The Idea Factory

by Pepper White

  I wasn't through. "Well, dammit, Nick, next time knock, will you? Now we have to start all over. Besides, if you'd opened the door when the camera was running you would have ruined a test."

  Nick's expression sank further. "Sorry, Cap'n."

  The abuse the institute had dealt me, the damage it had done to my self-esteem, had piled up like the pressure in the tank; it needed to be vented, and Nick was the nearest victim.

  Scott opened the valve and dumped the air from the tank. "It's no big deal," he said, trying to patch things up. "Everything's armed. We can just start the sequence again. We'll finish all the tests we need to do today."

  "Gee, Nick, I'm sorry," I said. "I just kind of lost it there for a minute."

  " 'S all right, Cap'n. I've seen it happen to a lotta students here. It's like one of the professors said to me once. They put the heat on you to harden you, just like they do to steel."

  So now I'm a product of this place, I wondered. Quicker, smarter, arrogant, impatient, directed, inhumane. I've got to get out of here. But if I'm a tough, arrogant jerk to Nick, who's used to these people, who will I be to the rest of the world? I wish I could stay here forever.

  "There's a sign down in one of the idle cells, Cap'n. I'll go bring it for you," Nick said, and he returned with a framed white sign, like the one on the door of the cell, that said, "Test in progress; do not disturb."

  "Thanks, Nick," I said.

  Chet rounded the comer into the cell.

  "So how you guys doing?" he asked.

  I answered, "OK. We're about to do a series of tests. We're aiming to do the swirl case and the no swirl case today." Swirl means the air is spinning in the engine, like a whirlpool. That's supposed to mix the diesel fuel with the air better so it bums better. No swirl means it's not.

  Chet said, "Well, if you get those two cases to work, you'd better keep going. You know when an experiment with this many pieces works all at once you gotta keep the momentum before something breaks. A lotta my friends spent three years building their experiments and one day doing the tests. I'll hang around and be a cheerleader. We also oughta vary the air temperature and see how that affects the ignition delay. If you get five temperatures, you can make a graph and that will be your thesis."

  The light at the end of the tunnel wasn't a train coming the other way anymore. I could have the data today. Some pretty movies to wow the reviewing professors at the qualifiers, some analysis of the films. Master's from MIT. I remembered the sound of it from the guy at West Virginia U talking about the guy who'd been there the summer before who had a master's from MIT and how smart he was. Of course, now my sights were higher, and M-I-T, P-H-D, M-O-N-E-Y was on my lifetime to-do list. Whenever you near a milestone you look ahead to the next one.

  All systems were go in my miniature version of the space program. The injector now spurted consistent amounts of fuel on every injection. (I'd figured out how to modify the insides using the pieces of junk that George the technician at United Technologies had given me.) Its spherical nozzle went in the right direction now. George's shop didn't read my drawing right the first time, so I'd taken a golf ball out there and marked it up like a giant nozzle and shown it to the machinist to make sure he knew what I was talking about the second time.

  And we'd tested the clear window I'd designed, and we knew it would withstand the pressure of the combustion. That was my end of the machine.

  For his part, Scott had finished the new starting mechanism, and the electronics to sequence the experiment were set to make everything happen at the right time. We knew just how long the film would take to reach a viewing rate of 3,000 frames per second. We knew just how long the piston would take to travel the 18 inches from one end of the machine to the other. We knew the mechanical delay times in the starting mechanism and the fuel injector. With all this data, we'd constructed a map, a sequence of the experiment, much as a choreographer would block out a dance, or a composer would arrange a score.

  We'd dialed in the appropriate delays, all thousandths of seconds, in the little black electronic timing boxes. God willing, the delays would be repeatable, the film would catch the combustion, the computer would catch the pressure data, and I would find something inspired to say about it all.

  "Lab lights off," I said.

  "Check," Scott said.

  "Flashlight on."

  "Check."

  "Raise tank pressure: 50 psi ... 60 ... 70 ... 80 ... 90. .

  The machine creaked and made the 90-psi thunk, but I knew at what pressure it would make each noise so my pulse rate only increased half a beat per minute for each psi of pressure, down from two beats during the earlier firings.

  I continued to let the air in the tank. "100... 110... 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120 and steady," I said.

  The creaking stopped. The machine was at equilibrium at its high state of stress.

  "Check."

  "Say a little prayer."

  Pause. Silence.

  "Check."

  "Fire!"

  ZZZZZZIIINNNNGGGGG. The film rolled. Click. The shaft released. Boom. Flash. Ignition. We have ignition, Houston.

  All in half a heartbeat. "Okay, turn the lights on," Chet said. "Write down the readings on the pressure gauge in the tank and on the fuel injector. You might need that information later. You probably won't, but if you don't write it down it's lost forever. I think we got a good test. I think it's going to be a good test day."

  I recorded the pressures in the lab notebook and dumped the pressure to the tank. We opened the door and Nick was standing outside.

  "Sounded like a good one, Cap'n. Everything sounded just right. Yep, I bet that one took the building another thousandth of an inch apaht or so. We better keep an eye on that crack in the wall."

  "Thanks, Nick. Five more to go and I'll have a master's degree."

  Zing. Click. Boom. We repeated the sequence five times, with swirl, without swirl, with different air temperatures. The computer worked every time. The flash worked every time. But did the film work every time?

  I loaded the undeveloped film in my backpack and cycled across the Harvard Bridge (the bridge next to MIT spanning the Charles), from the Harvard Bridge down Commonwealth Avenue past the exponentially appreciating condominiums and on to the film developing lab in the South End.

  It seemed like yesterday, last spring when I'd done the same route with the film of the fuel injection into air. The pink magnolia flowers were blooming then, their fragrance overpowering even the diesel bus fumes ahead of me.

  Now the leaves were changing and I smelled only the diesel exhaust. But if the test were successful, I would soon see that exhaust in its formative milliseconds. I would see what Rudolph Diesel could only imagine. If I could see the exhaust, perhaps I could find a pattern in it, an insight, a new way of looking at it that would maybe, just maybe, find its way into future generations of diesel engines. In the Eiffel tower of technology, I would be a rivet.

  October 22

  Most of the Calorics had graduated, but Senior House had an intramural soccer team in B-league, one notch above C-league. Everyone on the team was a skinny nineteen-year-old, but at twenty-six I was wiser.

  "Come on, you fat old man," they said. "Run. Move."

  I played smart. I was at the right place at the right time at left wing and the goalie was flatfooted when I rocketed the shot to the back of the net. Score one for me.

  After the game the Senior House crew returned across campus to Walker dining hall and I went to eat in Lobdell, closer to the lab, by myself. More and more I ate by myself. Friends from the first year were gone and I'd slackened in my efforts to make new friends. All that mattered now was the thesis, and after that the doctoral qualifying exams.

  Cindy Brooks sat at my table. After a few minutes of conversation, she said, "You're kind of a loner, aren't you?"

  October 25

  The placement office is in Building 12, on the same level as the infinite corridor. It makes it easier for the rec
ruiters to find the place. I'd signed up to talk to the people from Schlumberger, the oil exploration company.

  I had no interest in exploring for oil; in my heart of hearts I would prefer to explore industrial plants for ways to lower the need for oil. But these guys made about fifty thousand 1983 dollars in their first year, plus bonuses, and their taxes weren't as high because they worked overseas in places like Malaysia and Indonesia. In three years you can buy a house for cash and then do what you want. A master's from MIT qualifies you for this kind of job.

  The placement office was skylit, had several tables with corporate brochures with pictures of mostly men in shirtsleeves and ties and women wearing lab jackets, and headings like "Expand your horizons at Data General" and "Let your career grow with Du Pont."

  This day, in addition to the normal interviews, the sophomore Six-a's (Course Six majors; a means co-op) were interviewing for their co-op positions. These electrical engineers would spend part of their undergraduate years working in industry, defray the cost of their education, provide cheap skilled labor, and obtain "realworld" experience before graduation. The Six-a's all wore the same dark blue suit, white shirt, red tie, and black shoes and socks; I wondered how the interviewers could tell them apart.

  I signed in for the interview as Mr. Theunissen, in a light blue suit, walked out of the back area of interview cubicles and put his hand out. "Mr. White?" he said.

  "Yes," I said and shook his hand firmly, as recommended in the placement office guide to interviewing.

  "It's a pleasure to meet you. Please come this way." He led me back through the long narrow corridor with the little interview compartments on each side, with doors for privacy. The walls weren't very thick, though, so we could pick up bits and pieces of the interviews as we passed to his space. "Why weren't you at the slide presentation about the company last night?" he asked. "Attendance was mandatory."

  What slide presentation? He's trying to catch me off guard. He's no Chet Yeung, though. Nor is he a Heywood or a Gyftopoulos.

  "I had a test this morning, and I really needed to study for it," I answered. "Do you have a video or anything I can borrow? There are VCRs in the library."

  He smiled, made a little note on his pad. "No, I don't think that will be necessary. If you come visit us in Houston, you'll find out all you need to know about our business. Why are you interested in working for Schlumberger?"

  "I hear you guys make tons of money," I said.

  He smiled more this time, almost laughed, and made another note. "You know, that's the first time anyone has ever answered that question that way," he said. "How much do you think we make?"

  "Oh, I don't know, maybe $50K or so. I figure after a few years with you guys I'd be set for life."

  "Yes, you're right; it's at least fifty thousand in the first year, and then within the first five years at the company it reaches up to one hundred thousand; then, as you move up in management, the compensation package becomes more and more attractive."

  I smiled, made a little note on my pad.

  He asked a question, "It says here you speak French. Would you mind if we conducted the interview in French for a few minutes?"

  "Bien stir; et italien?" (Sure, how about Italian after that?) After a few minutes and friendly marks on his notepad we returned to English.

  "I see you spent some time in Belgium at the von Karman Institute. Would you care to tell me a little about what you did there?"

  This is the part of the interview where they want you to show how you can communicate technical concepts; it might be important in a meeting with a king or a sheik or an oil minister someday in the future. The consortium meeting presentations had prepped me for this. "Well, I spent a lot of time dealing with air flow speed measurement techniques such as hot wire anemometry." A big word or two couldn't hurt. He'd probably never heard of hot wire anemometry anyway.

  "That's very interesting," he said. "In fact, my thesis at the Ecole Technique Superieure in Paris involved exploring the electronic limitations of hot wire anemometry."

  Uh-oh. I'd broken interview rule number one. Never throw out a buzzword that you can't back up with a full explanation, a derivation of its tree of specialized knowledge. I wished they'd put that in the interview handbook instead of tips on tie colors.

  It was two and a half years ago I did that. It was before I'd learned about internalizing the deep structures of things, and I was busy enjoying my year-long paid vacation in Brussels. "Uh. It has to do with the air flow cooling off a wire. As the fine short length of wire cools, its resistance decreases. The wire is in an electrical circuit, and the decrease or increase in electrical resistance is sort of like an input to the circuit. It changes the output to the circuit, and that's how you know how fast the flow is going." That should do it, I thought. A general discussion is sufficient for a job interview, isn't it? This isn't a doctoral qualifying exam.

  He wanted more. "Would you mind sketching the circuit that the anemometer would fit into?"

  "Well, gee, it's been a while and, uh ..."

  "You can take a couple of minutes if you'd like. I'll just read my newspaper," he said, removing his copy of Le Figaro from his briefcase.

  I tried to remember the explanation from my summer electronics class of how a Wheatstone bridge measurement circuit worked. I'd understood about 80 percent of it then, just enough to pass the class. It was a little hard to concentrate, though, with him behind the paper, occasionally flipping the page.

  "This is the best I can do for now," I said finally. I showed and briefly explained my sketch. "And so as the resistance changes in this leg, it makes a voltage difference between these two points in the circuit and that's what you see on the oscilloscope; I remember there's a trick to setting up the equations for the circuit to solve for the voltage, but I can't remember that right now. Maybe I could mail it to you this evening."

  "That won't be necessary. I think that's enough for now. We would like you to take an application form and send it in to us as soon as you can. I'll show it to some of the other recruiters and we may invite you to Houston for some further interviews," he said.

  I think I passed.

  That night, in my office. Whirrwhirrwhirrwhirrr went the desktop film viewer as I scanned the high-speed movie of the first combustion test. It was blackness, blackness, blackness for hundreds of frames. I was expecting mostly darkness: the camera needed to accelerate for most of the test; that's why it was the first thing to be turned on.

  Frame 800 showed an image. I slowed the film viewer. 801 was brighter, 802 brighter still, 803 brighter still, each frame a three-thousandth of a second. The three flashes that I'd found at the used camera store in Newton started to light the combustion window. 804, 805, 806, 807 were at full brightness, but nothing was happening in the cylinder. I hoped we caught the injection of the fuel. I hoped our synchronization of all the delays was correct.

  810, 811, the diesel fuel appeared at the nozzle tip, a liquid starfish-shaped set of jets radially emanating from the center. We have injection, Houston. 812, 813, the jets traversed the cylinder. Fourteen more frames, fuel kept flowing into the hot air in the combustion chamber. Come on, big guy, you can do it. The fuel jets became thicker for a couple of frames. 828, 829 then returned to the regular flow of the previous fourteen frames, then another pulse of thickness for a frame. The little parts inside the injector were bouncing up and down as the plunger compressed the liquid and the liquid went out and the plunger compressed it again and the liquid went out again.

  Let's go, guy. Burn.

  Frame 831. We have ignition, Houston. Little orange lights started at the edge of the cylinder, and then like a house afire the orangeness became bright yellow, then almost white as the flame engulfed the jets from the outside in-a bright flaming starfish.

  Please refer to Figure 1. Next slide, please.

  The starfish flamed and burned and flamed until ... frame 839, as we can see, the soot particles are forming around the outside of t
he flame and ... the starfish is no longer there now, just a glowing ember of primordial galaxies forming and glowing and darkness yielding the last breath of the starfish's life gasping, glowing embers fading fading back into fading darkness ... this is the no swirl case. There is residual soot formation as less of the fuel vaporizes prior to combustion and more of the fuel is effectively baked, not burned, in an air-starved environment.

  Next slide, please. The swirl case.

  The starfish burned and disappeared, without the lingering, burning embers. A result to report in my thesis. Similarly for the other swirl cases at different air temperatures. Now to look at the pressure data. I looked at the computer-generated graphs. The cylinder pressure rose, stayed fairly constant as the piston reached the end of its travel and was locked in place, and then the graph steeply shot up again.

  All the graphs looked the same, sitting side by side.

  What to do? The consortium meeting is in three days. I stared at them all, looking for a pattern. There has to be a pattern. The first definition of thesis is a proposition advanced and maintained by argument. If there is no proposition there is no thesis. If there is no thesis there is at least no master's degree, and certainly no Ph.D. There must be something more to say about these narrow lines generated by a computer printer. What to do?

  Trace them on transparencies.

  Okay, I'll trace them on clear plastic. Now what?

  Mark where the injection starts with a little arrow.

  Easy enough. What else?

  Pile the transparencies one on top of the other, and slide them around until the steep part of the start of combustion lines up at the same place.

  The still, small voice was not in the fire.

  Tplus 19,000 hours. We have thesis, Houston. We have thesis. Mission Control clapped and cheered and the engineers hugged one another and shook one anothers' hands and patted one another on the back and looked up at the large-screen television and tears welled up in more than one pair of eyes. The Eagle has landed.