Today, we name a new machine. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
A. J. Meadows claims that
the way we name our machines depends on their
maturity -- that we don't settle in on a name until
the machine has settled itself into our lives. Try
the airplane: a hundred years ago there were dozens
of terms like "aerial velocipede," "aerial screw
machine," "aerodrome," "aeromotive engine," "bird
machine," and "flying machine." Most of these names
vanished ten years after the Wright brothers flew.
And, sure enough, we've now settled on just two
names -- "airplane" and "aircraft."
No one I knew had a refrigerator when I was little.
We had an icebox with a rack on top where we put a
new 50-pound block of ice every few days. I still
forget and annoy my son by calling our refrigerator
an "icebox." During the 30s we tried all kinds of
terms for the then-new machine -- "Frigidaire,"
"electric icebox," and, of course, "refrigerator."
The two words "engine" and "machine" show up again
and again when devices are first named. They come
from Latin and Greek roots and broadly refer to
devices that carry out functions. So the steam
engine was first called a "fire engine," and it
still keeps the engine part. We still talk about
"sewing machines," but no one calls a telescope an
"optical engine" any more, the way they did in the
17th century. I especially like the name Babbage
gave his first computer 150 years ago. He called it
an "analytical engine." By the way, there's
presently a software package for checking programs
called a "parsing engine."
Foreign names stick to new gadgets for a while, but
they tend to fade. Airplane designers have moved
away from the French words empenage, fuselage, and
nacelle in favor of the English equivalents: tail,
body, and pod. The German name Zeppelin has
gradually given way to dirigible. Today we call a
writing desk an escritoire only to run its price
The first names we give new technologies often tie
them to older ones. So an early name for the first
dirigibles was "aerial locomotives," and railway
passengers still ride in "coaches."
Finally: play a game with me. Watch, during the
next few years, as we change the names related to
computers. Watch as we run through words like
screen, CRT, and monitor. Watch as we select among
names like minicomputer, PC, word processor, or
simply "the machine." Watch as we try to settle on
terminology for this particular "engine of our
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds