The top 10 engineers who should have or would have been awarded the Nobel Prize

Mildly explicit language warning!

This list is slightly different from a list of greatest engineers of all time. Engineering has mainly dealt with applied sciences and while building something useful out of an abstract theory is a prize on its own, usually, the Nobel prize is traditionally awarded for the advancement of knowledge and breakthrough in the understanding of mankind. 

What’s already controversial is engineer’s rightful claim to the prize. If you were to go through the will of Sir Alfred Nobel himself (which will be attached at the end of the article), there’s nothing preventing Steve Jobs or Charles Babbage from winning a Nobel prize in physics for the prize should be awarded to anyone who makes the biggest discovery, or invention of the preceding year, ‘invention’ being the keyword here.

Nonetheless, as past trends suggest, Nobel prize has established itself only for radical discoveries and so here is the list of top 10 engineers of all time who came up with radical discoveries worthy of a Nobel prize.

​10. Frank Whittle

Nobel prize in physics: For the discovery of heated supersonic flow expansion in a rarefied fluid flow.

The inventor of the turbojet engine, his biggest radical moment of brilliance was discovering how a supersonic flow from the combustion chamber can be made to do work in the most efficient way possible. This was important because the physics of supersonic flow was not at all developed at his time. Literally no one had much ideas about the trade-offs between shockwave losses and high-speed jet ejections, especially in case of an afterburner. 
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Why you should care? Because without this, none of your air-force fighter jets, or your intercontinental ballistic missiles would work. Be it Iran, India, Russia, China, France, USA or literally any other country in the world with a fighter jet, you have a lot to thank this guy for. Without him, we would go back to the slow days where the war was won or lost on naval and land dominance.

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