The Idea Factory

by Pepper White

  "Those guys will have A's, every one of them," I said. "That'll surely push at least me way back in the standings."

  "Yeah, they do seem to know what they're doing," he said. "This place gets me down sometimes. But I just try to keep re membering what my grandma from South Carolina used to say to me when I was little."

  I asked him what she said.

  "God didn't make no junk."

  The Saturday morning before final Tuesday, the senior who had been building the pedal-powered crew shell for his undergraduate thesis was preparing to launch it with Professor David Gordon Wilson, his thesis adviser. I was in my office at 9:30 studying heat transfer, but when they asked whether I wanted to help I said yes. I was reaching the resignation point, when you begin to think that there's nothing more you can do to study for exams. It's a combination of saturation, burnout, and a feeling that if you don't know it by now there's no way you're going to know it by Tuesday. Besides, I thought, it might help to score some brownie points with Wilson. Who knows, he might be grading a test of mine someday.

  "Why don't you fellows bring the boat out, and I'll bring my car around," Wilson said. He was always so chipper. We loaded the crew shell onto the roof of his early '70s red VW station wagon. The boat looked a little funny with the propellor up in the air and the fiberglass outrigger pontoon strapped to the side, all upside down.

  With Wilson and his tweed jacket and British accent, I felt like one of the pioneers of early aviation going out to the testing ground, walking fast like on the newsreel.

  As we slowly drove around the block to the boathouse, Wilson said, "The propellor is based on the same design that Paul Mac- Cready used on the Gossamer Condor. It's very efficient at low flow rates. We can hope that this test will be successful, and then the next student can work on making it into a pedal-powered hydrofoil. My calculations have shown that it should be possible for one person pedaling a hydrofoil to go faster than the Harvard varsity eight-oared shell."

  It did make sense when I thought about it. The oarsmen spend a lot of time just returning their oars to the power stroke. If you pedal the vessel, you're always in the power stroke.

  There were no crew shells on the Charles that late in the season, just one woman, who was training for the Olympic team, standing on the dock at the boathouse after she'd finished her workout. It was cold and gray and felt like snow.

  Wilson and I and the undergrad attached the pontoon to the crew shell on the dock, with the crew shell sitting on two sawhorses and the propellor on its strut attached by the bicycle chain to the sprocket in the middle of the boat. The chain went through a halfdollar-size hole in the bottom of the shell.

  We put the shell in the water and let it sit there for a few seconds.

  "It appears to be taking on water, sir," the undergrad said as the brown muck flowed through the hole for the chain.

  "Yes, well, the water isn't coming in that fast; we'll just have to do our test runs quickly," Wilson said. "We can bail it out between runs if necessary." Stiff upper lip. Pip pip. Cheerio.

  The undergrad went first. When he sat in the boat, the water came in a little faster. He pedaled for several revolutions and in half a minute he moved 8 feet along the dock. Then the chain fell off.

  "Well, that at least is a proof of concept," Wilson said. "The propellor is designed to give maximum power at about 8 miles an hour boat speed, so we may need to give some thought as to how to get up to that speed."

  We picked up the shell to let the water out, and Wilson took his turn, with similar results. Then came my turn.

  "Craaack" went the boat as I sat down in it. I saw the two fracture lines move out from either side of the propellor hole and the water came in faster than it had when Wilson was in the boat.

  "Maybe you should take the picture now," I said.

  I smiled for the camera, pedaled four strokes, moved a couple of feet, and slid back over onto the dock from the boat's seat.

  As we lifted the boat out, Wilson said, "Well, that's what design is. You have an idea for how to do something, you build it, you test it, and then you fix the problems that you discover."

  That midnight, the last Saturday before Tuesday's exams, the MIT symphony played Mozart's clarinet concerto in Lobby 7. Hundreds of us huddled on the floor-huddled masses, seeking comfort, seeking refuge from the cold and lonely study of science.

  Fluids and Thermo were in Du Pont Gym. We were competitors for position on the bell curve, now not playing basketball but rather working problems.

  Fluids started at 9:00. 1 wished Carlos and Matt and Mary good luck and turned over the typed packet when Shapiro said, "You may begin," over the loudspeaker. His voice echoed through the vaulted aircraft-hangar-shaped room. It was the last kilometer of the bicycle race.

  Gemayel and Shapiro handed out the booklets to two twenty five and to two twenty, the undergraduate Fluids class to our right. Gemayel said to Shapiro, "We better not get any of the tests mixed UP."

  Shapiro answered wryly, "It wouldn't make any difference to the results."

  I turned over the typed exam that said again at the top "Open book ... open notes." They don't bother to make you memorize things here. Instead they let you use anything you can carry and make the problems impossible anyway.

  As usual, I looked through the exam for something that looked doable. Surprisingly, Shapiro had put some gift points up front. These were just general information questions, things I could look up in my neatly copied notes, or the general concepts that I had mastered independently of my ability to solve test problems. Within the first hour I had a good third of the points down.

  I felt a little high-the bright lights shining down on the white paper as the freshly sharpened number two pencil makes its ordered impressions on the page. Call it test-taker's high, like in a bicycle race when the pack is carrying you along faster than you've ever gone before. There's a focused mental atmosphere in the room, 300 very bright people around you, thinking quietly, quickly, with no random thoughts. You reason, look at the drawings you've made, write the formulas down, and listen for the ideas you need.

  At ten after ten, Professor Smith had an announcement for the students taking the undergraduate Thermo final: "There's a typo on Problem 3b." His voice echoed up and down the hangar. "It should be 12 calories per gram, not 120 calories per gram." Evidently a guy who'd walked up to talk to Smith had spotted the error.

  Why don't they proofread the tests before they give them out, I thought.

  The problem section, worth 60 of the 100 points, involved the same shaft I'd seen on the previous two exams. This time, to add a third degree of difficulty, the rod was spinning:

  "(a) Find the maximum speed of rotation at which the oil flow between the shaft and the sleeve can be considered viscous. (30 points) (b) Find the lifting force on the shaft as the rotation speed reaches 3,600 rpm. (30 points)"

  So much for test-taker's high.

  I gave it the institute try for the rest of the exam period and figured my total would be around 70. Time to hope that the average was low.

  Thermo was a little harder. It did feel like I'd learned something, though. I knew how to do an "ennergy balance and an ennntropy balance," as Gyftopoulos had emphasized. I knew how to draw rectangles and arrows going in and out of them to symbolize the heat or mechanical energy going into or out of the rectangle. The rest was number-crunching detail.

  Gyftopoulos walked around the gymnasium as we took the test. He stopped at each table and briefly looked at how each of us was doing. It was his way of showing he cared, but it was unnerving. When he came to my table he gently put one hand on my shoulder, one on the table, and leaned over to look at my number two pencil impressions on the white page.

  "Umhmmmm," he said approvingly as he watched me write.

  It was better than "Tsk Tsk," but I really wanted to turn to him and say, "Eeeeyesss? May I help you?"

  You don't joke around with these guys, though; certainly not before they've made all t
heir judgment calls for the borderline grades.

  The next day, from the moment I turned over Rohsenow's final, I knew it was fourth and long yardage. It had been just as well that I'd helped Wilson and his undergraduate thesis student with that stupid boat. Fully half the test dealt with the resistance method of determining amounts of radiation heat flux. Rohsenow had touched on this during the last two lectures.

  The idea is that you think of the hot surfaces as if they're batteries. The higher the temperature, the higher the voltage of the battery. Different fractions of the heat are absorbed by different objects, depending on how far away they are, how big they are, and how they face the hot surface. You put all that information into an effective electrical resistance, and then you can solve the set of equations for various hot surface temperatures.

  Aha. That's what they mean by modeling. You throw equa tions at the phenomenon and vary parameters. Generally, you throw equations that you know how to solve from somewhere else, as with the electrical analog model for radiation. Unfortunately, I had never mastered the electrical equations. I knew enough of them to parrot problems in sophomore physics exams, but not enough to transfer that knowledge to another field in the four days before the final when I had two other exams to worry about.

  I spent three hours scraping for partial credit points on the other two problems. It was discouraging to watch the other guys in the small classroom working so fast. The radiation questions, if you knew how to set them up, must have had many, many steps.

  The day before Christmas Eve I assessed the damage, starting with Beretta. If there was bad news, I didn't want to risk another scene with Gyftopoulos.

  "Your final score was really quite low in comparison with the rest of the class," he said deliberately. "Some people did very very well, and some did poorly. We even had to give some D's and F's this time.... We talked it over and decided to give you a C."

  "How many people finished the class?"

  "Forty-five."

  I remembered Matt's algorithmic count of 76 at the first lecture. The lower third of the bell curve, the one that would have put me in the middle, had dropped after the first midterm, leaving me grasping at the back of the pack as one grasping for a railing on the back of a receding train car.

  I went downstairs to Rohsenow's office. The news would surely be better there. Jamie was the grader, after all, and we were on the same intramural hockey team.

  I sat in the seat that was becoming familiar. Rohsenow pulled out the curve sheet from the test. It was a histogram, a graph with the final scores on the horizontal axis and little x's for the number of people in the different ranges extending vertically, like the one he'd drawn on the blackboard after the first quiz. The graph had two humps on it, one centered on 90 percent and another centered on 75. To the left of the two humps were two lone little x's at 60.

  Rohsenow explained the graph. "Here are the scores, see. Now Jamie and I sat down and we looked at the graph and we said, well, that hump looks like an A, and that hump looks like a B." He pointed to the 90 hump and the 75 hump. "Then we looked at these two little x's, and we said, well, we could call these a B, but they really look more like a C. You're one of those."

  Good for Jamie, I thought. Influence peddling by playing on the same intramural team doesn't do any good at MIT. In a way, the C felt good. It was an honest C. I wondered who was the other one.

  "Uh, this could be a problem, sir," I said. "I just talked to Professor Beretta, and he said that I got a C in Thermo, too. I don't know how I did in Fluids, but I doubt it was an A."

  "If you have a C in my class and a C in Thermo, the trend would indicate you'll probably have a C in Fluids, too. The subject matter's similar," he said.

  Everything's a trend to this guy-points on a graph with a line in between them.

  I asked, "What would 3 C's mean for my future at MIT?"

  "Well," he answered, "you have to have a 3.5 to get a degree from here. That means you have to have at least as many B's as C's. So if your average ever goes below a 3.5, we put you on probation. If it goes under 3.5 for two terms in a row, we start playing a numbers game. We try to figure out whether it's mathematically possible for you to dig yourself out of the hole by the time you complete all your coursework. If it looks like a long shot, well, we point that out to you and we hope you prevent things from getting ugly by resigning."

  It was all so matter-of-fact to him. It's easy to be matter-offact when you've been on the right side of every bell curve, even after they've skimmed and skimmed until there's nothing but extra-rich cream left.

  "What does this mean in the short term?" I asked.

  "First of all, you'll get a letter from the dean," he said. "He'll tell you that you're on probation, and that you should come and talk to me."

  Probation. Do I get a probation officer?

  Rohsenow continued, "But you're talking to me now, so you can ignore that. Just try to get a couple of B's next term."

  The news didn't shake me up as much as it might have. There was, after all, always business school. I walked toward where I'd locked my bike near Building 31 and bumped into Gemayel.

  "So, how'd I do in Fluids?" I asked.

  "Well, we're really not supposed to tell you until after the holidays," he said.

  Right. Don't tell them they're failures until they've opened up their Christmas presents and been well fed at home. The policy must be designed to keep the sidewalks near the tall buildings clean.

  "Aw, come on. You can tell me," I persisted. "At least give me a hint."

  "Ehh," he hesitated, "you did okay."

  I did okay. That meant a B.

  C H A P T E R

  7

  The Guild

  January 2, 1982

  7:30 A.m. Frank West was already on his second cup of coffee when I knocked on his door. It was the first day of my R.A. With an R.A., you take two or three classes per term and work about 30 hours a week in the lab or on a computer. In exchange, you receive free tuition and a stipend of about $600 each month. And the research work ends up in your master's or Ph.D. thesis, so an R.A. kills two birds with one stone.

  "Here I am," I said enthusiastically. "What do you want me to do?"

  "Your job is to raise the compression ratio of the rapid compression machine, which from now on we'll call the RCM. You'll need to redesign it, conduct experiments over a test matrix of swirl rates and turbulence levels, and investigate parametric influences on ignition delay," he answered briskly.

  Gulp. This guy should come with a glossary.

  West continued, "You can sit down if you want. I know it's a big job. We want to get results in February, in time for the meeting of the research sponsors. You'll need to design the equipment; Nick Vittoro will be working for you. I want you to keep him busy."

  Sure. How can I keep anybody else busy when I don't know what I'm doing. I've never designed anything in my life.

  "Uh huh," I said.

  "Oh, and about lab rules," he added. "The first rule is 'It's your job and not mine.' The second is 'I don't take any excuses,' and the third is 'Lab hours are 7:30 to 5:30, with half an hour for lunch.' You should be able to get all your lab work done between those hours. Harvard's Physics Department lost a student last year when he fell asleep into his experiment's high-voltage power supply at 2:00 in the morning. He was found dead the next day. We don't want that kind of thing to happen here in the Sloan Lab.'

  Me neither. "Uh huh."

  "You can do computer work at night and read journal articles. And try taking a swim after dinner for half an hour or so. I've found that exercising at that time makes me need less sleep and wakes me up so I can work another four or five hours. Come on downstairs-I'll show you your cell."

  It sounded so confining. It was the start of what might not have an ending. Matt had told me that all most graduate students think about is getting their advisers to approve their theses. Real theses. Not a business school forty-page "major paper" that you write over spr
ing break, but a year to two year's effort-if all went well-and West seemed like he'd squeeze as much work out of me as he could before signing.

  Past the piston at the door the lab looked like a small factory, with lathes, drill presses, a welding station, and over it all, an overhead crane that ran on tracks to move the really heavy objects. The test cells were small rooms around the perimeter of the main shop. Each housed the equipment for one experiment. It was like a prison workshop scene in a gangster movie, where one gangster tries to drop the engine block on the other one. I even had a cell of my own.

  The ordeal would be worth it, though. I'd always been good in math, but when it came to mechanical things I was less than gifted. In high school I tried to rebuild the engine on my minibike after it froze when I let the oil get too low, but that project ended in my taking the minibike to the lawnmower shop. The model rocket I built in sixth grade went up 6 inches, veered to the right, and crashed. And my garage was always a mess, nothing like the ones featured in Popular Mechanics, where all the tools are neatly placed on pegboards.

  I could keep my bicycle on the road, though, and that was enough for West.

  He opened one of the battleship-gray steel double doors to the cell and before he left said, "Here it is. Have fun!"

  Thanks. The machine was a mass of gray and brown metala tank, bolts, tubes, pipes, wires, switches. I had no idea where to start.

  Somebody turned on the radio on the shelf in the center of the machine shop. The song was Glenn Miller's "In the Mood."

  I looked at the yellowing, crumbling piece of paper attached with aged masking tape to the gray tank. It read "Rapid compression machine. All systems operational: May 15, 1972." The machine had been rusting while I'd been going through puberty, and now I had two months to bring it back to life.

  "We gotta get some eh in hih, Cap'n," the man with gray hair around the edge of his baseball cap said as he opened the second double door to my cell. He wore a blue workshirt buttoned all the way up to the turned-up collar, a blue lab jacket and blue jeans, and work boots that were probably steel-toed. He was a little shorter than I and kind of shuffled into my cell. "I'm Nick Vittoro. What's your name?"