[bluGill]

How many of the people who made the steam engine possible do we remember? James Watt of course, but many many people were making contributions in material science, needed to make them useful. Not to mention many advances in values. No doubt lots of other areas as well, but I'm no expert in the steam engine.

[EncomLab]

Not sure what you mean by this - it's not as if steam engines are an extensive technology today, and certainly no university is teaching "steam science", while nearly every school is teaching "computer science".

Perhaps this is just the attitude that drives Mr. Kay's point home - do individuals who are interested in CS have little value for who and what has come before them?

[CamperBob2]

To be fair, everybody who takes a thermodynamics course owes 90% of it to the 'steam science' pioneers. Understanding what determines and limits the efficiency of heat engines was as big a deal in its day as the WWW is in ours, but unlike our own era, a lot of brand-new science and math had to be discovered by those engineers.

Steam tech is much, much more interesting than it appears at first.

[nancyminusone]

Sure they do, it's just called fluid dynamics and thermodynamics. Enough to fill up about 1/3 of a mechanical engineering degree, if you're really into it (most aren't).

Not that there's a lot of historical context to things as far as which people did what - most of that sort live on in names of techniques and methods (Rankine cycle, de Laval turbine, Carnot efficiency, etc.)

[bigger_cheese]

I studied Materials Engineering. Similar experience.

Carnot, Thompson, Clausius, Gibbs, Rankine, Boltzman etc all made big historical contributions to modern understanding of Thermodynamics.

And for Fluid Dynamics: Euler, Bernoulli, Mach, Stokes and so on.

And if you are looking for someone more modern I'd say Ergun (Packed bed's, Fluidized Bed Reactors etc).

All builds upon "steam science"