WEBVTT 00:00:00.150 --> 00:00:02.470 The following content is provided under a Creative 00:00:02.470 --> 00:00:03.880 Commons license. 00:00:03.880 --> 00:00:06.920 Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare continue to 00:00:06.920 --> 00:00:10.570 offer high-quality educational resources for free. 00:00:10.570 --> 00:00:13.470 To make a donation or view additional materials from 00:00:13.470 --> 00:00:17.400 hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare at 00:00:17.400 --> 00:00:18.650 ocw.mit.edu. 00:00:28.640 --> 00:00:30.310 PROFESSOR: When did you arrive at MIT? 00:00:30.310 --> 00:00:31.800 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: I was a post-doc in 1980. 00:00:31.800 --> 00:00:35.180 PROFESSOR: Yeah, I just remember that. 00:00:35.180 --> 00:00:39.080 PROFESSOR: So Ros is also a historian of technology. 00:00:39.080 --> 00:00:42.270 But she practices the craft a little different 00:00:42.270 --> 00:00:43.340 than David and I do. 00:00:43.340 --> 00:00:47.170 She focuses on the cultural side of things and is an 00:00:47.170 --> 00:00:50.860 expert in literature and what writers have said about 00:00:50.860 --> 00:00:55.210 technological change and has written a 00:00:55.210 --> 00:00:56.580 lot about those subjects. 00:00:56.580 --> 00:01:00.110 But also, she served as the dean of 00:01:00.110 --> 00:01:01.620 undergraduate education. 00:01:01.620 --> 00:01:03.500 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: And student affairs. 00:01:03.500 --> 00:01:04.220 I did both jobs. 00:01:04.220 --> 00:01:06.060 PROFESSOR: I didn't know if I had the title. 00:01:06.060 --> 00:01:09.085 There was one time when you didn't have two deans. 00:01:09.085 --> 00:01:12.310 You didn't a dean for residential life. 00:01:12.310 --> 00:01:14.010 You had them combined in one office. 00:01:14.010 --> 00:01:17.940 And she got stuck with that job, which is as you might 00:01:17.940 --> 00:01:19.320 imagine, is a lot of work. 00:01:19.320 --> 00:01:21.820 And so Ross did that for at least six-- 00:01:21.820 --> 00:01:22.420 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Five years. 00:01:22.420 --> 00:01:23.410 PROFESSOR: Five years. 00:01:23.410 --> 00:01:26.330 So that's been a big item on her agenda. 00:01:26.330 --> 00:01:28.690 And now, she's back in the department. 00:01:28.690 --> 00:01:31.690 And today, she's going to talk about chemical engineering 00:01:31.690 --> 00:01:35.370 basically, in the early 20th century. 00:01:35.370 --> 00:01:37.600 And this is extremely interesting. 00:01:37.600 --> 00:01:41.110 She gave a lecture about it last year. 00:01:41.110 --> 00:01:43.410 Because her grandfather was Warren K. Lewis. 00:01:46.060 --> 00:01:48.610 If any of are familiar with the "Lewis Report" of the late 00:01:48.610 --> 00:01:52.340 1940s, that's the report that in effect that established the 00:01:52.340 --> 00:01:55.320 School of Humanities and Social Sciences. 00:01:55.320 --> 00:02:00.460 But here's a chemical engineer who is a very much involved 00:02:00.460 --> 00:02:05.250 and looking at all aspects of life at MIT and coming up with 00:02:05.250 --> 00:02:06.480 this report. 00:02:06.480 --> 00:02:09.340 And as they say, the rest is history. 00:02:09.340 --> 00:02:13.070 So Ros has a long lineage here, that your grandfather 00:02:13.070 --> 00:02:14.990 goes back to the early 1900s, I would say. 00:02:14.990 --> 00:02:16.280 Didn't he get here-- 00:02:16.280 --> 00:02:17.665 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: He was class of '05. 00:02:17.665 --> 00:02:17.970 PROFESSOR: Yeah. 00:02:17.970 --> 00:02:20.820 So she's going to talk about this area. 00:02:20.820 --> 00:02:23.380 And she's brought some very interesting materials I'm 00:02:23.380 --> 00:02:24.540 anxious to look at. 00:02:24.540 --> 00:02:26.680 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: So I wanted to do something new this time. 00:02:26.680 --> 00:02:29.380 And that's why in the last hour, I went 00:02:29.380 --> 00:02:31.790 though my Lewis box. 00:02:31.790 --> 00:02:34.800 Archives are just boxes of stuff. 00:02:34.800 --> 00:02:37.890 This is from my attic. 00:02:37.890 --> 00:02:40.160 And the library's is just not that different. 00:02:40.160 --> 00:02:43.680 And I pulled out some little treasures, at least I think 00:02:43.680 --> 00:02:46.750 they're treasures, that will give you a flavor of what 00:02:46.750 --> 00:02:50.590 archives are like and when you're doing history, what you 00:02:50.590 --> 00:02:54.380 learn from archives that you don't learn online, can't 00:02:54.380 --> 00:02:56.830 learn online. 00:02:56.830 --> 00:02:58.090 I may overstate that. 00:02:58.090 --> 00:02:59.200 I may take that back. 00:02:59.200 --> 00:03:02.750 But I'll stand by it for a talking point. 00:03:02.750 --> 00:03:07.960 So I'm going to start with giving you an overview of 00:03:07.960 --> 00:03:12.270 intertwined biography of Warren K. Lewis and of the 00:03:12.270 --> 00:03:18.770 world here in the Boston area, Cambridge, and MIT 00:03:18.770 --> 00:03:22.100 specifically, as they intertwined. 00:03:22.100 --> 00:03:26.430 And in discussing afterwards, we can talk about him, we can 00:03:26.430 --> 00:03:28.395 talk about chemical engineering. 00:03:28.395 --> 00:03:31.860 We can also talk about deanly things. 00:03:31.860 --> 00:03:35.920 If you're interested in student life history, I've 00:03:35.920 --> 00:03:41.030 done a little boning up on that for a documentary that 00:03:41.030 --> 00:03:42.890 was being shot last week about the evolution of 00:03:42.890 --> 00:03:44.650 student life at MIT. 00:03:44.650 --> 00:03:50.070 So I sort of refreshed my memory about some points on 00:03:50.070 --> 00:03:52.220 that topic. 00:03:52.220 --> 00:03:55.030 So we talk about anything you want to talk about. 00:03:55.030 --> 00:03:58.330 But first of all, let me give you some what my grandfather 00:03:58.330 --> 00:04:03.000 used to say, you want to put the fodder down where the 00:04:03.000 --> 00:04:05.170 calves can get at it. 00:04:05.170 --> 00:04:06.780 So I'm going to put out some fodder. 00:04:06.780 --> 00:04:09.920 Fodder is food, so cow food. 00:04:09.920 --> 00:04:12.600 They say you've got to put it down. 00:04:12.600 --> 00:04:14.020 So I'm putting it down. 00:04:14.020 --> 00:04:16.860 And we'll chew on this together and then see 00:04:16.860 --> 00:04:17.910 where it takes us. 00:04:17.910 --> 00:04:24.550 So this is this kind of biographical history of 00:04:24.550 --> 00:04:27.060 chemical engineering at MIT. 00:04:27.060 --> 00:04:33.320 I remember my grandfather sitting in the living room 00:04:33.320 --> 00:04:36.380 holding forth, as he was wont to do, in Newton, 00:04:36.380 --> 00:04:37.250 Massachusetts. 00:04:37.250 --> 00:04:42.070 This is where he lived with my grandmother and mother and 00:04:42.070 --> 00:04:44.430 three other siblings. 00:04:44.430 --> 00:04:47.490 He was a boarder in the household 00:04:47.490 --> 00:04:48.840 and married the daughter. 00:04:48.840 --> 00:04:51.700 And this is a little part history right there. 00:04:54.330 --> 00:04:57.040 Most MIT students, there weren't residences. 00:04:57.040 --> 00:05:01.100 So you boarded with families or you were in a fraternity. 00:05:01.100 --> 00:05:04.250 So boarding was very common. 00:05:04.250 --> 00:05:06.390 Let me just me just mention something about his family. 00:05:06.390 --> 00:05:07.990 You see his dates. 00:05:07.990 --> 00:05:23.300 His father was born in 1845, in Laurel, Delaware. 00:05:23.300 --> 00:05:28.940 And his father, my grandfather's grandfather, had 00:05:28.940 --> 00:05:35.010 been born in the kind of, well, mid to late 1700s. 00:05:35.010 --> 00:05:37.120 He had three wives. 00:05:37.120 --> 00:05:40.510 My grandfather's father was the last child 00:05:40.510 --> 00:05:41.880 of the third wife. 00:05:41.880 --> 00:05:46.303 So there's a huge gap in the half-brothers, between Henry 00:05:46.303 --> 00:05:50.180 Clay Lewis, Henry Clay Lewis, that's the name of my 00:05:50.180 --> 00:05:55.800 grandfather's father, and the first wife's, first child. 00:05:55.800 --> 00:05:56.790 Many of these children died. 00:05:56.790 --> 00:06:01.160 But this is just a part of history, the fact that if I go 00:06:01.160 --> 00:06:03.690 from my grandfather, to his father, to his father, I'm 00:06:03.690 --> 00:06:06.730 back to the Revolutionary War. 00:06:06.730 --> 00:06:11.580 Because his grandfather had a brother who died in a prison 00:06:11.580 --> 00:06:14.590 ship, moored in the Hudson River during the 00:06:14.590 --> 00:06:15.950 Revolutionary War. 00:06:15.950 --> 00:06:19.450 So it's just amazing to me that you just take a few steps 00:06:19.450 --> 00:06:22.230 and you're back in time, like that. 00:06:22.230 --> 00:06:23.270 This is Delaware. 00:06:23.270 --> 00:06:25.650 Delaware was a slave state. 00:06:25.650 --> 00:06:28.690 It was a slave-owning family. 00:06:28.690 --> 00:06:32.500 Also an abolitionist family, which is a strange 00:06:32.500 --> 00:06:34.090 combination. 00:06:34.090 --> 00:06:37.130 But it's one of those, it's a nice idea, but not until I die 00:06:37.130 --> 00:06:38.830 will I free my slaves, family. 00:06:38.830 --> 00:06:40.320 And that's what happened. 00:06:40.320 --> 00:06:45.320 But his father was one of the two votes for Abraham Lincoln 00:06:45.320 --> 00:06:48.360 in his county in Delaware in 1860. 00:06:48.360 --> 00:06:51.455 And his father-- 00:06:51.455 --> 00:06:53.350 God, these dates don't seem right. 00:06:53.350 --> 00:06:56.330 Because if his father is born in 18-- 00:06:56.330 --> 00:06:56.760 OK. 00:06:56.760 --> 00:07:02.890 It was his grandfather, his last vote was for Abe Lincoln, 00:07:02.890 --> 00:07:07.370 that's it, in Laurel, Delaware. 00:07:07.370 --> 00:07:10.350 If you look at the history of slavery in Laurel, what's 00:07:10.350 --> 00:07:14.810 fascinating is that next door was Maryland, where slaves 00:07:14.810 --> 00:07:16.680 could be traded, but not in Delaware, 00:07:16.680 --> 00:07:17.530 after a certain date. 00:07:17.530 --> 00:07:18.440 You may know that. 00:07:18.440 --> 00:07:20.460 But in Delaware, you could hold slaves, but you 00:07:20.460 --> 00:07:22.000 couldn't sell them. 00:07:22.000 --> 00:07:26.430 So there's a huge kidnapping ring, where people from 00:07:26.430 --> 00:07:29.490 Maryland would go just over the border to Laurel, kidnap 00:07:29.490 --> 00:07:34.010 either free blacks or slaves, take them back to Maryland, 00:07:34.010 --> 00:07:36.720 where they could be sold for a huge profit. 00:07:36.720 --> 00:07:39.270 Because at that time, they could still be sold to other 00:07:39.270 --> 00:07:40.900 parts of the United States. 00:07:40.900 --> 00:07:46.130 So Delaware, Laurel was the site of the Patty Cannon 00:07:46.130 --> 00:07:50.820 kidnapping ring, which is a fascinating story. 00:07:50.820 --> 00:07:53.010 But it's not the story I'm here to tell. 00:07:53.010 --> 00:07:55.830 But it does give context. 00:07:55.830 --> 00:07:57.160 This is a farm boy. 00:07:57.160 --> 00:08:02.090 Kenny was raised on the farm in Laurel, Delaware. 00:08:02.090 --> 00:08:07.090 Expecting to say on the farm, and his life, he got hijacked 00:08:07.090 --> 00:08:08.650 by the 20th century. 00:08:08.650 --> 00:08:13.130 These are just some more pictures holding forth. 00:08:13.130 --> 00:08:17.100 That's a very familiar pose, very familiar. 00:08:17.100 --> 00:08:17.320 PROFESSOR: You know it well. 00:08:17.320 --> 00:08:18.060 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Yeah. 00:08:18.060 --> 00:08:23.540 I mean as a granddaughter, you knew this guy. 00:08:23.540 --> 00:08:26.300 Students were terrified of him because he'd get you up here. 00:08:26.300 --> 00:08:28.690 And you'd start doing something on the board. 00:08:28.690 --> 00:08:29.560 And you wouldn't know what you were doing 00:08:29.560 --> 00:08:31.170 and he would pounce. 00:08:31.170 --> 00:08:35.289 But as a granddaughter, it was just a very affectionate 00:08:35.289 --> 00:08:36.630 relationship. 00:08:36.630 --> 00:08:38.789 I was aware how much he terrified other people. 00:08:38.789 --> 00:08:41.460 But that was not my relationship with him. 00:08:41.460 --> 00:08:46.420 That's the farmhouse, still in a Laurel, Delaware. 00:08:46.420 --> 00:08:48.600 It used to be a bed and breakfast not that long ago. 00:08:48.600 --> 00:08:50.610 I don't think it's in business anymore. 00:08:50.610 --> 00:08:52.110 That's my brother. 00:08:52.110 --> 00:08:55.070 That's more Warren K. Lewis, Jr., my uncle, and my 00:08:55.070 --> 00:08:56.300 grandfather. 00:08:56.300 --> 00:08:58.560 This is in 1952. 00:08:58.560 --> 00:09:01.940 He has just sold the farm. 00:09:01.940 --> 00:09:05.570 Heart breaking, because it had been in the family back to the 00:09:05.570 --> 00:09:08.140 late 1700s. 00:09:08.140 --> 00:09:15.530 But a part of the farm was cut through by a road, the dual, 00:09:15.530 --> 00:09:17.420 they call it there, a dual highway. 00:09:17.420 --> 00:09:20.290 Route 14 cut through a corner of the farm and he realized it 00:09:20.290 --> 00:09:22.780 was never going to be a working farm again. 00:09:22.780 --> 00:09:25.600 And the irony is of course that part of the reason for 00:09:25.600 --> 00:09:29.890 putting in that highway is that DuPont had established 00:09:29.890 --> 00:09:32.250 big factories in northern Delaware. 00:09:32.250 --> 00:09:35.460 And there's more commuter traffic from south to north. 00:09:35.460 --> 00:09:38.400 So chemical engineering, in a sense, 00:09:38.400 --> 00:09:39.820 destroyed the family farm. 00:09:39.820 --> 00:09:41.540 And I say there's a sort of irony. 00:09:41.540 --> 00:09:43.240 There's quite a bit of irony there. 00:09:43.240 --> 00:09:47.130 Not to mention the fact that the whole automobile age was 00:09:47.130 --> 00:09:51.280 in part made possible through new methods of refining 00:09:51.280 --> 00:09:54.480 petroleum, using catalytic cracking, that my grandfather 00:09:54.480 --> 00:09:56.020 directly worked on. 00:09:56.020 --> 00:09:58.330 This is not the best-- but this is the Eastern Shore, 00:09:58.330 --> 00:09:59.310 this peninsula. 00:09:59.310 --> 00:10:01.280 The Chesapeake Bay is here. 00:10:01.280 --> 00:10:03.420 So Baltimore is up around here. 00:10:03.420 --> 00:10:05.790 Washington is kind of off the map, over here. 00:10:05.790 --> 00:10:08.140 And Philadelphia is to the north. 00:10:08.140 --> 00:10:10.080 But this is the Eastern Shore. 00:10:10.080 --> 00:10:14.280 And it's Virginia down here. 00:10:14.280 --> 00:10:15.550 You can't see the map-- 00:10:15.550 --> 00:10:16.800 the split division. 00:10:21.390 --> 00:10:25.530 So last time I went, I go to the airport in Baltimore, I 00:10:25.530 --> 00:10:29.390 drive over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, I go down to roads, 00:10:29.390 --> 00:10:30.900 about right in the middle. 00:10:30.900 --> 00:10:33.950 And that takes me two hours. 00:10:33.950 --> 00:10:39.325 So you go from one end to the other in a couple hours. 00:10:39.325 --> 00:10:41.280 With the dual, you go fast, yeah. 00:10:41.280 --> 00:10:43.460 So there is a Maryland over here. 00:10:43.460 --> 00:10:45.510 Oh, you can see the dotted line, OK. 00:10:45.510 --> 00:10:46.700 So this is Maryland over here. 00:10:46.700 --> 00:10:50.680 This is where like Dick Cheney lives now, in Easton. 00:10:50.680 --> 00:10:52.915 It's very high, upper crust. 00:10:55.750 --> 00:10:57.300 And this is Delaware, which is much more 00:10:57.300 --> 00:10:58.620 farming, much more rural. 00:10:58.620 --> 00:11:00.000 And then Virginia down here. 00:11:00.000 --> 00:11:01.010 It's pretty rustic. 00:11:01.010 --> 00:11:03.410 The Chincoteague ponies, Chincoteague is one of these 00:11:03.410 --> 00:11:05.140 islands off of here. 00:11:05.140 --> 00:11:10.045 So this is a garden spot in the 18th and 19th centuries. 00:11:10.045 --> 00:11:14.570 It is the truck garden area for the Philadelphia and 00:11:14.570 --> 00:11:20.380 Baltimore markets, raising mainly corn, fruits, 00:11:20.380 --> 00:11:24.930 vegetables, peaches, tomatoes, live stock. 00:11:24.930 --> 00:11:26.210 It's mixed farming. 00:11:26.210 --> 00:11:29.460 And I'll tell you some more about that as we go on. 00:11:29.460 --> 00:11:33.230 But the reason I have this map-- this is from Bob Post-- 00:11:33.230 --> 00:11:38.510 the railroad comes to Laurel in 1859. 00:11:38.510 --> 00:11:43.650 And that opens up the whole area to commercial 00:11:43.650 --> 00:11:44.940 farming much more. 00:11:44.940 --> 00:11:49.080 I mean it had always been such, but even more. 00:11:49.080 --> 00:11:53.560 Now, my grandfather's grandfather was a sea captain. 00:11:53.560 --> 00:11:54.940 Farming was his-- 00:11:54.940 --> 00:11:57.150 that's where the wife and kids stayed. 00:11:57.150 --> 00:12:00.220 But he made his money in the trade, starting from the 00:12:00.220 --> 00:12:02.930 Chesapeake, doing a lot of trade of the Caribbean. 00:12:06.250 --> 00:12:09.490 So that's where his money came from. 00:12:09.490 --> 00:12:14.660 I mean he was a large, established farmer and the 00:12:14.660 --> 00:12:15.710 state legislator. 00:12:15.710 --> 00:12:20.400 So he was a politician. 00:12:20.400 --> 00:12:26.260 But he was a well-off person for Delaware, but still 00:12:26.260 --> 00:12:30.080 basically a sea captain and a farmer. 00:12:30.080 --> 00:12:33.860 So the railroad comes. 00:12:33.860 --> 00:12:37.530 And this is sort of getting ahead of the story. 00:12:37.530 --> 00:12:43.490 But my grandfather born in 1882, he goes through the 00:12:43.490 --> 00:12:47.370 three-year high school in Laurel, Delaware. 00:12:47.370 --> 00:12:49.130 And learns everything you learn there, because there's 00:12:49.130 --> 00:12:52.370 one teacher for all grades, in one classroom. 00:12:52.370 --> 00:12:55.290 And his parents want him to get a better education. 00:12:55.290 --> 00:12:56.640 He's an only child. 00:12:56.640 --> 00:12:58.590 He's obviously going to inherit the farm. 00:12:58.590 --> 00:13:03.550 So they want him to go to a better high school than the 00:13:03.550 --> 00:13:04.570 Laurel one. 00:13:04.570 --> 00:13:09.420 So his cousin, she's actually a cousin I guess. 00:13:09.420 --> 00:13:13.700 He had an older female cousin named Mary Witherby, who had 00:13:13.700 --> 00:13:17.410 left Laurel to teach school, like her father, and she was 00:13:17.410 --> 00:13:21.200 teaching school at the Lasell Female seminary, which still 00:13:21.200 --> 00:13:22.260 exists around here. 00:13:22.260 --> 00:13:23.540 Do any of you-- 00:13:23.540 --> 00:13:24.290 you know what I'm talking about. 00:13:24.290 --> 00:13:25.150 PROFESSOR: Oh, sure. 00:13:25.150 --> 00:13:27.430 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: It's now Lasell College. 00:13:27.430 --> 00:13:29.420 It used to be junior college, now college. 00:13:29.420 --> 00:13:33.100 Yeah, and it's in West Newton, just a stone's 00:13:33.100 --> 00:13:34.270 throw from your place. 00:13:34.270 --> 00:13:38.110 So my grandfather was sent up by his parents to live in 00:13:38.110 --> 00:13:40.190 Newton, go to high school. 00:13:40.190 --> 00:13:43.200 Newton High was famous even then as a good school. 00:13:43.200 --> 00:13:44.770 He would board with the family. 00:13:44.770 --> 00:13:47.180 But he had his cousin in town. 00:13:47.180 --> 00:13:49.280 And she would look after him and make sure he didn't get 00:13:49.280 --> 00:13:50.510 into too much trouble. 00:13:50.510 --> 00:13:56.300 This house is a block away from where I live now. 00:13:56.300 --> 00:13:58.380 I go there all the time. 00:13:58.380 --> 00:14:02.230 So that's still there, one of the older houses in the 00:14:02.230 --> 00:14:02.630 neighborhood. 00:14:02.630 --> 00:14:04.630 So this is where he boarded. 00:14:04.630 --> 00:14:13.130 Now, I happen to have his diary from his first full 00:14:13.130 --> 00:14:16.570 winter at Hunnewell Avenue in Newton. 00:14:16.570 --> 00:14:20.460 And it starts January 10, 1898 and it 00:14:20.460 --> 00:14:23.970 goes through the spring. 00:14:23.970 --> 00:14:30.000 So I'm a little mixed up about the timing, because I believe 00:14:30.000 --> 00:14:32.140 this is his second year I believe at Newton High. 00:14:32.140 --> 00:14:39.000 His first year he came up, he got an A in arithmetic, a D in 00:14:39.000 --> 00:14:41.350 drawing, and F's in everything else. 00:14:41.350 --> 00:14:43.650 So it was not a good high school he was coming from. 00:14:43.650 --> 00:14:45.200 And he really had to catch up. 00:14:45.200 --> 00:14:49.130 By this time, I think it's the second year, he's got his feet 00:14:49.130 --> 00:14:50.520 under him and he's doing better. 00:14:50.520 --> 00:14:53.790 So he's boarding in the winter of '98. 00:14:53.790 --> 00:14:57.030 And I just want to read a few little details that will give 00:14:57.030 --> 00:15:00.010 you a sense of what life was like, daily life was like for 00:15:00.010 --> 00:15:02.250 him at that time. 00:15:02.250 --> 00:15:05.040 This is the Second Industrial Revolution, is what we call it 00:15:05.040 --> 00:15:05.660 from up here. 00:15:05.660 --> 00:15:08.100 But down here, this is what it's like. 00:15:08.100 --> 00:15:10.310 After school, this is high school, he says, this is 00:15:10.310 --> 00:15:15.740 January 12, I went up to Lasell and read Cicero with 00:15:15.740 --> 00:15:17.432 cousin Mary. 00:15:17.432 --> 00:15:19.976 Who's Cicero? 00:15:19.976 --> 00:15:21.655 What does this tell you? 00:15:21.655 --> 00:15:23.830 You read Cicero in Latin. 00:15:23.830 --> 00:15:26.260 You start with doing Cicero. 00:15:26.260 --> 00:15:27.770 You wind up with Cicero and Virgil. 00:15:27.770 --> 00:15:31.490 So he's reading his Latin with his cousin. 00:15:31.490 --> 00:15:37.740 And then she gave me a supper of canned chicken, cocoa, 00:15:37.740 --> 00:15:40.400 bread, butter, crackers, and peanut butter. 00:15:40.400 --> 00:15:43.040 I had a fine time. 00:15:43.040 --> 00:15:44.770 OK, canned chicken? 00:15:44.770 --> 00:15:46.470 I mean I don't have to rub this in. 00:15:46.470 --> 00:15:47.360 You can figure this out. 00:15:47.360 --> 00:15:48.540 This is not off the farm. 00:15:48.540 --> 00:15:52.220 Canned chicken, cocoa, you know we're dealing with the 00:15:52.220 --> 00:15:54.970 Caribbean at least, if that's not the East Indies. 00:15:54.970 --> 00:15:58.450 Bread, butter, all right, crackers-- 00:15:58.450 --> 00:16:01.420 packaged food-- and peanut butter. 00:16:01.420 --> 00:16:02.090 OK. 00:16:02.090 --> 00:16:06.050 So he mentions that-- at home, he got a letter from home. 00:16:06.050 --> 00:16:08.810 And the letter from home says four factories were going up 00:16:08.810 --> 00:16:12.230 in Laurel and vicinity for canning. 00:16:12.230 --> 00:16:13.300 He, my father-- 00:16:13.300 --> 00:16:16.840 this is my grandfather's father, he is going to put out 00:16:16.840 --> 00:16:18.090 10 acres of tomatoes. 00:16:18.090 --> 00:16:21.620 He has only four cows now. 00:16:21.620 --> 00:16:24.390 So there's a lot of agricultural history there. 00:16:24.390 --> 00:16:30.470 There's a new canning factory, more tomatoes, fewer cows. 00:16:30.470 --> 00:16:35.310 So just to jump ahead, my grandfather would say that he 00:16:35.310 --> 00:16:40.580 paid for his MIT tuition when he got to MIT, with tomatoes, 00:16:40.580 --> 00:16:43.736 sold to a cannery at $4 a ton. 00:16:43.736 --> 00:16:46.260 PROFESSOR: Jesus, $4 a ton. 00:16:46.260 --> 00:16:47.430 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: $4 a ton. 00:16:47.430 --> 00:16:49.710 Now, he had the bright idea, during his 00:16:49.710 --> 00:16:52.760 college years, of recycling. 00:16:52.760 --> 00:16:55.540 That is, using the tomato skins, which are removed in 00:16:55.540 --> 00:16:58.320 the canning process, or they tried to remove them, using 00:16:58.320 --> 00:17:02.340 those skins to feed to the cows as fodder. 00:17:02.340 --> 00:17:03.390 And they tried it. 00:17:03.390 --> 00:17:04.200 The cows ate them. 00:17:04.200 --> 00:17:05.810 But then they gave pink milk. 00:17:05.810 --> 00:17:08.660 So it didn't work. 00:17:08.660 --> 00:17:11.880 OK, just a few more of these from his diary. 00:17:11.880 --> 00:17:14.430 We're still back in January 1898. 00:17:14.430 --> 00:17:17.170 Today, as I was walking home from school, cousin Mary in 00:17:17.170 --> 00:17:19.260 the electrics-- 00:17:19.260 --> 00:17:22.079 so what are the electrics? 00:17:22.079 --> 00:17:22.640 PROFESSOR: Trolleys. 00:17:22.640 --> 00:17:22.935 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Trolleys. 00:17:22.935 --> 00:17:26.530 OK, the street car suburbs-- 00:17:26.530 --> 00:17:27.750 this is a little digression. 00:17:27.750 --> 00:17:32.875 But this is showing how the electric trolley system was 00:17:32.875 --> 00:17:34.070 being extended at the time. 00:17:34.070 --> 00:17:38.080 This is the Sam Best Warner's classic study. 00:17:38.080 --> 00:17:42.570 And the trolley, which I remember from my childhood, 00:17:42.570 --> 00:17:45.340 near Hunewell Avenue, where he lived, is just a block away. 00:17:45.340 --> 00:17:46.150 You can just walk. 00:17:46.150 --> 00:17:47.950 In fact, now it's a bus system. 00:17:47.950 --> 00:17:49.700 But it's the same route. 00:17:49.700 --> 00:17:51.940 And you can get on where we live and go to 00:17:51.940 --> 00:17:55.840 Fenway Park in one stop. 00:17:55.840 --> 00:17:57.211 PROFESSOR: No wonder you live in that neighborhood. 00:17:57.211 --> 00:17:59.460 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Of course, you got it. 00:17:59.460 --> 00:18:01.650 Then we went into Boston. 00:18:01.650 --> 00:18:04.340 Cousin Mary in the electrics, saw me, got out and walked 00:18:04.340 --> 00:18:04.770 home with me. 00:18:04.770 --> 00:18:06.180 Then we went into Boston. 00:18:06.180 --> 00:18:08.050 Now, this would have been on the train track, which is the 00:18:08.050 --> 00:18:10.475 other side of the hill that he's looking on. 00:18:10.475 --> 00:18:11.610 Went into Boston. 00:18:11.610 --> 00:18:18.620 And she bought two tin basins, a pie pan, a strainer, and a 00:18:18.620 --> 00:18:20.270 dozen knives and forks. 00:18:20.270 --> 00:18:22.830 She carried it in a mug strainer belonging to the 00:18:22.830 --> 00:18:26.430 coffee pot, to fit the strainer she brought to it. 00:18:26.430 --> 00:18:30.400 So she's buying a piece for her coffee pot. 00:18:30.400 --> 00:18:31.912 She's buying all this stuff, taking the 00:18:31.912 --> 00:18:33.610 electrics into Boston. 00:18:33.610 --> 00:18:35.810 So this tells you a lot about technological 00:18:35.810 --> 00:18:37.900 systems of the day. 00:18:37.900 --> 00:18:43.230 But I think my favorite entry from this 00:18:43.230 --> 00:18:49.860 diary, this is in February. 00:18:49.860 --> 00:18:51.450 He says, I went downtown. 00:18:51.450 --> 00:18:52.500 This would be Newton Corner. 00:18:52.500 --> 00:18:56.920 I went downtown in the evening and rode, R-O-D-E, underlined. 00:18:56.920 --> 00:19:02.060 I asked a man passing, for a ride, and he consented. 00:19:02.060 --> 00:19:05.220 It was the first time, underlined, I've ridden, 00:19:05.220 --> 00:19:08.910 underlined, on or behind a horse since last September, 00:19:08.910 --> 00:19:12.740 and I a farmer's boy. 00:19:12.740 --> 00:19:16.200 So there's cars, there's trolleys, there's trains. 00:19:16.200 --> 00:19:18.860 But he wants to ride the horse, because that's what 00:19:18.860 --> 00:19:20.570 farmers; boys did. 00:19:20.570 --> 00:19:21.390 There's a lot. 00:19:21.390 --> 00:19:23.430 I could go on and on about what you find 00:19:23.430 --> 00:19:24.560 out from this diary. 00:19:24.560 --> 00:19:28.030 There's a lot of reading, Cicero, Shakespeare. 00:19:28.030 --> 00:19:29.260 There's a lot of magazines. 00:19:29.260 --> 00:19:31.270 He's reading magazines a lot. 00:19:31.270 --> 00:19:32.260 He's going to church. 00:19:32.260 --> 00:19:33.330 There are church plays. 00:19:33.330 --> 00:19:36.110 There are glee club performances at Lasell. 00:19:36.110 --> 00:19:39.170 He goes into Boston for lectures at the temple, 00:19:39.170 --> 00:19:40.340 Fremont Temple. 00:19:40.340 --> 00:19:44.360 He goes to the Museum of Fine Arts, still with us, discusses 00:19:44.360 --> 00:19:48.670 modern illustrators who are exhibited there. 00:19:48.670 --> 00:19:50.770 Then cousin Mary gives him some pictures. 00:19:50.770 --> 00:19:53.920 But I mean it is an information 00:19:53.920 --> 00:19:55.050 age, in its own way. 00:19:55.050 --> 00:20:00.670 It's just a different kind of media. 00:20:00.670 --> 00:20:02.510 But he's very connected. 00:20:02.510 --> 00:20:06.900 So, for example, on January 20, he says he goes into 00:20:06.900 --> 00:20:09.940 Boston to hear a lecture on imperialism 00:20:09.940 --> 00:20:11.580 by Dr. Lyman Abbott. 00:20:11.580 --> 00:20:16.140 Now why in 1898, is he going to a lecture on imperialism? 00:20:16.140 --> 00:20:17.440 What's going on? 00:20:17.440 --> 00:20:18.690 What's the news? 00:20:21.150 --> 00:20:21.760 Anybody know? 00:20:21.760 --> 00:20:23.110 AUDIENCE: Spanish-American War. 00:20:23.110 --> 00:20:24.270 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: OK? 00:20:24.270 --> 00:20:24.730 Which-- 00:20:24.730 --> 00:20:26.220 PROFESSOR: He said it. 00:20:26.220 --> 00:20:27.400 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Spanish-American War, go to 00:20:27.400 --> 00:20:28.870 the head of the class, yeah. 00:20:28.870 --> 00:20:31.130 And it's interesting. 00:20:31.130 --> 00:20:34.660 He says the lecture was a fine one in favor of staying to 00:20:34.660 --> 00:20:37.940 help them, the Filipinos in this case, learn to govern 00:20:37.940 --> 00:20:38.730 themselves. 00:20:38.730 --> 00:20:41.670 And then he goes to another lecture the next week, same 00:20:41.670 --> 00:20:44.950 topic, another speaker, who also make good points. 00:20:44.950 --> 00:20:46.760 But cousin Mary said some bad ones. 00:20:46.760 --> 00:20:50.080 He attacked, the second speaker, Dr. Abbott, the first 00:20:50.080 --> 00:20:53.060 speaker, saying he had made some misstatements concerning 00:20:53.060 --> 00:20:56.530 the arguments on Californian annexation and made McKinley 00:20:56.530 --> 00:20:58.910 out as having imperial power. 00:20:58.910 --> 00:21:02.300 So there's debate going on. 00:21:02.300 --> 00:21:05.040 And then on February 7, we received our first news 00:21:05.040 --> 00:21:08.360 yesterday of the Battle of Manila. 00:21:08.360 --> 00:21:10.800 Reports of dead and wounded, the gunboats 00:21:10.800 --> 00:21:12.360 did a fearful execution. 00:21:12.360 --> 00:21:14.850 Then there's Washington's birthday soon after, the 00:21:14.850 --> 00:21:16.850 church bells ring all day. 00:21:16.850 --> 00:21:19.330 And my grandfather writes, these are signs to me that it 00:21:19.330 --> 00:21:21.600 is the anniversary of the birth of the greatest 00:21:21.600 --> 00:21:25.180 American, underlined, ever borne. 00:21:25.180 --> 00:21:26.470 OK, anyway. 00:21:26.470 --> 00:21:27.486 PROFESSOR: It wasn't Abe Lincoln. 00:21:27.486 --> 00:21:30.045 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Um, true. 00:21:30.045 --> 00:21:30.820 PROFESSOR: It was GW. 00:21:30.820 --> 00:21:31.734 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: It was GW. 00:21:31.734 --> 00:21:32.191 How about that. 00:21:32.191 --> 00:21:32.648 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. 00:21:32.648 --> 00:21:34.020 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Yeah. 00:21:34.020 --> 00:21:34.910 PROFESSOR: Well, her-- 00:21:34.910 --> 00:21:36.410 yeah, but her-- 00:21:36.410 --> 00:21:38.070 it would be your great grandfather's-- 00:21:38.070 --> 00:21:40.840 whose name is Henry Clay. 00:21:40.840 --> 00:21:42.100 Now, Henry Clay-- 00:21:42.100 --> 00:21:42.860 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: That's another-- 00:21:42.860 --> 00:21:43.540 yeah. 00:21:43.540 --> 00:21:47.470 PROFESSOR: But Henry Clay was Abraham Lincoln's 00:21:47.470 --> 00:21:49.910 great idol in a way. 00:21:49.910 --> 00:21:53.180 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: I mean the story of this family and 00:21:53.180 --> 00:21:55.710 slavery is just fascinating. 00:21:55.710 --> 00:21:57.010 PROFESSOR: Yeah, it's very interesting, very interesting. 00:22:00.290 --> 00:22:02.850 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Well, I just showed you this paper of 00:22:02.850 --> 00:22:05.470 my grandmother's, my grandfather's wife, on the 00:22:05.470 --> 00:22:08.150 Negro problem in 1921. 00:22:08.150 --> 00:22:11.475 Because my grandfather, he wanted to go back to the farm 00:22:11.475 --> 00:22:15.570 and improve race relations by starting that farm up again in 00:22:15.570 --> 00:22:16.600 the right way. 00:22:16.600 --> 00:22:18.250 And that never happened. 00:22:18.250 --> 00:22:19.230 But that was the idea. 00:22:19.230 --> 00:22:21.110 OK, instead what happens? 00:22:21.110 --> 00:22:24.180 In the spring, he asked two teachers at Newton High what 00:22:24.180 --> 00:22:27.400 they thought would be best for him to do about college? 00:22:27.400 --> 00:22:29.295 They will think it over, he writes. 00:22:29.295 --> 00:22:33.600 But the former advised either Amherst Agricultural-- 00:22:33.600 --> 00:22:34.160 what's that? 00:22:34.160 --> 00:22:35.330 PROFESSOR: New Mass. 00:22:35.330 --> 00:22:36.740 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Yeah, it's the University of Amherst now, 00:22:36.740 --> 00:22:39.780 the Ag School-- other Amherst agriculture, or as even 00:22:39.780 --> 00:22:41.330 better, tech. 00:22:41.330 --> 00:22:44.520 One of them mentioned Cornell, but tech. 00:22:44.520 --> 00:22:45.850 Here we are. 00:22:45.850 --> 00:22:48.320 So he thinks about it. 00:22:48.320 --> 00:22:51.062 By the way, this is just a picture of downtown Boston, 00:22:51.062 --> 00:22:54.010 when they take the train in there. 00:22:54.010 --> 00:22:58.950 I was there Friday, meeting my son and his girlfriend. 00:22:58.950 --> 00:22:59.680 It's not-- 00:22:59.680 --> 00:23:03.280 they're not people like I know. 00:23:03.280 --> 00:23:05.840 And I was saying to my son, oh gee, my grandparent's would be 00:23:05.840 --> 00:23:07.100 so distressed to see this. 00:23:07.100 --> 00:23:09.700 And he said-- he has a place in Fort Point, he said. 00:23:09.700 --> 00:23:10.750 But that's up and coming. 00:23:10.750 --> 00:23:12.736 That needs to be [INAUDIBLE]. 00:23:12.736 --> 00:23:15.950 And now, it's happening. 00:23:15.950 --> 00:23:20.620 But let me just mention, I mean these are quick reminders 00:23:20.620 --> 00:23:24.270 that the occupation of engineering was growing very 00:23:24.270 --> 00:23:27.040 quickly at the time. 00:23:27.040 --> 00:23:30.910 And that the people who went into engineering-- 00:23:30.910 --> 00:23:35.210 my grandfather is very typical, in being off the farm 00:23:35.210 --> 00:23:36.755 and not particularly well educated. 00:23:40.570 --> 00:23:45.200 This is the way for young men, almost always young men, to 00:23:45.200 --> 00:23:48.310 have a professional or quasi-professional career, 00:23:48.310 --> 00:23:51.270 without having to consider postgraduate study, like law 00:23:51.270 --> 00:23:56.400 or divinity or medicine required. 00:23:56.400 --> 00:23:59.030 So here's Boston Tech. 00:23:59.030 --> 00:24:00.890 You must have seen this picture 00:24:00.890 --> 00:24:02.470 somewhat, in this class. 00:24:02.470 --> 00:24:06.170 Here's Trinity Church in Copley Square. 00:24:06.170 --> 00:24:07.770 This is Boston Tech? 00:24:07.770 --> 00:24:08.860 PROFESSOR: It's Boston Tech. 00:24:08.860 --> 00:24:09.520 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Yeah. 00:24:09.520 --> 00:24:13.440 And I've seen other photos where I can't really place it. 00:24:13.440 --> 00:24:16.920 So I would love to see somebody do a sort of up to 00:24:16.920 --> 00:24:18.500 date GPS showing exactly-- 00:24:21.330 --> 00:24:23.100 AUDIENCE: So that's still there. 00:24:23.100 --> 00:24:25.690 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: That's there, yeah. 00:24:25.690 --> 00:24:28.252 AUDIENCE: And then across the street from that building is 00:24:28.252 --> 00:24:30.741 Brooks Brothers, on Berkeley Street, across from 00:24:30.741 --> 00:24:30.970 [INAUDIBLE]. 00:24:30.970 --> 00:24:32.586 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: This is all one big building there. 00:24:32.586 --> 00:24:33.980 AUDIENCE: Yeah, that's the [INAUDIBLE]. 00:24:33.980 --> 00:24:35.690 PROFESSOR: There's actually a plaque on the front of that 00:24:35.690 --> 00:24:36.285 office building 00:24:36.285 --> 00:24:38.720 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: But there was another building, not the 00:24:38.720 --> 00:24:40.210 Rogers Building, but another building, 00:24:40.210 --> 00:24:41.430 like off to the side. 00:24:41.430 --> 00:24:43.244 PROFESSOR: Yeah. 00:24:43.244 --> 00:24:44.160 It would be in that direction. 00:24:44.160 --> 00:24:45.670 AUDIENCE: There's a bunch of stuff. 00:24:45.670 --> 00:24:49.993 Mark Jarzombek showed us a map, and sort of to the right 00:24:49.993 --> 00:24:51.125 of where the photograph is. 00:24:51.125 --> 00:24:54.940 There's train tracks and stuff there. 00:24:54.940 --> 00:24:57.930 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Now, the steep steps, was that on this 00:24:57.930 --> 00:25:01.560 building, on the Rogers Building, or the second one? 00:25:01.560 --> 00:25:03.460 PROFESSOR: I think it's right there. 00:25:03.460 --> 00:25:04.340 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Oh, there. 00:25:04.340 --> 00:25:05.050 PROFESSOR: Right there. 00:25:05.050 --> 00:25:05.670 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Oh, OK. 00:25:05.670 --> 00:25:06.520 OK. 00:25:06.520 --> 00:25:08.930 Because again, my grandfather had a story about a kind of a 00:25:08.930 --> 00:25:13.630 riot involving Harvard and MIT students and a fire and he was 00:25:13.630 --> 00:25:14.720 on the witness stand. 00:25:14.720 --> 00:25:17.280 And it had to do with the steps. 00:25:17.280 --> 00:25:19.850 Some things don't change. 00:25:19.850 --> 00:25:21.300 AUDIENCE: Mark talked about the difference 00:25:21.300 --> 00:25:21.450 between those two-- 00:25:21.450 --> 00:25:22.840 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: These two buildings. 00:25:22.840 --> 00:25:23.180 AUDIENCE: --buildings. 00:25:23.180 --> 00:25:25.764 But they're separated by a couple of decades. 00:25:25.764 --> 00:25:29.748 But closer is a custom-built laboratory, where you can see 00:25:29.748 --> 00:25:31.242 the fumes of the vents coming at the top there. 00:25:31.242 --> 00:25:32.736 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Oh, that has happened here. 00:25:32.736 --> 00:25:34.230 That's fascinating. 00:25:34.230 --> 00:25:37.880 So in the subway spot at Kimball, it says the second 00:25:37.880 --> 00:25:41.036 building MIT build was a gym, a gymnasium? 00:25:41.036 --> 00:25:42.720 Does anybody-- 00:25:42.720 --> 00:25:44.830 I just read it there the other day, thinking 00:25:44.830 --> 00:25:48.010 that's the first I knew. 00:25:48.010 --> 00:25:55.270 So Warren K. Lewis enters MIT in 1901, planning to study 00:25:55.270 --> 00:25:58.520 chemical engineer-- excuse me, mechanical engineering, still 00:25:58.520 --> 00:26:02.680 the dominant engineering, kind of the default mode. 00:26:02.680 --> 00:26:08.310 But he had a friend, this friend that he was boarding 00:26:08.310 --> 00:26:13.470 with in Newton, whose sister he eventually married, urged 00:26:13.470 --> 00:26:15.110 him to try chemical engineering. 00:26:15.110 --> 00:26:19.300 It seemed more interesting and so on and so forth. 00:26:19.300 --> 00:26:24.940 So as you know from your reading, something like 00:26:24.940 --> 00:26:27.350 industrial chemistry had begun. 00:26:27.350 --> 00:26:31.480 Actually, it was 1888, I think was the first offerings in 00:26:31.480 --> 00:26:33.020 industrial chemistry. 00:26:33.020 --> 00:26:35.090 And by 1893, there was a lab. 00:26:35.090 --> 00:26:38.060 This is sort of like the first start of chemical 00:26:38.060 --> 00:26:39.290 engineering at MIT. 00:26:39.290 --> 00:26:41.110 But then because of deaths and 00:26:41.110 --> 00:26:43.400 departures, it sort of declined. 00:26:43.400 --> 00:26:47.480 But just when my grandfather's was entering, actually in 00:26:47.480 --> 00:26:49.980 1903, this is when Walker comes back. 00:26:49.980 --> 00:26:52.110 And Noyes had been there for a couple years. 00:26:52.110 --> 00:26:54.770 So it's sort of like a false start early on. 00:26:54.770 --> 00:26:57.740 And then it kind of restarted around 00:26:57.740 --> 00:26:59.260 the turn of the century. 00:26:59.260 --> 00:27:04.710 And this is something that he wrote many years later, that I 00:27:04.710 --> 00:27:08.800 think captures the overall feeling of the time. 00:27:08.800 --> 00:27:12.070 Lewis wrote, the stimulus of these concepts, and he's 00:27:12.070 --> 00:27:15.650 referring to unit operations and these related concepts, 00:27:15.650 --> 00:27:18.610 the stimulus of these concepts made work in chemical 00:27:18.610 --> 00:27:21.730 engineering at the Institute from 1902 to the outbreak of 00:27:21.730 --> 00:27:26.580 World War I an inspiration for both staff and student, which 00:27:26.580 --> 00:27:29.400 it is impossible to describe. 00:27:29.400 --> 00:27:30.960 So these are happening years. 00:27:30.960 --> 00:27:35.870 I mean the tension between Noyes and Walker is a 00:27:35.870 --> 00:27:37.120 productive tension. 00:27:40.060 --> 00:27:43.290 They had each other to play off of. 00:27:43.290 --> 00:27:44.710 And they certainly did. 00:27:44.710 --> 00:27:46.830 By the way, you know Walker, that's not 00:27:46.830 --> 00:27:49.050 Walker, Memorial Walker. 00:27:49.050 --> 00:27:52.660 Walker Memorial is named after Francis Amasa Walker, one of 00:27:52.660 --> 00:27:53.950 the early presidents. 00:27:53.950 --> 00:27:54.780 Have I got it right? 00:27:54.780 --> 00:27:55.610 PROFESSOR: Yup. 00:27:55.610 --> 00:27:57.825 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: And we're talking about William Walker. 00:28:00.704 --> 00:28:02.290 It's no relation. 00:28:02.290 --> 00:28:04.790 So it's important to those straight. 00:28:04.790 --> 00:28:09.330 So you have these two very strong personalities. 00:28:09.330 --> 00:28:13.960 This is Noyes, trained in Germany, a physical chemist. 00:28:13.960 --> 00:28:19.400 And really brought in serious chemistry to the program, 00:28:19.400 --> 00:28:21.710 beginning in 1902. 00:28:21.710 --> 00:28:26.450 And then you have William H. Walker, who had also been 00:28:26.450 --> 00:28:30.280 educated in Germany, Penn State and Gottingen, both. 00:28:30.280 --> 00:28:33.960 And was teaching analytical chemistry, the partner of A.D. 00:28:33.960 --> 00:28:37.190 Little, which was originally Little and Walker. 00:28:37.190 --> 00:28:41.840 So he was entrusted with Course 10 in 1903. 00:28:41.840 --> 00:28:45.570 And was entrusted with building it up into a chemical 00:28:45.570 --> 00:28:47.330 engineering curriculum. 00:28:47.330 --> 00:28:49.750 Now this, you can't read. 00:28:49.750 --> 00:28:53.650 But I will read to you, because this is Walker's 00:28:53.650 --> 00:28:55.440 statement written years later. 00:28:55.440 --> 00:28:56.930 This was after he had left MIT. 00:28:56.930 --> 00:29:00.870 This is either from the late '20s or early '30s-- 00:29:00.870 --> 00:29:02.840 well, he died in the '30s. 00:29:02.840 --> 00:29:05.210 So this is his statement of what he was trying to do. 00:29:05.210 --> 00:29:07.200 It's a fascinating statement. 00:29:07.200 --> 00:29:10.800 So I'm going to read you what Walker wrote. 00:29:10.800 --> 00:29:15.940 What an industry needed was not a man who had been taught 00:29:15.940 --> 00:29:19.010 what the industry already knew, but rather a man who was 00:29:19.010 --> 00:29:20.880 trained to do what the industry had not 00:29:20.880 --> 00:29:23.080 been able to do. 00:29:23.080 --> 00:29:25.900 The ideal man for the industries was one who had 00:29:25.900 --> 00:29:28.420 been given a sound knowledge of chemistry and physics. 00:29:28.420 --> 00:29:31.030 And then as a part of the curriculum, had been given 00:29:31.030 --> 00:29:34.560 systematic experience in the application of this knowledge 00:29:34.560 --> 00:29:36.980 to the solution of industrial problems. 00:29:36.980 --> 00:29:39.800 That he should not be a specialist, but a solver of 00:29:39.800 --> 00:29:43.740 problems, any kind of problem that industry might present. 00:29:43.740 --> 00:29:46.580 And then he goes on to say, this idea met opposition, both 00:29:46.580 --> 00:29:48.320 from established courses of chemical 00:29:48.320 --> 00:29:50.525 instruction and from industry. 00:29:50.525 --> 00:29:53.620 And the industry thought it was too theoretical. 00:29:53.620 --> 00:29:57.200 But the scientists thought it was too industry oriented. 00:29:57.200 --> 00:30:02.350 So Walker is on this very nice edge between not trying to 00:30:02.350 --> 00:30:03.870 give into one or the other. 00:30:03.870 --> 00:30:05.380 And then he goes on and says-- 00:30:05.380 --> 00:30:07.790 this at the top of the second paragraph, I love this-- 00:30:07.790 --> 00:30:09.560 to prove the soundness of this idea, I 00:30:09.560 --> 00:30:11.760 returned to MIT in 1903. 00:30:11.760 --> 00:30:14.810 And after a hot fight with both the chemical and the 00:30:14.810 --> 00:30:17.960 engineering faculties, I reconstructed Course X as a 00:30:17.960 --> 00:30:21.050 general educational course without options. 00:30:21.050 --> 00:30:23.480 And without options, that turns out to be important. 00:30:23.480 --> 00:30:25.560 So this is a feisty guy. 00:30:25.560 --> 00:30:27.990 And I'm sure that's one reason he and my grandfather got 00:30:27.990 --> 00:30:29.070 along very well. 00:30:29.070 --> 00:30:34.270 They were both feisty people, very self assured. 00:30:34.270 --> 00:30:37.440 But my grandfather always would say, it is Walker who 00:30:37.440 --> 00:30:40.090 invented chemical engineering in this country. 00:30:40.090 --> 00:30:43.310 He did not claim that for himself at all. 00:30:43.310 --> 00:30:45.410 But again, my grandfather studied. 00:30:45.410 --> 00:30:47.520 With Noyes. 00:30:47.520 --> 00:30:49.750 You know, I was just reminding you, this is particularly in 00:30:49.750 --> 00:30:51.630 Servos's article. 00:30:51.630 --> 00:30:55.510 My grandfather studied with Noyes, took P-Chem from him, 00:30:55.510 --> 00:31:02.290 and graduating in the class of '05. 00:31:02.290 --> 00:31:04.416 My grandfather's is this kind of this grim-- he looks-- kind 00:31:04.416 --> 00:31:07.690 of a grim looking guy. 00:31:07.690 --> 00:31:08.700 And you'll see another picture. 00:31:08.700 --> 00:31:10.370 I'll pass it around. 00:31:10.370 --> 00:31:13.440 In the spring of his senior year, he expected to go back 00:31:13.440 --> 00:31:16.510 to the farm, as much as you and I expect the Sun to come 00:31:16.510 --> 00:31:17.190 up tomorrow. 00:31:17.190 --> 00:31:24.920 However, he got a job in the lab, I think with Noyes. 00:31:24.920 --> 00:31:29.320 And then that led to somebody, I don't know whether it was 00:31:29.320 --> 00:31:32.350 Noyes or Walker, one of them suggested that he apply for a 00:31:32.350 --> 00:31:34.770 traveling fellowship which was being offered. 00:31:34.770 --> 00:31:38.280 And it was $1,000 stipend, which is that day and age was 00:31:38.280 --> 00:31:40.140 a lot of money. 00:31:40.140 --> 00:31:42.330 A traveling fellowship, he could go 00:31:42.330 --> 00:31:44.070 anywhere for a doctorate. 00:31:44.070 --> 00:31:46.510 And so he really was not interested. 00:31:46.510 --> 00:31:50.840 But one of them basically appealed to his competitive 00:31:50.840 --> 00:31:54.010 spirit and kind of said well, if you don't get it, somebody 00:31:54.010 --> 00:31:54.880 else is going to get it. 00:31:54.880 --> 00:31:56.970 And $1,000 sounded very nice. 00:31:56.970 --> 00:32:02.545 He applied, got it and was on his way to Breslau, in what is 00:32:02.545 --> 00:32:05.310 now Germany, it's kind of on the Polish-German border, for 00:32:05.310 --> 00:32:07.640 graduate school the next year. 00:32:07.640 --> 00:32:12.715 Later, he found he was in fact the only applicant that year. 00:32:12.715 --> 00:32:14.200 PROFESSOR: Well, it's interesting. 00:32:14.200 --> 00:32:17.170 Think about what the Harvard class of 1905, where they 00:32:17.170 --> 00:32:19.650 might have chosen to have their picture taken. 00:32:19.650 --> 00:32:19.955 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Aah. 00:32:19.955 --> 00:32:22.962 AUDIENCE: I'm sure it was not in the laboratory. 00:32:22.962 --> 00:32:23.950 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Yeah, yeah. 00:32:23.950 --> 00:32:28.938 I mean this is a good example, where it tells you so much. 00:32:28.938 --> 00:32:30.930 It does. 00:32:30.930 --> 00:32:33.072 Began with the names and faces. 00:32:33.072 --> 00:32:34.458 AUDIENCE: Books piled up in the front of them. 00:32:34.458 --> 00:32:35.382 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Yeah. 00:32:35.382 --> 00:32:37.700 So-- 00:32:37.700 --> 00:32:39.550 AUDIENCE: What's in the books on the front? 00:32:39.550 --> 00:32:40.390 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Yeah. 00:32:40.390 --> 00:32:42.390 Oh yeah, that's great. 00:32:45.180 --> 00:32:52.200 So this is his dissertation in German, from Breslau, three 00:32:52.200 --> 00:32:53.910 years later. 00:32:53.910 --> 00:32:59.040 He wrote it in Florence, because he thought Florence 00:32:59.040 --> 00:33:01.040 was the most beautiful city in the world, and why not write 00:33:01.040 --> 00:33:02.070 your dissertation there? 00:33:02.070 --> 00:33:04.870 I recommend that highly, if any of you write 00:33:04.870 --> 00:33:07.320 dissertations. 00:33:07.320 --> 00:33:08.680 But this is Germany. 00:33:08.680 --> 00:33:11.400 And just keep that in mind when we get to World War II. 00:33:11.400 --> 00:33:12.314 PROFESSOR: Yeah, yeah. 00:33:12.314 --> 00:33:13.230 AUDIENCE: World War I. 00:33:13.230 --> 00:33:15.820 PROFESSOR: And he was sufficiently literate in 00:33:15.820 --> 00:33:17.000 German to be able to write a dissertation. 00:33:17.000 --> 00:33:17.440 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Yeah. 00:33:17.440 --> 00:33:17.740 Yeah. 00:33:17.740 --> 00:33:20.730 Well, he never felt his German was that great. 00:33:20.730 --> 00:33:24.710 And in fact, back to Latin, a story he tells us taking the 00:33:24.710 --> 00:33:27.570 train to Italy, or maybe back from Italy. 00:33:27.570 --> 00:33:30.830 But in any case, he was seated next to somebody-- maybe they 00:33:30.830 --> 00:33:32.220 were like Polish or something. 00:33:32.220 --> 00:33:34.040 But German didn't work. 00:33:34.040 --> 00:33:35.290 The other person didn't know English. 00:33:35.290 --> 00:33:37.600 So they conversed in Latin. 00:33:37.600 --> 00:33:38.110 PROFESSOR: Is that right? 00:33:38.110 --> 00:33:39.250 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: You never know. 00:33:39.250 --> 00:33:39.460 PROFESSOR: It's fascinating. 00:33:39.460 --> 00:33:41.970 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: It may come in handy. 00:33:41.970 --> 00:33:44.560 So then he comes back to-- 00:33:44.560 --> 00:33:47.810 well, he has a year working at a tannery in 00:33:47.810 --> 00:33:50.190 Manchester, New Hampshire. 00:33:50.190 --> 00:33:52.640 And as a result of that experience, he always said 00:33:52.640 --> 00:33:54.750 tanneries do not have to pollute. 00:33:54.750 --> 00:33:57.350 It's not necessary, if you run them right. 00:33:57.350 --> 00:33:59.560 And they don't have to smell either, that's the other thing 00:33:59.560 --> 00:34:01.720 you associate was a tannery. 00:34:01.720 --> 00:34:06.480 So he comes back. 00:34:06.480 --> 00:34:12.300 And you can see how chemical engineering around 1910, 00:34:12.300 --> 00:34:16.489 there's this kind of reversal of who was majoring in what. 00:34:16.489 --> 00:34:19.840 And this is before the war. 00:34:19.840 --> 00:34:25.060 Because when World War I comes, even before the US 00:34:25.060 --> 00:34:29.570 enters World War I, the Great War, in 1917, there's a 00:34:29.570 --> 00:34:34.330 tremendous demand for military equipment. 00:34:34.330 --> 00:34:39.219 And chemical engineering is connected with gas warfare, 00:34:39.219 --> 00:34:42.909 which was used right near the beginning of the war. 00:34:42.909 --> 00:34:47.560 It was in the spring of 1915 that chlorine was first used 00:34:47.560 --> 00:34:51.440 on the battlefield as a poison gas. 00:34:51.440 --> 00:34:53.922 Chlorine is not the most effective, by any means. 00:34:53.922 --> 00:34:55.679 It dissipates pretty quickly. 00:34:55.679 --> 00:34:59.880 But the surprise factor was such that it really did work 00:34:59.880 --> 00:35:01.310 in the initial use. 00:35:01.310 --> 00:35:05.650 And it had a tremendous psychological effect in 00:35:05.650 --> 00:35:10.340 scaring people on both sides. 00:35:10.340 --> 00:35:14.170 So Walker, William Walker, was put in charge of the Edgewood 00:35:14.170 --> 00:35:17.710 Arsenal, once the US entered the war, to 00:35:17.710 --> 00:35:19.780 manufacture toxic gases. 00:35:19.780 --> 00:35:24.790 And my grandfather was put in charge of gas defense. 00:35:24.790 --> 00:35:27.160 So he worked on the masks. 00:35:27.160 --> 00:35:28.460 And there's all sorts of-- 00:35:28.460 --> 00:35:32.860 I mean this is very specialized equipment. 00:35:32.860 --> 00:35:36.240 And to try to design equipment that made it possible to keep 00:35:36.240 --> 00:35:39.770 fighting and yet would protect the soldier from poison gas, 00:35:39.770 --> 00:35:42.276 not just the soldier but-- 00:35:42.276 --> 00:35:45.720 do I have some of the-- the animals too. 00:35:45.720 --> 00:35:49.030 In fact, there's a whole long story about the horses being 00:35:49.030 --> 00:35:51.520 affected by mustard gas, which is a vesicant. 00:35:51.520 --> 00:35:53.620 And it's a much nastier gas. 00:35:53.620 --> 00:35:55.680 And it would affect the animals too. 00:35:55.680 --> 00:35:58.730 So the one story that I need to tell you about my 00:35:58.730 --> 00:36:05.490 grandfather and gas defense, this made such an 00:36:05.490 --> 00:36:08.370 impression on me. 00:36:08.370 --> 00:36:09.935 We had this conversation was I was a teenager. 00:36:14.990 --> 00:36:19.090 Let's see, he said there was not a single Allied soldier-- 00:36:19.090 --> 00:36:20.423 am I taking too much? 00:36:20.423 --> 00:36:20.525 PROFESSOR: No, no. 00:36:20.525 --> 00:36:22.360 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: It won't take much longer. 00:36:22.360 --> 00:36:27.570 There's not a single Allied soldier is World War I who 00:36:27.570 --> 00:36:32.530 died from poison gas when they had the gas mask and other 00:36:32.530 --> 00:36:34.060 equipment on. 00:36:34.060 --> 00:36:37.960 And I grandpa, you must been so proud because you designed 00:36:37.960 --> 00:36:41.840 something that was fail-safe. 00:36:41.840 --> 00:36:43.330 It worked every time. 00:36:43.330 --> 00:36:48.020 And he said no, it means I over designed. 00:36:48.020 --> 00:36:54.140 And what he meant was the cost of putting on a 00:36:54.140 --> 00:36:55.360 mask is quite high. 00:36:55.360 --> 00:36:57.820 It's makes it hard to breathe. 00:36:57.820 --> 00:36:59.310 And it does encumber you. 00:36:59.310 --> 00:37:04.020 So in designing the gas mask, you have to make 00:37:04.020 --> 00:37:07.110 it just on the edge. 00:37:07.110 --> 00:37:10.210 Because then, soldiers are more likely to put it on in 00:37:10.210 --> 00:37:11.660 the first place. 00:37:11.660 --> 00:37:15.000 So by over designing it, it meant that he was surmising 00:37:15.000 --> 00:37:16.650 that more people had died but not putting 00:37:16.650 --> 00:37:17.890 on the mask at all. 00:37:17.890 --> 00:37:21.050 Because it was such a pain to put on. 00:37:21.050 --> 00:37:25.910 And for an engineer to think that way about human life, it 00:37:25.910 --> 00:37:29.182 just really took me aback. 00:37:29.182 --> 00:37:33.850 And I thought, boy, that's responsibility. 00:37:33.850 --> 00:37:38.230 After he died in 1975, you clean out the house of the 00:37:38.230 --> 00:37:40.370 person who has passed on. 00:37:40.370 --> 00:37:47.510 And down in the cellar, big basement, in the furnace room 00:37:47.510 --> 00:37:48.790 there are these shelves. 00:37:48.790 --> 00:37:53.340 And there were all these gas masks lined up on the shelves. 00:37:53.340 --> 00:37:58.450 And it turned out at the end of the war, the Allied troops 00:37:58.450 --> 00:38:01.860 have given him a model of each of the gas masks that had been 00:38:01.860 --> 00:38:03.760 used by the Allies in the war. 00:38:03.760 --> 00:38:07.590 So he had this collection of gas masks that were just 00:38:07.590 --> 00:38:08.770 sitting down there. 00:38:08.770 --> 00:38:12.325 And I called the Smithsonian and I called the MIT Museum, 00:38:12.325 --> 00:38:14.410 and I said I think this is really interesting. 00:38:14.410 --> 00:38:16.705 But nobody took the gas masks. 00:38:16.705 --> 00:38:20.606 So they have thrown out, because I tried. 00:38:20.606 --> 00:38:22.550 I tried. 00:38:22.550 --> 00:38:24.206 AUDIENCE: You weren't tempted to just mount them on wall in 00:38:24.206 --> 00:38:26.420 your living room? 00:38:26.420 --> 00:38:28.180 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Well, they're odd. 00:38:28.180 --> 00:38:31.090 Well, I mean we'd been looking at pictures from Japan, 00:38:31.090 --> 00:38:32.170 testing children. 00:38:32.170 --> 00:38:36.380 And when you get in a haz suit, it's really scary. 00:38:36.380 --> 00:38:37.710 It's just very curious, period. 00:38:37.710 --> 00:38:39.343 So no, I was not inclined to keep them around. 00:38:39.343 --> 00:38:41.510 I was just surprised somebody didn't want them. 00:38:44.260 --> 00:38:45.570 Well, actually now I can go back to 00:38:45.570 --> 00:38:47.302 gas masks for a minute. 00:38:51.120 --> 00:38:54.950 You've read about the tension between Noyes and Walker, 00:38:54.950 --> 00:38:56.410 Walker finally leaving. 00:38:56.410 --> 00:38:59.410 My grandfather finally becoming head of the chemical 00:38:59.410 --> 00:39:01.300 engineering department in 1920, 00:39:01.300 --> 00:39:03.630 known as Walker's protege. 00:39:03.630 --> 00:39:08.360 But also the real appreciation for the science-based 00:39:08.360 --> 00:39:09.060 engineering. 00:39:09.060 --> 00:39:12.920 And the more I read Servos's article, the more I would love 00:39:12.920 --> 00:39:17.670 to look at his headship of Course 10 in that period. 00:39:17.670 --> 00:39:20.240 I think it's a really interesting story. 00:39:20.240 --> 00:39:20.750 I don't know it. 00:39:20.750 --> 00:39:24.176 But I'm almost sure it's there. 00:39:24.176 --> 00:39:29.000 OK, he it comes back. 00:39:29.000 --> 00:39:31.810 Heads the department for 10 years, but that isn't what he 00:39:31.810 --> 00:39:32.400 wants to do. 00:39:32.400 --> 00:39:34.590 He's not an administrative type. 00:39:34.590 --> 00:39:36.030 He doesn't like it. 00:39:36.030 --> 00:39:39.550 He loves teaching and he's famous for his teaching. 00:39:39.550 --> 00:39:42.770 And that's where he really made his mark. 00:39:42.770 --> 00:39:45.490 But he did a lot of consulting for what was what was then 00:39:45.490 --> 00:39:49.640 Standard Oil in New Jersey, Esso, Exxon. 00:39:49.640 --> 00:39:53.500 And one thing your articles didn't mention I think is the 00:39:53.500 --> 00:39:58.160 relationship between the university and industry 00:39:58.160 --> 00:40:00.930 through consulting work and how that 00:40:00.930 --> 00:40:02.880 fits into the picture. 00:40:02.880 --> 00:40:05.850 And he was a great believer in the value of consulting. 00:40:05.850 --> 00:40:09.890 That's how you find out what's happening in the world and it 00:40:09.890 --> 00:40:10.880 keeps you on your toes. 00:40:10.880 --> 00:40:12.820 And it's also useful for industry. 00:40:12.820 --> 00:40:19.330 So he, to his death, he got a check every month from Exxon. 00:40:19.330 --> 00:40:22.170 I mean it wasn't a lot, but it was a retainer. 00:40:22.170 --> 00:40:23.540 And he died at what, 94. 00:40:23.540 --> 00:40:27.740 So they were very loyal to him and vice versa. 00:40:27.740 --> 00:40:35.480 So this is a drawing of the catalytic cracking process. 00:40:35.480 --> 00:40:37.405 Let's see, have you been to the MIT Museum exhibit? 00:40:37.405 --> 00:40:38.120 You must have been. 00:40:38.120 --> 00:40:38.500 AUDIENCE: I have. 00:40:38.500 --> 00:40:39.990 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: OK. 00:40:39.990 --> 00:40:40.985 And you go through the whole thing. 00:40:40.985 --> 00:40:43.660 And just when you're going to leave when to go out of the 00:40:43.660 --> 00:40:50.820 exhibit in that back room, on the left, is a picture of my 00:40:50.820 --> 00:40:54.410 grandfather and a couple other gentlemen at a refinery in 00:40:54.410 --> 00:41:00.080 Venezuela where catalytic cracking has been put into 00:41:00.080 --> 00:41:02.000 production in 1939. 00:41:02.000 --> 00:41:05.030 And there's a barrel above there, an 00:41:05.030 --> 00:41:06.070 empty barrel I trust. 00:41:06.070 --> 00:41:08.120 But anyway, just to make the exhibit 00:41:08.120 --> 00:41:10.090 about catalytic cracking. 00:41:10.090 --> 00:41:14.720 But the timing, 1939, means that once the war broke out in 00:41:14.720 --> 00:41:19.200 1940, the demand for aviation fuel was huge. 00:41:19.200 --> 00:41:22.740 I mean catalytic cracking began as a way to get higher 00:41:22.740 --> 00:41:24.365 octane for automobiles. 00:41:24.365 --> 00:41:27.440 And it was the automobile race that instigated it. 00:41:27.440 --> 00:41:30.730 AUDIENCE: Does everybody know what catalytic cracking is? 00:41:30.730 --> 00:41:34.130 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: So let me give my brief, nontechnical-- 00:41:34.130 --> 00:41:35.670 actually this is very interesting. 00:41:35.670 --> 00:41:39.330 He did the work in the basement of Building 12. 00:41:39.330 --> 00:41:46.120 And you need some kind of a catalytic agent 00:41:46.120 --> 00:41:48.560 to promote the cracking. 00:41:48.560 --> 00:41:54.690 It's usually a powder and its mixed in with the petroleum to 00:41:54.690 --> 00:41:58.730 get more higher octane fractions or lighter weight 00:41:58.730 --> 00:42:01.440 fractions out of a certain amount of petroleum. 00:42:01.440 --> 00:42:04.420 So if you have the same amount of petroleum and the cracking 00:42:04.420 --> 00:42:07.430 works efficiently, you get more usable high octane fuel 00:42:07.430 --> 00:42:08.560 than you do without it. 00:42:08.560 --> 00:42:10.000 So you have this-- 00:42:10.000 --> 00:42:12.588 AUDIENCE: You take crude oil, basically, and separating out 00:42:12.588 --> 00:42:13.381 all the parts. 00:42:13.381 --> 00:42:16.330 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: It's part of the distillation process. 00:42:16.330 --> 00:42:19.870 And a higher octane means you can run engines faster and get 00:42:19.870 --> 00:42:23.112 more power out of them, without knocking and so forth. 00:42:23.112 --> 00:42:25.880 You know when you need higher octane, if you fill up your 00:42:25.880 --> 00:42:28.320 car and your car starts knocking. 00:42:28.320 --> 00:42:30.000 That's a sign that things are not going well. 00:42:30.000 --> 00:42:31.090 It's true in cars. 00:42:31.090 --> 00:42:32.410 It's true in airplanes. 00:42:32.410 --> 00:42:38.850 So they were trying to blow the catalyst through the 00:42:38.850 --> 00:42:41.170 petroleum stream. 00:42:41.170 --> 00:42:44.070 But as a pattern, it kept settling out. 00:42:44.070 --> 00:42:47.340 It didn't stay mixed in with the stream. 00:42:47.340 --> 00:42:50.110 So after months and months of work, on trying to get it to 00:42:50.110 --> 00:42:53.640 hold into the stream, my grandfather, who was famously 00:42:53.640 --> 00:42:58.000 profane, said damn it, let it settle out. 00:42:58.000 --> 00:43:01.060 And in other words, if you let it settle out, then you get a 00:43:01.060 --> 00:43:04.480 fluid bed at kind of the bottom of the reactor. 00:43:04.480 --> 00:43:09.360 And it mixes the fumes, the petroleum fumes with, or 00:43:09.360 --> 00:43:13.165 gases, with the catalyst, better than if you try to blow 00:43:13.165 --> 00:43:15.360 it along with the stream. 00:43:15.360 --> 00:43:20.320 So it's fluid-bed catalytic cracking that he and his 00:43:20.320 --> 00:43:25.330 students are known for and brought a huge fortune to 00:43:25.330 --> 00:43:28.300 Exxon, which is one of the early adopters. 00:43:28.300 --> 00:43:31.050 What he never imagined was that-- 00:43:31.050 --> 00:43:33.150 again, it comes on line in 1939. 00:43:33.150 --> 00:43:38.030 Within a year, the tankers are going to Venezuela to fill up 00:43:38.030 --> 00:43:41.500 with a high octane aviation fuel, going to the docks of 00:43:41.500 --> 00:43:44.050 Liverpool, and pumping the fuel into 00:43:44.050 --> 00:43:46.080 the tanks of Spitfires. 00:43:46.080 --> 00:43:48.740 They don't even put it in the holding tank. 00:43:48.740 --> 00:43:52.670 They put it right in the tanks of the airplanes. 00:43:52.670 --> 00:43:54.830 And the Spitfires go up to do battle in 00:43:54.830 --> 00:43:56.760 the Battle of Britain. 00:43:56.760 --> 00:44:04.040 So it's a dramatic example of what you do and then how 00:44:04.040 --> 00:44:08.240 things happen to change the implications of what you do, 00:44:08.240 --> 00:44:10.290 that are entirely out of your control. 00:44:10.290 --> 00:44:12.580 That of course is also the story of 00:44:12.580 --> 00:44:13.830 the Manhattan Project. 00:44:17.050 --> 00:44:20.060 When the Manhattan Project got under way-- 00:44:20.060 --> 00:44:22.030 do I have any slides about this? 00:44:22.030 --> 00:44:23.540 Oh, this goes back, OK-- 00:44:28.290 --> 00:44:33.710 basically my grandfather is asked to head up the series of 00:44:33.710 --> 00:44:38.530 committees making recommendations about the 00:44:38.530 --> 00:44:42.950 extraction and refinement of fissionable material. 00:44:42.950 --> 00:44:46.660 In other words, the chemical engineering problems of the 00:44:46.660 --> 00:44:52.590 atomic weapons, they require high grade ore, high grade 00:44:52.590 --> 00:44:54.220 uranium or plutonium. 00:44:54.220 --> 00:44:55.220 And how do you get it? 00:44:55.220 --> 00:44:56.690 That's an engineering problem. 00:44:56.690 --> 00:44:58.450 That's a chemical engineering problem. 00:44:58.450 --> 00:45:03.446 So if you go to the MIT archives and ask for Warren K. 00:45:03.446 --> 00:45:07.376 Lewis material, a lot of it is still classified from World 00:45:07.376 --> 00:45:10.460 War II, but there is a notebook that he kept when he 00:45:10.460 --> 00:45:13.760 was going around to, trying to figure out-- 00:45:13.760 --> 00:45:16.100 I think this is 1941. 00:45:16.100 --> 00:45:20.110 When was the chain reaction started? '42, right, in Stagg 00:45:20.110 --> 00:45:21.070 Field, Chicago? 00:45:21.070 --> 00:45:22.010 AUDIENCE: Chicago? 00:45:22.010 --> 00:45:22.370 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Chicago. 00:45:22.370 --> 00:45:23.040 Was that earlier? 00:45:23.040 --> 00:45:23.540 AUDIENCE: Earlier. 00:45:23.540 --> 00:45:24.075 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: It was earlier. 00:45:24.075 --> 00:45:26.340 AUDIENCE: Before the war I think. 00:45:26.340 --> 00:45:27.820 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: In the middle of this notebook, 00:45:27.820 --> 00:45:29.420 appears that event. 00:45:29.420 --> 00:45:32.030 And he's going around to DuPont, to Oak Ridge. 00:45:32.030 --> 00:45:35.500 He's going out to Berkeley, Lawrence Lab, talking to all 00:45:35.500 --> 00:45:40.600 these people, trying to figure out how to do the refining to 00:45:40.600 --> 00:45:44.400 get the material that they would need for these weapons. 00:45:44.400 --> 00:45:46.650 And he served on a series of committees. 00:45:46.650 --> 00:45:53.550 Was gone all during the war, kind of overseeing the 00:45:53.550 --> 00:45:56.790 construction and the development of these vast 00:45:56.790 --> 00:46:00.872 facilities, especially at Oak Ridge, also out in Hanford. 00:46:00.872 --> 00:46:04.560 AUDIENCE: If you look at the Manhattan Project, which my 00:46:04.560 --> 00:46:07.194 favorite statistics would be the size of the US auto 00:46:07.194 --> 00:46:11.200 industry at the time, a huge project, less that 10% of it 00:46:11.200 --> 00:46:14.960 is concentrated at Los Alamos or [INAUDIBLE]. 00:46:14.960 --> 00:46:16.468 Brilliant physicists are-- 00:46:16.468 --> 00:46:19.610 and most of it were chemical engineering plants in 00:46:19.610 --> 00:46:24.362 Tennessee and in Washington state, huge plants making the 00:46:24.362 --> 00:46:27.050 actual material. 00:46:27.050 --> 00:46:32.390 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: So he told his wife, my grandmother, just 00:46:32.390 --> 00:46:33.410 don't ask where I am. 00:46:33.410 --> 00:46:37.410 But if you need me in an emergency, you call General 00:46:37.410 --> 00:46:41.220 Groves in Washington, and gave her the phone number. 00:46:41.220 --> 00:46:45.350 And again, I presume the students have already heard 00:46:45.350 --> 00:46:48.850 this, but my mother was married in 1940 and 00:46:48.850 --> 00:46:50.210 I was born in 1944. 00:46:50.210 --> 00:46:51.570 So this was kind of like the next 00:46:51.570 --> 00:46:53.390 generation was coming along. 00:46:53.390 --> 00:46:56.807 And my mother tells me that when she heard the Lowell 00:46:56.807 --> 00:46:59.620 Thomas announcement of the bomb being dropped on 00:46:59.620 --> 00:47:03.780 Hiroshima, on the radio, she said now I know where pop's 00:47:03.780 --> 00:47:06.490 been, all the war. 00:47:06.490 --> 00:47:09.380 And I'm a baby. 00:47:09.380 --> 00:47:15.650 And we're back to Japan these days. 00:47:15.650 --> 00:47:22.335 OK, I have to think he was deeply troubled by his role in 00:47:22.335 --> 00:47:24.730 the Manhattan Project because he didn't talk about it. 00:47:24.730 --> 00:47:27.340 He talked a lot about World War I and gas masks. 00:47:27.340 --> 00:47:30.360 But World War II, he just-- 00:47:30.360 --> 00:47:34.400 I mean I wish I had pressed him more, but I didn't. 00:47:34.400 --> 00:47:36.850 My mother said that after the war-- 00:47:36.850 --> 00:47:40.630 for example, at those days if you got a watch, a wrist 00:47:40.630 --> 00:47:42.820 watch, and you wanted it to glow in the dark, they put a 00:47:42.820 --> 00:47:46.460 little radium on the dial just to make it glow in the dark. 00:47:46.460 --> 00:47:48.320 And he would scrape it off. 00:47:48.320 --> 00:47:51.980 He didn't want any of that stuff near him. 00:47:51.980 --> 00:47:54.480 Anyway, so I'm surmising. 00:47:54.480 --> 00:47:58.830 But he chaired the Lewis committee, and you'll hear a 00:47:58.830 --> 00:48:01.460 lot more about that, kept teaching at MIT. 00:48:01.460 --> 00:48:05.830 My husband had him as a kind of senior thesis adviser in 00:48:05.830 --> 00:48:09.000 the early 1960s. 00:48:09.000 --> 00:48:14.450 And there's a lot of letters that he wrote about the role 00:48:14.450 --> 00:48:17.040 of the engineer and civilization, the profession 00:48:17.040 --> 00:48:19.360 of engineering. 00:48:19.360 --> 00:48:22.090 And this quote from the Lewis Report I 00:48:22.090 --> 00:48:23.700 think really captures-- 00:48:23.700 --> 00:48:26.285 I mean we don't know who actually wrote it. 00:48:26.285 --> 00:48:28.640 Maybe it Morrison or somebody. 00:48:28.640 --> 00:48:30.850 But he really believes that. 00:48:30.850 --> 00:48:37.930 He said, if I could come back, it would be as a social 00:48:37.930 --> 00:48:41.470 scientist, because that's where the big problems are, 00:48:41.470 --> 00:48:43.050 the really intractable ones. 00:48:43.050 --> 00:48:45.790 I can see after World War II why you would say that. 00:48:45.790 --> 00:48:49.280 So that's the-- 00:48:49.280 --> 00:48:51.680 yeah, the Spring Garden farm again. 00:48:51.680 --> 00:48:52.910 OK, so back to the farm. 00:48:52.910 --> 00:49:01.610 So what I did in about 15 minutes before class was just 00:49:01.610 --> 00:49:03.240 go through my box of stuff. 00:49:03.240 --> 00:49:05.800 And I'm just going to pass this around. 00:49:05.800 --> 00:49:08.850 Obviously, just collect it back there, when it 00:49:08.850 --> 00:49:10.920 gets back to you. 00:49:10.920 --> 00:49:13.240 The point is what you learn from archives that you don't 00:49:13.240 --> 00:49:17.300 learn from reading articles or so forth. 00:49:17.300 --> 00:49:20.380 Monthly Report, Laurel City Schools, Laurel, Delaware, 00:49:20.380 --> 00:49:23.560 Report of Warren Lewis, 1895. 00:49:23.560 --> 00:49:26.740 This tells you sort of, not only what his grades are, but 00:49:26.740 --> 00:49:27.350 what they're teaching. 00:49:27.350 --> 00:49:28.570 PROFESSOR: Is that the original document? 00:49:28.570 --> 00:49:29.740 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: That's the document. 00:49:29.740 --> 00:49:31.200 Why do I have this stuff? 00:49:31.200 --> 00:49:33.488 I have no idea. 00:49:33.488 --> 00:49:37.130 I gave a lot of it to the archives. 00:49:37.130 --> 00:49:38.610 And they have copies of this. 00:49:38.610 --> 00:49:40.850 And I kept a few original documents. 00:49:40.850 --> 00:49:42.060 There's a lot more. 00:49:42.060 --> 00:49:44.840 I mean I am from a very literate family. 00:49:44.840 --> 00:49:46.620 I don't know how else to put it. 00:49:46.620 --> 00:49:50.080 Now Ross Basset told you about going through MIT yearbooks 00:49:50.080 --> 00:49:52.863 and looking at where people are from? 00:49:52.863 --> 00:49:54.760 PROFESSOR: A little bit. 00:49:54.760 --> 00:49:57.230 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: This is my grandfather on the left. 00:49:57.230 --> 00:50:03.320 So this is what Ross was looking at, hometown and list. 00:50:03.320 --> 00:50:05.660 My grandfather's list is very brief. 00:50:05.660 --> 00:50:09.430 But again, I just thought you'd like to see. 00:50:09.430 --> 00:50:14.780 And Breslau, here are photographs of Breslau, where 00:50:14.780 --> 00:50:19.690 he studied, got his Ph.D. I mean it got bombed to 00:50:19.690 --> 00:50:20.670 smithereens in the war. 00:50:20.670 --> 00:50:22.370 None of this is here anymore. 00:50:22.370 --> 00:50:26.870 But this is old Germany. 00:50:26.870 --> 00:50:29.730 PROFESSOR: Did you ever go back to try to visit there? 00:50:29.730 --> 00:50:33.330 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Not Breslau, no. 00:50:33.330 --> 00:50:35.100 I think it blew all to smithereens. 00:50:35.100 --> 00:50:36.360 PROFESSOR: Probably nothing to see. 00:50:36.360 --> 00:50:38.040 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: And I had a couple of bigger photos, that 00:50:38.040 --> 00:50:40.800 are really beauties, that I have framed it at home. 00:50:40.800 --> 00:50:42.255 And here's his dissertation. 00:50:42.255 --> 00:50:47.210 I'm not sure, my German not being workable. 00:50:47.210 --> 00:50:52.080 But it's signed Rosalind D. Kenway, from Warren, July '05, 00:50:52.080 --> 00:50:53.330 that's my grandmother. 00:50:58.740 --> 00:51:02.410 The Tech, special chemistry and chemical engineering 00:51:02.410 --> 00:51:05.030 issue, 1910. 00:51:05.030 --> 00:51:08.720 So remember that chart showing chemistry is going down and 00:51:08.720 --> 00:51:10.650 chemical-- so this is published at that time. 00:51:10.650 --> 00:51:15.070 I have no idea why I have this, but I do. 00:51:15.070 --> 00:51:18.580 And it's so interesting. 00:51:18.580 --> 00:51:21.470 Few industries not founded on chemistry, it says. 00:51:24.610 --> 00:51:25.880 Now, this is a Xerox. 00:51:25.880 --> 00:51:30.840 This is his father basically selling off the stock of the 00:51:30.840 --> 00:51:34.220 farm, public sale of valuable cows. 00:51:34.220 --> 00:51:37.830 And this is what his father writes in 1917, back in 00:51:37.830 --> 00:51:38.930 Laurel, Delaware. 00:51:38.930 --> 00:51:42.870 I have sailed life's storm-swept sea for 74 years 00:51:42.870 --> 00:51:44.880 and I am now nearing port. 00:51:44.880 --> 00:51:46.430 I smell the land. 00:51:46.430 --> 00:51:49.430 It is wise that I should take in-- and I can't read it. 00:51:49.430 --> 00:51:51.710 But it must be take in the sails-- 00:51:51.710 --> 00:51:53.250 Therefore on-- 00:51:53.250 --> 00:51:55.790 He's going to sell his milk cows. 00:51:55.790 --> 00:51:58.610 This is the start of the decline of agriculture in the 00:51:58.610 --> 00:52:03.350 United States right here, the family farm. 00:52:03.350 --> 00:52:07.760 This is the high school, now Newton North, Newton high 00:52:07.760 --> 00:52:13.360 school kind of review magazine. 00:52:13.360 --> 00:52:14.490 This is 1918. 00:52:14.490 --> 00:52:17.730 A lot of young men are going over to Europe. 00:52:17.730 --> 00:52:22.490 But it talks about a Newton high school scientist. 00:52:22.490 --> 00:52:25.320 Of the many capable men on the defense side of chemical 00:52:25.320 --> 00:52:28.450 warfare service, perhaps none has contributed more practical 00:52:28.450 --> 00:52:30.050 ideas that Dr. Lewis. 00:52:30.050 --> 00:52:33.510 This is his high school, hall of fame, kind of. 00:52:33.510 --> 00:52:34.760 This is page 10. 00:52:37.870 --> 00:52:40.150 My kids went to the same school. 00:52:40.150 --> 00:52:41.306 PROFESSOR: Newton North? 00:52:41.306 --> 00:52:43.170 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Yeah, of course. 00:52:43.170 --> 00:52:44.465 OK, this is March 5, 1920. 00:52:44.465 --> 00:52:45.715 PROFESSOR: Of course. 00:52:49.010 --> 00:52:50.060 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: You got to show spirit. 00:52:50.060 --> 00:52:51.660 PROFESSOR: Of course. 00:52:51.660 --> 00:52:53.527 Boy if live in Newton, there's a difference. 00:52:53.527 --> 00:52:53.880 I know that. 00:52:53.880 --> 00:52:54.050 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: A different Newton. 00:52:54.050 --> 00:52:56.410 It matters whether it's north or south. 00:52:56.410 --> 00:53:02.170 OK, Debbie K. Lewis, required Course 10, 1920. 00:53:02.170 --> 00:53:04.770 His time here seems very interesting. 00:53:04.770 --> 00:53:06.020 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. 00:53:09.330 --> 00:53:10.420 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Well, actually I won't pass this 00:53:10.420 --> 00:53:11.810 around because he-- well, maybe I will. 00:53:11.810 --> 00:53:13.270 This is Spring Garden farm. 00:53:13.270 --> 00:53:15.242 I showed you the photo actually earlier. 00:53:20.720 --> 00:53:28.190 OK, here we have-- oh look, August 5, 1946. 00:53:28.190 --> 00:53:29.830 Anybody know what happened on August 5, 19-- 00:53:29.830 --> 00:53:34.441 you know what happened on August 6, 1945? 00:53:34.441 --> 00:53:37.000 It's Hiroshima. 00:53:37.000 --> 00:53:41.880 A year minus a day later, James R. Killian writes to Dr. 00:53:41.880 --> 00:53:46.280 Compton, during the summer, there have been a number of 00:53:46.280 --> 00:53:48.550 discussions of the need to promote here at the Institute, 00:53:48.550 --> 00:53:51.380 more interest in the study of educational objectives and 00:53:51.380 --> 00:53:52.340 procedures. 00:53:52.340 --> 00:53:56.130 This calls for the Lewis Commission essentially. 00:53:56.130 --> 00:54:00.000 And it's a letter saying Lewis should head it. 00:54:00.000 --> 00:54:02.850 And here's some people who should be on it, and here's 00:54:02.850 --> 00:54:04.400 the budget. 00:54:04.400 --> 00:54:08.760 And then a second letter, outlining in more detail what 00:54:08.760 --> 00:54:10.662 the Lewis Commission would do. 00:54:10.662 --> 00:54:12.680 It follows shortly thereafter. 00:54:12.680 --> 00:54:17.330 Then I just have a bunch of, again my grandfather's 00:54:17.330 --> 00:54:22.000 thoughts about the history of chemical engineering; 00:54:22.000 --> 00:54:25.530 engineering as a profession; my favorite title, "The Place 00:54:25.530 --> 00:54:28.790 of Engineering in Society and Civilization." This is from 00:54:28.790 --> 00:54:30.380 Tech Review. 00:54:30.380 --> 00:54:32.460 And I thought you would enjoy this title, "Chemical 00:54:32.460 --> 00:54:40.220 Engineering, A New Science," a new science, 1953. 00:54:40.220 --> 00:54:46.190 And so these are all published in one form or another. 00:54:46.190 --> 00:54:48.270 But then there are letters. 00:54:48.270 --> 00:54:52.440 And there are quite a few letters to me, to my mother, 00:54:52.440 --> 00:54:56.330 to my father, when my father's trying to figure out-- this is 00:54:56.330 --> 00:54:59.960 1945 and my father notes that at GE, so many younger 00:54:59.960 --> 00:55:03.030 engineers are getting offers from small companies and 00:55:03.030 --> 00:55:04.830 should be thinking about this? 00:55:04.830 --> 00:55:06.930 And my grandfather writes this long letter 00:55:06.930 --> 00:55:08.150 back, in long hand. 00:55:08.150 --> 00:55:14.060 In 1970, somebody has asked him for conversations. 00:55:14.060 --> 00:55:16.560 He wants to discuss the fundamental differences 00:55:16.560 --> 00:55:21.060 between Greek philosophy and modern science on the purely 00:55:21.060 --> 00:55:23.570 intellectual level. 00:55:23.570 --> 00:55:25.620 And he wants me to come up and help him write 00:55:25.620 --> 00:55:26.650 something about this. 00:55:26.650 --> 00:55:31.320 And this is very moving because he says, I am getting 00:55:31.320 --> 00:55:38.210 older and it's hard for people to understand me. 00:55:38.210 --> 00:55:41.616 You, however, have heard enough of it over the years so 00:55:41.616 --> 00:55:43.540 you know at least the direction in 00:55:43.540 --> 00:55:44.860 which my mind is working. 00:55:44.860 --> 00:55:46.170 PROFESSOR: Ah, interesting. 00:55:46.170 --> 00:55:47.380 High compliment. 00:55:47.380 --> 00:55:47.730 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Yeah. 00:55:47.730 --> 00:55:49.275 It's a huge compliment. 00:55:53.190 --> 00:55:55.920 Anyway, if you don't get the personality, 00:55:55.920 --> 00:55:57.040 you're missing things. 00:55:57.040 --> 00:55:59.400 Thanksgiving dinner. 00:55:59.400 --> 00:56:06.830 Actually this would be 1963, the fall of 1963. 00:56:06.830 --> 00:56:09.790 So what happened in the fall of 1963? 00:56:09.790 --> 00:56:11.375 PROFESSOR: Oh, Kennedy. 00:56:11.375 --> 00:56:12.670 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: It was right after Kennedy's 00:56:12.670 --> 00:56:14.110 assassination. 00:56:14.110 --> 00:56:16.250 And my grandfather is saying grace. 00:56:16.250 --> 00:56:18.890 I remember this like yesterday. 00:56:18.890 --> 00:56:22.900 He had his usual grace and he gave thanks for the American 00:56:22.900 --> 00:56:25.880 family, because in such difficult times like these, 00:56:25.880 --> 00:56:28.320 that's the rock on which the country is founded, the 00:56:28.320 --> 00:56:29.510 American family. 00:56:29.510 --> 00:56:34.580 This is my then boyfriend, between me and my mother. 00:56:34.580 --> 00:56:35.920 PROFESSOR: It's not Gary. 00:56:35.920 --> 00:56:39.014 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Yeah, yeah. 00:56:39.014 --> 00:56:42.226 Have you see the actual Lewis Report? 00:56:42.226 --> 00:56:43.670 PROFESSOR: I have never seen that. 00:56:43.670 --> 00:56:46.260 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: It's nice, nice binding job. 00:56:46.260 --> 00:56:50.740 And this is A Dollar to a Doughnut, which are stories 00:56:50.740 --> 00:56:53.010 about my grandfather's teaching. 00:56:53.010 --> 00:56:55.680 And this is what the chemical engineering department put 00:56:55.680 --> 00:56:58.630 together for him when he retired as a feitschrift, 00:56:58.630 --> 00:57:01.960 because they felt the normal, staid one was not appropriate 00:57:01.960 --> 00:57:02.760 for such a character. 00:57:02.760 --> 00:57:06.450 PROFESSOR: What year did he retire? 00:57:06.450 --> 00:57:07.940 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Well, this is the official retirement. 00:57:07.940 --> 00:57:10.510 So this is like 1950 or so. 00:57:10.510 --> 00:57:12.600 But as I say, he's like Leo. 00:57:12.600 --> 00:57:14.200 He just kept teaching. 00:57:14.200 --> 00:57:16.200 This is a CD. 00:57:16.200 --> 00:57:18.580 Just so you know, in the archives they have-- this is 00:57:18.580 --> 00:57:22.520 from tape, the original tape, now on CD. 00:57:22.520 --> 00:57:24.910 At the 50th anniversary of the Department of Chemical 00:57:24.910 --> 00:57:29.330 Engineering, so in 1970, he gave a talk about 00:57:29.330 --> 00:57:32.930 reminiscences and the fascinating history of 00:57:32.930 --> 00:57:35.280 chemical engineering in the 19th century, where he has a 00:57:35.280 --> 00:57:41.710 whole theory about the time lag between discovery and 00:57:41.710 --> 00:57:44.020 implementation, both in electrical and chemical 00:57:44.020 --> 00:57:45.800 engineering. 00:57:45.800 --> 00:57:48.570 For example, the role of batteries in running the 00:57:48.570 --> 00:57:52.720 telegraph system, which I had never thought about it as an 00:57:52.720 --> 00:57:55.100 incentive to chemical engineering. 00:57:55.100 --> 00:57:57.550 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Oh, very interesting. 00:57:57.550 --> 00:58:00.980 AUDIENCE: You know the great mentors of the chemical 00:58:00.980 --> 00:58:03.920 industry that got [INAUDIBLE]? 00:58:03.920 --> 00:58:04.410 PROFESSOR: No. 00:58:04.410 --> 00:58:05.880 AUDIENCE: Paper making. 00:58:05.880 --> 00:58:07.520 A lot of early involvement. 00:58:07.520 --> 00:58:10.300 [INAUDIBLE] 00:58:10.300 --> 00:58:13.468 to some degree, much less than they were a national center of 00:58:13.468 --> 00:58:14.620 paper making. 00:58:14.620 --> 00:58:17.212 A lot of the early MIT chemical engineers were with 00:58:17.212 --> 00:58:18.940 the paper industry. 00:58:18.940 --> 00:58:21.350 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: I didn't know that. 00:58:21.350 --> 00:58:23.030 And this last thing, and I bring this along just in 00:58:23.030 --> 00:58:24.060 serendipity. 00:58:24.060 --> 00:58:27.436 This is an obituary in 1975. 00:58:27.436 --> 00:58:29.730 He died on March 9. 00:58:29.730 --> 00:58:31.495 This is the Tech Talk, when we used to have 00:58:31.495 --> 00:58:34.020 a printed MIT newspaper. 00:58:34.020 --> 00:58:35.850 But what struck me as I was picking 00:58:35.850 --> 00:58:36.540 it up, OK, an obituary. 00:58:36.540 --> 00:58:42.980 And then I look on the back of the first page, "Response 00:58:42.980 --> 00:58:48.060 Awaited on Proposal to Train Iranian Nuclear Engineers." 00:58:48.060 --> 00:58:53.660 And it just struck me, this is why I love hard copy. 00:58:53.660 --> 00:58:55.270 Because you' come across things you don't 00:58:55.270 --> 00:58:56.190 plan to come across. 00:58:56.190 --> 00:59:00.540 And this is a reminder of this is happening. 00:59:00.540 --> 00:59:04.820 And of course this had my attention, but on the back we 00:59:04.820 --> 00:59:06.990 were being friendly with Iran. 00:59:06.990 --> 00:59:09.110 The Shah was still around. 00:59:09.110 --> 00:59:09.930 OK. 00:59:09.930 --> 00:59:12.330 So that's my show and tell. 00:59:12.330 --> 00:59:13.580 Do you have any questions? 00:59:16.130 --> 00:59:18.080 PROFESSOR: Yeah. 00:59:18.080 --> 00:59:20.250 Thank you for bringing all this stuff. 00:59:20.250 --> 00:59:22.550 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Well, I just love stuff. 00:59:22.550 --> 00:59:27.960 PROFESSOR: It reminds me that I think historians have a 00:59:27.960 --> 00:59:31.100 special feeling for stuff like this. 00:59:31.100 --> 00:59:33.780 But I remember when I was working on my dissertation at 00:59:33.780 --> 00:59:37.530 the National Archives, I was writing about a topic that 00:59:37.530 --> 00:59:40.060 dated back to the end of the War of 1812. 00:59:40.060 --> 00:59:42.360 So it was a long time ago. 00:59:42.360 --> 00:59:47.610 And I was getting materials out of the archives that were 00:59:47.610 --> 00:59:50.420 still bound in the original red tape. 00:59:50.420 --> 00:59:52.120 And you'd pull those strings apart and they would 00:59:52.120 --> 00:59:53.370 disintegrate. 00:59:55.350 --> 00:59:58.380 I don't know, it's a weird feeling thinking that I'm the 00:59:58.380 --> 01:00:03.800 first one to look at the stuff in over 200 years. 01:00:03.800 --> 01:00:07.310 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: It's kind of creepy, but it's also 01:00:07.310 --> 01:00:08.290 exhilarating. 01:00:08.290 --> 01:00:09.490 PROFESSOR: Yeah, it is. 01:00:09.490 --> 01:00:11.800 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Exploration, right. 01:00:11.800 --> 01:00:15.690 PROFESSOR: And then we had a colleague that Ros and I knew, 01:00:15.690 --> 01:00:17.750 and I think you may have known him too, David. 01:00:17.750 --> 01:00:18.910 His name was Brooke Hindle. 01:00:18.910 --> 01:00:22.600 He was the former director of the Museum of American History 01:00:22.600 --> 01:00:23.690 at the Smithsonian. 01:00:23.690 --> 01:00:28.120 But he wrote an article one time called "What is a Piece 01:00:28.120 --> 01:00:31.840 of the True Cross Worth." Do you remember that article, 01:00:31.840 --> 01:00:35.070 about the importance of artifacts in the study of 01:00:35.070 --> 01:00:37.830 technology particularly? 01:00:37.830 --> 01:00:40.330 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: The story is that they had four 01:00:40.330 --> 01:00:42.570 children, two daughters, two sons. 01:00:42.570 --> 01:00:49.280 The other daughter, besides my mother, Mary, married a guy 01:00:49.280 --> 01:00:52.140 named Cherry Emerson, who went into plastics 01:00:52.140 --> 01:00:54.390 after World War II. 01:00:54.390 --> 01:00:57.150 Plastics, and to quote Chambers, made quite a bit of 01:00:57.150 --> 01:01:00.220 money in chemical engineering. 01:01:00.220 --> 01:01:02.630 And he studied with Doc during the war. 01:01:02.630 --> 01:01:07.940 So he gave the money to renovate the library, naming 01:01:07.940 --> 01:01:12.780 it in honor of my grandmother, Warren K Lewis' wife. 01:01:12.780 --> 01:01:15.780 And he always claimed it was because she 01:01:15.780 --> 01:01:17.180 loved music so much. 01:01:17.180 --> 01:01:20.345 And I must say I never heard her listen 01:01:20.345 --> 01:01:22.320 or talk about music. 01:01:22.320 --> 01:01:24.830 So I think it was more Cherry's love 01:01:24.830 --> 01:01:26.110 of music, than her's. 01:01:26.110 --> 01:01:27.010 But that doesn't matter. 01:01:27.010 --> 01:01:30.770 I think it's a great library. 01:01:30.770 --> 01:01:35.610 And I think my grandmother would particularly be happy 01:01:35.610 --> 01:01:37.780 that students can sleep on the couches there. 01:01:37.780 --> 01:01:40.420 She's a very gentle soul. 01:01:46.290 --> 01:01:50.031 AUDIENCE: Does anybody here have parents who went to MIT 01:01:50.031 --> 01:01:52.756 or other relatives? 01:01:52.756 --> 01:01:57.272 So one think you do see is, any institution that lasts 01:01:57.272 --> 01:02:00.180 this long has this kind of family connection. 01:02:00.180 --> 01:02:03.429 Universities are sort of famous for keeping track of 01:02:03.429 --> 01:02:04.679 that sort of thig. 01:02:10.180 --> 01:02:12.170 And that's true among faculty, as well. 01:02:12.170 --> 01:02:17.560 And there's the genealogies of our blood families. 01:02:17.560 --> 01:02:20.110 And then we'll talk a bit about this, but not to much 01:02:20.110 --> 01:02:20.950 explicitly yet. 01:02:20.950 --> 01:02:23.795 We'll talk about it in the second half, the academic 01:02:23.795 --> 01:02:27.420 genealogies of so and so's teacher was so and so's 01:02:27.420 --> 01:02:28.534 student, was so and so's student, 01:02:28.534 --> 01:02:29.564 was so and so's student. 01:02:29.564 --> 01:02:34.530 And then our colleague, Leo Marx, who was my teacher, Who 01:02:34.530 --> 01:02:36.910 said that, how does it go? 01:02:36.910 --> 01:02:39.801 His adviser from Harvard in the '40s-- it's only two steps 01:02:39.801 --> 01:02:42.687 back to Ralph Waldo Emerson. 01:02:42.687 --> 01:02:45.332 You can trace four academic generations today from Leo 01:02:45.332 --> 01:02:47.016 Marx to Ralph Waldo Emerson. 01:02:51.950 --> 01:02:55.060 I'm sure there are people here, some of the senior 01:02:55.060 --> 01:02:57.960 faculty who were students of your grandfather's. 01:02:57.960 --> 01:02:59.320 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: If I go to Chemical 01:02:59.320 --> 01:03:00.810 Engineering, they just-- 01:03:00.810 --> 01:03:02.060 oh, Warren K-- 01:03:05.210 --> 01:03:07.910 AUDIENCE: And that's a person who started here in 1896. 01:03:07.910 --> 01:03:11.347 And more than 100 years later, there are still that person's 01:03:11.347 --> 01:03:12.820 students around. 01:03:12.820 --> 01:03:14.680 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: That's been a great been pleasure of 01:03:14.680 --> 01:03:15.410 university life. 01:03:15.410 --> 01:03:16.245 It's a sense of continuity. 01:03:16.245 --> 01:03:17.950 I mean it would drive me crazy too. 01:03:22.710 --> 01:03:27.870 PROFESSOR: Ros, your grandfather was born in 01:03:27.870 --> 01:03:31.920 Delaware and pretty much raised there. 01:03:31.920 --> 01:03:35.500 He obviously was a religious person. 01:03:35.500 --> 01:03:36.750 What persuasion? 01:03:39.230 --> 01:03:41.750 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: I think in Delaware, he was Methodist. 01:03:41.750 --> 01:03:42.080 PROFESSOR: Methodist. 01:03:42.080 --> 01:03:42.910 Yeah, that makes sense. 01:03:42.910 --> 01:03:45.560 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: And one of the most fascinating books I 01:03:45.560 --> 01:03:49.130 have is of an uncle of his who was a Methodist circuit rider 01:03:49.130 --> 01:03:54.800 in Delaware, in the 1850s, setting up black churches. 01:03:54.800 --> 01:03:55.490 They were separate,-- 01:03:55.490 --> 01:03:55.690 PROFESSOR: Really. 01:03:55.690 --> 01:03:56.400 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: --but setting them up. 01:03:56.400 --> 01:03:58.670 Oh, it's fascinating. 01:03:58.670 --> 01:04:02.810 And my grandfather then joined the Congregational church up 01:04:02.810 --> 01:04:07.620 here, Elliott church in Newton. 01:04:07.620 --> 01:04:10.650 Because Methodism up here is a little different from what it 01:04:10.650 --> 01:04:12.100 was in the South. 01:04:12.100 --> 01:04:13.820 But you get the point. 01:04:13.820 --> 01:04:14.650 It's a low church. 01:04:14.650 --> 01:04:15.900 It's not Episcopalian. 01:04:18.181 --> 01:04:22.560 And he taught Sunday school every Sunday, 01:04:22.560 --> 01:04:24.380 as long as he could. 01:04:24.380 --> 01:04:28.910 And his religious faith meant a lot to him. 01:04:28.910 --> 01:04:31.820 He was not a fundamentalist, at all. 01:04:31.820 --> 01:04:36.910 He said, I take the Bible seriously, but not literally. 01:04:36.910 --> 01:04:41.450 But I mean he knew his Bible up one side 01:04:41.450 --> 01:04:43.270 and down the other. 01:04:43.270 --> 01:04:45.890 And it was really fundamental to him. 01:04:45.890 --> 01:04:52.075 In his old age, he became good friends with John Crocker, who 01:04:52.075 --> 01:04:57.080 was the Episcopal chaplain here at MIT. 01:04:57.080 --> 01:04:58.410 And they had a lot of talks. 01:04:58.410 --> 01:05:00.780 And I mean again, I think maybe whether it was guilt 01:05:00.780 --> 01:05:08.640 about the Manhattan Project or just trying to kind of talk 01:05:08.640 --> 01:05:11.280 about matters of faith and other matters too. 01:05:11.280 --> 01:05:18.490 So Crocker led his funeral service, which I was glad that 01:05:18.490 --> 01:05:19.330 he was able to do. 01:05:19.330 --> 01:05:22.110 So I think religion is one of the great untapped kind of 01:05:22.110 --> 01:05:27.750 untapped, unappreciated sources of motivation at MIT. 01:05:27.750 --> 01:05:30.470 And I don't think my grandfather's unusual. 01:05:30.470 --> 01:05:33.480 And it's not necessarily any particular religion. 01:05:33.480 --> 01:05:37.950 But people from outside MIT are always amazed to find how 01:05:37.950 --> 01:05:42.150 strong the religious groups are here and how many there 01:05:42.150 --> 01:05:44.250 are and how active they are. 01:05:44.250 --> 01:05:48.410 It's not their vision of MIT, but it's very true. 01:05:53.450 --> 01:05:53.820 OK. 01:05:53.820 --> 01:05:55.410 ROSALIND WILLIAMS: Well, thank you very much. 01:05:55.410 --> 01:05:57.630 PROFESSOR: Thank you very much. 01:05:57.630 --> 01:06:03.060 PROFESSOR: OK, I want to just talk today a little bit more 01:06:03.060 --> 01:06:06.520 about the '30s, the '20s and the '30s. 01:06:06.520 --> 01:06:12.830 And again, kind of like Ros's talk, use a specific case of a 01:06:12.830 --> 01:06:16.190 particular faculty member and a particular machine to 01:06:16.190 --> 01:06:20.890 illustrate some of the general ideas about where MIT moved 01:06:20.890 --> 01:06:26.790 between about 1925 and 1935 and why that's interesting. 01:06:26.790 --> 01:06:31.850 And you of course know from the readings, and the more you 01:06:31.850 --> 01:06:34.340 look at this, everybody says it and the more I read about 01:06:34.340 --> 01:06:37.460 it, the more you really feel like Karl Compton coming here 01:06:37.460 --> 01:06:40.420 in 1930 was a major turning point. 01:06:40.420 --> 01:06:44.310 There was this kind of internal warfare. 01:06:44.310 --> 01:06:49.140 What was the word that Lewis used, hot fights about the 01:06:49.140 --> 01:06:51.120 relation of science and engineering. 01:06:51.120 --> 01:06:54.930 And the Corporation definitely has an opinion about it. 01:06:54.930 --> 01:06:56.290 And one thing they do-- 01:06:56.290 --> 01:06:58.150 they don't have a lot of control over the faculty, but 01:06:58.150 --> 01:07:00.130 they do decide who the president is. 01:07:00.130 --> 01:07:02.510 And so they bring in Karl Compton. 01:07:02.510 --> 01:07:04.110 He's 42 years old-- 01:07:04.110 --> 01:07:07.100 and it probably sounds old to you. 01:07:07.100 --> 01:07:10.030 It sounds young to me-- 01:07:10.030 --> 01:07:11.230 in 1930. 01:07:11.230 --> 01:07:15.530 And one of the young people who was already here was this 01:07:15.530 --> 01:07:17.420 guy then Vannevar Bush, who we've also heard about, and 01:07:17.420 --> 01:07:20.110 we'll hear about a bunch more, who was a young electrical 01:07:20.110 --> 01:07:22.740 engineering professor. 01:07:22.740 --> 01:07:25.370 And he was building this device called a 01:07:25.370 --> 01:07:26.920 differential analyzer. 01:07:26.920 --> 01:07:32.080 And what I want to do today-- this is again, a sort of 01:07:32.080 --> 01:07:35.150 prototype for what a paper topic might be, is to look at 01:07:35.150 --> 01:07:39.160 this instrument and how this instrument was handled and how 01:07:39.160 --> 01:07:42.230 the instrument itself changed as the goals of the 01:07:42.230 --> 01:07:45.870 Institution changed, from the '20s through the '30s. 01:07:45.870 --> 01:07:48.690 So here's Bush and there's the analyzer. 01:07:48.690 --> 01:07:54.960 And when we go to the MIT Museum, one of the 150 objects 01:07:54.960 --> 01:07:56.960 is that part of the analyzer that's in 01:07:56.960 --> 01:07:57.800 the wooden box there. 01:07:57.800 --> 01:07:59.180 I'll tell you more about what that is. 01:07:59.180 --> 01:08:01.405 But it's sitting right there on the front of the floor. 01:08:01.405 --> 01:08:05.380 And when I was first doing this research, I asked them if 01:08:05.380 --> 01:08:07.260 they had a piece of it and they didn't really know. 01:08:07.260 --> 01:08:09.620 And Debbie Douglas and I went back in the storerooms and we 01:08:09.620 --> 01:08:12.535 found that the original integrator was there. 01:08:15.490 --> 01:08:19.050 So if you go into the 1920s, Bush is here. 01:08:19.050 --> 01:08:20.300 He's a young professor. 01:08:20.300 --> 01:08:22.670 He had gotten his Ph.D. here. 01:08:22.670 --> 01:08:24.569 And he was a student of Kennelly, who I mentioned 01:08:24.569 --> 01:08:26.990 before, who was Edison's assistant. 01:08:26.990 --> 01:08:31.720 And they were very much in the kind of technology plan world 01:08:31.720 --> 01:08:36.210 of MIT, solving problems for big industrial partners. 01:08:36.210 --> 01:08:39.100 And what is the problem that the big industrial partners 01:08:39.100 --> 01:08:39.670 are having? 01:08:39.670 --> 01:08:43.040 Well, in the electrical world, and you've got to remember 01:08:43.040 --> 01:08:45.060 electrical engineering for a-- 01:08:45.060 --> 01:08:48.500 how people here are Core 6, in one way or another? 01:08:48.500 --> 01:08:49.859 OK, so about a third. 01:08:49.859 --> 01:08:52.590 Electrical engineering, for its first 100 years, really 01:08:52.590 --> 01:08:56.250 was electrical, without a lot of electronics or any of that 01:08:56.250 --> 01:08:57.899 solid state physics or certainly no 01:08:57.899 --> 01:08:58.779 computers and stuff. 01:08:58.779 --> 01:09:05.410 It was building big machines to make big generators, and 01:09:05.410 --> 01:09:13.399 big generators, transmission lines, large electric motors, 01:09:13.399 --> 01:09:15.520 to drive factories and other kinds of things. 01:09:15.520 --> 01:09:21.450 And anybody ever hear of the IEEE, Institute of Electrical 01:09:21.450 --> 01:09:25.090 and Electronic Engineers? 01:09:25.090 --> 01:09:26.600 This is a little bit of trivia. 01:09:26.600 --> 01:09:29.359 But there was the AIEE, American Institute of 01:09:29.359 --> 01:09:30.240 Electrical Engineers. 01:09:30.240 --> 01:09:32.470 Those are the big electric power people. 01:09:32.470 --> 01:09:35.790 In fact, in German universities they still divide 01:09:35.790 --> 01:09:38.779 the curriculum into big signals and a little signals. 01:09:38.779 --> 01:09:41.819 And so big signals was the AIEE. 01:09:41.819 --> 01:09:44.479 Little signals was the IRE, Institute of Radio 01:09:44.479 --> 01:09:47.710 Engineering, lots of little tiny, little small signals. 01:09:47.710 --> 01:09:50.330 And in 1964, they merged in the IEEE. 01:09:50.330 --> 01:09:52.470 It's to electrical and electronic engineers. 01:09:52.470 --> 01:09:55.520 Even though it's probably one of the two major professional 01:09:55.520 --> 01:09:58.240 societies for computation, but the word "computer" doesn't 01:09:58.240 --> 01:10:01.110 appear in the title at all. 01:10:01.110 --> 01:10:03.970 And so, this is back in the days of electric power. 01:10:03.970 --> 01:10:09.710 And the problem with the electric power industry is the 01:10:09.710 --> 01:10:15.030 electric generators start out as basically local phenomena. 01:10:15.030 --> 01:10:17.840 A local entrepreneur will build a generator, either a 01:10:17.840 --> 01:10:20.000 hydro plant or steam powered, in one way or 01:10:20.000 --> 01:10:22.040 another, in a town. 01:10:22.040 --> 01:10:26.940 And they'll create lighting in the town and maybe run some 01:10:26.940 --> 01:10:28.650 motors in factories. 01:10:28.650 --> 01:10:31.990 And it's all centralized and it was all nonuniform. 01:10:31.990 --> 01:10:34.080 Every town had a different 01:10:34.080 --> 01:10:36.010 voltage, a different frequency. 01:10:36.010 --> 01:10:38.510 Some of them were running on direct current versus 01:10:38.510 --> 01:10:39.390 alternating current. 01:10:39.390 --> 01:10:43.520 These are all big battles they were having at the time. 01:10:43.520 --> 01:10:47.070 But over the course of the teens and the '20s, those 01:10:47.070 --> 01:10:48.750 systems are becoming standardized and they're 01:10:48.750 --> 01:10:51.420 becoming connected into what today we would call grids. 01:10:51.420 --> 01:10:53.590 So they have a big electric power grid. 01:10:53.590 --> 01:10:57.410 And they're not quite national yet, but 01:10:57.410 --> 01:10:59.020 they're very much regional. 01:10:59.020 --> 01:11:03.040 And so in the '20s, General Electric starts to build a big 01:11:03.040 --> 01:11:10.170 grid that brings hydroelectric power from in Canada and also 01:11:10.170 --> 01:11:13.330 from Niagara Falls, through very, very long transmission 01:11:13.330 --> 01:11:16.130 lines, hundreds and hundreds of miles, down into the New 01:11:16.130 --> 01:11:19.250 York City area, which is where most of the population and 01:11:19.250 --> 01:11:21.780 most of the energy usage is from. 01:11:21.780 --> 01:11:24.660 And those lines begin to have problems. 01:11:24.660 --> 01:11:28.420 And the problems are, if you've got either a lightning 01:11:28.420 --> 01:11:31.740 strike at one part of the line, you had a bad electrical 01:11:31.740 --> 01:11:36.090 storm, or even if you had a short circuit and part of the 01:11:36.090 --> 01:11:41.180 grid tripped off and had just to sort of save itself, you'd 01:11:41.180 --> 01:11:43.300 get these transients on the line. 01:11:43.300 --> 01:11:45.530 And the transients would travel great distances. 01:11:45.530 --> 01:11:49.570 They were just like big wave power spikes on the line and 01:11:49.570 --> 01:11:51.250 create blackouts all over the place. 01:11:51.250 --> 01:11:53.790 And there a couple of famous blackouts that happened in the 01:11:53.790 --> 01:11:55.850 early '20s that really caused a big problem. 01:11:55.850 --> 01:12:02.040 So this was like a critical issue about how do you figure 01:12:02.040 --> 01:12:05.410 out, how do you model the performance of these systems 01:12:05.410 --> 01:12:06.990 under this kind of stress? 01:12:06.990 --> 01:12:10.170 And General Electric, and this has come up in the readings in 01:12:10.170 --> 01:12:12.820 places, had a very close relationship with MIT. 01:12:12.820 --> 01:12:15.840 There were a lot of young engineers who would go there, 01:12:15.840 --> 01:12:17.985 what they called on-test, to Schenectady. 01:12:17.985 --> 01:12:20.960 In fact, that's where Ros's father worked. 01:12:20.960 --> 01:12:24.930 I don't if she mention that, Doc Lewis's son went to 01:12:24.930 --> 01:12:27.750 Schenectady and worked for General Electric. 01:12:27.750 --> 01:12:30.660 And then they would come back to MIT sometimes, to get a 01:12:30.660 --> 01:12:32.010 master's degree. 01:12:32.010 --> 01:12:34.920 And they began looking at this problem of how do you 01:12:34.920 --> 01:12:36.420 understand these systems. 01:12:36.420 --> 01:12:40.120 Now, Bush had done earlier work in his career, which was 01:12:40.120 --> 01:12:42.010 also based on this whole idea of modeling. 01:12:42.010 --> 01:12:44.260 I may have mentioned this before where-- 01:12:44.260 --> 01:12:47.010 how many of you have taken an engineering class where you 01:12:47.010 --> 01:12:53.200 use a spring mass damper system and model a RLC 01:12:53.200 --> 01:12:55.200 circuit with it? 01:12:55.200 --> 01:12:56.790 Ring a bell for anybody? 01:12:56.790 --> 01:12:59.660 OK, maybe a few too many times. 01:12:59.660 --> 01:13:01.530 Or, there are other analogies, different kinds 01:13:01.530 --> 01:13:03.510 of hydraulic analogies. 01:13:03.510 --> 01:13:06.170 Well, that whole idea basically comes from the first 01:13:06.170 --> 01:13:08.470 book that Vannevar Bush wrote, which is called Operational 01:13:08.470 --> 01:13:14.680 Circuit Analysis, where first of all he applies a thing 01:13:14.680 --> 01:13:18.860 called Oliver Heaviside's operational calculus. 01:13:18.860 --> 01:13:21.170 Anybody ever heard of the Heaviside step function? 01:13:24.438 --> 01:13:29.360 And Heaviside was a sort of somewhat outlandish English 01:13:29.360 --> 01:13:31.580 engineer around the turn of the century, who came up with 01:13:31.580 --> 01:13:32.710 these ideas. 01:13:32.710 --> 01:13:34.890 Mathematicians didn't like them because they couldn't 01:13:34.890 --> 01:13:36.510 prove they were valid. 01:13:36.510 --> 01:13:38.685 Heaviside just didn't care about it at all because he 01:13:38.685 --> 01:13:40.390 could show that they were useful. 01:13:40.390 --> 01:13:43.760 And they told you a lot about how transients go down lines. 01:13:43.760 --> 01:13:46.390 And Bush really took the Heaviside work and he put it 01:13:46.390 --> 01:13:48.740 on a rigorous mathematical foundation. 01:13:48.740 --> 01:13:51.840 And said among other things, you can use these analogies 01:13:51.840 --> 01:13:57.570 and you can model a second order system in any of these 01:13:57.570 --> 01:14:00.120 different fields with a set of equations. 01:14:00.120 --> 01:14:03.460 And that can be either RLC circuit or a spring mass 01:14:03.460 --> 01:14:07.080 damper or there are also hydraulic versions of it, I'm 01:14:07.080 --> 01:14:09.320 sure any number of other ones. 01:14:09.320 --> 01:14:13.300 And what that basic idea allows you to do is to make 01:14:13.300 --> 01:14:15.270 models of different kinds of circuits. 01:14:15.270 --> 01:14:17.990 And so what they said is here's this 01:14:17.990 --> 01:14:19.060 electric power problem. 01:14:19.060 --> 01:14:23.120 Let's look at this problem and let's build a model of it. 01:14:23.120 --> 01:14:27.300 And what this thing is, is called a network analyzer. 01:14:27.300 --> 01:14:30.630 And this picture is probably about 1927. 01:14:30.630 --> 01:14:34.240 And all it is, is-- well, first thing they make a model 01:14:34.240 --> 01:14:38.630 of just the electric power line between 01:14:38.630 --> 01:14:41.100 Niagara Falls and Boston. 01:14:41.100 --> 01:14:47.770 So there might be a couple of generators on the line in 01:14:47.770 --> 01:14:50.670 Niagara Falls, then there's a long transmission line, then 01:14:50.670 --> 01:14:57.080 there's a whole bunch of different users, and maybe you 01:14:57.080 --> 01:15:00.280 make one circuit that's 50,000 times 01:15:00.280 --> 01:15:02.780 smaller than the original. 01:15:02.780 --> 01:15:06.500 And you use that as a model. 01:15:06.500 --> 01:15:08.250 And anybody know what the big problem 01:15:08.250 --> 01:15:09.500 with that was actually? 01:15:12.850 --> 01:15:16.720 The hardest thing about making these small models was 01:15:16.720 --> 01:15:19.880 measuring the output. 01:15:19.880 --> 01:15:23.250 If you go to the actual electric power system and you 01:15:23.250 --> 01:15:26.240 put a voltmeter on the line, that voltmeter is going to 01:15:26.240 --> 01:15:27.300 load the line by some amount. 01:15:27.300 --> 01:15:29.690 But it's negligible, it really has no impact. 01:15:29.690 --> 01:15:32.130 If you make it 50,000 times smaller, you've still got the 01:15:32.130 --> 01:15:33.280 same voltmeter. 01:15:33.280 --> 01:15:35.380 And you put it on the line and it's the equivalent of like 01:15:35.380 --> 01:15:36.900 putting a whole factory on the line. 01:15:36.900 --> 01:15:39.060 And it affects the performance of it in ways 01:15:39.060 --> 01:15:42.210 that it wouldn't otherwise. 01:15:42.210 --> 01:15:44.750 So it's one thing to make this model. 01:15:44.750 --> 01:15:46.940 And they did that rather successfully and it helped 01:15:46.940 --> 01:15:47.690 them describe. 01:15:47.690 --> 01:15:50.460 And they then reported the results to GE, this is how the 01:15:50.460 --> 01:15:52.420 thing would behave under a lightning strike. 01:15:52.420 --> 01:15:55.080 And these are some strategies you can take to make it a 01:15:55.080 --> 01:15:56.630 little more robust. 01:15:56.630 --> 01:15:58.980 Well, once the word out about that, all these different 01:15:58.980 --> 01:16:00.760 power companies came and said, we would like you 01:16:00.760 --> 01:16:02.340 to model our system. 01:16:02.340 --> 01:16:03.780 And so what did they do? 01:16:03.780 --> 01:16:05.500 Did they constantly build a new one for 01:16:05.500 --> 01:16:06.670 everybody's power system? 01:16:06.670 --> 01:16:07.380 No. 01:16:07.380 --> 01:16:08.690 They built a little set up. 01:16:08.690 --> 01:16:10.680 Actually, I don't even have to draw it, because it's here. 01:16:10.680 --> 01:16:12.610 Where they said OK, we're going to put a bunch of models 01:16:12.610 --> 01:16:15.580 of transmission lines and a bunch of models of generators 01:16:15.580 --> 01:16:17.190 and a bunch of models of other things. 01:16:17.190 --> 01:16:18.930 And they're actually connected together by 01:16:18.930 --> 01:16:20.770 telephone plug boards. 01:16:20.770 --> 01:16:25.130 And you bring your system here and we'll plug it together in 01:16:25.130 --> 01:16:27.710 a certain way, much like a telephone 01:16:27.710 --> 01:16:29.100 operator connects circuits. 01:16:29.100 --> 01:16:30.790 At that time, it was done manually. 01:16:30.790 --> 01:16:32.870 And we'll create this thing. 01:16:32.870 --> 01:16:37.130 And this thing, they actually called it a network computer, 01:16:37.130 --> 01:16:40.400 which is a nice word for it, that comes up later in MIT 01:16:40.400 --> 01:16:42.080 culture, about 50 years later. 01:16:42.080 --> 01:16:44.420 And electric power companies would come here. 01:16:44.420 --> 01:16:48.270 And students would write their theses by designing this 01:16:48.270 --> 01:16:53.560 system and describing it for a particular power company. 01:16:53.560 --> 01:16:55.140 And saying here, I modeled your circuit. 01:16:55.140 --> 01:16:57.520 And this thing actually was around until the 01:16:57.520 --> 01:16:59.490 '50s, it turns out. 01:16:59.490 --> 01:17:02.000 We'll talk about it getting shut down when Gordon Brown 01:17:02.000 --> 01:17:03.120 shut it down. 01:17:03.120 --> 01:17:07.640 But it was again this kind of classic MIT in the 1920s, 01:17:07.640 --> 01:17:12.020 early '30s, model of close relationships with industry, 01:17:12.020 --> 01:17:15.490 solving very particular problems, almost in a literal 01:17:15.490 --> 01:17:16.750 consulting role. 01:17:16.750 --> 01:17:17.910 Tell us what your issue is? 01:17:17.910 --> 01:17:20.560 We'll model it and we'll help you solve the problem. 01:17:20.560 --> 01:17:23.110 So we read a lot about that. 01:17:27.210 --> 01:17:29.750 Then there was another approach, which was to 01:17:29.750 --> 01:17:35.290 calculate the progress of these transients directly. 01:17:35.290 --> 01:17:37.250 And how did they do that? 01:17:37.250 --> 01:17:43.240 Well, they could do it analytically with algebra. 01:17:43.240 --> 01:17:45.430 It was extremely difficult because it was not easy to 01:17:45.430 --> 01:17:46.250 write the equations. 01:17:46.250 --> 01:17:48.430 But it was much easier to build an analog 01:17:48.430 --> 01:17:50.000 computer to model it. 01:17:50.000 --> 01:17:58.580 And it turned out, and you probably recognize this, that 01:17:58.580 --> 01:18:03.960 the integral of the product of two functions 01:18:03.960 --> 01:18:05.380 is a critical piece. 01:18:05.380 --> 01:18:07.850 Today, you find it in all kinds of signals processing 01:18:07.850 --> 01:18:10.500 and convolution algorithms. 01:18:10.500 --> 01:18:14.830 And they said we'll build basically these machines that 01:18:14.830 --> 01:18:17.330 will model the key function of it. 01:18:17.330 --> 01:18:19.930 And this is an early version of it, which is also a 01:18:19.930 --> 01:18:22.590 specific machine modeled to evaluate 01:18:22.590 --> 01:18:23.660 the specific integral. 01:18:23.660 --> 01:18:25.970 They called it a product intergraph. 01:18:25.970 --> 01:18:27.530 And it didn't use equations at all. 01:18:27.530 --> 01:18:30.030 It just took curves in and drew curves out. 01:18:30.030 --> 01:18:32.980 There you can see Bush. 01:18:32.980 --> 01:18:35.560 This is actually the output device, which 01:18:35.560 --> 01:18:37.250 is a watt/hour meter. 01:18:37.250 --> 01:18:38.760 Why would they use a watt/hour meter 01:18:38.760 --> 01:18:40.170 from an electric utility? 01:18:45.290 --> 01:18:47.380 Because a watt/hour meter does the same thing, right. 01:18:47.380 --> 01:18:50.150 It evaluates the integral of the product of the current. 01:18:50.150 --> 01:18:51.910 And the voltage is the amount of power that 01:18:51.910 --> 01:18:53.890 you get billed for. 01:18:53.890 --> 01:18:57.930 So they take this thing and they just stick there. 01:18:57.930 --> 01:19:00.400 And then there's these kind of funky mechanical linkages. 01:19:00.400 --> 01:19:02.210 And there's all these people involved. 01:19:02.210 --> 01:19:03.980 And actually they have big high-power 01:19:03.980 --> 01:19:06.110 resistors, so they use a-- 01:19:06.110 --> 01:19:07.520 anybody want to guess what that thing hanging 01:19:07.520 --> 01:19:10.450 up on the top is? 01:19:10.450 --> 01:19:11.620 AUDIENCE: Radiator. 01:19:11.620 --> 01:19:13.020 PROFESSOR: Close. 01:19:13.020 --> 01:19:13.460 AUDIENCE: Radiator. 01:19:13.460 --> 01:19:16.120 PROFESSOR: It's a radiator, from? 01:19:16.120 --> 01:19:17.020 AUDIENCE: Model T. 01:19:17.020 --> 01:19:19.840 PROFESSOR: It's a radiator from a Model T Ford, that 01:19:19.840 --> 01:19:23.130 they're using to provide cooling water to this machine, 01:19:23.130 --> 01:19:25.540 which evaluates this particular integral for this 01:19:25.540 --> 01:19:27.510 particular electric power problem. 01:19:27.510 --> 01:19:30.930 In fact, some of these are Bush's students. 01:19:30.930 --> 01:19:33.310 This one particularly is a guy named Harold Hazen, who we 01:19:33.310 --> 01:19:34.900 will talk about later. 01:19:34.900 --> 01:19:39.380 In fact, he's also the guy sitting in the middle there, 01:19:39.380 --> 01:19:40.630 in that picture. 01:19:43.670 --> 01:19:44.620 Here's another picture of it. 01:19:44.620 --> 01:19:48.320 You can see the watt/hour meter, just taken right out of 01:19:48.320 --> 01:19:53.080 an electric power measurement facility. 01:19:53.080 --> 01:19:54.700 Again, you sort of work with what you have. 01:19:54.700 --> 01:19:56.140 They were working with electric companies. 01:19:56.140 --> 01:19:58.180 They had these electrical things, a whole bunch of 01:19:58.180 --> 01:20:00.110 different motor and gears and interconnections. 01:20:00.110 --> 01:20:03.770 And this was probably in Building-- 01:20:03.770 --> 01:20:05.050 somewhere in the main group. 01:20:05.050 --> 01:20:06.010 I'm forgetting exactly. 01:20:06.010 --> 01:20:10.210 Building 10, I believe was this lab. 01:20:10.210 --> 01:20:12.460 I liked, you still have the pencil sharpener there. 01:20:12.460 --> 01:20:14.585 This is probably the one part of what was in the lab that 01:20:14.585 --> 01:20:16.590 you might still find in a laboratory today. 01:20:21.030 --> 01:20:22.360 There's a picture of Bush with it. 01:20:22.360 --> 01:20:23.670 You can see he looks pretty young. 01:20:26.780 --> 01:20:31.710 And so there's the first product 01:20:31.710 --> 01:20:33.490 intergraph, is this device. 01:20:33.490 --> 01:20:37.530 And what it does is all those little graph chart holders 01:20:37.530 --> 01:20:41.170 basically, move under these three independent needles. 01:20:41.170 --> 01:20:47.680 And the operators just follow the first two curves and then 01:20:47.680 --> 01:20:51.410 the output plots the integral of those two curves. 01:20:51.410 --> 01:20:53.700 So it's literally a graphical user interface 01:20:53.700 --> 01:20:56.320 for an analog computer. 01:20:56.320 --> 01:20:59.940 And then, they actually bring it up to one more level of 01:20:59.940 --> 01:21:00.690 complication. 01:21:00.690 --> 01:21:03.560 And there's a way that you can make it solve a differential 01:21:03.560 --> 01:21:06.320 equation, as well as just evaluating an integral. 01:21:06.320 --> 01:21:09.070 And so this thing is called the second product intergraph, 01:21:09.070 --> 01:21:10.060 where it's the same kind of thing. 01:21:10.060 --> 01:21:14.340 There's two different pieces and then you can sort of tie 01:21:14.340 --> 01:21:16.420 the output back to the input. 01:21:16.420 --> 01:21:20.510 And this is about where things stood when Karl Compton 01:21:20.510 --> 01:21:22.395 becomes president of MIT. 01:21:22.395 --> 01:21:25.390 And Compton basically says, we're not going to do that 01:21:25.390 --> 01:21:26.380 kind of stuff anymore. 01:21:26.380 --> 01:21:28.410 It's too focused on just one problem. 01:21:28.410 --> 01:21:30.060 It's too simple. 01:21:30.060 --> 01:21:36.760 And Bush responds in a very energetic way. 01:21:36.760 --> 01:21:39.840 And he builds this machine about 1931. 01:21:39.840 --> 01:21:41.530 And this is called the differential analyzer. 01:21:41.530 --> 01:21:45.380 Anybody ever heard of that term before? 01:21:45.380 --> 01:21:51.280 And really it's kind of nothing more than this, but 01:21:51.280 --> 01:21:53.640 made in a fully general purpose way. 01:21:53.640 --> 01:21:57.250 Or like I mentioned before, they did with the simulator, 01:21:57.250 --> 01:22:00.630 they first started building a custom one and then they built 01:22:00.630 --> 01:22:01.790 a general one. 01:22:01.790 --> 01:22:06.430 And what you see here is, these guys here are called 01:22:06.430 --> 01:22:07.140 integrators. 01:22:07.140 --> 01:22:10.540 That's the core of the problem. 01:22:10.540 --> 01:22:12.520 Again, it's primarily an integral thing you're trying 01:22:12.520 --> 01:22:13.900 to evaluate. 01:22:13.900 --> 01:22:16.450 An integrator is nothing more than, they call it a wheel and 01:22:16.450 --> 01:22:18.030 disk integrator. 01:22:18.030 --> 01:22:19.590 There's a disk that spins around. 01:22:19.590 --> 01:22:22.530 In a mechanical sense, that's just a transmission, but a 01:22:22.530 --> 01:22:24.200 continuously variable one. 01:22:24.200 --> 01:22:26.520 Then there's a wheel that sits on the transmission. 01:22:26.520 --> 01:22:32.830 And if the disk is spinning at a fixed rate and the wheel 01:22:32.830 --> 01:22:35.210 goes in and out, the number of turns on the upper end of 01:22:35.210 --> 01:22:39.680 wheel is the integral of the curve of the position of the 01:22:39.680 --> 01:22:40.890 wheel that pulls it off. 01:22:40.890 --> 01:22:44.170 But it's a very simple idea mechanically, very hard to do 01:22:44.170 --> 01:22:46.440 that in a way that is mechanically 01:22:46.440 --> 01:22:48.230 robust and very accurate. 01:22:48.230 --> 01:22:51.550 And that's the piece-- 01:22:51.550 --> 01:22:53.910 actually it was so critical to make it accurate, they covered 01:22:53.910 --> 01:22:55.350 these with those wooden boxes. 01:22:55.350 --> 01:23:01.360 That's the piece that's in the MIT Museum. 01:23:01.360 --> 01:23:03.890 And then there's all these other elements. 01:23:03.890 --> 01:23:05.140 I may have a picture of it. 01:23:11.570 --> 01:23:13.620 So there are all these other elements. 01:23:13.620 --> 01:23:15.790 You can take these integrators and then you have a 01:23:15.790 --> 01:23:19.790 multiplier, which is nothing but a gear that connects one 01:23:19.790 --> 01:23:21.590 rod to another in a ratio. 01:23:21.590 --> 01:23:23.500 And you have these rods that go through the middle. 01:23:23.500 --> 01:23:25.760 They're almost like the bus on a computer. 01:23:25.760 --> 01:23:28.950 And you can connect these things in all different ways 01:23:28.950 --> 01:23:31.880 to evaluate a particular equation. 01:23:31.880 --> 01:23:34.810 In this case, this is just a second order equation for a 01:23:34.810 --> 01:23:36.980 falling body problem. 01:23:36.980 --> 01:23:40.390 But you can mix and match this thing and essentially program 01:23:40.390 --> 01:23:43.860 it by rebuilding it around these connecting rods. 01:23:43.860 --> 01:23:47.690 And so, I'll show you a couple of pictures of the-- 01:23:47.690 --> 01:23:48.940 oops. 01:23:52.890 --> 01:23:55.450 Here is another view of the integrator. 01:23:55.450 --> 01:23:59.370 Here you can see the disk and the little 01:23:59.370 --> 01:24:00.250 wheel that takes off. 01:24:00.250 --> 01:24:02.200 It actually has a real knife edge on it, to 01:24:02.200 --> 01:24:04.310 try to make it accurate. 01:24:04.310 --> 01:24:07.340 One of the real problems with those integrators is that they 01:24:07.340 --> 01:24:09.150 can't drive much of a load. 01:24:09.150 --> 01:24:11.820 If they slip at all, they lose a lot of accuracy. 01:24:11.820 --> 01:24:13.870 So here they have put these things called torque 01:24:13.870 --> 01:24:17.050 amplifiers, which are these very clunky, exotic, kind of 01:24:17.050 --> 01:24:20.000 cached in like devices that amplify the torque. 01:24:20.000 --> 01:24:22.220 And then they connect them in. 01:24:22.220 --> 01:24:26.640 And where you might have in an electrical analog computer, 01:24:26.640 --> 01:24:30.530 there's a voltage that gets pushed around, in a mechanical 01:24:30.530 --> 01:24:34.330 analogue computer it's just the rotation of these shafts 01:24:34.330 --> 01:24:37.070 that carry the data from one place to another. 01:24:37.070 --> 01:24:43.060 And they do that by going into this matrix of mechanical rods 01:24:43.060 --> 01:24:44.410 that you see over there on the left. 01:24:44.410 --> 01:24:47.450 And each time they wanted, they could kind of reprogram 01:24:47.450 --> 01:24:48.600 the whole thing. 01:24:48.600 --> 01:24:50.710 And here's another shot. 01:24:50.710 --> 01:24:53.150 So here's a gear ratio that would perform the 01:24:53.150 --> 01:24:54.400 multiplication. 01:24:54.400 --> 01:24:57.070 You can see that this stuff is beautifully machined, very 01:24:57.070 --> 01:24:59.092 interesting and carefully done. 01:24:59.092 --> 01:24:59.494 Yeah? 01:24:59.494 --> 01:25:00.620 AUDIENCE: And they were doing this in the electrical 01:25:00.620 --> 01:25:00.940 department. 01:25:00.940 --> 01:25:02.200 PROFESSOR: This is in electrical engineering 01:25:02.200 --> 01:25:03.050 department, right. 01:25:03.050 --> 01:25:04.421 AUDIENCE: It seems very much like a mechanical project. 01:25:04.421 --> 01:25:05.655 PROFESSOR: It does seem like a mechanical project. 01:25:05.655 --> 01:25:07.330 That's a very good point. 01:25:07.330 --> 01:25:11.820 And Bush actually said, he was very clear, he said, I want my 01:25:11.820 --> 01:25:15.680 engineers to be able to design mathematical equations the way 01:25:15.680 --> 01:25:17.110 they design circuits. 01:25:17.110 --> 01:25:20.310 And he tried to make a circuit design-type 01:25:20.310 --> 01:25:22.210 language, visual language-- 01:25:22.210 --> 01:25:23.220 I redrew this picture. 01:25:23.220 --> 01:25:24.710 But I redrew it from one of their papers. 01:25:24.710 --> 01:25:28.180 It's the same terminology-- 01:25:28.180 --> 01:25:31.410 that you could actually design these equations and make these 01:25:31.410 --> 01:25:32.570 big kind of systems. 01:25:32.570 --> 01:25:35.360 And already you're beginning to see a move toward 01:25:35.360 --> 01:25:36.530 generality. 01:25:36.530 --> 01:25:40.670 So he says, this is not a device to evaluate integrals 01:25:40.670 --> 01:25:43.450 for studying transience in the electric power industry. 01:25:43.450 --> 01:25:45.650 This is a research device for a general 01:25:45.650 --> 01:25:47.480 purpose calculating machine. 01:25:47.480 --> 01:25:49.570 And it's interesting, he goes to the Rockefeller-- 01:25:49.570 --> 01:25:52.860 well, I'll cover that in a minute. 01:25:52.860 --> 01:25:55.370 So already you're beginning to see this guy beginning to 01:25:55.370 --> 01:25:58.960 think in a more general, kind of fundamental terms, as 01:25:58.960 --> 01:26:01.180 opposed to in these specific terms. 01:26:01.180 --> 01:26:03.870 And this is within just a couple of years of Compton 01:26:03.870 --> 01:26:06.550 coming here to MIT. 01:26:06.550 --> 01:26:09.160 Here's the output of the device. 01:26:09.160 --> 01:26:12.280 You can see it's basically creating a family of curves. 01:26:12.280 --> 01:26:15.350 And they were very into the fact that they 01:26:15.350 --> 01:26:16.570 didn't need any algebra. 01:26:16.570 --> 01:26:18.320 They didn't need any equations. 01:26:18.320 --> 01:26:20.250 They said the world is basically analog. 01:26:20.250 --> 01:26:21.190 They didn't use that term. 01:26:21.190 --> 01:26:23.170 And said, the world is continuous. 01:26:23.170 --> 01:26:25.850 Our integrator is continuous and 01:26:25.850 --> 01:26:28.530 produces continuous outputs. 01:26:28.530 --> 01:26:32.330 And again, you can see this kind of 01:26:32.330 --> 01:26:33.660 graphical user interface. 01:26:33.660 --> 01:26:35.850 There's a little magnifying glass there. 01:26:35.850 --> 01:26:38.700 And he's kind of following these curves, which was a kind 01:26:38.700 --> 01:26:40.800 of manual input. 01:26:40.800 --> 01:26:43.410 Bush is kind of looking over the shoulder there. 01:26:43.410 --> 01:26:44.920 And they would evaluate all these 01:26:44.920 --> 01:26:46.170 different kinds of curves. 01:26:50.950 --> 01:26:53.260 Here's another view, where they're all connected by an 01:26:53.260 --> 01:26:54.930 electrical audio system. 01:26:54.930 --> 01:26:57.080 And there's one guy in the center, telling everybody OK, 01:26:57.080 --> 01:26:58.610 follow your curves now. 01:26:58.610 --> 01:27:01.100 And here, he's not doing it by hand so much anymore. 01:27:01.100 --> 01:27:03.790 He's turning a little crank to trace all the curves. 01:27:03.790 --> 01:27:07.370 And you can begin to see by the curves, they can do some 01:27:07.370 --> 01:27:08.470 pretty complicated things. 01:27:08.470 --> 01:27:11.620 And there's a whole kind of science of analog computing 01:27:11.620 --> 01:27:15.420 that comes up in the '30s around these machines, where 01:27:15.420 --> 01:27:17.730 they measure the number of integrators the way you would 01:27:17.730 --> 01:27:21.120 measure the number of megahertz of processor that 01:27:21.120 --> 01:27:22.900 you have in your computer. 01:27:22.900 --> 01:27:25.920 Because the integrator was the expensive thing that kind of 01:27:25.920 --> 01:27:29.060 described what order equation you could possibly model with 01:27:29.060 --> 01:27:30.000 these things. 01:27:30.000 --> 01:27:34.330 And people start to use them to model electron orbits in 01:27:34.330 --> 01:27:35.420 atomic physics. 01:27:35.420 --> 01:27:38.190 They used them particularly for ballistics. 01:27:38.190 --> 01:27:39.690 The Army gets really interested. 01:27:39.690 --> 01:27:42.630 And they have to calculate ballistic equations for all 01:27:42.630 --> 01:27:44.470 different kinds of guns and shells. 01:27:44.470 --> 01:27:47.120 And this makes it a lot more convenient. 01:27:47.120 --> 01:27:52.830 And so you begin to see the move away from, even with the 01:27:52.830 --> 01:27:56.080 same research group, the same people literally, from this 01:27:56.080 --> 01:27:58.840 kind of specific industry oriented work toward more 01:27:58.840 --> 01:28:01.230 general work in what they think of as a 01:28:01.230 --> 01:28:04.140 general purpose computing. 01:28:04.140 --> 01:28:07.760 This is kind of the most famous picture of the device. 01:28:07.760 --> 01:28:10.200 And you can see there three integrators 01:28:10.200 --> 01:28:11.450 inside their glass cases. 01:28:11.450 --> 01:28:15.200 Those integrated became so precise that you had to have 01:28:15.200 --> 01:28:17.720 them covered, free of dust, and 01:28:17.720 --> 01:28:20.300 really very well protected. 01:28:20.300 --> 01:28:22.580 And it turns out there was a integrator that was developed 01:28:22.580 --> 01:28:25.190 secretly by the Navy for controlling the big guns on 01:28:25.190 --> 01:28:27.500 battleships, that was better than this one, that they 01:28:27.500 --> 01:28:30.550 weren't really aware yet. 01:28:30.550 --> 01:28:34.590 And has nobody ever see a tubal integrator? 01:28:34.590 --> 01:28:36.915 It's a whole other kind of mechanism that you can use to 01:28:36.915 --> 01:28:38.910 do mechanical integration. 01:28:38.910 --> 01:28:42.250 So then this project spurs a whole bunch of different other 01:28:42.250 --> 01:28:44.830 kinds of projects. 01:28:44.830 --> 01:28:50.820 One is called the cinema intergraph, where the idea is 01:28:50.820 --> 01:28:53.460 instead of integrating with these kind of problematic 01:28:53.460 --> 01:28:56.690 mechanical integrators, you integrate using this exotic 01:28:56.690 --> 01:28:57.710 new technology. 01:28:57.710 --> 01:29:00.330 Anybody want to guess what that is over on the left? 01:29:00.330 --> 01:29:02.440 It's a photo cell. 01:29:02.440 --> 01:29:07.720 And they would actually plot the mathematical curves as 01:29:07.720 --> 01:29:10.780 images on this 35 millimeter film. 01:29:10.780 --> 01:29:13.600 And then shine a light through it and plot the area under the 01:29:13.600 --> 01:29:18.460 curves by integrating the charge that came through the 01:29:18.460 --> 01:29:20.030 photo cell. 01:29:20.030 --> 01:29:23.730 And this is the guy who made it. 01:29:23.730 --> 01:29:26.730 As he said, it was mostly a machine for producing 01:29:26.730 --> 01:29:27.155 dissertations. 01:29:27.155 --> 01:29:30.100 It had essentially no practical output. 01:29:30.100 --> 01:29:33.310 But it was important in that, this guy is named Gordon 01:29:33.310 --> 01:29:37.550 Brown, who is a student of Harold Hazen, and becomes the 01:29:37.550 --> 01:29:40.330 dean of engineering right at the end of the 01:29:40.330 --> 01:29:41.480 Second World War. 01:29:41.480 --> 01:29:44.090 And is the guy who closes down all that old-fashioned 01:29:44.090 --> 01:29:45.030 electrical machinery. 01:29:45.030 --> 01:29:46.640 We read about him a little bit. 01:29:46.640 --> 01:29:47.870 I think it was in the [? Laquier ?] 01:29:47.870 --> 01:29:49.420 article. 01:29:49.420 --> 01:29:53.090 And kind of is the dean of engineering when they kind of 01:29:53.090 --> 01:29:55.580 formalized a lot of things after the Second World War. 01:29:58.600 --> 01:30:00.490 And there's another picture of the cinema intergraph. 01:30:00.490 --> 01:30:03.450 Also one of his advisers on there was Norbert Wiener, who 01:30:03.450 --> 01:30:05.630 was also very closely related to Bush's work. 01:30:05.630 --> 01:30:08.930 And a lot of his earlier ideas of cybernetics also came out 01:30:08.930 --> 01:30:11.220 of this work. 01:30:11.220 --> 01:30:13.460 This is Harold Hazen again. 01:30:13.460 --> 01:30:15.840 It's called an automatic curve follower. 01:30:15.840 --> 01:30:19.260 And his idea is, gee, maybe I could make these photo cells 01:30:19.260 --> 01:30:22.230 just follow these curves automatically. 01:30:22.230 --> 01:30:26.030 And today, you can go to the Science Museum and buy a 01:30:26.030 --> 01:30:28.180 little robot kit with a robot that follows a 01:30:28.180 --> 01:30:29.370 line across the floor. 01:30:29.370 --> 01:30:31.720 This is the first one of those. 01:30:31.720 --> 01:30:34.300 But what's much more interesting and important than 01:30:34.300 --> 01:30:38.440 that about this, was that in order to do this and order to 01:30:38.440 --> 01:30:41.120 make the differential analyzer work, it's the amount of 01:30:41.120 --> 01:30:43.090 friction that builds up in the mechanisms. 01:30:43.090 --> 01:30:46.260 And it gets to a point where you basically just can't turn 01:30:46.260 --> 01:30:47.040 the crank anymore. 01:30:47.040 --> 01:30:49.190 And you start to lose a lot of accuracy. 01:30:49.190 --> 01:30:50.870 You don't lose it in the gears. 01:30:50.870 --> 01:30:52.500 Eventually you would, because they would break. 01:30:52.500 --> 01:30:55.090 But you lose it in all these other systems, particularly 01:30:55.090 --> 01:30:55.930 the integrator. 01:30:55.930 --> 01:30:59.770 So what they do is they put what they call followers or 01:30:59.770 --> 01:31:03.510 servomechanisms between the stages, where they can kind of 01:31:03.510 --> 01:31:08.300 renew the signal and add energy to the system. 01:31:08.300 --> 01:31:11.250 Because with a mechanical system, if you don't have any 01:31:11.250 --> 01:31:13.590 energy, it's just going to eventually-- 01:31:13.590 --> 01:31:14.870 the energy is all dissipated. 01:31:14.870 --> 01:31:18.510 But if you can carry the data from one point to another and 01:31:18.510 --> 01:31:21.050 just add energy and make it constantly stronger, you can 01:31:21.050 --> 01:31:22.700 build them as big as you want. 01:31:22.700 --> 01:31:25.830 And it's between that problem and this problem that Hazen 01:31:25.830 --> 01:31:28.760 actually writes the first paper ever on what he calls 01:31:28.760 --> 01:31:31.900 the theory of servomechanisms, which you now what know as 01:31:31.900 --> 01:31:33.040 feedback control theory. 01:31:33.040 --> 01:31:36.310 And anybody take a course on that, or probably in every 01:31:36.310 --> 01:31:38.890 engineering course you're taking something in feedback 01:31:38.890 --> 01:31:40.260 control theory. 01:31:40.260 --> 01:31:42.690 And he became interested in these basic problems. 01:31:42.690 --> 01:31:46.210 Until that point, people had governors on steam engines. 01:31:46.210 --> 01:31:48.520 They had different kinds of regulators in this electric 01:31:48.520 --> 01:31:50.120 power network they were working on. 01:31:50.120 --> 01:31:53.030 But nobody had thought of, let's write about the theory 01:31:53.030 --> 01:31:56.110 of how this feedback mechanism works overall. 01:31:56.110 --> 01:31:58.070 And there again, there's another one of these, a little 01:31:58.070 --> 01:32:00.640 more detailed example of an intellectual way that 01:32:00.640 --> 01:32:03.410 Compton's move was not just administrative, he didn't just 01:32:03.410 --> 01:32:05.090 say let's stop working with industry 01:32:05.090 --> 01:32:06.210 and think about science. 01:32:06.210 --> 01:32:08.600 He actually influenced these people in their labs very 01:32:08.600 --> 01:32:11.430 quickly, within a couple years, to start thinking about 01:32:11.430 --> 01:32:13.930 fundamental problems as opposed to just these kind of 01:32:13.930 --> 01:32:14.990 immediate problems. 01:32:14.990 --> 01:32:17.623 Hazen also becomes dean of engineering at MIT during the 01:32:17.623 --> 01:32:20.401 Second World War and head of the electrical engineering 01:32:20.401 --> 01:32:21.790 department. 01:32:21.790 --> 01:32:25.630 Here's his model of servomechanisms. 01:32:25.630 --> 01:32:29.210 Also in that group, looking at again this electric power 01:32:29.210 --> 01:32:33.230 problem, and saw something literally in the electrical 01:32:33.230 --> 01:32:36.700 power problem that was bigger than simply 01:32:36.700 --> 01:32:37.600 the immediate problem. 01:32:37.600 --> 01:32:39.070 Anybody want to get who this is? 01:32:42.060 --> 01:32:43.345 Let me describe what he's doing and 01:32:43.345 --> 01:32:44.190 maybe then you'll guess? 01:32:44.190 --> 01:32:46.670 So you can actually see in this picture, he says, I'm 01:32:46.670 --> 01:32:47.870 going to look at these generators. 01:32:47.870 --> 01:32:49.470 And the problem is when they have these 01:32:49.470 --> 01:32:50.680 transients of these-- 01:32:50.680 --> 01:32:54.980 they fall out of step, so that in an A/C system, everything 01:32:54.980 --> 01:32:56.720 has to be running in perfect synchrony. 01:32:56.720 --> 01:32:58.840 And if it's not running synchronized, you get all 01:32:58.840 --> 01:32:59.630 kinds of issues. 01:32:59.630 --> 01:33:06.430 And he says, I'm going to tape cardboard N and S. So that I'm 01:33:06.430 --> 01:33:09.570 going to tape them to each of the poles on the generator and 01:33:09.570 --> 01:33:11.950 then let the generator spin really fast. 01:33:11.950 --> 01:33:14.220 And then I'm going to shine a light on it and I'm going to 01:33:14.220 --> 01:33:17.840 pulse the light at exactly the same frequency as the 01:33:17.840 --> 01:33:19.830 generator is supposed to be spinning. 01:33:19.830 --> 01:33:22.060 And that will freeze the N and S in your eye 01:33:22.060 --> 01:33:23.240 when you look at it. 01:33:23.240 --> 01:33:25.720 And then if there's a phasing problem, you'll see the N and 01:33:25.720 --> 01:33:27.810 the S moving back and forth. 01:33:27.810 --> 01:33:29.195 Now, anybody want to guess who this is? 01:33:29.195 --> 01:33:29.510 AUDIENCE: Edgerton. 01:33:29.510 --> 01:33:30.580 PROFESSOR: This is Edgerton, right? 01:33:30.580 --> 01:33:34.320 And this is the first application he have of this 01:33:34.320 --> 01:33:35.230 stroboscope. 01:33:35.230 --> 01:33:37.340 And very soon, he says hey, you know what, this 01:33:37.340 --> 01:33:38.900 stroboscope thing is really interesting. 01:33:38.900 --> 01:33:40.950 I can make some innovations there. 01:33:40.950 --> 01:33:42.610 Forget about electric power stuff. 01:33:42.610 --> 01:33:46.620 I'm interested in high-speed photography and generally 01:33:46.620 --> 01:33:49.300 high-speed electrical discharge. 01:33:49.300 --> 01:33:51.020 AUDIENCE: It's like the first timing light for a car. 01:33:51.020 --> 01:33:51.390 PROFESSOR: Yeah. 01:33:51.390 --> 01:33:53.790 It's exactly the same as the timing light for a car. 01:33:53.790 --> 01:33:55.560 Most of which are made by EG&G, which 01:33:55.560 --> 01:33:56.980 was Edgerton's company. 01:33:56.980 --> 01:34:01.410 And so there again, he gets interested in a bunch of 01:34:01.410 --> 01:34:02.140 different things. 01:34:02.140 --> 01:34:06.700 But all of them have in common this idea of like how even 01:34:06.700 --> 01:34:07.730 most of the flashes-- 01:34:07.730 --> 01:34:10.190 you don't see it so much in your digital camera, with the 01:34:10.190 --> 01:34:11.060 little teeny ones. 01:34:11.060 --> 01:34:16.510 But if you ever have a big flash, it fires and then you 01:34:16.510 --> 01:34:18.020 hear it charging up. 01:34:18.020 --> 01:34:19.000 And then it fires all again. 01:34:19.000 --> 01:34:26.340 And Edgerton really became an expert at very rapid discharge 01:34:26.340 --> 01:34:28.080 of electrical energy. 01:34:28.080 --> 01:34:30.180 I work a lot at the Undersea World, where Edgerton did a 01:34:30.180 --> 01:34:31.480 lot of work with sonar. 01:34:31.480 --> 01:34:34.570 But the particular kind of sonar he built was very much 01:34:34.570 --> 01:34:37.350 like the flash bulb, in that it was a sonar 01:34:37.350 --> 01:34:39.070 that flashed the sound. 01:34:39.070 --> 01:34:42.690 It's called side-scan sonar, rather than continuous wave 01:34:42.690 --> 01:34:45.300 sonar, would just gave it all the time. 01:34:45.300 --> 01:34:49.950 So for the plutonium bomb in particular, the one during 01:34:49.950 --> 01:34:52.710 World War II, and I think they still are spherical, and you 01:34:52.710 --> 01:34:54.730 had to implode this device. 01:34:54.730 --> 01:34:57.470 And a guy at Harvard, Kistiakowsky, made these 01:34:57.470 --> 01:34:59.190 explosive lenses. 01:34:59.190 --> 01:35:01.970 And you had to trigger them all around this sphere at 01:35:01.970 --> 01:35:03.830 exactly the same moment. 01:35:03.830 --> 01:35:06.530 Otherwise, you were going to get a lopsided shock wave and 01:35:06.530 --> 01:35:08.590 you weren't going to implode the thing perfectly. 01:35:08.590 --> 01:35:11.230 And it was Edgerton's company that designed the triggering 01:35:11.230 --> 01:35:13.280 mechanisms for that atomic bomb. 01:35:13.280 --> 01:35:16.080 They also did high-speed photography of the actual 01:35:16.080 --> 01:35:16.830 mushroom clouds. 01:35:16.830 --> 01:35:19.230 And it's amazing, sort of frightening imagery that 01:35:19.230 --> 01:35:22.970 they've collected all through the Cold War about that. 01:35:22.970 --> 01:35:25.090 And that was EG&G. It was founded by Edgerton, 01:35:25.090 --> 01:35:27.240 Germeshausen, and Grier, two of his colleagues. 01:35:27.240 --> 01:35:32.530 And the-- let's see, what is it-- 01:35:32.530 --> 01:35:36.570 Building 37 is the building they gave. 01:35:36.570 --> 01:35:39.040 And there's a Grier room and the Germeshausen room. 01:35:39.040 --> 01:35:43.140 And I forget which the auditorium is called. 01:35:43.140 --> 01:35:44.970 But that work started here. 01:35:44.970 --> 01:35:47.520 And then Edgerton developed that. 01:35:47.520 --> 01:35:51.305 And interestingly, one of the students, a guy named Marty 01:35:51.305 --> 01:35:53.850 Klein, who is the sort of the father of that side-scan 01:35:53.850 --> 01:35:54.970 sonar, is a good friend of mine. 01:35:54.970 --> 01:35:57.880 And he always says, Edgerton was a time domain man. 01:35:57.880 --> 01:35:59.760 He never thought in the frequency domain. 01:35:59.760 --> 01:36:01.300 For those of you who are EEs, you'll know 01:36:01.300 --> 01:36:02.340 what that refers to. 01:36:02.340 --> 01:36:06.790 And that really came out this legacy from Bush's lab of 01:36:06.790 --> 01:36:08.970 thinking about transience on these lines. 01:36:08.970 --> 01:36:11.900 There's nothing to say about electric power systems in the 01:36:11.900 --> 01:36:14.350 frequency domain, because it's all 60 Hertz. 01:36:14.350 --> 01:36:17.080 It's all exactly the same frequency, unlike radio which 01:36:17.080 --> 01:36:19.720 is all about frequency domain. 01:36:19.720 --> 01:36:20.950 He thought in the time domain. 01:36:20.950 --> 01:36:23.270 And everything about the electronics-- 01:36:23.270 --> 01:36:25.330 anybody work in the Edgerton lab these days or 01:36:25.330 --> 01:36:27.540 take a class there? 01:36:27.540 --> 01:36:30.520 All that stuff is time domain stuff, kind of epitomized by 01:36:30.520 --> 01:36:31.770 the high-speed photography. 01:36:35.380 --> 01:36:39.370 Here's an image again of the Army getting interested at the 01:36:39.370 --> 01:36:43.730 Aberdeen Proving Ground, down in Maryland, which did a lot 01:36:43.730 --> 01:36:45.910 of the measurement for ballistics. 01:36:45.910 --> 01:36:49.230 They bought five or six of these or they hired people and 01:36:49.230 --> 01:36:51.280 they made their own copies of them. 01:36:51.280 --> 01:36:53.520 Within a few years, during the '30s, they were all over the 01:36:53.520 --> 01:36:56.615 place, not just in electric power. 01:36:56.615 --> 01:36:58.320 Yeah? 01:36:58.320 --> 01:37:00.330 AUDIENCE: When do you begin to see military 01:37:00.330 --> 01:37:04.400 funding of this work? 01:37:04.400 --> 01:37:06.190 Does it start with Bush's differential? 01:37:06.190 --> 01:37:06.780 No, OK. 01:37:06.780 --> 01:37:07.950 PROFESSOR: Really not until the war. 01:37:07.950 --> 01:37:11.980 So I'll come to the funding issue in a second, because 01:37:11.980 --> 01:37:13.030 it's pretty interesting. 01:37:13.030 --> 01:37:19.280 They also, with Bush's consulting, built the control 01:37:19.280 --> 01:37:23.230 system for the Palomar telescope, which at the time 01:37:23.230 --> 01:37:25.220 was the biggest telescope ever built. 01:37:25.220 --> 01:37:27.370 It didn't even become operational until after the 01:37:27.370 --> 01:37:28.470 Second World War. 01:37:28.470 --> 01:37:30.260 Anybody ever been there? 01:37:30.260 --> 01:37:33.130 It's in California, outside of San Diego. 01:37:33.130 --> 01:37:37.030 And you have this enormous, three-story high telescope. 01:37:37.030 --> 01:37:39.510 And you've got to point it with great accuracy. 01:37:39.510 --> 01:37:42.260 And it actually had a lot of similarities to the problems 01:37:42.260 --> 01:37:43.510 they were working on there. 01:37:48.060 --> 01:37:51.250 So there's also a funding story here. 01:37:51.250 --> 01:37:53.890 Warren Weaver is also mentioned in the-- 01:37:53.890 --> 01:37:56.000 I'm forgetting if it was the Servos or the [? Laquier ?] 01:37:56.000 --> 01:37:58.190 article from the Rockefeller Foundation. 01:37:58.190 --> 01:37:59.010 And they talk about it. 01:37:59.010 --> 01:37:59.540 It was [? Laquier. ?] 01:37:59.540 --> 01:38:04.810 He said, as soon as Compton came in, he went to the 01:38:04.810 --> 01:38:08.720 Rockefeller Foundation and said, I need $175,000 for this 01:38:08.720 --> 01:38:10.040 new initiative. 01:38:10.040 --> 01:38:12.150 And if you guys back me on this-- 01:38:12.150 --> 01:38:14.870 at the time, there was no National Science Foundation. 01:38:14.870 --> 01:38:17.950 There was no public money other than from the military, 01:38:17.950 --> 01:38:20.210 available for research. 01:38:20.210 --> 01:38:23.690 But the Rockefeller Foundation was basically the equivalent 01:38:23.690 --> 01:38:26.080 of the NSF today, a private foundation 01:38:26.080 --> 01:38:27.260 handing out these checks. 01:38:27.260 --> 01:38:29.880 And Bush went to Weaver. 01:38:29.880 --> 01:38:32.210 And he went to Weaver with this early version of the 01:38:32.210 --> 01:38:33.950 differential analyzer. 01:38:33.950 --> 01:38:36.110 And it was about 1931. 01:38:36.110 --> 01:38:39.280 And Weaver says, not interested. 01:38:39.280 --> 01:38:45.070 That engineering stuff is best handled by industrial funding. 01:38:45.070 --> 01:38:46.960 We don't support anything that looks 01:38:46.960 --> 01:38:48.220 like engineering research. 01:38:48.220 --> 01:38:52.750 We only support fundamental research. 01:38:52.750 --> 01:38:55.180 Why don't you go find an electric power company or 01:38:55.180 --> 01:38:57.330 somebody to give it to you? 01:38:57.330 --> 01:39:02.280 Two years later, Bush goes back to Weaver and says oh, 01:39:02.280 --> 01:39:04.460 this is not a machine for electric power research. 01:39:04.460 --> 01:39:05.300 This is a machine for 01:39:05.300 --> 01:39:08.510 fundamental research in computing. 01:39:08.510 --> 01:39:10.520 And Weaver says, oh, well if you're going to put it that 01:39:10.520 --> 01:39:13.830 way, here's $100,000. 01:39:13.830 --> 01:39:16.030 At the depths of the Depression, that a lot of 01:39:16.030 --> 01:39:19.405 money for a research program, far beyond what anybody-- in 01:39:19.405 --> 01:39:22.170 fact, I think there's a statistic in there that before 01:39:22.170 --> 01:39:25.350 the war, the entire federal funding for all of MIT was 01:39:25.350 --> 01:39:27.060 only $40,000 a year. 01:39:27.060 --> 01:39:31.880 And they gave Bush, not just $100,000, but about $250,000 01:39:31.880 --> 01:39:35.710 in the middle of the '30s, to build the next version, which 01:39:35.710 --> 01:39:37.340 became known as the Rockefeller 01:39:37.340 --> 01:39:39.510 differential analyzer. 01:39:39.510 --> 01:39:42.900 And here you see, it looks a little bit more sophisticated. 01:39:42.900 --> 01:39:45.550 Instead of those earlier tables, they called them input 01:39:45.550 --> 01:39:47.440 tables, here you have a rotating drum. 01:39:47.440 --> 01:39:50.130 There's still a person required to sit there and turn 01:39:50.130 --> 01:39:51.740 the handle. 01:39:51.740 --> 01:39:56.600 But the basic model was a lot more electrical. 01:39:56.600 --> 01:39:59.420 And also interestingly, the operators of these machines 01:39:59.420 --> 01:40:00.980 changed from men to women. 01:40:00.980 --> 01:40:02.970 So they're no longer graduate students operating them. 01:40:02.970 --> 01:40:05.680 They're much more what they called human computers at the 01:40:05.680 --> 01:40:07.040 time, operating them. 01:40:07.040 --> 01:40:08.670 But you can see there, a similar idea. 01:40:08.670 --> 01:40:10.220 There are curves on this drum. 01:40:10.220 --> 01:40:14.335 The person looks at the curves and is providing the input to 01:40:14.335 --> 01:40:18.950 the machine by matching the pointer to the curve. 01:40:18.950 --> 01:40:21.130 And the way this machine worked, is also really 01:40:21.130 --> 01:40:22.175 interesting. 01:40:22.175 --> 01:40:26.570 A lot like the other one, but instead of that matrix of 01:40:26.570 --> 01:40:33.330 circular rods in the middle, it's a crossbar switch. 01:40:33.330 --> 01:40:35.780 Anybody know what industry a crossbar switch comes from? 01:40:38.881 --> 01:40:41.080 It's a telephone switch. 01:40:41.080 --> 01:40:43.860 And its electrical switch that basically says, I got all 01:40:43.860 --> 01:40:45.940 these inputs across the top and all these inputs across 01:40:45.940 --> 01:40:46.690 the bottom. 01:40:46.690 --> 01:40:50.430 I can connect anyone to anyone, in fact in this case 01:40:50.430 --> 01:40:52.280 using a punched paper tape. 01:40:52.280 --> 01:40:54.460 And so they get the prototype crossbar 01:40:54.460 --> 01:40:55.790 switch from Bell Labs. 01:40:55.790 --> 01:40:58.090 It was a pretty big revolution in telephone 01:40:58.090 --> 01:40:59.400 switching at the time. 01:40:59.400 --> 01:41:03.300 They had built this crossbar and donated it to MIT. 01:41:03.300 --> 01:41:05.200 And what they did was they said, we're just going to 01:41:05.200 --> 01:41:08.550 adapt each of these mechanical elements-- in fact, the 01:41:08.550 --> 01:41:10.160 integrators were still mechanical-- 01:41:10.160 --> 01:41:12.230 but we're going to give them electrical outputs. 01:41:12.230 --> 01:41:14.900 Instead of the quantities being represented by the 01:41:14.900 --> 01:41:17.050 rotation angle of the rod, it's now 01:41:17.050 --> 01:41:18.650 represented by a voltage. 01:41:18.650 --> 01:41:21.690 We'll feed all the voltages into the crossbar switch. 01:41:21.690 --> 01:41:25.710 And then you configure the crossbar switch by reading a 01:41:25.710 --> 01:41:27.220 paper tape into it. 01:41:27.220 --> 01:41:32.070 And so you can basically model any equation by some set of 01:41:32.070 --> 01:41:35.470 switch closings on the crossbar switch and you 01:41:35.470 --> 01:41:37.280 program those by a paper tape. 01:41:37.280 --> 01:41:40.730 And now, you're beginning to see the beginning of digital 01:41:40.730 --> 01:41:43.400 switching coming into -- there wasn't even a word for 01:41:43.400 --> 01:41:44.780 "digital" at the time-- 01:41:44.780 --> 01:41:47.640 coming into this idea of analogue computing. 01:41:47.640 --> 01:41:50.600 And so then the problem for the programmer becomes, they 01:41:50.600 --> 01:41:53.590 have this continuous analog equation across the top. 01:41:53.590 --> 01:42:01.520 I need to translate it into these paper tapes. 01:42:01.520 --> 01:42:03.200 And that's kind of an interesting problem, how do I 01:42:03.200 --> 01:42:07.760 think about the transformation from a set of equations into a 01:42:07.760 --> 01:42:10.940 set of switch closures? 01:42:10.940 --> 01:42:15.080 And this young master student looks at it and he says well, 01:42:15.080 --> 01:42:16.925 I can actually make this kind of-- 01:42:16.925 --> 01:42:19.300 he calls it a relay algebra. 01:42:19.300 --> 01:42:26.310 And I'm going to design a little kind of mechanical 01:42:26.310 --> 01:42:29.200 notation that will allow me to design these circuits. 01:42:29.200 --> 01:42:32.520 And you know that totally useless stuff that I studied 01:42:32.520 --> 01:42:34.940 in mathematics they called Boolean algebra, from the 19th 01:42:34.940 --> 01:42:38.960 century, is actually kind of useful here. 01:42:38.960 --> 01:42:42.410 And I'm going to call a closed switch, a 1 and an open 01:42:42.410 --> 01:42:44.270 switch, a 0. 01:42:44.270 --> 01:42:47.030 And that allows you to manipulate the whole thing 01:42:47.030 --> 01:42:49.060 mathematically. 01:42:49.060 --> 01:42:50.970 Anybody know who this is? 01:42:50.970 --> 01:42:52.250 You maybe the name flash by. 01:42:52.250 --> 01:42:53.410 AUDIENCE: You mean Claude Shannon? 01:42:53.410 --> 01:42:56.190 PROFESSOR: Yeah, it's actually Claude Shannon, writes his 01:42:56.190 --> 01:43:00.320 master's thesis on exactly this problem. 01:43:00.320 --> 01:43:02.760 And many people call this the most significant master's 01:43:02.760 --> 01:43:04.300 thesis ever written in electrical engineering. 01:43:04.300 --> 01:43:07.900 The master's thesis basically lays down the entire 01:43:07.900 --> 01:43:11.850 groundwork for the design of digital systems in 1936 and 01:43:11.850 --> 01:43:14.690 based on the problems that are raised by designing this 01:43:14.690 --> 01:43:17.060 computational machine. 01:43:17.060 --> 01:43:19.850 And he immediately gets hired by Bell Labs and starts to go 01:43:19.850 --> 01:43:22.380 work there and think about how to design switching circuits. 01:43:22.380 --> 01:43:25.640 And the kind of counterpart at Bell Labs right at that moment 01:43:25.640 --> 01:43:28.230 reads this thesis and says, I'm going to call this kind of 01:43:28.230 --> 01:43:30.160 electronics digital. 01:43:30.160 --> 01:43:33.080 And actually invents the word "digital" to describe that 01:43:33.080 --> 01:43:33.950 kind of electronics. 01:43:33.950 --> 01:43:36.440 So here's a case of-- 01:43:36.440 --> 01:43:38.620 again, 1936, Karl Compton has only been 01:43:38.620 --> 01:43:40.360 at MIT for six years. 01:43:40.360 --> 01:43:43.000 But he's already pushed this particular laboratory and this 01:43:43.000 --> 01:43:45.690 particular set of students to start thinking about their 01:43:45.690 --> 01:43:47.190 work in a different way. 01:43:47.190 --> 01:43:54.410 Much less specific to one industry specific to solving 01:43:54.410 --> 01:43:57.720 particular applications, and more generally thinking about 01:43:57.720 --> 01:44:00.500 the fundamentals, the mathematics, with applications 01:44:00.500 --> 01:44:04.110 to lots and lots of other areas. 01:44:04.110 --> 01:44:07.920 So that's just one case there, I thought I would show you. 01:44:07.920 --> 01:44:10.950 And then, all those people are also then people who get very 01:44:10.950 --> 01:44:13.090 involved in the early digital computing. 01:44:13.090 --> 01:44:15.430 Once the war starts, basically they all go to 01:44:15.430 --> 01:44:16.730 Washington with Bush. 01:44:16.730 --> 01:44:19.940 Some of them stay here and get very involved. 01:44:19.940 --> 01:44:23.290 But we'll cover that in the next time we actually meet. 01:44:23.290 --> 01:44:27.518 Questions, comments about that? 01:44:27.518 --> 01:44:30.906 AUDIENCE: Is that the same servomechanism laboratory that 01:44:30.906 --> 01:44:33.480 goes and creates the Whirlwind? 01:44:33.480 --> 01:44:33.860 PROFESSOR: Yeah. 01:44:33.860 --> 01:44:36.010 The earlier question, it's exactly that laboratory. 01:44:36.010 --> 01:44:38.120 So Gordon Brown starts the Servomechanism 01:44:38.120 --> 01:44:42.680 Laboratory in 1940. 01:44:42.680 --> 01:44:45.680 He the first course ever on feedback control 01:44:45.680 --> 01:44:53.590 theory at MIT in 1939. 01:44:53.590 --> 01:44:54.730 And he writes this one paper. 01:44:54.730 --> 01:44:57.320 In fact, it's called "Transient Analysis of 01:44:57.320 --> 01:45:00.820 Servomechanisms." So it still carries that transient idea 01:45:00.820 --> 01:45:02.980 from the early electric power work. 01:45:02.980 --> 01:45:08.000 And Warren Weaver shows up in his lab and says, guess what? 01:45:08.000 --> 01:45:09.060 I work for the government now. 01:45:09.060 --> 01:45:09.600 I don't work for the 01:45:09.600 --> 01:45:12.260 Rockefeller Foundation anymore. 01:45:12.260 --> 01:45:14.050 That paper that you just wrote, that you're about to 01:45:14.050 --> 01:45:15.540 publish, it's classified. 01:45:15.540 --> 01:45:17.260 You're not allowed to publish it anymore. 01:45:17.260 --> 01:45:22.200 And here's $500,000 to start your lab. 01:45:22.200 --> 01:45:24.810 And Brown sort of takes it in. 01:45:24.810 --> 01:45:28.010 And if it happens for an historian, very valuable that 01:45:28.010 --> 01:45:29.480 they classified that paper. 01:45:29.480 --> 01:45:32.720 Because then, anyone who got a copy of it, 01:45:32.720 --> 01:45:34.330 had to sign it out. 01:45:34.330 --> 01:45:36.800 So he writes this fundamental paper. 01:45:36.800 --> 01:45:40.460 And then you can actually trace week by week, out in the 01:45:40.460 --> 01:45:44.060 community, who's reading the paper and see how they are 01:45:44.060 --> 01:45:45.020 changing their work. 01:45:45.020 --> 01:45:48.210 And they begin to have this idea, again if you look at 01:45:48.210 --> 01:45:51.550 feedback control, there's governors on steam engines. 01:45:51.550 --> 01:45:54.160 There's regulators on arc lights. 01:45:54.160 --> 01:45:57.110 There's automatic pilots in airplanes. 01:45:57.110 --> 01:45:59.770 And is even feedback amplifiers in electrical 01:45:59.770 --> 01:46:00.500 engineering. 01:46:00.500 --> 01:46:02.810 But there's nobody who says, hey, you know what, all that 01:46:02.810 --> 01:46:04.550 stuff is really the same. 01:46:04.550 --> 01:46:07.890 And now, we take for granted as that's what you study in 01:46:07.890 --> 01:46:08.400 control theory. 01:46:08.400 --> 01:46:10.120 You don't study any one of those areas. 01:46:10.120 --> 01:46:12.020 You study the basic phenomenon. 01:46:12.020 --> 01:46:15.415 And that was the beginning of what Brown was doing. 01:46:15.415 --> 01:46:18.360 And it was really a coincidence that right about 01:46:18.360 --> 01:46:21.330 that moment, it goes underground and it stays 01:46:21.330 --> 01:46:22.990 underground for the whole war. 01:46:22.990 --> 01:46:25.090 And that's really where when Norbert Wiener comes out in 01:46:25.090 --> 01:46:28.040 1948, and says, cybernetics, feedback control, it's all 01:46:28.040 --> 01:46:31.920 about this, he was just saying something that had been secret 01:46:31.920 --> 01:46:35.120 for eight years already at that point. 01:46:35.120 --> 01:46:38.030 But one of the things that got me interested in this research 01:46:38.030 --> 01:46:42.040 was, why was MIT's first digital computer made by the 01:46:42.040 --> 01:46:43.340 Servomechanisms Lab? 01:46:43.340 --> 01:46:45.810 Because you don't necessarily associate those two 01:46:45.810 --> 01:46:46.920 things in your mind. 01:46:46.920 --> 01:46:50.670 A servo, you think of as an analog, mechanical thing and a 01:46:50.670 --> 01:46:52.750 digital computer as this funny electronic thing. 01:46:52.750 --> 01:46:56.430 But during the war, it sort of-- it actually happens after 01:46:56.430 --> 01:46:58.050 the war, but right after the war.