JLC Online: English speakers call it an "I-beam" since it looks like the capital letter "I", though occasionally you will hear somebody call it an H-beam. In many European languages, it's a double-T beam. In India, it’s an Indian Standard Beam. In Australia, it’s a Universal Beam.
2 comments:
To quote what one of my engineering professors says around 5 times every lecture, “engineers are really bad at naming things”. But I really liked how this article talked about how engineering and most technical advancements, came from building something, watching it fall down, and then building it back up but better this time, and only then pulling out a calculator to try and figure out why it did that. The whole narrative of an apple doesn't fall out of a tree because of an equation, it falls and the equation describes how it will fall, is quite poetic. It's an interesting way of looking at problem solving, with a failure first approach that I really like because it's hard to know what's going to work and what's not without just doing something and finding the failure point. My favorite quote from this whole article was “Sooner or later, the duration between failures gets so long that it’s called success” And I think this describes my whole state of being at any given moment.
This article was really insightful. Support beams are seen by everyone but questioned by no one. So it's really interesting to learn about some of the history behind the classic I-Beams and how they work. When someone first explained an I-beam to me I originally thought they meant I as in eye but the second I saw one I immediately understood what the name actually was. Having confident names that describe an object is one of the best choices in my opinion. With the large amount of different beams that are normally situated very high within the air it is key for their names to act almost as descriptions. Looking up and describing the shape of a beam can greatly help someone determine the next steps when it comes to a construction project or determine what the possible structural stability of a place may be. Overall I enjoyed this article and hope to learn more about structural beams in general.
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