This work benefited significantly from the insights and perspectives of Charlton Adams, G. D. Agarwal, José Andrés, Serge Appel, Norman Augustine, Celeste Baine, Simon Baron-Cohen, Craig Barrett, Harish Bhat, Vinton Cerf, Shu Chien, Francis Ching, Ralph Cicerone, Wayne Clough, David Collins, Robert Cook, Martin Cooper, Claire Curtis-Thomas, Ruth David, Tony DeRose, Gordon England, Robert Fein, Harvey Fineberg, Ralph Gomory, Ignacio Grossmann, Arlene Harris, Hank Hatch, Jim Hinchman, Chad Holliday, Ted Kaufman, David Koon, Robert Langer, George Laurer, Michael Lee, Steven Lien, Veer Bhadra Mishra, Vishwambar Nath Mishra, C. Dan Mote Jr., N. R. Narayana Murthy, Craig Newmark, José-Luis Novo, Vimla Patel, Atul Pawar, Charles Phelps, Jim Plummer, Nancy Pope, Bhaskar Ramamurthi, Steven Sasson, Piers Shepperd, Kenneth Shine, Barry Shoop, Ted Shortliffe, Robert Skinner Jr., Daniel Sniezek, Alfred Spector, M. S. Swaminathan, Margaret Szymanski, Paul Tonko, Sophie Vandebroek, Charles Vest, John Viera, and George Whitesides.
NOTES
Prologue: Invisible Bridges
The Rosie Ruiz scandal was widely covered in the popular press and media. I culled information from several features published around the time of the event—and some follow-up articles published years later—in the New York Times (by Neil Amdur: October 25, 1976; October 23, 1983; by David Picker: November 7, 2005), in the Washington Post (by Jane Leavy: April 22, 23, and 27, 1980; by Lee Lescaze: April 25, 1980), in Running Times (by Ed Ayres: July 1980), in the Christian Science Monitor (by Greg Lamb: April 23, 1980), and in the Evening Standard London (by Adrian Warner: April 12, 2005). The interview between Ruiz and the reporter, as well as the eyewitness’s quote, were transcribed from a 1980 news broadcast accessed on YouTube (“The Boston Marathon Cheater”).
David Collins’s 1994 book Using Bar Code: Why It’s Taking Over (published by the Data Capture Institute) is an excellent source of information that combines his technical and social perspectives on a broad portfolio of bar code technologies that he and others have helped develop over time.
George Laurer’s 2007 autobiography, Engineering Was Fun (published by Lulu.com), describes the development of the Universal Product Code. Quotes about the “golden chicken” (or “platinum pork”) problem are from page 121. Information on the committee of grocery industry executives is from page 147. A technical paper coauthored by Laurer and David Savir—entitled “The Characteristics and Decodability of the Universal Product Code” (IBM Systems Journal 14, no. 1 [1975]: 16–34)—was instructive.
One of the first articles describing the impact of the UPC—“A Standard Labeling Code for Food”—was published in the April 7, 1973, issue of Business Week (pages 71–73). The 1999 PricewaterhouseCoopers report “17 Billion Reasons to Say Thanks: The 25th Anniversary of the U.P.C. and Its Impact on the Grocery Industry,” by Vineet Garg and colleagues, served as a good reference. Economist Emek Basker’s 2012 working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research (“Raising the Barcode Scanner: Technology and Productivity in the Retail Sector”) provided a good technical overview of how bar code scanners help increase productivity in the retail sector. The May 1974 Harvard Business Review article “The Grocery Industry in the USA—Choice of a Universal Product Code” was a helpful primer. The Retail Identification History Museum (ID History Museum) also contains a wealth of information regarding the UPC and related technologies. The 2011 book Making the World Work Better: The Ideas That Shaped a Century and a Company, by Kevin Maney, Steve Hamm, and Jeffrey O’Brien (IBM Press)—on IBM and its innovators—was a useful guide overall.
John Seabrook’s quote is from the chapter “The Tower Builder” in his 2008 book Flash of Genius (St. Martin’s Press), page 247.
One: Mixing and Matching
Historian Ken Alder’s magnificent 1997 book Engineering the Revolution: Arms & Enlightenment in France, 1763–1815 (University of Chicago Press) was the principal reference. Alder’s 1991 dissertation, “Forging the New Order: French Mass Production and the Language of the Machine Age, 1763–1815” (Harvard University); his 1997 paper “Innovation and Amnesia: Engineering Rationality and the Fate of Interchangeable Parts Manufacturing in France” (Technology and Culture 38, no. 2: 273–311); and Howard Rosen’s 1981 dissertation, “The System Gribeauval: A Study of Technological Development and Institutional Change in Eighteenth Century France” (University of Chicago) provided additional historical background.
On the design of the naval carriage unit, see page 20 in Rosen’s dissertation. The term “authentic military hero” is from page 22. The term “enlightenment engineering” is from the second chapter of Alder’s book, the term “descriptionism” is quoted on page 71, and “mathematical gymnasium” is from page 90. “An enlightened man without passion . . .” is quoted from pages 38–39 of Alder’s book—whose original source is “Rapport au Ministère, 3 March 1762” in Eugene Hennebert’s Gribeauval, lt-general de armees du roy (Berger-Levrault, 1896), page 36.
The Louis XIV quote is from page 45 of John Lynn’s chapter “Forging the Western Army in Seventeenth-Century France” in the 2001 book The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300–2050, edited by M. Knox and W. Murray (Cambridge University Press). The information about the number of horses and men required to drag a 34-pounder gun is also from this chapter (page 40). Winston Churchill’s “first world war” quote—originally from his book A History of the English-Speaking Peoples—comes from the introduction to the 2014 book The Culture of the Seven Years’ War: Empire, Identity, and the Arts in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, edited by Shaun Regan and Frans De Bruyn (University of Toronto Press), page 3.
The cannon weight numbers are from the Xenophon Group—an association of military historians—based on research by historian Robert Selig accessed online on a web page headlined “Statistical Overview of Artillery at the Siege of Yorktown (1781).” The “Ordonnance Royale du 7 October 1732,” reprinted in Picard’s Artillerie française (pages 55–56), is quoted on page 75 of Alder’s dissertation; and the quote “a system of control: rationality made to serve despotism” comes from page 77. Gribeauval’s background is drawn from Alder’s book Engineering the Revolution, as is the “Star Wars” quote (page 23).
Gribeauval’s early years and technical contributions are also recounted in Stephen Summerfield’s December 2010 papers in the Smoothbore Ordnance Journal: “Gribeauval’s Early Work” (pages 9–17); “Gribeauval in France before the Seven Years War (1715–56)” (pages 18–23). More on the siege of Schweidnitz and Gribeauval’s translated text on Austrian army engineers can be found in Summerfield’s article “Gribeauval in Austrian Service (1758–62),” published in the same issue of the Smoothbore Ordnance Journal (pages 24–35), in which he quotes (on page 26) from Christopher Duffy’s 2000 book Instrument of War (volume 1 of The Austrian Army in the Seven Years War; Emperor’s Press). Also helpful was a paper by Digby Smith: “Gribeauval Report on the Austrian Artillery Dated 3 March 1762 (Translated from Hennebert, Revue d’Artillerie, 1896, French)” (Smoothbore Ordnance Journal, December 2010, 63–66).
Supporting references included the following: Kevin Kiley, “That Devil Gribeauval” (Napoleon Series Archive 2010, http://www.napoleon-series.org); Bruce McConachy, “The Roots of Artillery Doctrine: Napoleonic Artillery Tactics Reconsidered” (Journal of Military History 65, no. 3 [2001]: 617–40); Ken MacLennan, “Liechtenstein and Gribeauval: ‘Artillery Revolution’ in Political and Cultural Context” (War in History 10, no. 3 [2003]: 249–64); Brett Steele, “The Ballistics Revolution: Military and Scientific Change from Robins to Napoleon” (PhD dissertation; University of Minnesota, 1994); and Charles Gillispie and Ken Alder, “Exchange: Engineering the Revolution” (Technology and Culture 39, no. 4 [1998]: 733–54).
Thomas Kuhn’s classic book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 3rd edition, 1996) and Freeman Dyson’s The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet: Tools of Scientific Revolutions (Oxford University Press, 1999) provide stimulating yet somewhat contrasting perspectives on how science as an enterprise makes progress. Dyson’s December 2012 article “Is Science Mostly Driven by Ideas or by Tools?” (Science 338, no. 6113: 1426–27) is also a useful read; it summarizes his view on how new tools—that is, engineering—help inform and underpin scientific progress. In 1939, MIT’s Dugald Jackson went on to call engineering a “frontier influence” on modern civilization and social relations in a well-argued paper titled “Engineering’s Part in the Development of Civilization” (Science 89, no. 2307: 231–37).
Tom Peters’s quote is from “How Creative Engineers Think” (Civil Engineering 68, no. 3 [1998]: 48–51). Dan Mote’s quote is from his presidential address entitled “Understanding Engineering,” delivered at the fiftieth-anniversary celebration and 2014 annual meeting of the National Academy of Engineering, September 28, 2014. Other useful articles on engineering epistemology include Joseph Pitt’s “What Engineers Know” (Techné 5, no. 3 [Spring 2001], available online); and Steven Goldman’s “The Social Captivity of Engineering,” in Critical Perspectives on Nonacademic Science and Engineering, edited by P. Durbin (Research in Technology Studies 4; Lehigh University Press, 1991), pages 121–45.
Henry Petroski’s The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems (Vintage, 2011) also gives examples of how science sometimes gets in the way of engineering creations. For lateral reading on this topic, see also Edwin Layton’s chapter “A Historical Definition of Engineering,” also in Durbin’s Critical Perspectives (pages 60–79). Other useful articles include a classic piece by W. F. Durand: “The Engineer and Civilization” (Science 42, no. 1615 [1925]: 525–33); and a more recent one by Zachary Pirtle entitled “How Models of Engineering Tell the Truth,” in Philosophy and Engineering, edited by I. van de Poel and D. E. Goldberg (Springer, 2010), pages 97–108. Michael Davis’s 1996 article “Defining ‘Engineer’: How to Do It and Why It Matters” (Journal of Engineering Education 85, no. 2: 97–101), and Steven Vick’s 2002 book Degrees of Belief: Subjective Probability and Engineering Judgment (American Society of Civil Engineers Press) served as a useful framework for my thoughts.
Stuart Firestein and Andrew Wiles’s quotes are from Firestein’s 2012 book Ignorance: How It Drives Science (Oxford University Press), pages 2–7. On stepwise refinements, see Niklaus Wirth’s classic paper “Program Development by Stepwise Refinement” (Communications of the ACM, April 1971, 221–27). Cognitive psychologists liken top-down and bottom-up design approaches to “big chunk” and “small chunk” cognitions involved in information processing. The term “hardware of culture” comes from Roger Burlingame’s 1959 article by that title published in Technology and Culture (vol. 1, no. 1: 11–19).
The figure of less than 4 percent of (scientists and) engineers disproportionately creating jobs for the remainder is from the National Academies’ 2010 report Rising above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5 (page 3). A related source is the National Science Board’s Science and Engineering Indicators 2014. See also Nobel laureate Robert Solow’s influential 1957 paper “Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function” (Review of Economics and Statistics 39, no. 3: 312–20), which showed how technological innovation alone is known to contribute more than 50 percent of economic growth. Robert Ayres’s 1988 paper “Technology: The Wealth of Nations” (Technological Forecasting and Social Change 33: 189–201) is a useful read.
Eugene Ferguson explains visual thinking in his 1992 book Engineering and the Mind’s Eye (MIT Press). For more on structured thinking—including concepts such as “functional binding”—see Wayne Stevens, Glenford Myers, and Larry Constantine’s 1974 paper “Structured Design” (IBM Systems Journal 13, no. 2: 115–39) and Barry Richmond’s 1993 paper “Systems Thinking: Critical Thinking Skills for the 1990s and Beyond” (Systems Dynamics Review 9, no. 2: 113–33).
For systems thinking in general, I recommend, as examples, Peter Senge’s revised and updated 2006 book The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization (Currency Doubleday); Peter Checkland’s 1999 book Systems Thinking, Systems Practice (Wiley); Jay Forrester’s books, including World Dynamics (Pegasus Communications, 1971), Urban Dynamics (MIT Press, 1969), and Industrial Dynamics (MIT Press, 1961); and Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s classic 1969 work General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications (George Braziller).
The quote by Olivier de Weck and colleagues is from their 2012 book Engineering Systems: Meeting Human Needs in a Complex Technological World (MIT Press), page 34. For more on George Heilmeier’s catechism, see his piece “Some Reflections on Innovation and Invention” (Bridge 22, no. 4 [1992]: 12–16). The checklist template comes from Joshua Shapiro’s June 1994 profile of Heilmeier in IEEE Spectrum (page 58). A related article is by Chris Brantley: “The Heilmeier Catechism” (IEEE-USA Today’s Engineer, February 2012).
Two: Optimizing
The Stockholm data are from a 2008 National Academies’ Transportation Research Board conference proceedings—U.S. and International Approaches to Performance Measurement for Transportation Systems—from a section titled “Stockholm Congestion Charging Program: A Performance View,” by Naveen Lamba (pages 84–85).
Lamba’s quotes are from his article “Traffic and How to Avoid Future ‘Carmageddons’ ” (Fox Business, July 15, 2011) and from a Fast Company piece listing 50 “Most Innovative Companies” that ranked IBM at 19 (February 10, 2009). Also insightful was an article by Lamba published in the Tacoma News Tribune, August 9, 2011: “New Technology Offers Solutions for Traffic Congestion.” The 2012 Urban Mobility Report, authored by David Schrank, Bill Eisele, and Tim Lomax, was produced by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. The data are taken from page 5.
Swedish transportation research professor Jonas Eliasson and his colleagues have published extensively about the effects of congestion pricing on public behavior in Stockholm. Sample works include Maria Börjesson et al.’s 2012 paper “The Stockholm Congestion Charges—Five Years On” (Transport Policy 20: 1–12) and Jonas Eliasson’s 2009 paper “A Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Stockholm Congestion Charging System” (Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice 43, no. 4: 468–80).
The 2011 IBM report “Smarter Cities Series: Understanding the IBM Approach to Traffic Management,” prepared by Stefen Schaefer et al.; and a 2013 paper by Akshay Vij and Joan Walker—“You Can Lead Travelers to the Bus Stop, but You Can’t Make Them Ride” (Transportation Research Board 92nd Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers, National Academies Press)—were useful primers. Tom Vanderbilt’s 2009 book Traffic (Vintage Books) effectively covers the psychology of—as the book’s subtitle goes—Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says about Us).
Statisticians George Box and Norman Draper famously declared that “all models are wrong, but some are useful” in their 1987 book Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces (John Wiley & Sons). The paper from which Joshua Epstein is quoted is “Why Model?” (Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 11, no. 4 [2008]: 12).
The “super-horse” story quoted from John Kuprenas and Matthew Frederick’s 2013 book 101 Things I Learned in Engineering School (Grand Central Publishing, page 75) was derived from “The Possibility of Life in Other Worlds,” by Sir Robert Ball (Scientific American Supplement, no. 992 [January 5, 1895]: 15859–61). The 2001 book Rational Analysis for a Problematic World Revisited, by Jonathan Rosenhead and John Mingers (Wiley), is a good reference to learn more about such dichotomies as practical versus technical problems.
Nancy Pope’s quote “even if you’re really good at it . . .” is from her July 1, 2013, interview “50 Years Ago, ZIP Codes Revolutionized Mail Service” on NPR’s All Things Considered. A one-stop resource on the history and implementation of ZIP codes is the Smithsonian National Postal Museum’s website (http://www.postalmuseum.si.edu). David Henkin’s book The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2006) is one of the many terrific references and resources available for those interested in the history of postal communications.
Quotes about Google Maps are from researchers Dragomir Anguelov et al., “Google Street View: Capturing the World at Street Level” (Computer, June 2010, 32–37). Also useful were Evan Ratliff’s July 2007 article “The Whole Earth Cataloged: How Google Maps Is Changing the Way We See the World” in Wired and a July 2012 paper on “computational geography” by Carl Doersch et al.: “What Makes Paris Look Like Paris?” (ACM Transactions on Graphics [SIGGRAPH 2012 Conference Proceedings] 31, no. 4).
Randall Stephenson’s quote is from Valentin Schmid’s 2012 article “AT&T CEO Discusses Future of Mobile” (Epoch Times, November 22–28, A1). The Boeing 10-terabytes factoid is from a National Instruments report entitled “Automated Test Outlook 2013: A Comprehensive View of Key Technologies and Methodologies Impacting the Test and Measurement Industry” (page 10).
Economist Gregory Mankiw’s quote is from his 2006 paper “The Macroeconomist as Scientist and Engineer” (Journal of Economic Perspectives 20, no. 4: 29–46), which also cites John Maynard Keynes’s quote on dentistry. “While the early macroeconomists were engineers trying to solve practical problems, the macroeconomists of the past several decades have been more interested in developing analytic tools and establishing theoretical principles. These tools and principles, however, have been slow to find their way into applications,” Mankiw writes in this paper. “The tension between these two visions, while not always civil, may have been productive, for competition is as important to intellectual advance as it is to market outcomes.” Another useful read is John Sutton’s 2002 book entitled Marshall’s Tendencies: What Can Economists Know? (MIT Press).
Eric Maskin’s Nobel lecture is “Mechanism Design: How to Implement Social Goals” (December 8, 2007). See also articles by Alvin Roth—an operations researcher turned Nobel Prize–winning economist—including “The Economist as Engineer: Game Theory, Experimentation, and Computation as Tools for Design Economics” (Econometrica 70, no. 4 [2002]: 1341–78).
Alain Beltran’s quote is from his 1993 book chapter “Competitiveness and Electricity: Electricité de France since 1946,” in Technological Competitiveness: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on Electrical, Electronics, and Computer Industries, edited by W. Aspray (IEEE Press), page 318, which also offers a great picture of the intersection of economic and engineering thinking.
A related paper, written by William Hausman and John Neufeld, is “Engineers and Economists: Historical Perspectives on the Pricing of Electricity” (Technology and Culture 30, no. 1 [1989]: 83–104). The concept of Boiteux’s optimization is also closely related to what economists call “Ramsey pricing,” after the brilliant mathematician Frank Ramsey, who died at the age of twenty-six. His works have provided a superb foundation for the modern scientific field of decision analysis.
For additional insights on how economists think, model, and analyze the world around them, I suggest two recent books: The Assumptions Economists Make, by Jonathan Schlefer (Belknap Press of Harvard, 2012); and Mary Morgan’s The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
On differential pricing in theme parks, see, for example, Walter Oi’s “A Disneyland Dilemma: Two-Part Tariffs for a Mickey Mouse Monopoly” (Quarterly Journal of Economics 85, no. 1 [1971]: 77–96). For insights on how the engineering design of the power industry has, in a way, led to an economic theory of such markets, see Stanford economist Robert Wilson’s 2002 paper “Architecture of Power Markets” (Econometrica 70, no. 4: 1299–1340).
Three: Enhancing Efficiency and Reliability
On Clarence Saunders, the principal reference was Mike Freeman’s excellent biography Clarence Saunders & the Founding of Piggly Wiggly: The Rise & Fall of a Memphis Maverick (History Press, 2011). The following quotes are from this book: “cut out all the frills of merchandising” (page 33); “every forty-eight seconds . . .” (page 34); “He liked to preach . . .” (page 35); “Every item is plainly marked . . .” (page 35); “In his hand, Piggly Wiggly was never . . .” (page 25). Saunders’s U.S. patent number is 1242872. His other related patents are numbers 1357521, 1397824, 1407680, 1647889, and 1704061.
John Brooks’s 1959 article “A Corner in Piggly Wiggly: Annals of Finance” (New Yorker, June 6, 128–50) and Henry Petroski’s 2005 article “Shopping by Design” (American Scientist, November–December, 491–95) were useful references. Lauren Collins’s quote is from her article “House Perfect: Is the IKEA Ethos Comfy or Creepy?” (New Yorker, October 3, 2011).
The term “category killers” is from Robert Spector’s 2005 book Category Killers: The Retail Revolution and Its Impact on Consumer Culture (Harvard Business School Press). For more on IKEA history and philosophy, see Bertil Torekull’s 1999 book Leading by Design: The IKEA Story (translated by Joan Tate; Harper Business). Sam Walton’s autobiography is Sam Walton: Made in America (Doubleday, 1992).
Shepherd-Barron’s quote about the chocolate bar dispenser idea is from Caroline Davies’s obituary “Inventor of the Cash Machine Dies” (Guardian, May 19, 2010). The original source cited in this article is a 2007 BBC interview. Obituaries published in the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, the Windsor Star, the Herald Scotland, and BBC News provided additional information on Shepherd-Barron.
Michael Lee’s articles on the ATM Industry Association website were a tremendous source of information. Paul Volcker’s comment on the ATM is from a December 14, 2009, Wall Street Journal article: “Think More Boldly; Interview at Future of Finance Initiative.”
On opportunistic assimilation, see the chapter by Colleen Seifert et al.—“Demystification of Cognitive Insight: Opportunistic Assimilation and the Prepared-Mind Hypothesis”—in The Nature of Insight, edited by R. Sternberg and J. Davidson (MIT Press, 1993), pages 65–124. On matrix thinking, see Tom Peters’s “How Creative Engineers Think” (Civil Engineering 68, no. 3 [1998]: 48–51).
W. Bernard Carlson’s quotes are from his chapter “Invention and Evolution: The Case of Edison’s Sketches of the Telephone” in Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process, edited by J. Ziman (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pages 137–58.
Gary Bradshaw’s article is “The Airplane and the Logic of Invention,” in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 15: Cognitive Models of Science, edited by R. Giere (University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pages 239–49. A related article, by Anthonie Meijers and Peter Kroes, is “Extending the Scope of the Theory of Knowledge,” in Norms in Technology, edited by M. J. de Vries, S. O. Hansson, and A. W. M. Meijers (Springer, 2013), pages 15–34.
Tom Crouch’s book on the Wright brothers is The Bishop’s Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright (W. W. Norton, 1989). Most of his quotes are from a November 11, 2003, PBS Nova article “The Unlikely Inventors.” The quote “One literally has to ‘see’ the propeller . . .” is from Tom Crouch and Peter Jakab’s 2003 book The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Aerial Age (Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, National Geographic), page 120.
W. Brian Arthur’s 2005 paper is “The Logic of Invention” (Santa Fe Institute [SFI] Working Paper 2005-12-045:15). See also his 2009 book The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (Free Press).
Eiji Toyoda’s book is Toyota: Fifty Years in Motion (Kodansha International, 1987), and Taiichi Ohno’s is Toyota Seisan Hoshiki (in Japanese; Diamond, 1978). Chapters 1 and 2 in David Magee’s 2007 book How Toyota Became #1: Leadership Lessons from the World’s Greatest Car Company (Portfolio) offered useful information. Eiji Toyoda’s view on wringing water from a dry towel—as found in various articles and paraphrased here—appears to have been articulated in the context of cost-cutting efforts during the 1973 oil crisis, notes a February 26, 2010, Bloomberg piece by Alan Ohnsman and colleagues (available online). Escoffier’s culinary contributions are drawn from Bee Wilson’s 2012 book Consider the Fork (Basic Books), page 52.
Peter Senge’s quote is from his 2006 book The Fifth Discipline (Currency Doubleday), page 73. The Japanese sea model is described in Yuji Yamamoto and Monica Bellgran’s paper “Fundamental Mindset That Drives Improvements towards Lean Production” (Assembly Automation 30, no. 2 [2010]: 124–30).
Information on reduced-weight airplane cutlery is from Mark Gerchik’s 2013 book Full Upright and Locked Position: Not-So-Comfortable Truths about Air Travel Today (W. W. Norton), pages 247–49.
Taiichi Ohno’s approach to root-cause analysis comes from his 1988 book Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production (Productivity Press), pages 17–20. In nonscientific terms, the sort of questioning associated with root-cause analysis is not that different from the essence captured in the classic, rhythmic children’s song “There’s a Hole in My Bucket,” about a circular conundrum involving two characters, Henry and Liza, sourced here from Wikipedia:
Henry has got a leaky bucket, and Liza tells him to repair it. But to fix the leaky bucket, he needs straw. To cut the straw, he needs a knife. To sharpen the knife, he needs to wet the sharpening stone. To wet the stone, he needs water. However, when Henry asks how to get the water, Liza’s answer is “in a bucket.” It is implied that only one bucket is available—the leaky one, which, if it could carry water, would not need repairing in the first place.
Also useful as references on the Toyota Production System were James Womack and colleagues’ 1991 book The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production (Harper Perennial) and Allen Ward et al.’s 1995 article “The Second Toyota Paradox: How Delaying Decisions Can Make Better Cars Faster” (MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring, 43–61). One of the founding fathers of concurrent engineering—purely through the lens of efficiency—is Frederick Winslow Taylor. His 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management (Harper & Brothers) is a good read. Martha Banta’s 1995 book Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford (University of Chicago Press) is also a good review of the various production philosophies related to concurrent engineering.
For commentary on the RMS Titanic, see, for example, Henry Petroski’s “100 Years after the Titanic, We’re Still Not Unsinkable” (Washington Post, April 6, 2012). On aggressive and conservative trade-offs, Kevin Otto and Erik Antonsson’s 1991 paper “Trade-Off Strategies in Engineering Design” (Research in Engineering Design 3, no. 2: 87–104) is a good reference.
Regarding social trust of engineering, perhaps one of the oldest rules is the Code of King Hammurabi, which—as quoted on page 41 of John Kuprenas and Matthew Frederick’s 2013 book 101 Things I Learned in Engineering School (Grand Central Publishing)—states:
If a builder has built a house for a man, and has not made it sound, and the house falls and causes the death of its owner, that builder shall be put to death. If it is the owner’s son that is killed, the builder’s son shall be put to death. If it is the slave of the owner that is killed, the builder shall give a slave to the owner of the house. If it ruins goods, the builder shall make compensation for all that has been ruined, and shall re-erect the house from his own means. If a builder builds a house, even though he has not yet completed it; if then the walls seem toppling, the builder must make the walls solid from his own means.
Michio Kaku’s concept of High Tech and High Touch comes from his 2011 book Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 (Doubleday), page 15.
Four: Standardizing with Flexibility
Alexander Fleming’s 1929 paper is “On the Antibacterial Action of Cultures of a Penicillium, with Special Reference to Their Use in the Isolation of B. influenzae” (British Journal of Experimental Pathology 10, no. 3: 226–36). Fleming’s quotes come from his December 10, 1945, speech at the Nobel banquet and his Nobel lecture “Penicillin,” December 11, 1945, in Stockholm—both accessible on the Nobel Prize website. The term “national hero” is from Richard Cavendish’s article “Funeral of Sir Alexander Fleming” (History Today 55, no. 3 [March 2005]).
The history of penicillin mass production has been widely reported. See, for example, Maxwell Brockmann et al.’s 1970 book The History of Penicillin Production (American Institute of Chemical Engineers); Pfizer, Inc.’s 2008 booklet Penicillin Production through Deep-Tank Fermentation (National Historic Chemical Landmarks program of the American Chemical Society); Erik Lax’s 2004 book The Mold in Dr. Florey’s Coat: The Story of the Penicillin Miracle (Henry Holt); David Wilson’s 1976 book In Search of Penicillin (Alfred A. Knopf); Joseph Lombardino’s 2000 paper “A Brief History of Pfizer Central Research” (Bulletin for the History of Chemistry 25, no. 1: 10–15); and sections of two National Research Council reports—Frontiers in Chemical Engineering: Research Needs and Opportunities (1988) and Separation & Purification: Critical Needs and Opportunities (1987)—both from the National Academy Press.
Representative sources by Hugh De Haven that I consulted include “Mechanical Analysis of Survival in Falls from Heights of Fifty to One Hundred and Fifty Feet” (Injury Prevention 6 [2000]: 62–68), which originally appeared in War Medicine 2 (1942): 586–96; and Development of Crash-Survival Design in Personal, Executive, and Agricultural Aircraft (Crash Injury Research, Cornell University Medical College, 1953).
For commentaries on De Haven’s research implications, see Amy Gangloff’s paper “Safety in Accidents: Hugh DeHaven and the Development of Crash Injury Studies” (Technology and Culture 54, no. 1 [2013]: 40–61) and Carl Metzgar’s “Writing Worth Reading: Mechanical Analysis of Survival in Falls from Heights of 50 to 150 Feet” (Professional Safety, June 2003, 55, 75). The alternative account of the 1916 crash story is that the other pilot managed to walk away from his wrecked aircraft while De Haven was left debilitated. I relied on Gangloff’s documentation, which in turn relied on De Haven’s own “good record keeping.”
The quotes “the package should not open up . . . ,” “from impact against the inside . . . ,” “would not test . . . ,” “fragile, valuable objects . . . ,” “extreme forward movement . . . ,” and “fully appreciate the fact that . . . ,” are from De Haven’s 1952 SAE Technical Paper 520016: “Accident Survival—Airline and Passenger Car,” reprinted in William Haddon, Edward Suchman, and David Klein’s 1964 Accident Research: Methods and Approaches (Harper & Row), pages 562–68. Howard Hasbrook’s quote is from his 1956 paper “The Historical Development of the Crash-Impact Engineering Point of View” (Clinical Orthopaedics 8: 268–74), reprinted in Haddon et al.’s book, pages 547–54.
For more on the CREEP framework, see the 2002 book Small Airplane Crashworthiness Design Guide, edited by Todd Hurley and Jill Vandenburg (Simula Technologies), pages 1–3. On the invention of the three-point seat belt, see the U.S. patent issued to Roger Griswold and Hugh De Haven: “Combination Shoulder and Lap Safety Belts,” no. 2710649, June 14, 1955. The description of the fighter pilots’ shoulder harness as “uncomfortable and overly restricting” comes from this patent. A crosscutting 2012 volume edited by Sabine Roeser et al. (Handbook of Risk Theory: Epistemology, Decision Theory, Ethics, and Social Implications of Risk; Springer) and a 1958 review article by Charles Chayne (“Automotive Design Contributions to Highway Safety,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 320, no. 1: 73–83) offered valuable insights.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention articles on seat belts include “Achievements in Public Health, 1900–1999 Motor-Vehicle Safety: A 20th Century Public Health Achievement” (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, May 14, 1999, 369–74); “Seat Belts Fact Sheet” at http://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety; and “Adult Seat Belt Use in the US,” in CDC Vital Signs (National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, 2011).
Information about Margaret Hutchinson was gathered primarily from reporting in the Daily Boston Globe (July 29, 1952; June 26, 1955; December 9, 1956), the Christian Science Monitor (June 7, 1950), and the New York Times (June 25, 1955).
The quote “Heating, cooling, washing . . .” is from James Sparkman’s “Chemical Engineering Family: ‘Home’ Is Extensive Place for Woman Chemistry Sc.D.” (Christian Science Monitor, June 7, 1950); “keeps us so busy we don’t have . . .” comes from Nat Kline’s “Two at Stone & Webster Fear No Male Competition” (Daily Boston Globe, July 29, 1952); “I actually received little . . .” is from the article titled “Woman Engineer from Reading Wins Top Award” (Daily Boston Globe, June 26, 1955).
Pfizer executive John L. Smith’s quote “The mold is as temperamental . . .” is from the American Chemical Society’s “National Historic Chemical Landmarks” web page on the discovery and production ramp-up of penicillin. Penicillin production data are from A. N. Richards’s 1964 article “Production of Penicillin in the United States (1941–1946)” (Nature 201: 441–45). The quote “far beyond the art of brewing” is from the Hartford Courant’s article “World’s Largest Output of Antibiotics at Groton” (May 1, 1955).
On compound technologies, see Cambridge University industrial economist Antonio Andreoni’s works, including his chapter “On Manufacturing Development under Resources Constraints” in Resources, Production and Structural Dynamics, edited by M. Baranzini, C. Rotondi, and R. Scazzieri (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
The term interpretive consistency was coined by Gregory Gargarian. See, for example, his 1996 piece “The Art of Design,” in Constructionism in Practice: Designing, Thinking, and Learning in a Digital World, edited by Y. Kafai and M. Resnick (Lawrence Erlbaum), page 136.
The example of India’s “local systems of measures” is from Lawrence Busch’s 2011 book Standards: Recipes for Reality (MIT Press), page 61. For more on India’s 1956 Standards of Weights and Measures Act, see the volume Metric Change in India, edited by Lal Verman and Jainath Kaul (Indian Standards Institution, 1970), page 306.
Donald Berwick’s quote is from “How to Fix the System” (Time, April 24, 2006). On sirens, see Brian Hills’s “Vision, Visibility, and Perception in Driving” (Perception 9, no. 2 [1980]: 183–216), as well as a review paper by Robert De Lorenzo and Mark Eilers: “Lights and Siren: A Review of Emergency Vehicle Warning Systems” (Annals of Emergency Medicine 20, no. 12 [1991]: 1331–35). On the building of complicated systems, I recommend the 2011 book by Olivier de Weck, Daniel Roos, and Christopher Magee titled Engineering Systems: Meeting Human Needs in a Complex Technological World (MIT Press); see, for example, page 32.
John Rae’s quote is from his 1960 paper “The ‘Know-How’ Tradition: Technology in American History” (Technology and Culture 1, no. 2: 139–50). Useful companion articles included Carolyn Miller’s 1998 piece “Learning from History: World War II and the Culture of High Technology” (Journal of Business and Technical Communication 12, no. 3: 288–315) and Thomas Hughes’s 2004 book American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870–1970 (University of Chicago Press).
With Michael Vincent and Kenneth McLeod, I discuss the concept of transduction, among other biological metaphors (including transformation and fusion, which come up in the chapter on prototyping), in a chapter entitled “Evolutionary Processes as Conceptual Metaphor for Innovative Design Processes in Engineering,” published in the 2007 book Innovations 2007: World Innovations in Engineering Education and Research, edited by W. Aung et al. (International Network for Engineering Education and Research Press), pages 441–52. In biological fusion the integrated technologies are not merely add-ons, but they become part of the system, resulting in emergent behavior. Ricard Solé and colleagues explore additional related ideas in their 2013 white paper “The Evolutionary Ecology of Technological Innovations” (Santa Fe Institute).
On the innovation of Harold Willis and Henry Ford—and several other engineering innovators—see the section on Henry Ford in Harold Evans’s 2006 They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine, Two Centuries of Innovators (Back Bay Books). The quote is from page 303.
Recommended companion books include Douglas Brinkley’s Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress (Penguin, 2004), Lindy Biggs’s The Rational Factory: Architecture, Technology and Work in America’s Age of Mass Production (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), and David Nye’s America’s Assembly Line (MIT Press, 2013).
Five: Solutions under Constraints
Varanasi is also known as Banaras or Kashi. Mark Twain’s quote is from his 1897 book Following the Equator: A Journey around the World (American Publishing Company). Other prominent discussions on Varanasi include Richard Lannoy’s 1999 book Benares Seen from Within (Callisto Books); E. B. Havell’s 1905 volume Benaras: The Sacred City (Vishwavidyalaya Prakashan, reprinted 1990); Jonathan Parry’s 1994 work Death in Banaras (Cambridge University Press); Stephen Alter’s 2001 book Sacred Waters: A Pilgrimage up the Ganges River to the Source of Hindu Culture (Harcourt); and Mark Tully’s chapter “Varanasi: The Unity of Opposites,” in his 2007 book India’s Unending Journey (Rider).
Harvard’s Diana Eck calls Varanasi the “crossing place” in her notable 1998 book Banaras: City of Light (Columbia University Press). The quote “Death in Kashi [Varanasi] . . .” is from page 24. The description of Manikarnika Ghat as the “great cremation ground” is from page 32.
The fact that the water of the Ganges and dwelling in Varanasi are two of the most substantial things is paraphrased from the eighth-century Indian saint-philosopher Adi Sankara, noted in Veer Bhadra Mishra’s 2005 paper “The Ganga at Varanasi and a Travail to Stop Her Abuse” (Current Science 89, no. 5: 755–63). Mishra’s January 2013 monograph Wastewater Management in Ganga Basin (Kishor Vidya Bhavan) offers additional insights and ideas. Mishra’s quote “not a difficult problem” is from his 2010 TEDxDelhi talk.
The snakes-and-ladders quote (“My campaign has been like . . .”) is taken from the website of the Sankat Mochan Foundation. Alexander Stille’s 1998 article “The Ganges’ Next Life” (New Yorker, January 19) is a superb profile of Mishra. Also useful was an article written by the late Fran Peavey entitled “The Birth of Cleaning the Ganges Project,” available at http://www.crabgrass.org.
Dean Young’s lines are from his 2005 collection of poems entitled Elegy on Toy Piano (University of Pittsburgh Press). I originally spotted Young’s words in Geoff Dyer’s 2010 book Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (Vintage), which contains the quote on Varanasi traffic (page 164).
The coliform levels are from “Creaking, Groaning: Infrastructure Is India’s Biggest Handicap” (Economist, December 11, 2008). The World Health Organization provides relevant information on the “Global Epidemics and Impact of Cholera” page of its website.
Alan Turing’s quote can be found in various forms online, but the original source appears to be “Epigram to Robin Gandy” (1954), reprinted in Andrew Hodges’s book Alan Turing: The Enigma (Vintage, 1992), page 513, as noted by Wikipedia.
President Bill Clinton’s remarks can be found at the American Presidency Project maintained by the University of California, Santa Barbara; see “Remarks to the Business Community in Hyderabad, March 24, 2000.” William Oswald’s papers offer background on the technical solutions that Mishra adapted and proposed for Varanasi: “Ponds in the Twenty-First Century” (Water Science and Technology 31, no. 12 [1995]: 1–8) and “Introduction to Advanced Wastewater Ponding System” (Water Science and Technology 24 [1991]: 1–7).
Mishra’s quote “I pray that I should be able . . .” is from David Suzuki’s documentary The Sacred Balance (Kensington Communications), in an excerpt accessed on YouTube. Also recommended is a 1998 documentary entitled Holy Man and Mother Ganga (41st Floor Films), written and produced by Patricia Chew and Claude Adams.
The woman in the hospice and Shiva spoke to me in Hindi, which I translated into English.
The historical details—including the quote “made a feeble effort to rise . . .”—are from Sandford Fleming’s 1877 report, which is cited and discussed in the book Sir Sandford Fleming, edited by Doris Unitt, Andrew Osler, and Edward McCoy (Clockhouse, 1968), pages 74–75.
The Ireland train station story is from Clark Blaise’s terrific 2001 book Time Lord: The Remarkable Canadian Who Missed His Train, and Changed the World (Vintage Canada), pages 66, 75–76. Fleming’s contemporary was Charles Dowd, and the quote comes from page 95 of Blaise’s book. The 144-time-zones factoid and the term “bloodthirsty savage” are also from this book.
Some have attributed Greenwich Mean Time as a prime force leading to Britain’s industrial development, putting it in the lead—perhaps nearly half a century ahead of others. But some parts of the world have resisted standardizing to Greenwich Mean Time, for various reasons. Arizona, for example, does not observe daylight savings time; and some countries, like India, are thirty minutes off. China, which has an impressive span that would ordinarily encompass five time zones, has only one time. A web search on these topics will yield more information.
Another important person in the history of time zones is meteorologist Cleveland Abbe. Interested readers may wish to read a brief biographical sketch, written by J. Humphreys in 1918, entitled “Biographical Memoir of Cleveland Abbe, 1838–1916” (National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoirs 8, pages 469–508).
The term “culture’s time” and the quote “There was no ‘system’ . . .” are from Ian Bartky’s 1989 paper “The Adoption of Standard Time” (Technology and Culture 30, no. 1: 25–56). The railway miles expansion data from 1832 and 1880 are cited in this paper with a source directing to the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry published in 1943. Bartky has also written two excellent scholarly volumes published by Stanford University Press: Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America (2000) and One Time Fits All: The Campaigns for Global Uniformity (2007).
Other useful references include Lawrence Burpee’s 1915 Sandford Fleming, Empire Builder (Humphrey Milford), Hugh Maclean’s 1969 Man of Steel: The Story of Sir Sandford Fleming (Ryerson Press), and David Prerau’s 2006 Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time (Basic Books).
Former Indian president A. P. J. Abdul Kalam’s quotes are taken from his valedictory address at the Annual National Techno-Management Symposium, Jaipur, February 26, 2012. Full text of his speech is available on his website. The Samuel Johnson quote is from James Boswell’s 1791 book Life of Johnson, abridged and edited with an introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood (Electronic Classics Series, recently issued by Pennsylvania State University), page 285.
Kevin Kelly’s quote is from his 2010 book What Technology Wants (Viking Penguin), page 110. John Armitt’s quote is from Nick Smith’s July 2012 piece “Setting the Stage for the Greatest Show on Earth” (IET Member News, 10–13). More on constraint programming can be found in the 2006 Handbook of Constraint Programming, edited by Francesca Rossi, Peter van Beek, and Toby Walsh (Elsevier Science).
Gordon Cook’s quote on Bazalgette is from “Construction of London’s Victorian Sewers: The Vital Role of Joseph Bazalgette” (Postgraduate Medical Journal 77 [2001]: 802–4). Stephen Halliday’s 2009 book The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis (History Press) is a comprehensive resource.
I added emphasis on “nothing happens” in the quote “There are television shows . . .” by Harvey Fineberg, which was published in “The Paradox of Disease Prevention” (JAMA 310, no. 1 [2013]: 85–90). See also his informative article “Public Health and Medicine: Where the Twain Shall Meet” (American Journal of Preventive Medicine 41, no. 4S3 [2011]: S149-51).
Six: Crossing Over and Adapting
David Koon gives a first-hand account of his daughter Jennifer’s murder and his transition from engineering to politics in a chapter entitled “Politics and Legislation,” in Career Development in Bioengineering and Biotechnology, a book I coedited with Barbara Oakley and Luis Kun (Springer, 2008), pages 233–38. Also useful as references were articles and analyses by Tanya Fluette for the Rochesterian, by Lois Rumfelt for the Lutheran, by David Schneider for the American Scientist, and by others for the Buffalo News, Wireless Review, Mobile Radio Technology, and the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. Koon’s Newsday quote on death and dying (“Even her voice . . .”) is from Bret Begun’s article “Pain of Murder Victim’s Parents” (August 16, 1997).
My description of the 2003 rowboat accident involving four teenagers is based on reporting for the New York Times by Al Baker, Sheila Dewan, Kevin Flynn, Robert McFadden, Lydia Polgreen, William Rashbaum, Marc Santora, Michael Wilson, and Robert Worth. The information about the teenagers buying cookies, candies, and Frappuccino, for instance, is from Santora’s piece “Facing Icy Waters and Grim Realities” (January 29, 2003).
Koon’s quote “I put their deaths on our governor’s shoulders” is mentioned in Glenn Bischoff’s article “An Ounce of Prevention” (Wireless Review, May 2003, 32–33, 41). The hero quote is from Glenn Bischoff’s “Wavelengths: Koon Truly Deserving of ‘Hero’ Award” (Mobile Radio Technology Bulletin, March 5, 2004). One of Koon’s high-profile senate testimonies (made together with the then senator Hillary Clinton) on “E-911 Implementation” was with the Communications subcommittee of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in 2003.
On the “senate syndrome,” see Steven Smith’s 2010 “The Senate Syndrome” (Brookings Institution, Issues in Governance Studies, June). For an extended treatment on this subject, see Smith’s 2014 book under the same title (University of Oklahoma Press). The discussion of selection bias in politics is based on the article “There Was a Lawyer, an Engineer and a Politician . . . Why Do Professional Paths to the Top Vary So Much?” (Economist, April 16, 2009).
In place of frame mismatch, philosophers may use the more formal term frame problem, which, as noted in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “is the challenge of representing the effects of action in logic without having to represent explicitly a large number of intuitively obvious non-effects.” Abraham Lincoln’s view on public sentiment has been discussed in countless publications. My source is “The Ottawa Debate” in the 1991 edition of The Complete Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858, edited by P. Angle (University of Chicago Press; originally published in 1958), page 128.
Simon Baron-Cohen’s quote is from page 103 of the 1997 paper “Is There a Link between Engineering and Autism?” (Autism 1, no. 1: 101–9), which he coauthored with several colleagues. For further reading, I suggest Baron-Cohen’s more recent article titled “Autism and the Technical Mind” (Scientific American, November 2012, 72–75). Much research has been carried out—and recently popularized—on dichotomies in the human brain. In addition to Baron-Cohen’s research, I would point readers to popular accounts by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2011) and by Iain McGilchrist in The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Modern World (Yale University Press, 2009).
The Dilbert quote is from James Braham’s 1992 article “The Silence of the Nerds” (Machine Design, August 20, 75–80). Steve Wozniak’s quote is taken from radio host and former engineer Ira Flatow’s 2008 book Present at the Future (HarperCollins) in a chapter entitled “The Wizard of the Woz” (pages 259–60). Astronaut Neil Armstrong’s quote comes from his essay “The Engineered Century,” published in the National Academy of Engineering periodical The Bridge (Spring 2000, 14–18).
Seven: Prototyping
Steve Sasson’s quote “our plan was unrealistic . . .” is from his 2010 talk at the Chautauqua Institution. Eastman’s motto on the camera being as “convenient as the pencil” is from Kodak’s website. Elizabeth Brayer’s George Eastman: A Biography (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) and Todd Gustavson’s Camera: A History of Photography from Daguerreotype to Digital (Sterling Signature; reprint, 2012) are useful sources of historical information. The quote “basically told Sasson . . .” is by Timothy Lynch, Kodak’s chief intellectual property officer, taken from Mark Harris’s “Snapping Up Kodak” (IEEE Spectrum, February 2014, 30–35).
For an accessible history of cell phones, see “1973–1983: Making History, Developing the Portable Cellular System” under “Cell Phone Development” on the history page of the Motorola Solutions website (http://www.motorolasolutions.com). Also useful was Motorola’s Press Information piece entitled “The Cellular Telephone Concept—An Overview,” September 10, 1984. The quote “it will be possible . . .” is from a Motorola press release issued in New York, April 3, 1973: “Motorola Demonstrates Portable Telephone to Be Available for Public Use by 1976.” See also the following articles on Martin Cooper: “Father of the Cell Phone” (Economist, June 4, 2009); Tas Anjarwalla’s “Father of the Cell Phone” (CNN Tech, July 9, 2010); Pagan Kennedy’s “Who Made That Cellphone” (New York Times, March 15, 2013).
“We realize the impossible . . .” is from the website of Wonder Works, Piers Shepperd’s company (http://www.wonder.co.uk). On Einstellung, see, for example, a 2010 review by Merim Bilalić, Peter McLeod, and Fernand Gobet: “The Mechanism of the Einstellung (Set) Effect: A Pervasive Source of Cognitive Bias” (Current Directions in Psychological Science 19, no. 2: 111–15). John Lienhard’s analysis of technological performance enhancements can be found in his 1979 paper “The Rate of Technological Improvement before and after the 1830s” (Technology and Culture 20, no. 3: 515–30). See also “Rates of Technological Improvement: Doubling in a Lifetime,” episode 559 of Lienhard’s radio program The Engines of Our Ingenuity (Houston Public Media), and his 1985 paper “Some Ideas About Growth and Quality in Technology” (Technological Forecasting and Social Change 27: 265–81).
A concept close to prototyping is reverse engineering. The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized reverse engineering as an “essential part of innovation” that could lead to important technological advances. More on this topic can be found in Pamela Samuelson and Suzanne Scotchmer’s 2002 review entitled “The Law and Economics of Reverse Engineering” (Yale Law Journal 111: 1575–1662).
Eight: Learning from Others
Victor Mills’s “mess” quote is from Jeff Harrington’s 1997 article “Disposable Diaper Inventor Dies” (Cincinnati Enquirer, November 7). Another illustrative article on Mills is “Victor Mills Is Dead at 100; Father of Disposable Diapers,” by Andrew Revkin (New York Times, November 7, 1997). The information about Betsy Wetsy comes from an article by Claudia Flavell-While: “A ‘Pampered’ Career” (Chemical Engineer Today, May 2011, 52–53). Malcolm Gladwell, in “Smaller: The Disposable Diaper and the Meaning of Progress” (New Yorker, November 26, 2001), discusses the lesser-known development of Huggies, the rival of Pampers.
The ketchup case study is from the chapter “Investigating and Researching for Design Development” in the book Engineering Design: An Introduction, by John Karsnitz, Stephen O’Brien, and John Hutchinson (Delmar Cengage Learning, 2nd edition, 2013), pages 186–87. Related references include the article “Heinz, Hunt’s Turn Ketchup Upside-Down” (Packaging World, June 30, 2002) and Arnie Orloski’s “Heinz ‘Caps’ Squeeze Ketchup” (Packaging World, April 30, 2000). The NASCAR pit stop quote is taken from an article written by journalist Frank Greve: “Top-Down Approach Rekindles Our Love Affair with Ketchup” (Seattle Times, June 27, 2007).
For an account of the historically low enrollment of women in engineering, see, for example, Amy Sue Bix’s 2014 book Girls Coming to Tech!: A History of American Engineering Education for Women (MIT Press).
Lucy Suchman’s views on user-centered design come from her 2006 book Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions (Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition), pages 9, 23. See also a related chapter, “Work Practice and Technology: A Retrospective,” which Suchman wrote in Making Work Visible: Ethnographically Grounded Case Studies of Work Practice, edited by M. Szymanski and J. Whelan (Cambridge University Press, 2011), pages 21–33. Another broad analysis of this subject is presented by Bruno Latour in his 1988 book Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Harvard University Press). A good account of Xerox culture is Michael Hiltzik’s Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (Harper Business, 2000).
Sony chairman Akio Morita’s quotes are from his 1986 memoir Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony (Dutton), pages 64, 65, 264. The phrase “preserved women” is from social historian Shelley Nickles’s 2002 paper “ ‘Preserving Women’: Refrigerator Design as Social Process in the 1930s” (Technology and Culture 43, no. 4: 693–727). For a discussion of other cultural effects of refrigerators, see Bee Wilson’s 2012 book Consider the Fork (Basic Books).
The article entitled “The House of Quality” is by John Hauser and Don Clausing (Harvard Business Review, May–June 1988). The Los Angeles Sentinel article (Ann Job, Behind the Wheel, “Toyota Avalon,” April 13, 2000) contains the phrase “stone-pecking noise.” Michael Kennedy’s quote is from Leland Teschler’s article “How to Develop Products Like Toyota” (Machine Design, October 9, 2008, 58–64).
For more on the opening of Japan in the mid-1800s, I recommend the U.S. Navy Museum’s website (one sample article is “Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan,” available at http://www.history.navy.mil). The idea of engineering needing a “black ship effect” occurred to me when I was reading a thoughtful chapter by Koji Kishimoto—“Fujitsu Learned Ethnography from PARC: Establishing the Social Science Center”—in Szymanski and Whelan’s Making Work Visible (pages 327–35). Kishimoto likens Fujitsu to Japan’s process of liberation, and I adapted and applied that idea to advance my case of how engineering could benefit from its own version of creative liberation. Kishimoto also summarizes three ethnographic processes that I believe can be applied for innovative outcomes in engineering or any other creative process: field observation, reflection, and codesign.
Francisco Aguilera’s paper is titled “Is Anthropology Good for the Company?” (American Anthropologist 98, no. 4 [1996]: 735–42). See also Erik Styhr Petersen, James Nyce, and Margareta Lützhöft’s 2011 paper “Ethnography Re-engineered: The Two Tribes Problem” (Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science 12, no. 6: 496–509). Diana Forsythe’s views are from her 1999 paper “ ‘It’s Just a Matter of Common Sense’: Ethnography as Invisible Work” (Computer Supported Cooperative Work 8: 127–45). For further inquiry, the following well-regarded works should be helpful references: Hortense Powdermaker’s Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist (W. W. Norton, 1967); and Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures (1977) and Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (1983), both published by Basic Books.
Mamie Warrick’s quote is from Jeffrey Liker and Michael Hoseus’s 2008 book Toyota Culture: The Heart and Soul of the Toyota Way (McGraw-Hill), page 326. In his article “Drink Me: How Americans Came to Have Cup Holders in Their Cars” (Slate, March 15, 2004), Henry Petroski discusses how nonessential features subsequently become indispensable in the interior design of automobiles. For research on “reductive bias” and oversimplification in engineering design, see the 2004 paper by Paul Feltovich et al. entitled “Keeping It Too Simple: How the Reductive Tendency Affects Cognitive Engineering” (IEEE Intelligent Systems 19, no. 3 [May/June]: 90–94).
In his 1999 book Beyond Engineering: How Society Shapes Technology (Oxford University Press), Robert Pool eloquently analyzes how culture shapes engineering outcomes. Marketing scholar John Sherry’s 1986 paper “The Cultural Perspective in Consumer Research” (Advances in Consumer Research 13: 573–75) is a good companion read, as is Jodi Forlizzi’s 2008 piece “The Product Ecology: Understanding Social Product Use and Supporting Design Culture” (International Journal of Design 2, no. 1: 11–20). For the role of listeners in influencing musical evolution, see, for example, the paper “Evolution of Music by Public Choice,” by Robert MacCallum et al., and the related commentary by Christoph Adami (“Adaptive Walks on the Fitness Landscape of Music”), both published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (109, no. 30 [2012]).
On the concept of preference paradox, see Nobel Prize–winning economist Kenneth Arrow’s 1950 paper “A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare” (Journal of Political Economy 58, no. 4: 328–46), as well as his 1963 book Social Choice and Individual Values (John Wiley & Sons, 2nd edition).
There appears to be no documented evidence that Henry Ford actually said his customers wanted faster horses, but the quote is often attributed to him. See, for example, an interesting piece by Patrick Vlaskovits: “Henry Ford, Innovation, and That ‘Faster Horse’ Quote” (Harvard Business Review blog, August 29, 2011). Steve Jobs’s quotes come from the article “Apple’s One-Dollar-a-Year Man” (Fortune, January 24, 2000). Marissa Mayer’s quote is from her conversation with Erik Schatzker during the session “An Insight, an Idea with Marissa Mayer” at the 2013 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, Davos, Switzerland.
Anthropologist Stephen Lansing’s quotes are from his February 13, 2006, lecture “A Thousand Years in Bali,” delivered at the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco. Along with his outstanding 2007 book Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali (Princeton University Press), I found Lansing’s 1993 paper (with James Kremer) titled “Emergent Properties of Balinese Water Temple Networks: Coadaptation on a Rugged Fitness Landscape” (American Anthropologist 95, no. 1: 97–114) and his 1987 paper “Balinese ‘Water Temples’ and the Management of Irrigation” (American Anthropologist 89, no. 2: 326–41) valuable.
For related readings on technology and its healthy and unhealthy impacts on society, I suggest Edward Tenner’s Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (Vintage, 1996), as well as Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford University Press, 1964). For readings on the efficiency trap, see David Owen’s The Conundrum (Riverhead Books, 2012) and Steve Hallett’s The Efficiency Trap: Finding a Better Way to Achieve a Sustainable Energy Future (Prometheus, 2013).
For a discussion of how military technologies have fueled social technologies, see Michael White’s 2005 book The Fruits of War: How Military Conflict Accelerates Technology (Simon & Schuster). On the designer and intentional fallacies, see Don Ihde’s chapter “The Designer Fallacy and Technological Imagination” in the 2009 book Philosophy and Design: From Engineering to Architecture, edited by P. Kroes et al. (Springer).
Levent Orman’s quote is from his 2013 article “Technology and Risk” (IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, Summer 2013, 26). Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog’s quote is from their 2009 article “Why Are There So Many Engineers among Islamic Radicals?” (European Journal of Sociology/Archives Européennes de Sociologie 50, no. 2: 201–30). Robert Fein’s quote on mental illness is from his presentation “National Security: Assassination, Interrogation, and School Shootings” at the National Academies’ “Social and Behavioral Sciences in Action” symposium on September 24, 2012.
Richard Nelson’s 1977 book The Moon and the Ghetto: An Essay on Policy Analysis (W. W. Norton) and 2011 paper “The Moon and the Ghetto Revisited” (Science and Public Policy 38, no. 9: 681–90) are terrific scholarly resources.
Another good source is Nobel laureate Herbert Simon’s 1973 piece “The Structure of Ill-Structured Problems” (Artificial Intelligence 4: 181–201). For more on social costs, see Nobel laureate Ronald Coase’s paper “The Problem of Social Cost” (Journal of Law and Economics, October 1960, 1–44).
In his 1968 paper by the same name, biologist Garrett Hardin highlights his concept “the tragedy of the commons” (Science 162 [December 13]: 1243–48)—“The population problem cannot be solved in a technical way, any more than can the problem of winning the game of tick-tack-toe”—confirming the idea that engineering-inspired technology alone is not sufficient, but engineering-informed strategy will be critical.
Fade-Out: A Mind-set for the Multitudes
On his engineering background, Alfred Hitchcock said, “After I left the Jesuits, I went to a school of engineering and navigation, studying engineering, electricity, mechanics, the laws of force and motion, and draftsmanship. I had to learn screw-cutting and black-smithing, work on a mechanical lathe, the whole works. One got a thorough grounding there.” This quote is from the 2003 book Alfred Hitchcock Interviews, edited by Sidney Gottlieb (University Press of Mississippi), page 164.
Popular-culture essayist Chuck Klosterman offers a crisp characterization of Hitchcock’s approach in his 2004 book Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto (Scribner): “Alfred Hitchcock’s success as a filmmaker was that he didn’t draw characters as much as he drew character types; this is how he normalized the cinematic experience” (page 31).
Hitchcock’s systematic notes, including his 1962 “Background Sounds for the ‘The Birds,’ ” in the collections of the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; Tony Lee Moral’s 2013 book The Making of Hitchcock’s The Birds (Kamera Books); and Kyle Counts and Steve Rubin’s article “The Making of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds” (Cinemafantastique, Fall 1980) were very helpful resources.
The articles on bird attacks that inspired Hitchcock are from the New York Times (“Man in Bush Wants Birds Kept in Hand,” May 16, 1961); Los Angeles Examiner (Frank Lee Donoghue, “Man’s Face Badly Slashed by Owl,” May 24, 1961); Herald Express (“Birds Block Traffic: Invading Flocks Jam Santa Cruz,” August 18, 1961); San Jose Mercury (“City Deep in Feathers,” August 19, 1961); and Los Angeles Herald (“Dying Birds Jam Santa Cruz,” August 18, 1961), from which the quote “The place was black with them” was taken. Reference to the 16-millimeter films is in a letter from Suzanne Gauthier (Hitchcock’s assistant) to Joseph Lateana, August 23, 1961. Daphne du Maurier’s piece is “The Birds” (Good Housekeeping, October 1952, 54–55, 110–32).
Except as noted here, Hitchcock’s quotes were accessed on YouTube or at http://www.hitchcockwiki.com. “Looking at a nightmare” is from a 1965 interview in which Hitchcock discusses the crop duster scene in North by Northwest (accessible on YouTube). The phrase “chilling movie audiences long before air conditioning” is from a 1963 Universal-International Newsreel, “Suspense Story: National Press Club Hears Hitchcock,” with voiceover by Ed Herlihy. “Dipping their toes in the cold waters of fear” is from a Hitchcock interview on the Dick Cavett Show, filmed in 1972, which is available as a summary by Lorraine LoBianco entitled “The Dick Cavett Show: Alfred Hitchcock” on the Turner Classic Movies website. The quotes “a man in one position for the whole picture . . .” and “I make a film entirely on paper . . .” are from Tim Hunter’s interview article entitled “Alfred Hitchcock at Harvard” (Harvard Crimson, October 14, 1966). “Cinematically, there wasn’t a single shot . . .” is from an interview between Alfred Hitchcock and Keith Berwick, for a Channel 28 program called Speculation, broadcast in 1969.
“You could not take the camera . . .” is from a 1964 interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, directed by Fletcher Markel (Telescope). “As the film went on there was less and less violence . . .” is from a July 5, 1964, interview between Hitchcock and Huw Wheldon, filmed for the BBC television program Monitor (also included in Gottlieb’s Alfred Hitchcock Interviews, page 69). The quotes “extract a little more drama out of ordinary sounds” and “of course, I’m going to take the dramatic license . . .” are by Hitchcock in conversation with François Truffaut (Part 24) in August 1962—when The Birds was in postproduction. “Prodigious . . . I mean films like Ben Hur . . .” comes from the January 1963 issue of Movie magazine (with Ian Cameron and V. F. Perkins), pages 4–6, reprinted in Gottlieb’s book, page 45. “I usually wear a blue suit . . .” is from a video clip containing excerpts of Hitchcock’s interviews. The quote “Some directors film slices of life . . .” is from François Truffaut’s 1985 book Hitchcock (Touchstone, revised edition), page 103. “You see, I like you . . .” is from a video titled “How Hitchcock Got People to See ‘Psycho,’ ” accessed on the Oscars website.
The bird food information and “toneless composition” are from Sam Lucchese, “Birds Steal Show in New Thriller” (Atlanta Journal, April 12, 1963). Jimmy Stewart discusses his work with Alfred Hitchcock in a 1984 interview on the French TV show Cinema Cinemas. Stewart’s quote “You sort of get a feeling that Hitch’s life . . .” is from his speech at the March 7, 1979, American Film Institute ceremony honoring Hitchcock. Gary Rydstrom’s quotes are from the video “An Analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s Use of Sound” accessed at the Audio Spotlight website. Jack Sullivan’s 2006 book Hitchcock’s Music (Yale University Press) is a good related resource.
Hitchcock’s other notable design accomplishments include the uses of kinetic typography in North by Northwest, the whirlpool dolly—zooming forward while dollying backward—for Vertigo, and subdued and extremely effective 3-D in Dial M for Murder. Hitchcock never won a competitive Oscar, but he did receive the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award at the Fortieth Annual Academy Awards in 1968.
Smithsonian historian Tom Crouch’s quote is from the PBS Nova article “The Unlikely Inventors” (November 11, 2003).