The Idea Factory

by Pepper White

  January 21

  The ski jumper pulled up over the lip and accelerated down the take-off ramp.

  The written exam was on the fourth floor of Building 3, in the room across the hall from Tom Bligh's office. It was the room I'd built part of the two seventy design project in, with drafting tables and gears and gear catalogs on the tables around the perimeter. The exams were to start at 9:00 sharp; everyone was in place with twelve number two pencils and milk crates full of textbooks and notebooks. The guy sitting next to me had a backpack with breakfast and lunch in it, plus a thermos full of coffee.

  The proctors were two guys who'd passed the qualifiers the year before. I found this distasteful. It was as if they were the majordomos, the chief slaves in the southern plantations who were accorded special privileges in exchange for bossing around the other slaves. They handed out the institute gray envelopes and at 9:00:00 we ripped them open.

  Exam 1. System Dynamics and Controls. The exam was a pneumatic control problem. Pneumatic control uses various air chambers to open and close valves. They are simple if you've seen them before. They're so simple, in fact, that in the two MIT Controls classes, they were not even mentioned. Of course, if you really understand the concepts of controls, the fundamentals, you can pick out the important points in any kind of control system and solve the problem. I remembered what Carlos said about the qualifiers: "Let them know everything you know. They have to give an exam that only one person will be able to finish in an hour. Otherwise, people would start to walk out midway through the test and that wouldn't be fair to the slower ones. Just put down everything you know."

  I wrote that pressure times area equals force for all the components; I tried to link the components by fulcrums and geometric constraints. I scraped for partial credit. I hoped the other tests would be more familiar.

  Exam 2. Fluid Mechanics. I got a B in Shapiro's class that first term. I spent a year studying fluids in Belgium. This should be easy. "A hose discharges horizontally to a bucket with a hole in it as shown in the figure. Find the force required to hold the bucket up

  Piece of cake. At least seven out of ten points.

  Lunch break from 11:00 to 1:00. The guy sitting next to me sat and reviewed and ate his lunch and drank his coffee. I went to the ice rink. The pressure under my skate was high enough to melt a thin film of water upon which the blade slid with nearly no friction. The remaining friction between the skate and the ice provided the center-seeking centripetal force to balance my body's tendency to keep going straight, and I turned.

  Exam 3. Mechanics. "A vertical rod is given an impulse. Find the magnitude and direction of the impulse required to make the rod do one revolution and land on its end. See figure."

  Again, this is nothing like anything that was ever mentioned in any test or any class I'd taken at MIT. But I know how to think now, right? Sort of. I polled the data base and went back to high school physics class and back to the photos on Doc Edgerton's wall in Building 4. If you throw a wrench, this thing called the center of mass goes along a trajectory as if it were a baseball. The wrench rotates around that center of mass. So maybe the trick to this problem is to give the rod a kick big enough so that the time required for the center of mass to rise and fall (as if it were a baseball being thrown up in the air) is equal to the time required for the sideways component of the impulse to make the rod do a revolution. Break the problem into two separate problems; solve for a common link at the end.

  If I pass, I'll be able to go over the problem with the professor who wrote it and learn how close I was, because if I pass I'll be a member of the club. If I fail, I will never know whether I was even close, because the graded exams are not given back because (1) they don't want to give you any evidence if you decide to sue them for flunking you and (2) graduate students at MIT don't have a union. Estimated points, six.

  Exam 4. Thermo. I wanted to understand the smokestack, and here it was. "(A) Calculate the exit velocity from a smokestack, 300 feet high, with a 2 degree taper. Inlet conditions are air at 1200 degrees F, at a pressure of 2 atmospheres. Make any reasonable assumptions."

  Another piece of cake.

  "(B) Now assume that the flow is steady or does not vary with time."

  Wait a minute. I assumed it was steady in part A. Gyftopoulos must have written this test.

  Redo part (A). Ten minutes left. Start part (B). Estimated points, seven.

  Off the end of the take-off ramp the ski jumper from the Saudi Arabian Nordic team went. He was in the air now, for the weekend, floating, hoping he wouldn't fall forward and land on his face.

  I shared the analogy with one of the majordomos.

  He answered, "I think it's more like going through both sides of a hurricane. You went through one side today, and now you're in the calm eye for the weekend. On Monday and Tuesday you'll come out the other side."

  Sunday afternoon. I asked Ming how his weekend was going.

  "Oh, pretty good. I just finish memorizing textbooks for oral exam."

  Monday morning

  I did the practice runs in my three-piece suit and leather-soled shoes up and down the stairs. The perfect line was to start a little wide, then grab the vertical piece of the bannister as I ran in to take the turn close to the inside, like in the Indy 500. Any seconds saved in the movement from test to test might be the seconds of inspiration.

  Mechanics, Fluids, Thermo went well. Hill, Weare, Shapiro, Lincoln, and Gyftopoulos were surprisingly civil.

  And then there was Controls. The last forty minutes.

  "How would you design a feedback control loop to make the surface x move at a specified constant speed, when gas is allowed to enter chamber a from a large reservoir? Do NOT assume incompressible flow."

  The good old balloon problem, but with a twist. Compressible flow. This brings Fluids and Thermo into Controls. This makes it doubly hard. Seventeen minutes left to prepare my presentation. No idea on the compressible part. What you need is a control valve and a motion transducer to tell you how fast the thing is moving.

  This would be fine except the whole thing is highly nonlinear since the gas is compressible, so this problem doesn't fit within the framework of the Controls they've taught me.

  Prepare to dive, Captain. Whoop whoop whoop whoop. Aooga Aooga. Battle stations.

  I walked into the room where the three fat Inquisitors sat in judgment. I'd succeeded in not porking out during my studying; I'd actually lost a few pounds. These guys were on their way to tenure, if they lived that long.

  "Write your solution on the board," the first one said.

  The board was not a regular blackboard attached to a wall, but a freestanding type that you could flip over. It was unstable when I wrote on it.

  "Uh, I really don't know how to address the compressibility issue. I do have an idea for the incompressible case, though," I said.

  "Do you expect us to give you any points for that?"

  "Well, it would show some of what I know about this type of problem."

  "Okay, go ahead."

  I sketched the problem and what I remembered of the derivation I'd done for Greene's independent study. The blackboard flopped mercilessly as I wrote the symbols and equations, farther and farther down toward the floor. Any closer to the bottom of the board and the only way to write would be from my knees. I hesitated for a second and started to stand up.

  "No. Keep writing down there. Write to the bottom of the board," the third Inquisitor said. On your knees, boy. Squeal. Squeal like a pig.

  I don't need you, pal. I don't need your approval to make me complete. I stood up and said, "No. I prefer to stand. Like a man."

  Late Wednesday afternoon I knocked on Rohsenow's door. He took me out to the bench in the hall outside his office. It was noisier there and therefore more private.

  "Have a seat," he said. He opened the clipboard with the chart with everyone's scores on it. "You didn't do all that badly in Fluids; 7 written, 6 oral. And you got two 7s in Thermo, and 6
s, one 5 and one 3 in the other areas. You add it all up plus your thesis points of 13 out of 20 and it comes to 60 out of 100. Now see when somebody's score is in that range we look at the distribution. If you'd had a couple of 10s and a couple of 2s, well, we might have let you pass...."

  "Will you let me try again in May?"

  "Well, in a case like yours, we say, well, let's call it a ballgame."

  Where's Stephanie? Where's Ari? Where's Mary? Where's Nick? Who can I talk to now? Who can I cry to? The only shoulders are cold.

  Rohsenow continued, "I always tell students in your position to think of it sort of as if you went through a rigorous application process and weren't selected."

  "Ummmm. Ummmm. Okay, sir. I have to go, sir."

  February 5, 1984

  I put the completed thesis on Chet's desk. Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering.

  "So," Chet said as he signed the cover page, "you're a survivor."

  C H A P T E R

  21

  Continuing

  Education

  NEAR THIS SPOT SAMUEL WHITTEMORE THEN 80 YEARS OLD KILLED THREE BRITISH SOLDIERS APRIL 19, 1775 HE WAS SHOT, BAYONETED BEATEN AND LEFT FOR DEAD BUT RECOVERED AND LIVED TO BE 98 YEARS OF AGE

  -Historic Marker near the Jefferson Cutter house in Arlington Center, Massachusetts

  Schlumberger, the guys in Houston, didn't offer me a job, which may be just as well because I might have gotten stuck in Kuwait when the Iraqis rolled in in 1990. And I wouldn't have seen as much of my father in the last years of his life, or my mother or my sisters, who are alive and well.

  Renault, on the other hand, did offer me a job. They flew me to Paris a few months after Chet signed my thesis, and it was tough to turn them down. But a couple of kids selling lemonade by the side of the road during a bike ride in Lincoln kept me stateside. They just seemed so American, so optimistic, so nonexistential.

  December 31, 1984

  Somewhere in western New England. My first engineering project in the outside world. The construction site of the small hydroelectric power plant is abuzz with activity. The developer's lawyer is on site to bless the "substantial completion" of the plant and the tax credit to the investors in calendar year 1984. The welders who learned their craft at Electric Boat in Groton light up the cold night sky. "BVVVVVT! BVVVVVT!" the arcs sound. My technician and I climb into the submarinelike generator container and bolt up the last pieces of control hardware-the over-speed switch on the back of the shaft that will keep the generator from turning too fast, and the counter that optically reads the number of pulses of the gear teeth passing by and translates that information into rotational speed. The water has already been allowed to flow around the 'submarine" housing and the "submarine's" propeller acts as the turbine connected by the shaft to the generator. The shaft turns ever so slowly, but the torque could do serious damage to life and limb. I carefully screw the pulse counter into its mounting bracket, make the wiring connection, and climb out of the container.

  Up top in the switchgear room, the lead consulting engineer checks the generator's speed on the light emitting diode readout. When it corresponds to 60 cycles per second, he pulls the switch downward, and the 300 kiloWatt plant pumps 25 kiloWatts into the electric grid.

  The whole crew-the developer, the contractor, the main investor-applauds, and chats while the water pressure is transformed into electrical energy. A few minutes go by.

  "Well, that should hold up in court," the lawyer says. You can disconnect it now."

  So this is the way things work in the real world.

  January 24, 1986

  Late morning. Lake Forest, Illinois, in a sporting goods shop. In an entrepreneurial venture of my exuberant youth, I commis sioned t-shirts for Super Bowl XX between the New England Patriots and the Chicago Bears. To hedge my bets, I printed two shirts-one each so that I would have something to sell whichever way the game went. At halftime I took a People's Express flight from Newark to Chicago, and have stayed in Chicago for a few days after the game to try to unload the remaining shirts.

  Alas the Bears fans don't understand the imagery of a bear pulling apart the Liberty Bell. I can't totally blame them, since after all the Liberty Bell is in Philadelphia, not in New England. But it is a symbol of patriotism, therefore the Patriots, so it works for me.

  At 11:10 A.M., in the middle of my sales pitch to the Lake Forest sporting goods proprietor, the phone rings. He picks it up. "You're kidding me. Do they think any of them survived? Oh Jeez. Okay, I'll check the TV." He hangs up and says to me, The Space Shuttle Challenger just blew up.' It turned out to be the O-rings. O-rings are important.

  Winter 1987

  The trauma of discovering how stupid I was at MIT has caused me to rebuild my confidence by taking night school classes with regular people. I've enrolled in a class at the Peterson School of Steam Engineering in Woburn, just north of Boston. I heard a lecture once by a former head of NASA. He advised the young engineers in the audience to continually educate themselves, take classes, read. This class is in air conditioning servicing and controls. Mundane stuff that is far beneath MIT, like how a thermostat works, and what a control relay does, and how do you add refrigerant to an air conditioning system.

  The instructor, a contractor who installs air conditioning equipment, gets up in front of the 20 or so mechanics plus myself and says, 'If you get good in this field, you won't be able to wait to get up in the morning. You'll become a technician.' He says it with the pride of a man who loves his work and loves his independence. He's his own man. There are a lot of very smart people who never went to college, never mind MIT.

  At an engineering conference, late 80s

  A few of the engineers where I work are out for drinks. I'm on my third ginger ale. One of the guys has had a few too many and starts hitting on the one woman in the group. What do I do? What do I do, Mary?

  Make a joke, diffuse the situation. "So if you want a witness at the sexual harassment trial you can count on me," I say to her. "Yessiree I'll be there. I'm takin' notes." The drunk guy shuts up.

  July 1993

  Bucharest, Romania. I'm working on an excellent consulting gig, reviewing energy conservation reports that were written the year before, evaluating the impact of the previous reports. I'm part of a three-person team. The project came about from a referral from a guy I met at an energy engineering conference. The guy's brother-in-law's running partner needed an energy consultant a year after we met, and he gave me a call.

  Our guide tells us about the revolution. They didn't have guns, or much ammunition. So they made tape recordings of explosions and gunfire and placed them in the windows of the buildings. The government troops became afraid. The revolutionaries also took over the TV station. Once they had the thoughts of the people, they couldn't lose."

  We walk into the Russian-built electric power and steam generating station. The chief engineer gives us all warm handshakes and says, "We've been waiting 48 years for you guys to show up."

  July 1995

  A heat spell. Global warming may be real. Elderly people are dying in their steamy apartments in the cities of the midwest. I go in for the interview to be a large metropolitan housing authority's energy consultant.

  "So what would you do about energy savings now?" they ask.

  "Absolutely nothing," I answer. "Especially with the elderly and infirm, they've got to be cool and comfortable in this kind of weather. Being poor shouldn't be a capital offense. If you can't air-condition the whole building, make sure that there's at least some place where people can go to cool down. There'll be plenty of other opportunities for savings during the rest of the year."

  Spring 1999

  Riding on the Newburyport line of the commuter rail on a sunny afternoon. This is the line that Grandfather White rode daily between Beverly and Boston. I never met him, but he wrote a little journal on his train rides. The view on the right side of the tra
in toward Revere, Lynn, Salem, and Beverly was probably not much different in his day. After North Beverly, and into Wenham, the scenery becomes beautiful and English, with rolling hills, horse farms, and stately homes.

  "IP-swich!" the conductor announces. The lady sitting across from me, not a greenie, not an academic, just a regular working stiff, says to her friend, "Yeah, my daughter and son-in-law almost got caught in those avalanches in Austria a couple of months ago. It's that global warming."

  I get off the train, drive the 1.3 miles to our 1940s cape with seasonal water views and am greeted by my wonderful wife Elizabeth.

  Fifteen years have passed since I left MIT. The compressed air hissing out of the TRW plant is a faded memory. The building was torn down to make room for a new biology building. The F&T diner is long gone too, and as many MIT people eat their lunch at the food court by the Kendall Square T-stop as ever ate at Lobdell.

  Little by little the scars are beginning to heal. I still have an occasional dream that they're giving me a second shot at the qualifiers. Sometimes I daydream about applying to the doctoral program at Tufts or at UNH. Maybe do one course a term, get an A in each one, and in ten years be a Ph.D.

  After the hydroelectric experience and before the Challenger disaster I started working at an "energy service company" as a contract consultant. It was good experience. I learned my way around a boiler room, learned how to follow pipes, ducts, and electric lines through walls, learned what an air conditioning fan and a pump and a control valve look like.

  The work with the energy service company was good, but since I was a contract worker it seemed that the company had no incentive to invest in me. The thing that made me realize it was time to go in the spring of 1986 was when they had me install several hundred "water widgets" that reduced the flow in the showers at the dorms at the University of Rhode Island (URI). I was cheaper than a plumber.