Remember when there were 144 time zones in the United States? Probably not, because Sandford Fleming, an engineer and railroad planner, proposed a global grid of time zones that was adopted as a standard by the railroads beginning in the 1880s. Or how about when there was only enough penicillin in the world to treat a few people at a time? That was solved by Margaret Hutchinson, a resourceful chemical engineer who in the 1940s developed a fermentation method to mass-produce the drug. In the mid-1700s an unknown captain in the French military noticed that his army's cannons, while useful for fortress defenses, were too heavy to transport easily. An army on the offensive, he reasoned, needed agility above all else. So during the Seven Years War he developed a model for a smaller, more agile cannon. Eventually France could boast that it had "the most effective artillery in Europe."

A book titled Applied Minds: How Engineers Think, argues that now much our lives depend on the often hidden, unappreciated work of engineers. There are engineers for microprocessors, computer code, pharmaceuticals, rockets, electrical systems—even engineers who focus on big systems made out of smaller systems, such as air-traffic control. Yet most engineers share a few common roles—they create structures so that we can understand a problem and its solution, and then they formulate the most effective application for a given situation.

Unfortunately, in today's world, innovators and "creatives" get most of the praise for their efforts. For instance, Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, "received a statesman's funeral at St. Paul's Cathedral in London." He was hailed as a national hero. Margaret Hutchinson, who made the drug available to millions of people, died fairly anonymously on a winter's day in Massachusetts. But both of their roles were essential.