Today, we see through the inner eye of a great
engineer. 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.
James Nasmyth was born in
1808, in Scotland. The world-wide intellectual and
political revolution was over. English industry had
come out of the 18th century as the new civilizing
force. Nasmyth would grow up to become an engineer
in the 19th-century industrial world all this had
created.
James's father, Alexander Nasmyth, was an artist.
He founded the Scottish school of landscape
painting. But he'd also invented a lightweight iron
bridge, a new kind of rivet, and more. Young James
was raised in his father's workroom. He grew up in
a place where the artist's images of the mind met
the material means for making things.
Nasmyth made a life's work of rendering the dreams
of the 18th-century Industrial Revolution into the
heavy machinery of the 19th century. Yet before he
studied engineering, he first studied art. In 1840
he produced a great steam hammer to forge the new
steamship engine shafts. A decade later, that
marvelously agile forge drew crowds at the Crystal
Palace Exhibition. Nasmyth described how he
invented it:
Following ... this idea, I ... rapidly sketched
out my steam-hammer, having it all clearly before
me in my mind's eye.
So we look deeper at Nasmyth -- at the
process that spawned a lifetime of creating heavy
machine equipment. What we find is the imprint of the
artist's eye. Here's a page from his sketchbook.
Words, fragments of machinery, and calculations look
disordered at first. Then we see the progression from
the inner eye to the outer world. We catch the sense
of beauty that drives invention. If he'd written his
words backward, we'd think we were looking at
Leonardo's notebooks.
Nasmyth erases the line between art and thing
entirely. Great engines march out of his head, onto
his notebooks, and off into a new machine-powered
world. And when he's done, he turns about and
renders his finished machine back into an oil
painting. He takes the dream back into his mind,
where it was first born.
Nasmyth made this remarkable observation about
engineering:
The ... eyes and the fingers -- the bare fingers
-- are the two principal ... sources of trustworthy
knowledge in all the materials and operations ...
the engineer has to deal with.
He goes on to scorn a new breed of
cigar-smoking, glove-wearing engineers. People blind
to the sense of touch, and deaf to the inner eye,
cannot create worthy machines, he says. And that's
something we engineers should know now, just as
surely as Nasmyth knew it when he helped forge the
modern engines of our ingenuity.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
