Today, let's watch machines shape education -- and
invention. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
Edward Ritchie, writer
Deborah Jean Warner tells us, was "the most
innovative American instrument maker ... of the
nineteenth century." That sounds exaggerated, but
let's look at Ritchie.
He was born in 1814 of well-to-do parents. They let
him follow his natural talent for the manual arts
and didn't insist on college. By the age of 28
Ritchie was furnishing ships in New Bedford and
serving as a church organist. He was 35 when he
began making philosophical or
mathematical instruments. That meant
compasses, telescopes, microscopes, surveying
equipment, and the like.
Ritchie wasn't content just to make instruments. He
had to invent them as well. In the early days of
the Civil War the Navy asked him to copy the
English-made liquid compass for ships. After
studying the design, he scrapped it. He made and
patented a completely new version. He
revolutionized ships' compasses.
Just then shipbuilders were turning from wood to
iron. Imagine what that did to magnetic fields!
Ritchie solved the problem of local magnetic fields
by mounting the compass high above the ship's deck
and devising means for reading the output below
deck. Ritchie was following his instincts, and they
were taking him far into the new physics of
electricity and magnetism.
Even before the Civil War he'd developed a line of
electric induction coils that threw sparks almost a
foot. He made those coils as lecture
demonstrations. A generation later they rode in the
new automobiles, sending their small lightening
bolts across the points of spark plugs to ignite
gasoline.
When the great British physicist John Tyndall came
to America in 1872 for a lecture tour, Ritchie did
his demonstrations. Since education was a driving
theme for both Ritchie and Tyndall, they made a
good pair. In 1861 Ritchie was one of 37 signers of
the charter for a new school in Cambridge,
Massachusetts -- The Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. Before that, he'd made educational
apparatus with Barton Rogers, who became MIT's
first president.
One instrument most catches my eye in Ritchie's
long inventory -- an elegant demonstration device:
you turn a crank and watch the evolution of a
traveling wave. Think about swimming out over your
head in the ocean. The wave motion around you is
subtle. A great wall of water comes at you and you
only bob up, then down, while it passes through
you. Only with a keen understanding of that complex
motion was Schrö able to write his famous wave
equation and finally to crack the mysteries of
early quantum physics.
When education was fueled by Edward Ritchie's
thinking, it drove invention. Ritchie had an
instinct for what would be important in our
century. And that's why his array of 19th-century
explanatory machines so effectively tutored
20th-century thinkers.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
