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Workspace: John Lienhard and Engines of Ingenuity
John Lienhard's long-running radio program mixes story telling with the history of science and technology.
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Notes from the Inside
From the President
First Person: Darwin in a Different Voice
Playing with Dolphins
The Perils of Publicity
Profile: Leeds University
Michigan State University
SPACEWORK:HSS/NASA Fellowship
Patenting Jefferson
2009 Preliminary Program
Koyré Medal, Telescopes,
Southern Host,
Latest News,
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In Memoriam, Jobs, Conferences, Grants
Music, dyslexia, and a six-week workshop in the history of science, are the threads that bind John Lienhard’s history of science and technology radio show on KUHF-FM Houston. Lienhard is turning 79 this year, and his show, Engines of Ingenuity, is now in its twenty-first year of broadcast.
Trained as a mechanical engineer –he earned his Ph.D. at Berkeley – Lienhard has spent much of his career teaching mechanical engineering. In 1970, with no plans for the summer, he happened to apply for a workshop at the Smithsonian Institution and spent an intense six weeks studying the history of technology. Those few weeks kindled an interest that expanded into teaching history of technology courses and, eventually, into writing articles.
In 1987, while teaching at the University of Houston, the Dean of Engineering told Lienhard he wanted publicity for his college, specifically, 30-second history-of-technology spots on public radio to advertise engineering at the university. Lienhard said “Let’s make this a little more than that; let’s make it stand-alone pieces and stories. I took the bit between my teeth and before the college knew what was going on, I had cut a deal with the director of the radio station.” Engines of Ingenuity went to air 4 January 1988.
The show combines a long-time love of music – off air Lienhard was a long-time singer of liturgical, theatre, and small-ensemble music, and voice strongly informs the program – and the drawback of childhood dyslexia. “I was a very poor student through public school – I clawed my way up. It means that I’m visually driven as far as on-air stuff.”
Time constraints mirror the precision required in engineering. The show runs for exactly three minutes and twenty-seven seconds, plus or minus two seconds. “I have become very adroit at densifying. Writing an episode is about adding material and making it fit into the barrel – you wind up learning what fat to cut, when you are saying something that the listener’s ear will patch in anyway. Reading it, the prose might strike you as a little elementary schoolish, and that’s because it’s spoken prose.”
The program has become more fluid with time, says Lienhard, better at weaving the technical and non-technical. As the audience has grown, he explains less. “The public learn,” he says. “I didn’t believe in the idea of a teaching mission when I first began, but the public knows and hears and remembers more than you might think.” Even some of the now grown-up children of the early listeners tune in, telling Lienhard that they got hooked when their parents listened to his show.
The first few hundred episodes were a learning curve. Since then Lienhard has developed threads of interconnection tying a story together. “I find a thread of context and I follow that thread.” The preponderance of men in history, led Lienhard to ask, “Are there any women?” “I looked around and there are all these terrific women. Mary Somerville surfaced early. I looked at some of her prose, her background, and more and more she began to assume shape and form as someone who was remarkably influential in her circle in London. You feel the skein, so you pick up other figures. I have several skeins, including airplanes.” The on-air program and the Web site for Engines of Ingenuity are intimately related, allowing Lienhard to include lots of photographs.
Behind the show lies a long, hard slog. One episode takes approximately 10 hours to research and write. The program runs daily, and Lienhard creates 120 shows a year, filling in the rest with reruns. Since 2002, an increasing number of guest writers and presenters have reduced the load. “I hope as guests gain more and more traction, the show will go on without me,” says Lienhard, who is now emeritus at the University of Houston. The one ironclad rule is that the person who speaks is the person who writes and researches the script. Though many people volunteer, relatively few have what it takes to speak on air create an episode from start to finish. “I’m careful not to coax too much, I want to get people who are driven to do this.”
History plays a utilitarian role on Engines of Ingenuity. “I use it not as history for itself but as a way of telling people this is how other people use their minds, this is how other people function – this is how you can function.” The show revolves around stories. Because of his dyslexia the only stories Lienhard knew as a child were read to him by his father, “stuff that really flowed,” says Lienhard, “Kipling and Melville.” Stories, combined with his model airplane building saved him, he says, and gave him strong visual and pictorial sense.
In Engines of Ingenuity, stories range from the origins of computing through the industrialization of weaving to Salman Rushdie’s fairytale, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and how his vision of skeins of stories describe modern information networks and their mix and flow.
“All the great writers of history have been storytellers. If you go back to the origins of information theory, Claude Shannon in the 1940s introduced this term ‘surprisal.’” Based on the idea of linking surprise to knowledge transfer, Lienhard says that, “if there is no surprise, then no learning has taken place. This means that in my own episode writing, I absolutely have to get it all together in the writing of the last few sentences.” In those final sentences Lienhard must tell his audience that he is finishing and find a way to reinforce what they are hearing.
The only advice Lienhard will offer is to begin from a point of ignorance. “I have no time for experts; for an expert there can be no surprisal. Nobody learns more than I do from this. I want my audience to appreciate that pushing yourself in the life of the mind is a joyous thing.”
– Michal Meyer
Engines of Ingenuity is available online, including web audio or podcast at http://uh.edu/engines/
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