EDUCATION

A lecture given on 25 October 1956

..


Engineering fails mostly because all of the originators in the 
field of engineering have died off. They're way back on the 
track.

A chap came to me recently -- he rather surprised me; I was a 
little bit overwhelmed by this experience. He came to me in 
London, and the appointment was made by cable two or three days 
before the fact. The first whisper of it was about two weeks 
before the fact, and then the exact appointment was made about 
three days before the meeting. And he wanted to come by and see 
me at my office in London. He said he wanted to talk to me. He 
didn't say it was urgent.

So I sat there wondering what this could be all about, as the 
chap has a rather famous name. He's probably the leading boy 
employed at this time by the U.S. Air Forces in the field of 
aerodynamic research.

And I thought, "What on earth does this fellow want to see me 
for?" I haven't done anything, honest. You know?

And he sailed into the office, he sat down, he took one of my 
Kools, he accepted a Coca-Cola, rejected an offer of some vodka
-- said it was not national with him -- and chitter-chatted with 
me for exactly one-half an hour, talking about some recent 
developments.

I agreed with him, I thought these were fine, understood them a 
little bit, got some kind of an inkling of where he was going, 
fumbled with it a bit, said that's fine. He intimated that he was 
looking for some much younger man than himself, since he was 
about seventy-one and was right in there with the Wright 
brothers, to replace him someday, and intimated -- oh, how 
cursorily -- that someday he might want me to process somebody 
for him. But this was quite obviously not the object of his 
visit.

Well, he looked at his watch, went outside, got in the U.S. 
embassy car, went back to the airport, climbed aboard a U.S. Army 
Air Forces airplane, and was flown on to his destination, which 
was Brussels -- a large conference in Brussels -- and then flown 
home. That was all he wanted to do in London. And I sat there and 
I scratched my head, I couldn't figure out what in the hell was 
going on here. Didn't have any idea at all. No idea at all.

And finally -- after a lot of time went by I finally figured out 
what was wrong. The guy was lonesome! That's all. Haven't heard 
from him since. Told him to drop by here, he said sure he would. 
He isn't home yet. But this is an interesting thing.

But in his conversation it was rather easy to detect the fact 
that in his field he alone, he felt, was running on choice of 
data and theory. Everybody else in his field, his own associates 
and assistants, particularly his assistants, were all running 
fixedly on data which had now become agreed-upon data in the 
field of aerodynamics, but which is not necessarily true at all. 
In fact, I never have been able to figure out -- and neither 
could he -- how anybody ever applied calculus to an airfoil, and 
managed to build the same airfoil off the same mathematical 
sheet. He said he always inquired whether or not they had sent 
the test model over for measurements in building the actual 
model, and never felt comfortable unless they did.

But this man was a realist, terrific realist. If you couldn't 
think about it and look about it, you couldn't know anything 
about it, so what use was it? And that was the way he operated. 
That was it.