Today, we cut with Occam's Razor. 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.
The old Shaker tune,
'Tis a gift to be simple, 'tis a gift to be
free;
'Tis a gift to come down where you ought to
be
should be the first chapter in any book
on engineering design. It was a lesson I fell into
when the Army got me, two years after I finished
college. They put me in the Signal Corps Engineering
Labs, designing research equipment. There I met a
fine designer named Jules Soled -- a guy who could
clearly teach me things. So I said to him, "Teach me,
and I'll work for you."
And teach me he did -- many things -- things I
hadn't learned in school. But his first and last
lesson was always this: "Do a first design and then
attack it. Your first design will be elegant and
complicated. But it'll always work better when you
get rid of complication. In a really good design,"
he said, "you eventually make the very design
itself unnecessary." And this, he told me, is very
hard to do, because we like complication.
An early proponent of this idea was William of
Occam, a 14th-century scholastic. He told us we
should make no more assumptions than we really
needed to explain anything -- that the simplest
explanation is best. We call this idea "Occam's
Razor," because it helps us cut away the junk in
our thinking.
Look at the safety razor. For years designers
fought with the problem of loading, mounting, and
unloading a blade in a holder. Some of you might
remember Schick's "Push-pull, click click" ad for
its mechanism. Keeping the action workable and the
blade solidly in place was a big problem.
Then some bright person applied Occam's razor to
the razor-mounting problem. He realized you could
simply mold the blade right into the plastic
packaging. Now who buys replaceable razor blades?
Instead, we set the blades -- very solidly and with
great precision -- right into a cheap throw-away
piece of plastic. We've designed blade-holding
mechanisms right out of existence.
That sort of thing takes nerve as well as
imagination. We're so tempted to look smart by
mastering, not simplicity, but complication. If we
go back to our Shaker tune,
'Tis a gift to be simple, 'tis a gift to be
free.
the second line says:
'Tis a gift to come down where you ought to
be
Good design exacts a price from our
egos. But it really is a gift -- it really is freedom
-- to find the simplicity in things -- to finally
reduce an engineering design down to where it ought
to be.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
