The Engines of Our Ingenuity; 1989-01-04

This is the engines of our ingenuity, made possible by the University of Houston and the friends of KUHF. Today we meet the Witch of Anese. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run and the people whose ingenuity created them. Here's an old geometry book. One of its problems leads you to construct a singularly gentle and graceful curve. We're told that the curve is called the Witch of Anese, but why? There's nothing sinister about its flowing line. It turns out that one person who worked with this curve was Maria Anese, a noted 18th century Italian mathematician, a woman mathematician. So, she was the Witch. Well, perhaps. But maybe we should meet the Lady. Maria Anese was born in 1718, the daughter of an Italian mathematics professor at the University of Bologna. She was a child prodigy and the apple of her father's eye.

Yet she was shy and retiring. She wanted to become a nun, but her father wouldn't have that. Still, she never married. When she was 20, her mother died, and she took responsibility for the household. She also began to work on what was already her second book. That book was a two-volume treatise on the new differential and integral calculus. It took ten years for her to complete, and it was a major step in bringing the calculus to general use. It was in this extremely important work that she showed how the calculus could be used to create the curve that would later be called the Witch of Anese. The work was recognized in its time. Her queen rewarded it with a gift, and the pope arranged her appointment to the faculty at the University of Bologna. She was made a member of the Bologna Academy of Science. The French Academy wrote to tell her how much they admired her work, but they wouldn't take her as a member because she was female. Anese's father died when she was 34. After that, she put mathematics aside, and got on with what she really wanted to do.

She turned to charitable work among the poor in sick. She sold her belongings to raise money for the poor. She was eventually given charge over both a hospital and a retirement home. She worked steadily right up to her death at the age of 81. And after that, she was labeled an angel of consolation. So this was our Witch of Anese, a woman who seized the world's attention with brilliant mathematical work, and then gave it all up for a half-century of self-sacrifice. That's not the stuff most witches are made of. It turns out that her curve was called by the Italian word, vercierra, which means that which turns. But the Italians have another word, avercierra, which means wife of the devil. A Cambridge professor translated her book into English, he turned vercierra into witch into avercierra. And that is how the word witch was tied to this saintly lady's name.

I'm John Leanhard at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way Inventive Minds work. This program is part of a series called Women in Mathematics. To receive a transcript of all ten episodes, please send $5 to Engines, this is the Engines of Our Ingenuity, made possible by the University of Houston and the Friends of KUHF. Today, the son of a slave brings high tech to sugarcane. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.

Norbert Riojo was born in New Orleans in 1866. His mother was a slave, and his father was her master, not an uncommon situation in those days. Norbert's father freed his mother before the birth, and took Norbert as his son. The boy was very bright, so his father sent him off to the occult central in Paris, where he studied engineering. He stayed on as an instructor for a few years, and he published papers on steam power. He also began working on a problem from back in Louisiana. The last thing you do when you make white sugar is to evaporate the water used in the refining process. That exacts a terrible cost in fuel. Norbert Riojo put his knowledge of thermodynamics to work. He invented the first multi-stage evaporator. By evaporating and condensing at successively lower pressures, he used the heat over and over. It was a brilliant idea.

But Riojo was caught between two pernicious forces. Racism in America and technological conservatism in Europe. He weighed the alternatives and went back to New Orleans to work on a prototype. It was the right decision at the right time. He patented the machine in 1846 and prospered for some time. He was very highly thought of as a process engineer, and his machine revolutionized sugar refining. Finally, though, as the institution of slavery strengthened before the Civil War, the racial situation got worse. Riojo returned to France. And there he ran into prejudice of a different kind. Certain French engineers had misused his process. They made it look effective, and that hurt the good name he'd enjoyed as an engineer in America. He finally walked away from process engineering and took up archaeology. Arthur Robert Hayden tells us that a leading American sugar planter looked Riojo up in Paris in 1880. He found him in a library, translating Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Still, his technical interest revived once more. At the age of 75, he patented another process, one that cut in half the cost of processing sugar beets. Yet when he died in Paris in 1894, his abiding disappointment was the French refusal to credit his invention of multi-stage evaporation. In the end, Europe finally did recognize it. In 1934, the international sugar cane technologists raised a memorial to this remarkable engineer. Norbert Riojo's life suffered from prejudice on two sides, but he showed us a mind larger than the troubles of sailing it. And today, Riojo's evaporators are used for everything from desalting seawater to recycling processes in the space station. I'm John Leanhard at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive minds work. You would like a transcript of today's episode of The Engines of Our Engineering.

Please send one dollar, along with a self-addressed stamped envelope to Engines, care of KUHF, University of Houston, Houston, Texas, 777-204-4061, and please write program number 236 on the outside of the envelope. This is The Engines of Our Engineering, made possible by the University of Houston and the Friends of KUHF. Today, we take a new look at some old pictures. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run and the people whose ingenuity created them. Who hasn't looked at autonomous Bosch's pictures with a crawling sensation that he's been shown a window into hell?

Bosch painted his terrible visions of sin and human folly between 1475 and 1516. We see demons, monsters, and fragments of beings that populate his paintings. We wonder what drove the man. Art historian Loretta Dixon looks at his St. Anthony Triptitch with a growing understanding of his real aims. We do know that Bosch drew on the folklore of his day. The 15th century viewers recognized the demons of their own mythology and his work. But Dixon discovers something more. At least in this St. Anthony painting, Bosch is transmuting the pharmaceutical and medical technology of his day into metaphor. The painting shows a stages of St. Anthony's life, yet everywhere in its mad landscape we see elements that make no sense to us. An amputated and mummified human foot. A strange figure, half-human, half-vegetable, an egg-shaped structure, belching smoke and flame.

What can be going on? Dixon's answer is that during Bosch's life, the disease called St. Anthony's fire was rampant. Today, we know that St. Anthony's fire was caused by a form of grain ergot. The symptoms included fiery pain and gangrene that required amputations. Furthermore, since ergot baked in bread dough forms LSD, the disease also led to terrifying hallucinations. Indeed, the witch hangings that went on in Salem, Massachusetts, a century later, occurred during an outbreak of rye ergot. Those poor ladies, like the imagined viewers of Bosch's trip-titch, were probably just high on acid. So we dig deeper and find that amputated limbs were saved during Bosch's time so they might be rejoined to their owners at the last judgment. The odd vegetable creature is painted in the shape of a mandrake root. Mandrake was the herb used to staunch the feverish pains of St. Anthony's fire.

The egg-shaped building is exactly the shape of an apothecary's retort. The distillery used to reduce medicinal herbs. Element by element, dicks and walks us through Bosch's hallucinogenic scene. By the time she's done, we don't see the ravings of a madman at all. We see instead a wonderfully imaginative, but nevertheless realistic documentary. We see 15th-century medical technology spelled out in metaphorical terms. Bosch does what today's technical writers too often fail to do. When he shows us the means for coping with human misery, he shows us the nature and texture of the misery as well. He binds a technology to the human needs it serves. I'm John Leanhard at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way invented minds work. If you would like a transcript of today's episode of the Engines of our ingenuity, send one dollar, along with a self-addressed stamped envelope to Engines,

care of KUHF, University of Houston, Houston, Texas, 777-204- This is the Engines of our ingenuity, made possible by the University of Houston and the Friends of KUHF. Today, a murdering quest and a serpentine ring, a wake invention. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run and the people whose ingenuity created them. Physicist Hans van Beyer tells a strange story about the benzene molecule. It begins in 1850 with a young architecture student, Friedrich Keckley, testifying before a grand jury in Giesen, Germany.

The charred body of a neighbor lady had been found in her room. People thought she'd been the victim of spontaneous combustion brought on by drinking too much liquor. The great chemist, Eustace van Liebig, testified at the trial. He made it quite clear that the lady would have died long before she'd drunk enough alcohol to make her flammable. Then Keckley's testimony incriminated a servant who'd been stealing from the lady. He identified her distinctive ring which turned up in the servant's possession. Together, Liebig's and Keckley's testimony convicted the scoundrel of murdering the lady. The trial left its mark on the young Keckley. He dropped architecture and took up the study of chemistry with Liebig. The lady's odd ring also lingered in Keckley's mind. It had carried the old alchemy seal of two intertwined serpents biting each other's tails. 15 years later Keckley worked with Liebig on a new chemical called benzene.

Logic dictated that it must be an arrangement of six carbon and six hydrogen atoms. But how could you arrange such a molecule without violating the rules of chemical valence? It didn't seem possible. Keckley dosed in his chair by the fire trying to solve the riddle. As he nodded, he dreamt of the twining serpents on that old ring, whirling in the flames. Suddenly in the dream, the serpents caught each other's tails and formed a circle. Keckley saw the answer. The carbon atoms formed a hexagonal ring with alternating single and double bonds. Each one held its own hydrogen atom, like charms on a bracelet says fun-buyer. It was a structure utterly alien to anything else in chemistry. We're seldom given such a clear account of the moment and idea reveals itself. But in this case, the author's great-grandfather worked with Keckley and handed down a rare insight. We're shown two features of inventive thought. One is that the inventor can bring outside abilities to a field.

Keckley had an architect's spatial and structural sense, a place to stand outside of chemistry. Another way to look at things. But he was also able to place a problem in his subconscious mind and turn his dreams loose upon it. Pure invention breaks the thread of logic. Invention occurs when we're able to recognize the thing we do not expect. I'm John Leenhard at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive minds work. If you would like a transcript of today's episode of the Engines of Our Ingenuity, send one dollar, along with a self-addressed stamped envelope to Engines, care of KUHF, University of Houston, Houston, Texas, 777-204-4061. Please write program number 265 on the envelope and tell us where you heard the program. This is the Engines of Our Ingenuity, made possible by the University of Houston and the Friends of KUHF.

Today, I want to pit you against your machines. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run and the people whose ingenuity created them. I ask you to do an experiment. I ask each one of you to run up several flights of stairs as fast as you can. Use your watch to measure how long it takes you to do it. Say you run up three flights and it takes you 20 seconds. Now multiply the height of the stairs by your weight. If you weigh 150 pounds and the three flights go up 40 feet, then you've done 6,000 foot-pounds of work in 20 seconds. That's 300 foot-pounds a second. A horsepower is 550 foot-pounds a second, so you've generated just over half a horsepower. If you're in good shape, you can generate a whole horsepower in a short burst like that.

But what if you climb all day? Can you climb a 6,000 foot mountain in eight hours? That's only about 30 foot-pounds a second, about a 20th of a horsepower. This gets interesting when you compare your power with the machines that serve you. Suppose human beings had to power the generator that supplied 150 watt light bulb. It would take 15 people doing 5 man eight hour shifts to keep that light burning. An automobile engine that generates 100 horsepower does the work of 2,000 people. But when those people have to rest at the end of eight hours, the automobile keeps right on going. If everyone in America worked like a galley slave, they'd barely generate enough electricity to power a small city. The engines of our ingenuity are big and powerful, and we're no match for them. We've become absolutely dependent on huge supplies of power. But the very magnitude of our power plants threatens our well-being.

If they burn fossil fuel, they don't just spoil the air around the plant, they endanger the whole planet. If they use nuclear fuel, we can't figure out what to do with their waste. Solar collectors in any form eat up huge amounts of real estate. So try my experiment. Time yourself running up the stairs. You'll see what an astonishing difference in scale we've created between our machines and ourselves. We're like mice directing the movement of elephants. Too many of our machines can crush us with a wrong step. The difference in scale is increasing, and the greater it is, the more dangerous our machines become. In the end, our only protection from those great beasts is restraint. Restraint in the use of energy, restraint in our wants, restraint in the use of our ingenuity. Run up the stairs and measure your power output. Take a long, close look at the enormous gulf between us and our machines. Learn how to view those machines with a well-balanced mixture of fear and respect.

I'm John Leanhard at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive minds work. If you would like a transcript of today's episode of the Engines of our ingenuity, send one dollar, along with a self-addressed stamped envelope to Engines, care of KUHF, University of Houston, Houston, Texas, 777-204- This is the Engines of our ingenuity made possible by the friends of KUHF Houston. Today, we invent liquid paper, brown bags, and brassiers. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run,

and the people whose ingenuity created them. Here's a book called Mothers of Invention by Ver and Petachek about women inventors. The creative array in the book is vast. Of course, the inventions lean toward home and hearth. The child's toilet seat, brown paper bags, the brassier and vacuum canning. The forward is by actress Julie Newmar, who played Catwoman in the old TV Batman series. That's because she's one of the inventors in the book. She holds a patent for a clever pantyhose improvement. Typical of these inventors is Betsy Nessmith, who gave us liquid paper. She was a secretary using the new IBM typewriter in 1951. Its ribbon ink left nasty smudges when you erased it. So in a burst of creative frustration, she went home and invented a liquid for painting out mistakes. Its base was white tempera paint.

The liquid was an immediate hit with other typists. By 1956, she had a cottage industry going. She labeled it mistake out, and her small son Michael helped her fill hundreds of bottles a month. When that number reached thousands, she renamed it liquid paper. Then one day, her mind wandered, and she typed the liquid paper company on a letter, instead of her employer's name. She was fired, but no matter. Her liquid paper company was putting out 25 million bottles a year when she retired as chairman of the board in 1975. Betsy Nessmith died in 1980 and left a fortune to be divided between her son and the large charitable foundation she'd set up. A common thread among these women is problem solving. Melita Benz invented the so-called Melita drip coffee making process in 1999. She was really just trying to keep the grounds out of her own coffee. Sarah Baker became an MD in 1898 and went into public health. She patented everything from children's clothes to special eye drops for preventing the congenital blindness caused by gonorrhea.

She turned her creative energies loose on the problems that she fought daily in the Hills Kitchen ghetto area of New York. It was her detective work that tracked down the notorious typhoid Mary, the unwitting carrier who transmitted typhoid all over New York. Oddest of all these inventors was Heddie Lamar. During World War II, she played roles like the exotic Tundeleo in White Cargo, but she was also co-inventor of a submarine communication system. Her system switched among radio frequencies to defeat enemy monitoring. Heddie Lamar never let interviewers get near the subject. Authors there in Patatchek think she saw invent of ability tarnishing her carefully-tended sex symbol image. That, of course, has been the great contaminant of women's inventive genius. Still, it's clear as day that hard-core mechanical creativity is every bit as strong in women as it is in men. I'm John Leanhard at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive minds work.

If you would like a transcript of today's episode of The Engines of Urngenuity, send one dollar along with a self-addressed stamped envelope to engines, and care of KUHF radio, University of Houston, Houston, Texas, 772-04, dash 4061. And please write program number 306 on the envelope, and tell us on what station you heard the program. This is The Engines of Urngenuity, made possible by the friends of KUHF Houston. Today, we watch hunter-gatherers turn into farmers. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.

I was 16 in Roseburg, Oregon, a town recently swollen from 2,000 to 5,000 people by the wartime logging boom. I wore tough leather boots and coiled 100-foot surveyors chain across my chest. I carried a brush axe in a machete. We staked out logging roads through the Virgin Douglas fir. Now and then, Aksman in the valley behind us felled one of those 500-year-old trees, and the crash thundered up the draw. We picked our way on rotting logs, house high over rivolits and humus. We laid a trail for bulldozers where no human had ever been. Roseburg was a raw town. Our high school provided most of its cultural life, a band, plays, football games. We all drove cars. The real high school hero was the guy who could get an old model A Ford, reshape its body, tune its engine, and remove its muffler. Riding in the rodeo was next best in the social scale.

Now I'm back in Roseburg, 42 years later. I searched the eyes of old friends, trying to locate the child I knew in the adult. Usually he's there, surprisingly undamaged by a full lifetime. But a profound change has touched the town. Now it has its own museum and a community college. It has shopping malls and good restaurants. One cheerleader became a concert pianist, another and author. Child brides have grown into productive and fulfilled grandmothers. Cancer has claimed more lives than it should have. We're left to wonder which of our environmental offenses did that to so many people. Some logging fortunes blew away like summer smoke. Others made the town into a civilized community. Logs for the lumber mills are now trucked in from forests 100 miles away. The people talk about replanting and about the 20 to 50 year growth cycle of trees. The town was built on lumber and its future is still in lumber. We tore up the wilderness's children, but today the adults of Roseburg are husbandmen of trees.

The same sort of transformation ran through the whole dawn of human history. And here it happens in one lifetime. I can still see the careless child in these adults. The good humor remains. But they've stopped thinking like children and become citizens. They were only hearers of trees. But their grandchildren will be settled lumber farmers. I'm privileged to have known those prime evil woods. The smell and texture of untouched forests. I'm equally privileged to have seen my teenage friends play out the great technological drama of our species. I'm John Leanhard at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive minds work. If you would like a transcript of today's episode of the Engines of our ingenuity, send one dollar, along with a self-addressed stamped envelope to Engines, in care of KUHF radio, University of Houston,

Houston, Texas, 772-04-