Being There

We come at last to the forbidden first person, the I am. No story is right until the teller is part of it. Yet a peculiar mischief is abroad in the land of science and engineering. It is a mischief born out of the noblest of intentions. For decades it has spread like the flu, far beyond the technical journals that gave it birth. The intention is to let us stand like blindfolded Justice—pure, objective, and aloof. To do this, we write about our work without ever speaking in the first person. We try to let fact speak for itself. Instead of saying, “I solved the equation and got y = log x”, we write, “The solution of the equation is y = log x”. We turn our actions into facts that are untouched by human hands. To some extent we must do that. Our facts should be sufficiently solid that we do not need to prop them up with our desires. Third-person detachment has its place, but my own person is not so easy to erase. Suppose I think another engineer, whom I shall call Hoople, is wrong. I am not objective about Hoople, but I must appear to be. So I write, “It is believed that Hoople is incorrect.” That’s a cheap shot. I express my thoughts without taking responsibility for them. I seem to be reporting general disapproval of Hoople. In the unholy name of objectivity, I make it sound as though the whole profession thinks that Hoople is a fool. Now radio and TV journalists are doing it. I cringe every time I hear, “It is expected that Congress will pass the bill. “Who expects that? The announcer? The Democrats? A government official? Maybe the soy sauce lobby is the expectant source. So instead of objectivity we get obfuscation. If our work really occurred in objective isolation, we could write about it that way. But people are present. They think and they act. If we fail to represent human intervention accurately, we are dishonest, and objectivity becomes meaningless. The things we make tell the world what we are.

Who Got There First

Years ago, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution said to me, “Scientists and engineers are nutty on the subject of priority.” That was before I realized just how far-reaching that nuttiness was or how misguided the very concept of priority is. As an example, try searching out the inventor of the telephone. Instead of Alexander Graham Bell, you may get the name of a German, Johann Philipp Reis. The common wisdom is that Reis invented a primitive telephone that was only marginally functional, while Bell’s phone really worked. Reis was a twenty-six-year-old science teacher when he began work on the telephone in 1860. His essential idea came from a paper by a French investigator named Bourseul. In 1854 Bourseul had explained how to transmit speech electrically. He wrote: . . . Speak against one diaphragm and let each vibration “make or break” the electric contact. The electric pulsations thereby produced will set the other diaphragm working, and [it then reproduces] the transmitted sound. . . . Only one part of Bourseul’s idea was shaky. To send sound, the first diaphragm should not make and break contact; instead it should vary the flow of electricity to the second diaphragm continuously. While Reis had used Bourseul’s term “make or break,” his diaphragm actually drove a thin rod to varying depth in an electric coil. Instead of making and breaking the current, he really did vary it continuously. Bell faced the same problem when he began work on his telephone a decade later. First, he used a diaphragm-driven needle that entered a water-acid solution to create a continuously variable resistance and a smoothly varying electrical current. Bell got the idea from another American, inventor Elisha Gray. Of course, a liquid pool comes with two problems. One is evaporation; the other is immobility. Bell soon gave it up in favor of a system closer to Reis’ electromagnet. Still, it is clear that Gray’s variable-resistance pool had pointed the way for Bell. Next we must ask whether Bell was influenced by Reis’ invention. Reis died two years before Bell received his patent. (He was only forty, and he never got around to seeking a patent of his own.)

Ever-Present Dangers

A murderously recurrent theme surfaces as we read the record of technology. It can be decocted into the tidy epigram: “The fastest route to success is through failure. The greatest enemy of success is success.” When my civil engineering colleague Jack Matson recognized the validity of that idea, he began vigorously to promote the concept of intelligent fast failure. He said that we can speed our own creativity if we begin by running through as many wrong or foolish ways of accomplishing our end as we can think of. That process both emboldens us and instructs us in the full range of possibility. Conversely, success that fails to keep the boundaries of error within sight eventually takes itself for granted and leaves us open to failure on a grand scale. We skirted this issue toward the end of Chapter 9; now let us look at it more closely. A story of three bridges helps to expose the complex way in which success and failure work together. Henry Petroski takes us back to the forty-six-mile rail trip from Edinburgh to Dundee, which took half a day in 1870. Passengers had to ride the ferry over two wide fjords, arms of the North Sea slicing into Scotland. They are the Firth of Tay and the Firth of Forth. Then an English engineer, Thomas Bouch, sold backers on the idea of building bridges over those inlets. The first was an immense two-mile bridge over the Firth of Tay. When its eighty-five spans were finished in 1877, they made up the longest bridge in the world, and Queen Victoria knighted Bouch. Disaster followed almost immediately. The Tay Bridge collapsed in 1879, killing seventy-five people. Cost-cutting had yielded a bridge that couldn’t stand up to the wind forces. Bouch died in humiliation four months later. By 1881 the Tay Bridge had been rebuilt with heavy, unbeautiful trusses, and attention turned to the second bridge, the one over the Firth of Forth. The Firth of Forth bridge was to cross where the center of the firth was a mile wide, with only one shallow spot for a central pier.

Inventing America

America was not discovered, it was invented. Its name was invented; its machines were invented; its way of life was invented. America sprang from the minds of that unlikely breed of people who were able to pack up a few belongings and step into a great unknown. That step into the expanse of a new continent unleashed astonishing creative energy. America was an adventure of the mind. The land seemed to reach into infinity, and minds opened to fill it. The colonists had limited recourse to the European intellectual mainstream. They were poorly equipped, but they were freedom-driven and freedom-shaped. They were free of method and free of tradition. They were free to create a new life. Colonial technology was so molded by the imperative to be free that it is hard to talk about it without being drawn into that infectious drive. You cannot just report it; you have to celebrate it. As I look back at the early episodes of The Engines of Our Ingenuity upon which this chapter is based, it is clear that I too was drawn in. My first impulse in reworking this material for print was to tone it down and mute my enthusiasm. In the end I did not do so. History gives us too few moments with such verve. Why not go back and be the irrepressible child that America itself once was? The need to rediscover the childhood of our nation is great. We are drifting into a new sobriety. It was in my generation that we first lost a war. We no longer take our leadership in productivity for granted. We have found that we have a capacity for failure, and that we do not always emerge as the good guys. We have deconstructed our heroes until they seem to be heroes no more. But they were heroes. Any chapter on colonial technology inevitably yields up the names of Jefferson (no mean inventor himself), Fulton (with his thumb in so many pies), and the towering figure of Benjamin Franklin. These people appear here not because they were the only heroes we had, but because they were true paragons of colonial creativity.

Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution is an easily misunderstood event. In many people’s minds the phrase suggests mass production, assembly lines, and the heavy industry of the late nineteenth century, but these things all came much later. When Arnold Toynbee coined the term Industrial Revolution, he applied it to the technology-driven change of British life as it occurred from 1760 to 1840, opening a very large umbrella. Yet even that umbrella still did not cover the first mass production and assembly lines, nor did it encompass our images of modern heavy industry. Toynbee’s dating of the Industrial Revolution starts when its causes were just taking form, and ends when England had become a mature industrial power. He took in the whole saga of the revolution, but within that saga we can identify the Revolution as a much more specific moment in British history. It is the point at which technology suddenly joined hands with radical social and economic changes. In the 1780s Watt’s advanced steam engines, Hargreaves’ spinning jenny, Cort’s improvement of wrought-iron production, and Wilkinson’s cylinder-boring mill all came into being. At the same time, economic theoreticians David Hume and Adam Smith were setting forth a new economic and social system. This convergence of inventions was part and parcel of the other great revolutions of the late eighteenth century—the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and a spate of lesser European revolutions. We have to understand it in the context of those political and social upheavals. In England, social revolution grew out of eighteenth-century Protestant reform. The Wesleyan movement and the various dissident Protestant groups counted the makers of the Industrial Revolution among their members. The mid-eighteenth century was marked by worldwide discontent with authoritarianism and with the tyranny of the mercantile economic system. The French kings loved elaborate clocks and clockwork toys—devices that were completely preprogrammed. By the late seventeenth century, they had joined with the other western European nations in a clockwork economic system as well. The mercantile economic equation specified trade balances, such that raw material flowed in, manufactured goods flowed out, and gold flowed in.

Technology and Literature

Technology is a form of communication. Because it is communication, technology both echoes in our literature and seamlessly continues human discourse into another domain that is wordless. Suppose you want to tell a friend how to go from Houston to Detroit. You might write out the sequence of roads and turns that would get her there. Or you might prepare a map. On the other hand, you might do something more abstract; you might tell her what it feels like to drive to Detroit—about the ride and the sights you see on the way. The engineers in Detroit have another way to describe the trip. They design the machine we use to make the journey. They create the experience of the trip, give it its form and texture. Those engineers are using the automobile to tell you their own concept of what that experience should be. The feel of it, the sense of motion, the beauty of the auto, the way the car fits into your life and shapes it—these are all things the designer communicates in a remarkably compact and efficient way. This fact was dramatically impressed on my wife and me the day we found a prefabricated desk that we needed for her computer. Since the box had been damaged by a forklift, the as-is price was next to nothing. It was a big, complicated, three-element item, with ten pages of assembly instructions. Putting it together was no job for the timid. We took the box home, opened it, and only then found that the instructions were gone. There lay thirty precut pieces of wood, hundreds of metal and plastic fittings, and no hint as to how they were supposed to fit together. At first it was devastating. Then I realized that I could consult the designer directly! Why not just look at the parts and listen to the clear logic they represented? Why was this piece notched and drilled the way it was? Why did some fittings have little ribs while others did not? In the end, we had been relieved of the tedious and confusing intermediary of written instructions.

Systems, Design, and Production

No technology can be reduced to one invention or even to a cluster of inventions. The smallest component of any device, something so small as a screw, represents a long train of invention. Somebody conceived of a lever, someone else thought of a ramp, another person dreamed up a circular staircase. The simple screw thread merges all of those ideas, and it followed all of them. A contrivance made of more than one part is a system woven from those parts. Take a pair of scissors. It consists of just three correlated members—two blades with handles on one end and the bolt that holds them together. Each part represents a skein of invention, and the whole is a device with an efficacy that we would normally not see in the parts alone. System is a word that takes on new overtones in the modern engineering vocabulary. Yet the modern sense of the word is no different from the dictionary definition, “an assemblage with correlated members.” As machines become more complex, however, their systemic characters become increasingly important in the processes of conceiving, designing, and producing them. But the systemic nature of technology does not end with the particular device. Think for a minute about automobiles. An automobile engine is a large, complex system in itself, but it cannot be designed in isolation from the rest of the car. The engine, radiator, transmission, brakes, airconditioning, suspension, and much more all act in concert to get you to work or to play. And the systemic character does not stop there. The automobile interacts with life around it. Questions of service, noise, air pollution, parking, and pedestrian safety all come to rest on the shoulders of automobile makers. That particular assemblage of correlated members reaches even beyond the automobile and its immediate infrastructure. The finished automobile reshapes the society in which it moves. The layout of cities, the design of homes, and even the scaling of the nuclear family have been shaped to this exceedingly complex technology, and that process of change continues still.

Major Landmarks

Toward the end of the twentieth century we saw countless inventories of inventions and achievements—the top twenty scientific breakthroughs of the millenium, the fifty most important people of the century, and so on. I am of two minds when I look at such lists. On the one hand, they rightly celebrate and draw our attention to much good that has been done. On the other hand, as we noted in Chapter 4, a vast portion of real accomplishment goes on below our level of perception. That point recurs in Chapter 14. So much of the creativity that defines us as people is inevitably left off such lists. It would be a futile exercise to correctly identify any definitive list of the most influential machines of all time. Yet some inventions really are landmarks. I have selected from among the first year’s Engines of Our Ingenuity radio programs a set of starting points that strongly propagate forward in time. Some might be obvious choices; others might not. But each can rightly be called a landmark because it sits squarely on some major highway of subsequent development. There is, of course, only one place to begin such a list, and that is with the great progenitor of machines—the first machine most people will name. We begin with the wheel, which has become such a universal and familiar icon of our technological world that we forget the enormous conceptual leap it embodied. The wheel was almost surely invented somewhere within the borders of present-day Iran or Iraq, five and a half millennia ago. That in itself is surprising because it happened so late in human history. The wheel was also confined within Europe and Asia for a long time. Wheels were hardly seen in the American hemisphere until European settlers began bringing them into regular use in the sixteenth century. There is evidence that the eleventh-century inhabitants of what we now call Mexico had the concept, but we have no evidence of its general use. Of course, you and I have lived our entire lives with a hundred thousand different forms of the wheel.

Attitudes and Technological Change

We look into the mirror of our machines, but what do we really see when we look in that mirror? How does change occur in the context of the mirror? The mirror turns out to be a strange reflector. We do not see ourselves when we first look at a new machine because there is a time lag in the reflection. If you are a baby boomer or older, remember the first time you saw a computer. You felt neither need nor empathy for it. We cannot need what we have never experienced; yet that first glimpse initiated a long process. You have friends who still jitter about this new medium, wondering whether to accept the change it will bring into their lives or to keep dodging it. The need for transformation lies at our biological core, but we fear change nonetheless. The first computers I ever used were so large that they filled rooms, and we had to speak to them with punched cards. The simplest conversation could stretch into weeks. We would submit three-inch decks of cards, wait twenty-four hours, and be handed a five-hundred-page sheaf of nonsense output because a do-loop went mad when we misplaced a period. During the 1960s we began to compute things that had been beyond us a few years before; but even as we did we grew desperately frustrated. All we talked about was increasing the speed of calculation, but what we really needed was a more accurate mirror of our human nature. We finally began speaking directly to computers with keyboards during the 1970s. Then we realized we could compose text on the computer and print it out. Since the computer took no responsibility for organizing the text, we began to demand that word-processing logic be built into the computer. With the early 1980s, commercial software came on the market—canned sets of commands we could call up from the keyboard. Software now processed our words and laid our numbers out in spreadsheets. New programming languages removed more and more of the burden of speaking in the language of the machine.

Taking Flight

The recurring fantasies of my childhood were dreams of flight. I doubt I differed from other children in my imaginings, and in my childish way I seriously tried to achieve flight. I jumped from the garage roof into snowbanks. I scaled trees and cliffs. I swung on ropes. It’s a good thing my mother never learned just how hard I worked at leaving the earth. Sprained ankles and bruised ribs eventually convinced me that my body was earthbound even if my mind was not. I turned to model airplanes. I lived inside those lovely, light, buoyant structures. They carried me with them into the sky. My inner eye gazed down on the land from their vantage above. This craving to fly is bred in the bone of our species. The old legends come out of the past with such conviction that we know some core of truth must undergird them. In Chapter 2 I refer to documented experiments with flight in the ninth and eleventh centuries. The Chinese flew humans in kites as early as the sixth century. One of the oldest and oddest intimations of early flight came out of the Cairo Museum in 1969. An Egyptian doctor named Khalil Messiha was studying the museum’s collection of ancient bird models. He found that all the models but one were similar. That one was made of sycamore wood. It was a little thing with a seven-inch wingspan. It caught Messiha’s attention because he saw it through the eyes of his childhood. He remembered the shapes and forms he had worked with when he built model airplanes as a boy. This was not a bird at all; it was a model airplane, and that was impossible. Yet the other birds had legs; this had none. The other birds had painted feathers; this had none. The other birds had horizontal tail feathers like a real bird. Perhaps that was the most important difference. Birds do not have to be stable in flight because they can correct their direction; but a model airplane needs a vertical rudder to keep it moving straight.