HeadsUp Newsletter - Vol 4:01: January 2007

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. It is heard on national and local public radio stations. If you have it in your area, we suggest you tune in, as it always covers some engineering related factoid that you never knew or never thought about.

Dr. John H. Lienhard, author and voice of The Engines of Our Ingenuity, is M.D. Anderson Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering and History at the University of Houston. He received BS and MS degrees from Oregon State College and the University of Washington, his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, and he holds two honorary doctorates. He is known for his research in the thermal sciences as well as in cultural history. He is an Honorary Member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Just to peak your interest in listening to this wonderful series, here are two of the questions Dr. Lienhard has covered in this fine series:

January 3, 2006 – Donuts and the question of priority of who first invented them. Was it the sea captain who in 1847 fed his sailors “fried cake,” but couldn’t get his mother’s cake recipe to cook all the way through and so punched out the soggy inner circle? Or was it the Cape Cod pilgrim woman who was frying cakes outside, held one up to the plop into the frying pot and had its center punched out by the arrow of an Indian who was trying to scare her off and eat the cakes? By the way, the legend says that the Indian’s technique worked – the pilgrim woman screamed and fled away presumably leaving a pot of solid cakes and one with an arrow hole. The first patent was issued in 1872 for a wooden doughnut-cutter. Seventeen years later a second patent was issued for a metal doughnut-cutter. To learn more about how doughnuts came into our lives, click here.

October 19, 2006 – Who invented the first steamboat? We are always hearing that it was the United States and then someone will tell us no – it was France, or Scotland, or Great Britain. France had the first, according to this broadcast. The marquis de Jouffroy demonstrated the first working steamboat in 1783. John Fitch had the first operating steamboat passenger service in the USA in 1790. A lesser known steamboat was built in Scotland in 1788. But the Scottish steamboat was cast aside when public opinion, often fearful of new ideas, worked against it believing that the paddlewheels would erode the banks of the river. And then Robert Fulton meets another wealthy American when both were in Paris on business and history was made with their forming a partnership to develop commercially viable steamships for the American market. To learn more, click here.

Each program ends with “I'm John Lienhard at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive minds work.” I hope all of you have the opportunity of hearing this intelligent man’s voice over the radio in the near future. To learn more about the series, read articles from previous broadcasts and explore the universe of ideas he presents, go to www.kuhf.org and click on Engines of Ingenuity on the right hand column on the home page.