Today, I struggle with an old stereotype. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
"I guess it's a fact that
engineers can't write," an interviewer said as we
talked yesterday. I didn't rise quickly enough to
that bit of bait, and it ate at me all night.
Then the penny dropped. I realized that any
engineer who writes for public consumption gets
redefined. People of my generation read Nevil
Shute's work -- On the Beach, A
Town Like Alice, The Pied
Piper. It's easy to forget that Shute was a
prominent aeronautical engineer. We put him in our
mental bin for "writers." We forget his
grease-stained past.
Who remembers that Henry David
Thoreau wrote "Civil Engineer" after his name
when he signed documents? He fathered the American
pencil industry by inventing the clay binders that
made inferior American graphite into a decent
pencil lead. Then he manufactured and sold pencils.
He also left detailed drawings for his famous cabin
by Walden pond. Would-be ascetics have, ever since,
made perfect copies of his retreat in Colorado,
Arizona -- wherever there's a mountain tarn or
stream to contemplate.
And Thoreau's biographer, Henry Petroski? We call
him a historian. His latest book on American
technology is The Evolution of Useful
Things. He teaches Civil Engineering at
Duke.
Einstein's name as a physicist was too large to be
overwhelmed by all his book and essay writing. But
it's easier to forget his doctoral work on
meandering streams -- a civil engineering question.
It's easy to forget his serious first-class work in
the Swiss patent office, or that he received
royalties on his own engineering inventions during
most of his life.
No one gives us more reason to forget an
engineering past than Herbert Hoover: president,
humanitarian -- and author. Yet Hoover was the
world's reigning mining engineer before WW-I.
Every high-school student knows Tom Paine for the
fiery writings that called us to the American
Revolution -- Common Sense, The
Rights of Man. But did they ever tell you in
high school that Tom Paine was an engineer -- that
he went to England, not to wage revolution, but to
market the revolutionary lightweight iron bridge
he'd designed?
I could go on: a Rice University engineering
professor who writes and produces fine plays; the
quality of written work my own students are giving
me this semester. When engineers write, we stop
calling them engineers, and I think I know why:
engineering is too close to the jugular. Like sex,
politics, death, or good poetry, it defines us too
intimately. It has the vulgarity of anything that
touches us profoundly. Who expects writing from
people who deal in things that close to the human
heart?
I'm John Lienhard at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
