The Idea Factory

by Pepper White

  In the display case next to Bligh's office was a student project from the year before-a music stand with an automatic page turner. In the waiting room outside Bligh's office was a poster that read, "If you love something let it go. If it comes back to you it's yours. If it doesn't it never was." It was the first time I'd seen that poster, so it meant something to me; it reminded me of Stephanie.

  "Hello, Professor," I said. "I'd like to apply for a Lindbergh Fellowship for $15,000 and I'd like to know whether you'd be interested in being my faculty sponsor. The general area is alternative energy, and I've got an idea for a project."

  "Please, call me Tom," he said. His office had a skylight. Papers and models were everywhere. He had brown hair, a beard, and glasses and was about forty.

  He continued, "Well, if you can stomach applying for a grant in memory of a fascist, I'd be happy to help you."

  "Why was he a fascist?" I asked.

  "He was very pro-German in World War II, very much against U.S. involvement. Plenty of books have been written about it," he said.

  "All I know is he was a technologist and aviator. That's all I need to think about when I apply for this grant. I need the money."

  "All right, then, what's your idea?" Bligh asked.

  "Well, it's an idea I got from a friend of mine in Belgium last year. You know how it gets really cold and windy in Kansas and Nebraska in the winter? Why not have a windmill that drives a heat pump directly to heat the house or the barn? The windier it gets, the more power will be available from the windmill to drive the heat pump, so the cooling effect of the wind will be negated by the increased heat that's pumped," I said.

  "Hold on a minute while I call my patent attorney," he joked, then went back to being serious. "Can you explain to me how a heat pump works?"

  It was a friendly cross-examination, so I answered honestly. "Not really. All I know is that it's sort of like an air conditioner in reverse. I could figure that out after I get the grant."

  "That's the spirit," he said with irony, but also the wisdom of a successful time manager. "Let's put an outline together now, then you can come back in a week or so with a fleshed-out version. What do you propose to investigate?" he asked.

  "First, I'd take the windmill as an off-the-shelf item. Maybe you could even use one they use to pump water and attach a conversion kit to a different gear mechanism. Then I'd look at the power curves for the windmill and the performance curves for the heat pump at different temperatures, and then I'd recommend different size-matching strategies. Finally, I'd put together some economic analysis, figure out the payback over a conventional oilfired heating system."

  "There are your four sections. See you in a week."

  November 5

  Charlotte Evans's packet listed Joe Smith as a specialist in cryogenics, the study of the very cold, and cogeneration, the small power plants in Gyftopoulos's problem sets. I didn't have much interest in the very cold, but cogeneration seemed to be a great way to keep the polar ice caps from melting.

  Joe Smith, tenured professor, had his office off to one side, near the high-voltage magnet laboratory. He, a mechanical engineer, kept the electrical engineers' magnet cold enough to do tests in superconductivity. His window overlooked MIT's steam heat generating plant.

  "What can I do for you, son?" he asked in a fatherly manner, with a southern accent.

  "Well, I'm interested in energy conservation, cogeneration, heat recovery, insulation, solar energy-anything that saves energy. I saw that you do work in cogeneration," I said.

  "Yes I do, but right now I don't have any money in it," he said, leaning back in his chair, his feet up on the desk and hands clasped behind his head. "If you can come up with some funding in that area on your own, though, I'd be happy to be your adviser." He reminded me of a southern plantation owner.

  "Just a little piece of advice, son," he added. "When you work on energy, pretend you're running a mining operation. Focus your efforts on finding and extracting the most out of the concentrated areas of what you're mining. Don't worry about recovering anything from the slag heap. You'll spend more time and energy than you'll ever get out of it."

  I remembered watching a TV show in high school. The master at the monastery talked in riddles like that, too. When I understand what he means, I can leave.

  November 16

  The yellow glossy brochure spoke glowingly about the patriotism of the rental car magnate-how his hard work and determination, plus the freedom of the marketplace, had enabled him to build a fortune. Now he wanted to repay the country by providing free rides to talented science and engineering students.

  The brochure noted, "A strong technical workforce is essential for a strong defense, to maintain technological superiority over our adversaries. Individuals committed to these principles are invited to apply for the fellowship. The fellowship includes tuition, an allowance for books and supplies, and a stipend of $800 per month, free of taxes."

  My application had been reviewed and my interview was scheduled for ten in the morning at Draper. Draper Laboratories' logo had a series of circles and a bull's-eye point inside the D. Since their main product involved aiming things, the bull's eye made sense. The lobby had models of the inertial guidance systems developed at Draper. These gyroscopes allow airplanes to operate under automatic pilot. They let men walk on the moon. And they enable intercontinental ballistic missiles to fly thousands of miles and land within hundreds of feet of target.

  The guard-greased black hair, rayon shirt, polyester tie, and double-knit jacket covering a bulging shoulder holster-telephoned Dr. Jackson. Dr. Jackson arrived and signed me in; then we both took the elevator to the fourth floor. The new building, built in 1976, was sleek and white with glass that wrapped continuously around each of the eight floors. The visitor's badge I clipped to my brown tweed jacket stuck forward a little. The conference room had a window, with a view across Broadway and up Hampshire Street into Somerville. Most of the doors on the hallway were closed, with punch code locks.

  The only question of the interview concerned energy. The two engineering doctors wanted me to tell them how I would extract power from the flow of a river. Not at a waterfall, or a dam, or a reservoir with a pipe going to a turbine 3,000 feet down the moun tain like I'd seen in Switzerland, but from a river gently meandering along.

  "Well," I answered, "I suppose you could put a pipe in the middle of the river and put a turbine at the downstream end of the pipe."

  "How would you calculate the power output? Would the angle between the pipe and the water surface make a difference?"

  Good questions. I wanted to ask whether I could leave and get back to them in a couple of hours. Instead I verbally fumbled for several minutes, until one of them said, "I think we've heard enough. Thank you for interviewing with us."

  Outside was a group of several demonstrators, and a short, thin-bearded, white-haired man holding a stick with a globe on it. It looked like a giant blue and green Tootsie Pop.

  The others' homemade banner-felt letters on a white sheetsaid, "To disarm requires wisdom, love, and mercy."

  Cambridge liberals, I thought. Why don't these people do something productive for the economy?

  One of them offered me a green sheet of paper. I looked around to see whether there were any video cameras pointing in my direction, then accepted.

  The leaflet read, "Every Monday since 1979, a nonviolent vigil has taken place at Draper. Fully conscious of our personal failures in the practice of nonviolent love, we continue to choose to witness to the truth of the way of nonviolent love as the way to peace. We vow to express this truth in our silent witness, our leaflets, tax resistance, service to the poor, direct actions, and in serving time in jail."

  I wondered what they meant by direct action. I wondered whether these people considered themselves real Americans, what sense they had of the need for defense. Maybe they were little Soviet-funded gnats trying to undermine the commitment of Draper's engineers and scientists. Or
maybe, just maybe, they were right. I remembered that my ancestors had left a secure, well-defended island (England) to sail off the edge of the world and make friends with the Indians.

  I met Jim Stuart at the student center coffee shop and told him about the interview. "You probably won't get it," he said. "I heard those only go to straight-A undergraduates. Besides, I'm not sure you'd want it. They say there're no strings attached, but they really push you into defense work. They encourage you to have high-paying summer jobs at defense labs, and then that's the only thing you know. A friend of a guy from my lab had one of those and didn't know what was happening until it was too late. I think he ended up in a mental hospital."

  Tuesday, November 17

  Frederick Weare had advertised in the department newsletter: "Research Assistantship available. High-pressure application to fracture in geological structures. Sponsor: Mobil." Translation: Weare crushed rocks for a living.

  Weare, rumor had it, rode his bicycle to and from his apartment fifteen miles away in Needham every day. Rumor also had it that his wife had recently divorced him because she never saw him anymore.

  My appointment was at the end of the day in Weare's lab in the basement of Building 3. The lab had several black tabletops with samples of oil-laden rock on them, and bits and pieces of electronic circuitry and several oscilloscopes, miniature green TV screens in fancy boxes with lots of knobs on front.

  Weare was young and quite slim, with blond hair and a mustache. His eyes looked a little tired. He spoke with a slight accent, as if he'd been overseas somewhere for an extended period, but I couldn't place it. Maybe he was originally from Ireland.

  "What's your expertise?" he asked me early in the interview.

  I didn't know I was supposed to have expertise already; I thought I had come to MIT to get it.

  "Uh, well, I've done a lot of work with fluids; at the von Karman Institute in Brussels I did some work with instrumentation, temperature measurements, in a solar heat storage experiment," I answered.

  Weare smirked. "Ah yes, good old solar energy. Are you an environmentalist?"

  I didn't know the right answer. "Well, sort of," I said.

  "So am I," he said. "But full professorship is on my list of lifetime personal goalc, and I have to do fundable research to achieve that. Then maybe I'll dabble in that soft stuff again."

  "What would be the environmental impact of my thesis project?" I asked.

  "It actually would be less harmful than many of the other technologies under development. What I'm proposing is to make many underground explosions that will create big pressures on the oil and allow it to be pulled up out of the mountain rather than having to remove the rock and extract it outside the mountain," he said.

  "Well, it sounds interesting. Do you think you'd like to hire me?" I asked.

  He paused. "I'll look over your resume and then get back to you. I've got a couple more people to interview. If you don't hear from me within a week, give my secretary a call."

  Maybe something else will come up.

  That night I stood at the heat transfer solution board and copied down answers to the latest set of problems. It still annoyed me that they didn't just hand these solutions out. But they make the rules and we're engineers and we don't question the rules they make. We just want to solve our clearly definable problems and see an orderly world, even if it's someone else's order.

  The solution board is in a locked glass case, under a buzzing fluorescent lamp. There's a little ledge in front of it for your notebook. The lamp illuminates just the board and the hall lights are dimmed, so the solution board becomes its own little world of thought.

  Greg Webster, also in the class, was at the other end of the solution board. I'd met him in the dining hall one Sunday morning after the end of the soccer season. He was enrolled in my three classes, plus two others.

  "How's your money holding out?" I asked.

  "I've got enough saved up in the bank from my two years working on the space shuttle at Rockwell to last the whole year here. But I'd rather not deplete my savings."

  How can I hope to compete with somebody who's worked on the space shuttle? I wondered. He'll probably get a Ph.D. here and in five years I'll be watching TV and he'll be smiling and waving as he walks onto Discovery as a mission specialist.

  "How about you?" he asked.

  Should I tell him about Weare? Or about the other department newsletter listings I'll apply to? He's a potential friend, but also a potential competitor.

  I finished copying the solution to Advanced Problem 8 and told Greg all my leads.

  He replied in kind. "That reminds me," he said. "Frank West in the Sloan Auto Lab is looking for someone. They just got some big contract with a bunch of engine companies to do some combustion work. I just talked to him today. I would have taken it but it seems like he's really looking for a wrench turner to get the experiment going. I want to hold out for something more theoretical."

  "How do you spell his name?"

  Wednesday, November 18

  West's office was immaculate, with every book perfectly in place in the institute-issue wooden bookshelves with glass-in-woodframe covers that pulled out and down. A tapestry depicting a hunting scene hung on the white-painted cinderblock wall. The whole place smelled like a truck stop.

  "What a beautiful office," I said.

  "Thank you," he answered. "I've been trading in tapestries ever since I bought ten of them at a castle foreclosure sale in Holland during my junior year. I brought them back here and sold them for five times what I paid for them."

  I handed him my resume and he looked through it, nodding approvingly. I waited for a question from him about my research projects.

  "You seem to have done a lot of bicycling," he said, referring to the entry in my resume about having cycled in northern Italy for six months. "I was a Texas state cycling champion when I was in high school. You must be pretty good with a wrench."

  Milk this for all it's worth, I thought.

  "Well, I've taken apart every bearing in my bicycle, cleaned, regreased them, and reassembled them about three times in the past few years."

  "Good. How'd you like to work for me?"

  "I'd love to," I answered enthusiastically.

  "Fantastic," he said. "The funding starts the first week in January. Welcome aboard!"

  I shook his hand and walked downstairs a little unsteadily past the corridor to the engine lab. The first thing I saw, lying vertically in the middle of the floor, was a piston as high as my waist. The knot in my stomach tightened some more. But then a clear picture of my $50,000 debt dissolved into the concrete.

  I sang to myself:

  I got money

  I got funding

  I got an R.A.

  Who could ask for anything more?

  C H A P T E R

  6

  Finals

  In early December the letter from Stephanie arrived. "I thought you were a nice person.... I thought you were innocent.... I thought you were not an egotist. Evidemmentje m'en Buis trompe. I was wrong."

  It's good to see she took it so well.

  The days became shorter and shorter, Gyftopoulos's problem sets longer and longer. It was cold on the rides to and from Allston. My apartment was cold. The smoke from the power plant on Memorial Drive was thicker, billowier, and at night it was blown more and more to the side by the early winds of winter.

  Three weeks left in the term. Two weeks of classes, a weekend, Monday off, and then finals. There is no reading period at MIT. Technology is cumulative; if you can do the last problem set, you're ready to take the exam.

  They juggle the schedule to try to prevent conflicts, but there is a finite probability that if you have three classes, one exam will fall on the first morning, one that afternoon, and one the second morning. Mine did: Fluids, Thermo, Heat.

  I studied in the fourth floor of the library, downstairs from the main level, where the librarians' offices were. It was windowless and fr
ee of distractions.

  For Thermo and Heat Transfer, I xeroxed formulas and pictures of problem solutions and stapled them to index cards. They might help me recognize the patterns. Short of full understanding, I could refer to them at exam time.

  The first Saturday, Ike Thomas's Gospel singing group sang in Kresge Auditorium. Ike's office was around the corner from Matt's in the heat transfer lab. He'd done his undergrad work at Michigan State, and we sometimes chatted before and after Rohsenow's class. The small audience at the concert was comprised mostly of black students and their families. The singing was joyous, loving, and I felt warm and at home, as if I were back in North Carolina.

  Ike played the concert grand piano and sang "Amazing Grace," his rich, sonorous voice resonating with the bass chords, like a voice crying out in the wilderness.

  The following week Ike and I were invited to a study session in heat transfer. Four of the guys in the class lived in Ashdown House, the graduate student dorm at the corner of Mass Ave. and Memorial Drive. One of them also had a desk in Matt's office. Actually, I had heard about the study session by accident and sort of invited myself and then asked Ike whether he wanted to come along.

  It turned out that these guys had been meeting once a week since the beginning of the term and hadn't invited either of us. It's things like this that let you know who your friends are.

  The six of us sat around a table in one of the lounges. The four of them blasted through the week's recommended ungraded assignment quickly, enough to show that they'd all been keeping up with the pace of the class all term. The one at the head of the table leaned forward in his chair, his feet crossed beneath the chair, the upper foot shaking like the Asian semiconductor physics student's in the library two months before.

  Ike looked as discouraged as I felt. The session ended after about an hour, and as Ike and I left, we commiserated.