Tinker belle: A Wknd interview with structural engineer and author Roma Agrawal
She began writing books to help people connect, and fall in love with, the mechanics of their world. Her latest is about seven tiny objects that changed it all.
Roma Agrawal’s most recognisable work is The Shard, a 72-storey tower that has dominated the London skyline since 2013 (and is the tallest building in western Europe). She was part of the structural engineering team that worked on that building from 2006 to 2012.
Her newest work is far smaller, a book on some of the littlest man-made objects that have shaped the world. But it’s entirely hers, and represents an arc she is fairly proud of.
As a brown woman in the boys’ club of elite architecture in the Aughts, “I stayed quiet a lot,” says Agrawal, 40. Her existence in that space was often greeted with surprise, and that eroded her confidence. “I rarely spoke up at meetings.”
Over time, she realised that she knew what she was talking about. She decided that she wanted to be heard. She began to speak up more at meetings, and out in the world.
It helped that she had also fallen in love with concrete and place-making. She was intrigued by the idea that she was helping build the spines of what would become the built heritage of London. And it disappointed her that people seemed to view the business of building as distant and unfathomable.
That led to her first books — Built: The Hidden Stories Behind Our Structures (2018) and How Was That Built?: The Stories Behind Awesome Structures (2021) — and has informed her newest one, Nuts & Bolts: Seven Small Inventions that Changed the World (In a Big Way). Published in March 2023, Nuts & Bolts has now been shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize, a prestigious international award that recognises exceptional science writing for a non-specialist audience.
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Her aim with her books, Agrawal likes to say, is to be able to answer any question posed by a five-year-old. “They’re the ones who ask the hardest questions and have the most open minds. That’s the kind of mind one needs, to make new discoveries in the sciences. One doesn’t need to be some kind of a genius. That’s another myth I want to bust,” she says.
In Nuts & Bolts, Agrawal revisits the most complex achievements of engineering, with a focus on the role played by seven rudimentary inventions: the nail, spring, wheel, lens, magnet, string and pump. She explores how each of these objects is a marvel of design in itself, and how, by joining forces, they have enabled humankind to accomplish things that had for millennia been thought of as impossible, such as space travel.
Her narrative approach is simple and effective: “Even as I thought about larger and more complex objects – diggers, skyscrapers, factories, tunnels, electrical grids, cars, satellites, and so on – again and again, I came back to the same seven foundational innovations. We join things together: the nail. We need something that rotates or revolves: the wheel. We need power, and technology that can store it: batteries, sure, but more fundamentally, the spring. Magnetism (and electricity) allow us to manipulate things from a distance; the lens lets us play with the path of light. String gives us a strong material that is also flexible. To move water and keep us alive, we fashion pumps,” she writes.
Elsewhere in the book, she talks of how magnets, for instance, defined the electronic telegraph system, which was brought to India by the British in the 1800s, and helped the colonial power rule the country.
One gets the sense, reading the book, that she doesn’t like it that these little objects are so overlooked. “There is a gap I am trying to bridge, by showing how these inventions impacted our lives and our society,” she says, laughing.
There’s another gap too. Perhaps because we do so little manual labour ourselves today, rarely even changing our own tyres, engineering has become divorced from the average person’s life. Agrawal’s book serves as an evocative reminder.
“We have all, as children, built and broken things. That’s engineering,” she says. “I want to show people that we are all engineers at heart.”
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Agrawal is alert to the privilege in which she was raised, and her books as well as her other outreach work (more on that in a bit) attempt to address gaps in access too.
She grew up around the world. Born in Mumbai, she moved with her family to New York for six years; returned to Mumbai, then moved to London to complete her A-levels. Her father, an engineer, and her mother, a coder, wanted her to have the best education that the world could offer, so she graduated (in physics) from Oxford in 2004, got a Master’s in structural engineering from Imperial College in 2005.
She has since married. She and her husband Badri Wadawadigi, a healthcare professional, have a four-year-old daughter named Zarya.
Agrawal hosts a podcast called Create the Future, and runs an eponymous YouTube channel where she simplifies engineering concepts through everyday experiments.
She is also co-founder (with illustrator and science communicator Hana Ayoob) of the ScienceWrite mentorship programme. Now in its second year, the programme is supported by the Royal Society and aims to foster science writers from minority backgrounds in the UK.
In her work, her books and her outreach, “it’s all about having the ability to break someone’s stereotypes or expectations, which makes them go, ‘Oh! I never thought of that!’,” Agrawal says.
Which is why one of the things that makes her happiest are comments online from young women, who tell her they would never have thought concrete could be “so exciting”. Statements like that “are my driving force,” she says.
Up next: A children’s version of Nuts & Bolts. And perhaps a documentary too.
