars and with going into space so i guess that's a good place to end this episode uh so if you've enjoyed listening to this episode of tempe speaking you can find us on twitter to carry on the conversation and keep listening to some of the episodes the views expressed in this podcast
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