INNOVATION Centennial Collectors Edition January-February 2020

drivers soon began to demand fast, direct roads and bridges that would link both to the up-and- coming suburbs, and to the newly constructed Trans-Canada Highway. BC engineers were instrumental in opening out the Lower Mainland’s two-lane urban road system, built in the 1940s and 1950s, to four and six lanes, and in designing and building brand-new routes throughout the 1960s. Many of these new routes also required new bridges, such as the original Port Mann Bridge, which was the longest arch bridge in Canada and the third-largest in the world when it was completed in 1964. It was replaced by a new, 10-lane version in 2012.

1980 s NEW ENGINEERING DISCIPLINES CAUSE AN EXPLOSION OF SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES From the late 1960s through the 1970s, traditional ideas about what engineering is or should be began to expand and new engineering disciplines—like aerospace, computing, software, and biomedical engineering— began to arrive on campuses around the world, resulting in an explosion of advances in science and technology in the 1980s. These advances included the IBM personal

computer in 1981, followed in 1982 by Autodesk’s AutoCAD software, the first computer-aided design software intended for personal computers instead of mainframes. CAD had been used in auto and aerospace manufacturing since the late ‘60s, but the advent of fast processors now made CAD more accessible and affordable to many other industries. The ‘80s also saw the advent of the Apple Macintosh and additive manufacturing (yes, 3-D printing dates from the 1980s!), as well as video game design and cable TV. Biomedical engineering, too, was on a roll: 1980s inventions included magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), laser surgery, the pulse oximeter, vascular stents, and the digital hearing aid. Here in BC, Dr. Carolyn Small was the first person to

The personal computer, first made available by IBM in 1981, brought significant computer processing power to the desktop. It also made CAD affordable and available to a substantial number of engineers and their firms. A uto CAD screenshot circa 1982/1983: A utodesk . P hoto : G orodenkoff /S hutterstock . com

register with the association as a biomedical engineer in 1980. She worked at Vancouver General Hospital in medical technology management before returning to Ontario in 1987, where she was the first female engineering graduate to be appointed to the faculty at Queen’s University. Under her leadership, Queen’s Human Mobility Research Centre became renowned for its interdisciplinary research into innovative treatment strategies for bone and joint disorders.

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