The engineer was right. The client and the market were wrong.

I worked for a company for a few years that made record players for schools in the 80s when this was still a viable market. Every year or so someone would come up with an idea that they thought would pull them out of a dull bread-and-butter market and light up the world. When I started there it was the fan controller.

A fan was to be in a room. A wired device was to be placed in an adjacent room and that device was to be adjusted so the fan came on when the temperature difference between the rooms was some adjustable amount.

It was a fun project, but when the engineering was done, they could find nobody to market it because nobody wanted it. The lack of market killed this before it could be put into production.

As I write this, though, I realize that the only engineering mistake was that nobody said "this is really a dumb idea. Who the hell is going to drape a wire across the floor to another room, when it's so easy to just turn the fan on or off?"

So perhaps engineers, if at fault, are at fault for only following directions. As it says in Tom Lehrer's song about the work done in the 40s, prior to his coming here, by America's famous rocket specialist Wernher von Braun, "Vunce de rockets go up, who cares vere dey come down? That's not my depahtment," says Wernher von Braun.