The Idea Factory

by Pepper White

  We mingled until the crowd started to thin out, and I asked her whether she had plans for dinner.

  "No," she said. "How'd you like to go up Chuck River?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "You know, up the Charles to rub elbows with the Harveys. We can go to Cafe Pamplona, order espresso, and talk about Descartes and Sartre."

  "Sure," I said, and we walked to her car. I asked her more questions. "I can account for the past seven years between Dynatech and MIT. Where'd you grow up?"

  "I went to high school and most of elementary school in Dobbs Ferry, north of the City. My parents were really excited about the Soviet Union, so I went to first and second grade there."

  "Amazing," I said. "Do you realize that means you were in Russia when I ate the Hershey bars that my mother had hidden under the ping-pong table that was going to be my family's fallout shelter? What was it like?" I asked.

  "It was no big deal, really; I mean I didn't have much to compare it with. It was great for my Russian, though; I'll tell you that much."

  The door on the passenger side of her blue '77 Chevette didn't open from the outside, so she had to reach over to let me in.

  "They don't make 'em like they used to," she said.

  "Yeah, that's 'cause there's too many B-school bozos running things in Detroit. It's really annoying that those people are going to be our bosses, and they don't know anything."

  "Yeah, I know what you mean," she said. "But maybe we'll get some power some day and be able to change things."

  We drove to Harvard Square, up Mass. Ave through Central Square, past Jack's Nightclub and the Orson Wells theater. We talked more about Russia, Wall Street, Gyftopoulos, and his home in Sudbury. At times there was a tone of irony in Mary's voice, as if her intelligence were a burden-a burden because she couldn't be fooled.

  "Ah, a parking space," she said gleefully. "And only three blocks from the square."

  "You know, my father went there for both college and law school," I said, pointing across the street at the big old brick building with ivy growing up the side. "Remember that guy in The Paper Chase, the one who was fourth-generation Harvard and Harvard Law? I would have been third generation."

  "So why didn't you go there?" she asked as we walked left onto Bow Street.

  "I didn't want to get in there because of my genes. I wanted to go somewhere that was more merit-oriented. Besides, you look at Harvard, it's the fruit of industry. MIT is industry. And you know the funny thing; I think my father agrees with me."

  "Well, you're right about MIT. Here's the cafe."

  It was a little downstairs room hardly bigger than my bedroom; we sat at one of the small round tables. There were several berets and tweed. Vivaldi's Four Seasons was playing on the cafe stereo.

  "Summer," Mary said.

  "Excuse me?" I said.

  "That's which season this is. You can tell because it's the most upbeat."

  "Gee, and I thought I was doing well to recognize it was one of the Four Seasons," I answered.

  We ordered our dinner and continued to talk. "So give me some more dirt on Gyftopoulos," I said. "How'd he do so well?"

  "Well, he and his buddy Hatsopoulos were both graduate students here back in the '50s. After they finished their Ph.D.s they needed newer challenges, so they started applying for government grants for contract research. They also did a lot of work for the Natural Gas Research Institute. So they developed a reasonable cash flow from that and started investing some of the excess in product development. One thing led to another, and now Thermo's in the Fortune 1000."

  "How many millions do you think Gyftopoulos is worth?" I asked.

  "I don't know. He's probably set for life, though."

  "Gee. I wonder what keeps him going," I said.

  "These guys aren't in it for the money, once they make it," Mary said. "Then it becomes a matter of how much of an influence they can have in the world. And I think Gyftopoulos genuinely loves teaching and being at MIT. It must be fun to be one of the kings of the mountain."

  "Yeah. He's the kind of guy we all would like to be like," I said. "Not to change the subject, but what was your social life like here when you were an undergrad?"

  "Well, basically it was nonexistent until the first warm day in the spring. Then when I would study in the library, guys would come up to me one after the other and say, 'Uhh, hi. Uhhh, what are you, uhhh, reading?' The same thing happened to a lot of my friends."

  "How about the profs? How were they?"

  "Some were okay, others were jerks. You've got to remember that a lot of these guys are MIT cubed-you know, B.S., M.S., Ph.D. They never matured socially in high school. They came here and did nothing but work for the second half of their lives. They finally relax when they've got tenure. They see a nice young woman like me and they don't know what to do-if they have any power over you, like they're your thesis adviser, some stupid sexist comment is bound to come out sometime. Three years ago I cut my hair short to try to look less attractive and ward off the comments and you know what one of my professors said? He said, 'Oh, Mary, you look so punk sexy.' But other than that it was fine."

  We finished the vegetarian meal, went to see Chariots of Fire, and Mary drove me home.

  "Let's drop by the Seven-Eleven," I said. "I'll get some tea bags, milk, and sugar, and something from the Hostess rack."

  We sat at my kitchen table and talked some more. It was good not to spend Friday night by myself. It was good to know that there were other women in the world besides Stephanie. It was good to talk with Mary.

  "Oh, what a nice cat," Mary said as my roommate's cat jumped up onto her lap and purred.

  "Yeah, it's nice to have the cat around," I lied. "It belongs to my roommate."

  "Oh, I think the water's ready," Mary said as the kettle started to rumble.

  I spilled some hot water on the floor when I brought the cups to the table.

  "No problem," I said. "I'll just wipe it up with a paper towel." The hot water left a white spot on the otherwise dirt-gray floor. "Uh, I've been meaning to do some cleaning," I said.

  "Don't worry about it," she said, letting me off the hook.

  She was beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with the layout of her face. We didn't kiss goodnight, didn't touch. She was my friend.

  Tuesday, October 20

  Gyftopoulos did his own tutorials, with Beretta sitting in the front row of the small classroom to help with any questions that Gyftopoulos hadn't heard before. The room had recently been redone with indirect lighting, and at the end of the day it felt almost homey. Gyftopoulos wore his cashmere sweater and before we started begging for hints for how to do that week's problem set, he tried his hand at stand-up comedy.

  "You know, we've been starting to talk about chemical reaction, for which we use the symbol nu. Well, that reminds me of the time I was giving my first lecture back in 1954. 1 was young and, I have to admit, I was a little nervous. After talking about an hour and a half and writing the Greek letter over and over again on the board, one of the students said, 'Excuse me professor.... What's new?'"

  I laughed dutifully. Several people hissed.

  Gyftopoulos then fielded questions. The guy wearing the army uniform who sat in the second row raised his hand quickly, in a rigid military motion. He asked a question about the problem set that had been handed out that morning, due in two weeks.

  "I don't think we need to look at those yet," he said. "Let's focus on the problem set that's due next week. Your eagerness, though, reminds me of a little story. It seems that there was a sergeant who received a telegram that one of his soldiers' mother had died. He didn't know how to bring it up to the soldier, whose name happened to be Schultz. So he had all his men line up, and he said, 'Everyone who has a mom step forward.' As the men stepped forward, he said, 'Not so fast, Schultz.' "

  Everyone laughed at that one.

  "Well, enough of the fun and games. Let's get back to work," he said. "Are there any other question
s?"

  "Pro-Fesser?" the guy with wire-rimmed glasses and a bushy mustache said.

  "Yes, Lewis."

  "Could you go over the problem on cogeneration on the last problem set?"

  "Certainly. Do you have a copy of the problem statement?"

  Lewis unclipped it from his binder. Gyftopoulos put his cigarette down and went to the blackboard. The chemical engineer sitting next to me whispered, "I don't know about you, but it makes me nervous that he smokes. I'd rather that a nuclear engineer was a little more risk-averse."

  "At least they're filter cigarettes," I whispered back.

  Gyftopoulos started his explanation. "As you know, cogeneration is the simultaneous generation of electricity and useful heat with one engine, typically a diesel engine or a gas turbine. What we want to do is to minimize the overall use of fuel to protect the environment. We realize that there have to be smokestacks with products of combustion, or as some would say, 'products of pollution,' but if we design systems with a match between needs for electricity and heat either for industrial processes or for heating of homes, we can minimize the products of pollution. And by the way, let me emphasize one point to you. If in your future careers you become involved in the energy industry, you will see that there is a tremendous amount of money to be made. But you must never forget that as an engineer you must not think of the money, but rather how you can benefit society."

  Gyftopoulos continued the explanation of the problem. Other questions continued for the rest of the hour. There were occasional wisecracks from the students, never left without a rebuttal from Gyftopoulos. The atmosphere was collegial, nonthreatening, human.

  That night Mary, Matt, Carlos, and I met in Carlos's office to go over some fluids problems. Matt suggested the way to proceed. For a given problem, one of us would draw the problem statement on the blackboard and start the solution. The rest of us would help whoever was doing the problem if he or she came to a dead end. "Let's start with some of these problems with the Bernoulli equation," Matt said. "Do you want to give one a shot, Mary?"

  "Sure," she said. "Here's one that I worked on last nightproblem D-28. It's a carburetor. But first everyone understands the Bernoulli equation, right?"

  Matt and Carlos nodded and I shook my head. "I understand the derivation Shapiro did in class, how the Bernoulli equation falls out of the Navier-Stokes equations, but I don't fully understand it physically."

  "Yeah, it is kind of a toughie," she said. "Just imagine Bernoulli sitting in his cousin's jewelry shop on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. He's looking down at the Arno trying to figure out what to put in his next research proposal for the Medici Foundation. He's looking at two rocks in the middle of the river, and he notices that the water speeds up between them. He has a seminal idea for fundable research. 'If I draw a line following the path of the stream through the rocks, and then imagine a little tube of fluid going along that line, the energy of that little tube has to be constant along that line.' Got it?"

  I nodded up and down. "I understand that much, but I still don't have the physical meaning down. I mean, you'd think if the fluid sped up it would have more energy, just like a car has more kinetic energy the faster it goes," I said.

  Mary continued, "But the kinetic energy has to come from somewhere. And it comes from the energy stored in the static pressure of the fluid. Think of it like this: the little tube is a little spring that's compressed, and there's a whole bunch of these little compressed springs moving along parallel to each other. The only way they're all going to make it through the rocks is to loosen up a little bit. For this little spring, loosening up means that the front of the spring moves away from the back of the spring. All the other springs do the same thing and the water goes through the rocks, senza problema. When a compressed spring expands, it has less energy stored in it. The amount of decrease in pressure energy is equal to the increase in kinetic or speed energy."

  "OK. I'll buy that," I answered. "But Shapiro said today that it only applied to incompressible flows. If the flow is incompressible, how can the pressure go up and down?"

  Carlos jumped in on that one. "Incompressible just means that the volume doesn't change when you apply the pressure. It's like if you put a weight on some water, the volume doesn't change but the pressure goes up. Come to think of it, it's like being a student here. They put lots of pressure on us but our volume doesn't change."

  Not if we can help it.

  Mary went back to the problem. "It's a carburetor," she reiterated.

  "They want to know how much air has to go through how small a tube to bring in a specified amount of fluid from the holes around the outside of the tube. Now instead of water going through a couple of rocks in the Arno, we have air going through the tube. When its static pressure goes down below atmospheric, it sucks in fuel that's at atmospheric pressure. The faster the air goes in the tube, the lower the pressure will be, and the more fuel it will pull in."

  She went on to set up the equations and derive the fuel flow rate as related to the geometry of the problem. I had seen fluid mechanics before, but the problems here were different. Before the concepts were abstract-here they were tangible. Many of the geometries and the problems in Shapiro's class were real devices. I remembered Rohsenow's telling me that a physicist derives equations for a phenomenon and says "Hooray," and an engineer starts with the equations the physicist derives and then tries to build something that works.

  "There," Mary said as she circled the answer on the bottom of the chalkboard. "Next?"

  "Can someone explain why the tea leaves end up in the center of the cup?" I asked. "Ever since I saw the Peanuts cartoon where Peppermint Patty asks that, I've wanted to know the answer."

  "I can help out on that one," Matt said. "It was in one of those films Shapiro produced; I saw it when I took undergrad fluids. It's what they call a secondary flow. When you stir the tea, the liquid goes around in circles, like horses on a merry-go-round. The mystery is that you might expect the tea leaves to go to the outside of the teacup because of centrifugal force, just like when you're on a fast merry-go-round. But they don't-they end up in the center. Let me draw it on the board."

  He drew a vertical cylinder with a circular arrow above it to indicate rotation. I wondered whether I'd ever be as smart as Matt and Mary. It seemed almost unfair to let people with MIT undergrad educations loose in classes with people with lesser backgrounds.

  "If you imagine a little chunk of fluid at any height in the cylinder, sort of like a rectangular horse on the merry-go-round, it'll have pressure pushing on it from the side closer to the center and pressure pushing on it from the side closer to the outside of the merry-go-round. The pressure on the outside has to be greater than the pressure on the inside, to balance the centrifugal force of the chunk of fluid. On the bottom of the cylinder, the pressure at a given distance from the center is the same as it is at the top of the cylinder. But the tea and the tea leaves, too, go slower at the bottom because of the friction caused by the bottom of the cup. You know that, just like when you're on the merry-go-round, the slower you go, the less centrifugal force you have. So if you still have more pressure on the outside than on the inside, and less centrifugal force, you, the chunk of tea plus leaves, are going to move to the center of the cup. In fact, some of the tea is always circulating, up the center of the cup, across the top, down the side, and back to the center along the bottom."

  I said, "Thanks. I think I've got it. Anybody else have any questions they want to go over?"

  Carlos said, "There's this fire hose problem from section B. 'If a fire hose is delivering 800 gallons per minute to a fire, horizontally, and a fireman can provide a horizontal force of 125 pounds, how many firemen will it take to prevent the fire hose from flailing around like a wild snake?"

  "I think you can solve that one," I said. "It's a momentum theorem problem. You just have to figure out how much momentum is going out of the fire hose and how fast. That equals the force."

  I wrote
on the board. First I calculated how fast the water was leaving the hose, on the basis of the size of the nozzle. 100 feet per second, or about 70 miles an hour. That was the easy part, the part that any eighth grader can do. In Japan. Below that I calculated how many pounds of water were leaving the hose each second (about 100 pounds).

  Then I converted both numbers to the metric system and multiplied them together. This gave me the force, in newtons, named for Sir Isaac. Then I converted it back to pounds and had the answer-2.8 firemen.

  My colleagues applauded my solution, and Mary added, "That reminds me of what my freshman adviser said during my first week here. 'Getting an education at MIT is like getting a drink of water from a fire hose.' "

  C H A P T E R

  5

  Funding

  November 2

  Monday at three o'clock I went in to talk to Tom Bligh. Tom Bligh was the Mechanical Engineering department's resident energy conservation, solar, and alternative energy guru. Originally a British South African, he'd paid his dues as assistant professor at the University of Minnesota. There he'd made a name for himself in underground buildings (buildings so designed need less fuel to heat and cool because of the insulating value and stable temperature of the ground). He'd also developed a system to make ice in the winter and then melt it in the summer for air-conditioning.

  MIT recruited him as an associate professor; he had several ongoing projects with the Department of Energy-grants from the Carter era, when the government funded those kinds of things.

  Bligh's office was on the fourth floor of Building 3, down the hall from that of Woodie Flowers, who taught a course called "How Things Work." A little farther down the hall was Warren Seering, the robotics whiz who raised his consulting fees by $10 an hour every month in an effort to slow business.

  The fourth floor housed the design section of the department. These were the inventors, the truly creative. While many at the institute had one foot in science, the other in engineering, and two hands in the government's pockets, the fourth floor would rent itself out to product developers for thousands of dollars an hour just to shout ideas back and forth to one another.