Benjamin Linder (1960 – 1987) Hydropower for Nicaragua

Benjamin Linder

b 1960 Seattle, d 1987 Nicaragua

Linder was a young US mechanical engineer who was so inspired by the struggle of the Sandanistas in Nicaragua that he moved there in 1986.   That was at the height of the war between them and the Reagan-backed mercenary terrorists known as the Contras.   Linder did a lot of good work there on bringing electricity to a remote area by the construction of a dam, and on vaccination campaigns.  He made a good friend in a fellow American and fellow engineer named Rebecca Leaf.

In 1987 he was traveling to scout out a site for the dam with two locals when they were ambushed by Contras.  He was wounded by a grenade and then shot in the head, and his companions were killed.  This caused an uproar back in the US, where the Contras were not popular.   The Reagan administration responded by blaming him for being in a dangerous zone, the you-shouldn’t-have-walked-into-my-bullet theory of suicide.  A Republican congressman, Connie Mack, said as much to his mother’s face when she testified, showing the sympathy for which they are renowned.

Oddly enough, there is another Benjamin Linder floating around the Internet, one who seems like our Linder’s mirror twin. He is a VP of marketing for Unwired Planet, a firm trying to bring Internet access to cell phones. While Linder #1 was out there hiking in the jungle, trying to bring electricity to the desperately poor, Linder #2 jets around the world trying to bring a new toy to the absurdly affluent.

Ms Leaf still lives there (as of 2015), and is director of the Benjamin Linder Association of Rural Development Workers.  She is an MIT grad, and has now built dozens of small dams and drinking water projects around the town of El Cua.  In 1997 she won the Carl Barus Award for Outstanding Service in the Public Interest for her work on rural electrification in Nicaragua.

Links

Benjamin Linder, Photographs and Memories, a nice memorial page from a coworker in Nicaragua, Don Macleay

Linder v. National Security Agency (95-9251) is a description of the wrongful death suit brought by Linder’s family against various US gov’t agencies that were involved with the Contras.

In his 11/11/96 column in “The Nation” magazine Beat the Devil, Alexander Cockburn quotes the Linder family lawyer’s as having a quite different take on Linder’s death. They cite the forensic reports of Nicaraguan and American doctors in saying that Linder was killed by a gunshot to the temple from an inch away.

There’s a nice tribute to Linder in Juggler’s World magazine, talking about a tour of jugglers through Nicaragua just days after his death.

Jun-99

Gary Howland (197? – 2002) Financial Cryptography

Dec-20, 2003: R. A. Hettinga writes to report the death of a brilliant young crytographic coder, Gary Howland:

Dear John,

And another tragic loss – Gary Howland, who designed the SOX protocol and wrote the first version of Cryptix – passed on in 2002:

http://www.vmeng.com/pipermail/mac_crypto/2002-December/000114.html

[Mac_crypto] Obituary – Gary Howland – 197? – 2002

R. A. Hettinga mac_crypto@vmeng.com) passes on the obituary of Gary Howland:

From: Ian Grigg <iang@systemics.com>

Obituary – Gary Howland – 197? – 2002

I first met Gary in 1990. I was the team leader for a big telecoms project and he was one of the 1000 CVs that crossed my desk that summer.

Of those 1000, I interviewed about 50, and we ended up with a technical team of 20. Most were contractors from the huge pool of British labour, but from my jaundiced view, only 4 on our team rated as contractors.

Gary was one of those 4. He was only just out of college, the polytechnic at Brighton. But his CV included all that splattering of Unix acronyms that made you feel that here was a kindred spirit, one who learnt in spite of the academic environment.

We shared that time together, the vast tense year at ICL where we all made too much money and lived like there was no impending recession. Hard coding, hard driving; Gary in his girlfriend’s 924 was as fast as I was, at track day with the Porsche club, in my 928.

He was fast with the code, too, when a fire could be lighted under him. He once replaced a 3 month project in 3 days. For the most part he was slow and careful, thoughtful, complete and perennially late. But when a deadline hit, he could fly. He was the only person I could trust the sys admin role to, and he was the lowest paid contractor in the building.

Fast forward to 1995. I’d had my Spanish adventure, Gary had done his contracting stint in Germany, where he met his long term girlfriend, Inka. He’d hooked up with a new outfit in Amsterdam, some crazy guys doing money on the net, called DigiCash.

Gary fed me the papers and fed me the story. Using cryptography, David Chaum had invented a way to solve the privacy problem so that coins could be simulated on the net. As I sat in finance classes in London, I realised that bonds were just a more broad definition of money. We agreed that there was more to this than the guys at DigiCash had thought about, so we agreed to try out our hand at the finance area.

Gary was one of the first true financial cryptographers. He intuitively knew that DigiCash would fail. Not because of their software, which was good, but because their business was misdirected. He also knew that the bearer idea wouldn’t survive. Not because it wasn’t beautiful – it was the most extraordinary discovery in the last decade – but because it didn’t solve the bank robbery problem. He was a superlative cryptoplumber, but he understood intimately how the real action was in determining the business requirements without being blinded by the science.

Our early plans, hatched over email, assumed we could license DigiCash’s software, but that was scotched pretty quickly. So, Gary took on the task of designing a payment system for our venture.

It wasn’t easy. We had to address the bank robbery problem, and we had to retain the privacy. Those goals were eventually to coalesce as contradictions, and the way he walked the line became known as SOX.

I believe SOX is Gary’s legacy to the world. It is capabilities for the Internet. It is strong crypto, and it is private. It is extensible, it is flexible, and reliable. I mean, reliable in a deterministic way: we can guarantee correct results over SOX transactions that can only be imagined in other protocols.

It technically dominated the bearer model, in a way that only a few could grasp. It was also a computer science solution, a value that only came to be fully appreciated when we found how trivial it was to add David Chaum’s bearer tokens to SOX.

Gary, Mike and I, built the SOX protocol into Ricardo, a complete payment system that operated as the settlement and transfer layers for financial trading. We ran bonds, trading them at night so that all our bond holders around the world had a chance to access the market. At 9.15 pm every night, Gary’s 100MHz desktop blared out the theme song for the James Bond movies, to announce the start of trading; his workstation was also our one and only Issuance server, as well as the Exchange.

While they were at it, they wrote Cryptix. Gary did the Perl code for all our needs, and supervised Mike on the first version of the Java native interfaces, all to Gary’s design and core library in C. When we published Cryptix as complete open source crypto for Java and Perl, it was the first and only crypto available for Java, then, an emerging language.

Our decision to put out the Java cryptography libraries, later rewritten by Gary to be pure Java, set the scene for all Java crypto. It was critical in forcing Sun to write a crypto API that was relatively open, even though they were under tremendous pressure from the US government. In a silent, secret and private war, Gary fought against the behemoth known to us all as “the TLAs” in their bid to control the worldwide flow of information over our Internet.

When the Clinton administration capitulated in early 2000, it was because of Gary Howland and other fellow spirits – the authors of Crypto++, SSLeay, and all of the Cryptix programmers to follow in his footsteps. Their committment to always keep the art of cryptography an accessible, open tool for the people survives Gary. We will always publish free crypto as long as we remain free programmers, and a free people.

Like so many of the dotcom dreams to come, our trading adventure ran out of cash, and we took pause. We split, we both went back to contracting, and we paid off our debts.

He and Inka lived for a while on the island of Anguilla. There, the Financial Cryptography conference had employed him in ’97 and ’98 to teach the art of payment systems at “boot camp”.

Gary worked with Vince Cate’s SAXAS for a while, and when I caught up with him over a Grolsch in an Amsterdam bar, we laughed as he told me how he had spent most of the time trying to inject SOX ideas into SAXAS. We had great visions of Anguilla being the financial cryptography centre of the universe; at one stage, there were over 10 people working there on various projects, but, like many things, the dream faded as the field failed to take off, and frustration with the local bureaucracy scared too many people away.

Gary died last week of a heroin overdose in a friend’s London appartment. He’d been on it for a long time, but was well used to keeping the secret. I only learnt of his affliction well after we had split up.

I often wondered whether I’d change my mind about drugs when someone close was killed. Maybe I’d go rabid and insist on all those bastards being killed or incarcerated without trial, as seemed to be the response of others. Maybe I’d sign on for a term of service with the War on Drugs. (These days, it would be Homeland Defence, licensed to hack.)

On reflection, I can only say that Gary’s death underscores futility of the War on Drugs. The developments in Europe, Australia, and now some states in the US, as country after country seeks to decriminalise drugs, remain our only hope of a civilised response to the health problem that is addiction. If Gary had lived in a society that hadn’t forced the dirty secret on him, he might have got the support and community that would have helped him. I don’t know that I could have done anything there, but maybe someone else could have.

Financial cryptographers don’t die, they just cease to be atomic. Wherever he is, Gary would have laughed to know that his work will be the subject of scrutiny by the TLAs, once again. This time, from the other side; in the same week that Gary died, we filed all forms imaginable – four boxes-worth carried by hand in through the doors of the SEC headquarters in Washington, D.C. – to start a new financial system in the USA. Using Gary’s SOX, of course.

Archimedes (~287 – 212 BCE) Universal Genius

b ~287 BCE Syracuse, d 212 Syracuse

Renaissance mosaic in Stadelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt

Archimedes is the greatest intellectual figure on this list, and the most famous mathematician and inventor of classical Greece.. His greatest discovery can be stated in a sentence: the volume of a sphere is two-thirds that of the smallest cylinder that contains it. Since the area of the cap of a cylinder is π r² and its height is 2r, that can also be written as: V = 4/3 π r³ .

Cylinders and spheres are about the simplest three-dimensional shapes there are. Visualize a cylinder, and visualize a sphere of the same size. Imagine putting one inside the other. The sphere is smaller, but the empty space around it is of an odd shape. The space is tiny where the sphere touches the cylinder, expands in the corners, and is different on the sides instead of the top. How on earth would you figure out just what that volume is? No one ever did before Archimedes. It looks like such a simple formula, but the proof is difficult without calculus. Archimedes himself had a secret calculus-like technique, which he called the Method of Exhaustion, but was not widely known in classical times. In fact, it wasn’t known to moderns until 1906, when a parchment of his appeared that described it. It relied on infinitesimals, on getting closer and closer to a true answer by approximations. This is how he found that pi was about equal to 22/7, a value used until the Middle Ages. That’s good to within one part in three thousand, close enough for anything but fine mechanical work.

Yet he was known in classical times less for his mathematics than for his many mechanical inventions:

• The Archimedes Screw – a helix inside a cylinder that draws fluids upwards when turned. Its tradtional use has been in irrigation, but it is now also common in sewage treatment plants. It has the same advantage in both cases – a resistance to clogging by solid objects. Since it has no valves and no pistons sliding against walls, there is little for a particle to jam in to. He originally came up with it as a way to pump water out of ships.
• The compound pulley – Like the lever, this works by transforming a small force over a great distance into a large force over a short distance. With the compound pulley, the motion of the one rope that is being is pulled on is transformed into the motion of the many ropes between the pulleys. Archimedes demonstrated it by single-handed pulling a ship into dock.
• Ship grapplers (Archimedes Claw) – a hook mounted on a swinging crane that could grab a ship by the bow and upend it. A lead weight was released at one end of the crane to draw up the other end. Another example of leverage.
• Catapults – were known in the ancient world, but Archimedes developed several for the defense of Syracuse when it was being attacked by the Romans under Marcellus.
• Burning Mirrors – an array of mirrors mounted on a parabola, and used to ignite the sails of Roman ships. From his geometric studies he would have known about the focusing properties of the parabola. Still, this would have needed a lot of small mirrors with good surfaces and accurate placement to work. No one else to my knowledge has ever tried this, so it’s probably myth..
• Star globes – He was said to be bringing a map of the stars on a globe to the Roman general Marcellus when he was killed.
• Orrery – A model of the solar system with planets swinging around the sun. This would have been an impressively complex mechanism for the classical world, but it was lost. The modern name comes from the fourth Earl of Orrery, who commissioned one from George Graham in the early 18th century.

So that’s an engineering record that would guarantee anyone’s fame. Yet he is reported to have disdained this merely practical work. He was far more concerned with the pure and spiritual endeavors of mathematics.

These days we recognize that theory and practice are critical to one another. It was because he understood leverage that he was able to build a catapult. It was probably in trying to make a sphere from a cylinder that he was driven to wonder what the relationship was between their volumes. It’s not surprising that the Greeks didn’t connect theory and practice – no one else did either until the 18th century.

Archimedes was so proud of this formula that he asked for a sphere and cylinder to be carved on his tombstone. Over a century later the Roman author Cicero wrote about it in his memoir “On the Good Life”:

But from Dionysius’s own city of Syracuse I will summon up from the dust—where his measuring rod once traced its lines—an obscure little man who lived many years later, Archimedes. When I was questor in Sicily [in 75 BCE, 137 years after the death of Archimedes] I managed to track down his grave. The Syracusians knew nothing about it, and indeed denied that any such thing existed. But there it was, completely surrounded and hidden by bushes of brambles and thorns. I remembered having heard of some simple lines of verse which had been inscribed on his tomb, referring to a sphere and cylinder modeled in stone on top of the grave. And so I took a good look round all the numerous tombs that stand beside the Agrigentine Gate. Finally I noted a little column just visible above the scrub: it was surmounted by a sphere and a cylinder. I immediately said to the Syracusans, some of whose leading citizens were with me at the time, that I believed this was the very object I had been looking for. Men were sent in with sickles to clear the site, and when a path to the monument had been opened we walked right up to it. And the verses were still visible, though approximately the second half of each line had been worn away.

So one of the most famous cities in the Greek world, and in former days a great centre of learning as well, would have remained in total ignorance of the tomb of the most brilliant citizen it had ever produced, had a man from Arpinum not come and pointed it out!

“Obscure little man”, eh?

The Greek world was fading by his day, and being overrun by the monstrous and brutal Roman Empire. The arrogance displayed in the passage above was typical. They were much more impressed with his war machines than they were with a few formulas. This is a not uncommon attitude – serious public funding of science in the US only began with the Manhattan Project. The practical men only understand the value of intellect when it threatens to kill them.

Demise

The only account of his death was written by Plutarch about 300 years later.   He writes in “Parallel Lives” of the capture of Syracuse by Marcellus:

But nothing afflicted Marcellus so much as the death of Archimedes, who was then, as fate would have it, intent upon working out some problem by a diagram, and having fixed his mind alike and his eyes upon the subject of his speculation, he never noticed the incursion of the Romans, nor that the city was taken. In this transport of study and contemplation, a soldier, unexpectedly coming up to him, commanded him to follow to Marcellus; which he declining to do before he had worked out his problem to a demonstration, the soldier, enraged, drew his sword and ran him through. Others write that a Roman soldier, running upon him with a drawn sword, offered to kill him; and that Archimedes, looking back, earnestly besought him to hold his hand a little while, that he might not leave what he was then at work upon inconclusive and imperfect; but the soldier, nothing moved by his entreaty, instantly killed him. Others again relate that, as Archimedes was carrying to Marcellus mathematical instruments, dials, spheres, and angles, by which the magnitude of the sun might be measured to the sight, some soldiers seeing him, and thinking that he carried gold in a vessel, slew him. Certain it is that his death was very afflicting to Marcellus; and that Marcellus ever after regarded him that killed him as a murderer; and that he sought for his kindred and honoured them with signal favours.

If he had survived, one shudders to think how much more harm the Romans could have done with his technologies.  It’s likely, though, that even if they could have gotten Archimedes to work for them, they would have disregarded him as wooly-headed.  Who needs these incomprehensible cranes and screws when you have a good sharp sword?  Why waste time building all this complicated stuff when you can just kill everyone?  That worked pretty well for them for a long time.   Marcellus knew that he had lost a great treasure with Archimedes’ death, but I doubt the Romans appreciated just how far he had gotten.

Links

Archimedes (Chris Rorres) – site with complete biographical information

Archimedes on Spheres and Cylinders – a nice discussion of how Archimedes found the area of a sphere. One of Kevin Brown’s Math Pages

The Mathematical Achievements and Methodologies of Archimedes – a discussion of his various proofs

Apr-2004

Seymour Cray (1925 – 1996) Supercomputers

b 1925, d 1996 Colorado Springs

Seymour Cray died of injuries received in a Sept 22, 1996 car crash in Colorado Springs. One car had made a sudden lane change, forcing another car into Cray’s. His Jeep Cherokee went off the road and rolled three times. He suffered serious, and ultimately fatal, head injuries. He survived for two weeks in the hospital but never recovered consciousness. He had been putting together a new company, SRC Computer, after the failure of Cray Computer and the Cray-4.

What a loss! Cray was one of the best of our field, and a giant of post-war electrical engineering as a whole. He started in the early transistor era in the 50s, designed the first big vector machines, the CDC 6600 and 7600, while at Control Data, then spun off Cray Research to do the Cray-1 and Cray-2. His machines were the fastest computers in the world from the mid-60s to the mid-80s, when Steve Chen’s Cray-XMP superseded his own design. In these days when a hundred thousand people are involved in computer engineering, no other person is ever likely to dominate the field that way again.

A few bits of Cray lore:

• Of all his many patents, he was proudest of one he received for a magnetic amplifier design. This was a means of amplifying signals without tubes or transistors, just by exploiting the non-linear saturation curve of an iron transformer core. When the design came back from the patent office it read “No prior art”.
• The Cray-1 wasn’t just the fastest vector machine on the planet, it was also one of the most efficient random integer code machines. The vector pipeline was deep, but the integer pipeline was short. It could do character string moves more efficiently on a cycle-by-cycle basis than the VAX microcode could. This realization in the early 80s was when the VAX architects knew they were doomed, and was one of the spurs to the RISC revolution.
• For relaxation he liked to build sailboats. He didn’t like to sail them; that wasn’t the point. In fact, at the end of the season he would burn his old boat to make room for the new.
• When people asked why he didn’t use caches, he replied “You can’t fake memory bandwidth that isn’t there.” No cache could handle the data sets that his machines were meant for. Instead, he used hundreds of megabytes of interleaved 20 ns ECL RAM.
• He had the same cavalier attitude towards floating point precision; the bottom few bits of his double precision numbers were not at all guaranteed to be right. For instance, he did divides by a Newton-Raphson iteration instead of the bit-at-a-time method that gives accuracy to the last LSB. If you need those bottom few bits, you can’t be sure that even double precision is enough. Use the right algorithm instead of crippling the hardware.

So his machines were not easy to use or program by today’s standards. They were thoroughbreds, meant to solve problems of literally national survival, like bomb design, aerodynamics, and cryptography. When the Cold War ended, his last, brilliant works, the Cray-3 and Cray-4, no longer had a market. Sorry as we may be to see them fail, we can’t miss the conditions that made them needed.

A few links to him:

A Tribute to Seymour Cray by a colleague, Charles Breckenridge, at his last company, SRC Computers.

Cray Interview by the National Museum of American History

A Seymour Cray Perspective by Gordon Bell

Thomas Andrews (1873 – 1912) Designer of the Titanic

b 1873 Belfast, d 1912 North Atlantic

What do you do when things go maximally wrong? When time is short, when no one knows what’s happening, when everything is failing? You are one of those responsible. People are panicking. People are behaving badly. You have to do something, and you have to do it now.

Well, you can do what Thomas Andrews, the chief designer of the “Titanic”, did when he was summoned to the bridge on April 14, 1912. You assess the problem as quickly as you can, you confer with others on the solution, you do as much as possible for those in your charge, and then (and this is the key part), you stay out of the lifeboats. Taking responsibility means taking the blame. None of us (I hope!) will ever have to face a crisis as stark as his, but we can learn from how well he acted.

Career

Andrews was born to a fairly prominent family in Belfast, Ireland in 1873. His father was a local politician, and his mother was the sister of William Pirrie, the controlling owner of the Harland & Wolff shipyard. Pirrie had worked his way up through the shipyard starting as an apprentice, but was a partner at age 27. Pirrie was made a Baron in 1906 and a Viscount in 1921.

His nephew, Andrews, also started as an apprentice at the yard at age 16. He spent his whole career at Harland & Wolff, eventually working his way up to head of the drafting shop and managing director. A lot of the design on “Titanic” and her sister ship, “Olympic”, was done by the previous director, Alexander Carlisle, but Andrews was responsible for the final fit-out and much of her decor.

In 1908 Andrews married Helen Barbour and they had a daughter, Elizabeth, in 1910. Passengers mentioned that he spoke frequently of his wife and two-year-old daughter. He was well-known in the shipyard. He once brought a man down from an 80-foot scaffold who had been trapped up there by high winds. People in the crew knew and liked him too. First Officer Murdoch came to him for advice when worried about a promotion, and quarreling stewardesses turned to him for arbitration.

So there he was in 1912, with a loving family, the respect of all of all who knew him, and having just completed the greatest ship in the history of the world:

This photo shows the “Titanic” in dry-dock in Belfast on Feb. 3, 1912. The propellers are being fitted and a final coat of paint applied. It and the photo of Andrews came from Titanic – An Illustrated History.

Actions During Disaster

When the ship hit the iceberg, Andrews was in his stateroom going over some changes to the ladies’ writing room. It was meant to be the equivalent of the gentlemen’s smoking room as a place to retire to after dinner, but even in 1912 the ladies were not retiring as much as they were expected to. He planned to convert part of it to two more staterooms.

Like most of the first-class passengers, he hardly felt a jar from the collision. Forty-six thousand tons of steel are not easily jolted. He soon received a summons to the bridge, though, from the ship’s captain, E. J. Smith. The two of them inspected the forward holds. Other officers had already reported on the damage, but the captain and the builder had to see for themselves. They returned through the A deck foyer, which by that time was thronged with worried passengers. None of the passengers gained a clue from looking at their faces. The two of them must already have realized that the ship was in profound trouble, but a lifetime of British self-control let them not alarm the passengers.

They conferred back on the bridge. Fourteen feet of water had come in in ten minutes, far more than could be pumped away. As the water came in, the ship would settle towards the bow. Eventually the water would come up to the top of the transverse bulkheads that separated the holds. These were what was supposed to make the ship unsinkable. The bulkheads were fitted with watertight doors. A single hold could fill with water without flooding the rest of the ship or affecting the way she lay in the water. Even if the ship had been rammed at one of the bulkheads, causing two of the holds to fill, she would still have stayed afloat. Five holds, though, were just too many. This was an unforeseen failure mode. The collision was not particularly hard, but it happened in a way that just wasn’t accounted for.

Andrews calculated that the ship could only float for another hour or two. Even so, all was not lost. If she could stay up long enough, help could arrive from nearby ships. Although there were only lifeboats for half the passengers and crew, perhaps more could be ferried off if help arrived in time. The key thing was to keep the ship’s systems running and get as many people off as possible.

Andrews had little to do with the first task – that was the job of the engineering crew. They performed heroically, keeping the power on until close to the very end, and all of them were lost. What Andrews could do was help get people into the boats. At this point few of the passengers realized how serious the situation was. It was bitterly cold outside, and few wanted to wear the uncomfortable life jackets or climb into the perilously swaying boats. If the ship really could stay afloat, and all thought she was unsinkable, it would be better to stay on board than risk getting spilled into the icy Atlantic.

A number of people remembered Andrews as being all over the deck, helping people get ready. Here let me quote Walter Lord from his book A Night To Remember:

A little later [stewardess Mary] Robinson bumped into Andrews on A Deck. Andrews greeted her like a cross parent:

“I thought I told you to put your lifebelt on!”

“Yes,” she replied, “but I thought it mean to wear it.”

“Never mind that. Put it on; walk about; let the passengers see you.”

“It looks rather mean.”

“No, put it on… If you value your life, put it on.”

Andrews understood people very well. A charming, dynamic man, he was everywhere, helping everyone. And people naturally looked to him. He handled them differently, depending on what he thought of them. He told garrulous Steward Johnson that everything would be all right. He told Mr. and Mrs. Albert Dick, his casual dinner companions, “She is torn to bits below, but she will not sink if her after bulkheads hold.” He told competent Stewardess Mary Sloan, “It is very serious, but keep the bad news quiet, for fear of panic.” He told John B. Thayer, whom he trusted implicitly, that he didn’t give the ship “much over an hour to live.”

It took strenuous effort by Andrews and the crew to get people away. It wasn’t until the bridge started firing distress rockets and the ship’s list became noticeable that everyone realized how bad things were. There was then no more dallying about loading the boats with only first-class passengers, and then no more thought of sending the boats away half-loaded.

Survival Rates

To digress a moment, much has been made about how many more first-class passengers survived than third-class. People note that the percentage of first-class men who lived was about the same as the percentage of third-class children. I think much of this is in reaction to the boasting in 1912 about how many first-class men had nobly chosen to stay behind. After the destruction of the old order in World War I, few believed in those kind of pieties.

These days, though, the numbers don’t look so bad. The Victorian Era ended in 1914, but the Modern Era that replaced it is now also ended; it fell with the Berlin Wall in 1989. We no longer have to treat the Victorians with the automatic contempt shown by the Moderns. The Victorians were racists and sexists, true, but their vices pale compared to the intellectual fanaticism displayed by Modernists. The Modernist paradigm of revolution-by-experts that they pursued in art, architecture, and politics is now seen as a ghastly mistake. Now that we are no longer the cultural children of the Victorians, we don’t need to see them through family bitterness and bias.

So let’s look at the actual numbers to see what happened:

Passengers      Lost    Saved

1st Class         118      57     Men
                    4     140     Women
                    0       6     Children

2nd Class         154      14     Men
                   13      80     Women
                    0      24     Children

3rd Class         387      75     Men
                   89      76     Women
                   52      27     Children

Total Passengers  659     146     Men
                  106     296     Women
                   52      57     Children

Total Crew        670     192     Men
                    8      20     Women

Total Souls      1329     338     Men
                  109     316     Women
                   52      57     Children

This table comes from the British Inquiry Report, as quoted in Walter Lord’s The Night Still Lives On. The total number of women lost adds up to 114 instead of 109, but I don’t know if the error is in Lord or the Inquiry Report, or is a result of some other uncertainty.

Remember that most of the first-class passengers went away in the early boats, when the crisis didn’t seem so grave. Note that almost all of the second-class men died, and all of their children and most of their women were saved. At that point, the choice between saving men and saving women was clear. Note also that even if all of the first-class men had stayed behind, there still wouldn’t have been space for all of the third-class women.

The true problem, to my mind, is that the half-empty boats did not return for survivors. There was space for another several hundred people in the lifeboats, but only one went back. In some cases this was because of explicit cowardice on the part of the seamen who were captaining the boats. The one that did return was under the command of Fifth Officer Lowe, who also collected several boats together and organized the passengers among them. Mention should also be made of Second Officer Lightoller, who managed to keep an overturned boat from flipping by carefully balancing the people standing on it. He also saved a number of people who were caught without boats in the freezing water. And he helped in the evacuation of Dunkirk 28 years later! A natural hero.

But this is an issue that cuts beyond era-specific notions like Duty-Towards-Passengers and Women-And-Children-First. If you have the opportunity to save lives then you should do it, whether you are a Victorian in a lifeboat or a Post-Modern in a greenhouse-induced hurricane. Today we would probably not save women before men (although we would still save children first), and would probably not save people just because they paid someone something who also happened to be paying us. We would certainly not save first-class passengers first, nor would we ignore passengers who weren’t Anglo-Saxons. But simple humanity requires us to save those that we can, and that’s what most of the Titanic’s lifeboats did not do.

Demise

To get back to Andrews, he was last seen a few minutes before the end by a surviving steward. He was in the first class smoking lounge, looking at a painting of the harbor of Plymouth, Massachusetts called “Entrance To the New World”. His life jacket was strewn over a nearby chair. The steward asked “Aren’t you even going to make a try for it, sir?”, but Andrews didn’t respond.

There’s no telling what he was thinking in those last moments. He clearly didn’t intend to save himself. At that point it was clear that saving himself would have cost the life of someone else. It was that cut-and-dried. There were only so many places in the boats. Any place that he took could have been occupied by someone else.

Contrast his behavior with that of J. Bruce Ismay, the president of the White Star Line, which owned the ship. Like Andrews, he had been assisting people into the boats, but when no more could be found and his boat was about to launch, he jumped in himself. For saving himself when 1500 people were lost on his company’s ship, he earned eternal criticism. He was removed as president the next year, and lived as a recluse on his estate in Ireland until his death in the 30s.

Although Ismay had some defenders, the most potent case against him was made by Rear-Admiral A. T. Mahan (as quoted by Colonel Archibald Gracie (US Army) in The Truth About the Titanic):

For all the loss of life the company is responsible, individually and collectively: Mr. Ismay personally, not only as one of the members. He believed the Titanic unsinkable; the belief relieves moral guilt, but not of responsibility. Men bear the consequences of their mistakes as well as of their faults…

I hold that under the conditions, so long as there was a soul that could be saved, the obligation lay upon Mr. Ismay that that one person and not he should have been in the boat. More than 1,500 perished. Circumstances yet to be developed may justify Mr. Ismay’s actions completely, but such justification is imperatively required…

We should be careful not to pervert standards. Witness the talk that the result is due to the system. What is a system, except that which individuals have made it and keep it? Whatever thus weakens the sense of individual responsibility is harmful, and so likewise is all condonation of failure of the individual to meet his responsibility.

Andrews lived up to his responsibility when Ismay did not. When the system fails, when all our plans go awry, it takes extraordinary individual effort, and extraordinary self-sacrifice to save what we can. This is the kind of heroism that Thomas Andrews displayed.

Links

The Titanic story continues to draw enormous interest, of course. Even after ninety years there is enough new material to keep the Titanic Historical Society going.

Roy Brander has done extensive research into the issues around the engineering of the Titanic, which he has put into: Titantic & Risk Management, several excellent pieces on the underlying reasons for what went wrong.

M. A. Kribble has a good overall site devoted to Andrews here.

One of the oddest pages I saw was the Thomas Andrews collectible dolls and figurines from Maritime Heritage

Harland & Wolff are still in business, although their main line these days is off-shore oil and gas drilling equipment. Their archives are accessible here. One would think that this is not the sort of thing a company would like to be known for, but they must have decided there was no help for it.

There have been a number of films of the story. Of the ones I’ve seen, Andrews gets the most sympathetic portrayal in the latest version, “Titanic” (1997), directed by James Cameron.

The most accurate version is considered to be “A Night To Remember” (1958), directed by Roy Ward Baker with a screenplay by Eric Ambler, and I found it the most moving.

There is even a Broadway show, “Titanic: A New Musical”, with Andrews getting the opening number.

May-99

Clara Immerwahr Haber (1870 – 1915) Chemist

b 1870 Breslau Germany, d 1915 Berlin

Clara was the first wife of one of the great chemists, Fritz Haber. He invented the Haber-Bosch process for synthesizing ammonia, which in turn is the key for making nitrates for fertilizers and explosives. She herself was the first woman to receive a doctorate in chemsitry from the University of Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland) in 1900. She is said to have contributed much to his work, but hated his efforts for Germany in the First World War. Science should be used for constructive ends, not for blind patriotism.

He, though, was a converted Jew and loyal above all else to his country. He pushed the military into the use of chemical weapons. Their first major trial, of chlorine gas against French troops at Ypres on April 22, 1915, was a stunning success. Five thousand were killed and another few thousand incapacitated.

The German papers were full of praise, and Haber was promoted to captain. Finally a way had been found to break the stalemate of trench warfare. Haber threw a dinner party to celebrate. Clara and he got into a furious argument. That night she took his army pistol and killed herself in their garden with a shot to the chest.

Haber left the next day for the Eastern front, not even staying for the funeral arrangements. He continued to promote the use of poison gases, even when the true answer to the trenches turned out to be tanks. He was branded a war criminal after the Allied victory, but still won the Nobel Prize in 1918 for ammonia synthesis.

He remarried, and spent the years after war doing basic chemistry, but also searching desperately for a way to extract gold from seawater in order to pay the Weimar’s Republic’s debts. He rose steadily in honors, but nothing availed him when the Nazis came to power. Converting to Christianity and aiding one’s country mightily in its worst struggle didn’t count compared to his ancestry. He moved to a post at Cambridge, but died of a heart attack while traveling through Switzerland. He too was doomed, and by his actions as damned as Oppenheimer.

Link:

Bio of Fritz Haber
She is also a figure in Tony Harrison’s British verse drama “Square Rounds”

Dec-03

Peter Palchinsky (1875 – 1929) Russian Mining

b 1875 Kazan, Russia, d 1929 Moscow

Like Gerald Bull, Peter Palchinsky was an engineer in his fifties who was shot by the secret police. Unlike Bull, Palchinsky was killed for thinking too much about the consequences of his work instead of too little.

Nina and Peter Palchinsky, 1916

His story was covered up for decades by the Soviets, until it was ferreted out by Loren Graham, an MIT professor specializing in Russian technological history. It was published as “The Ghost of the Executed Engineer – Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union”, Harvard University Press, 1993. For Graham, Palchinsky’s story epitomizes everything that went wrong with Soviet industrialization.

Palchinsky was born in 1875 in a city on the Volga, Kazan. He studied mining engineering at the prestigious Mining Institute in St. Petersburg. His family was poor, so he worked his way through school in a variety of manual labor jobs. His formative professional experience, though, was his first major assignment out of the school. In 1901 he was instructed to investigate the living conditions of the workers in the coal mines of the Don basin as part of an overall report on why coal production was declining.

He was appalled by what he found. Single workers were housed in barracks with 68 men to a room. Families were crowded into single rooms with four to six families per house. The houses often had dirt floors and no toilet facilities. Small wonder that the workers weren’t motivated if this was all that their work brought them.

At first his work was well received, but then the political implications sank in to the czarist ministries. Improving the lot of the miners would require reform up and down the system. Palchinsky was sent on administrative exile to Siberia, where he continued to do good work as a mining consultant. He escaped in 1908, first to the Ukraine, and then to western Europe.

In Europe he worked as a consultant on the design of seaports. To him, a port was more than an arrangement of docks and railways; it was an entire system, including housing, schools, and medical care. He wrote extensively on the ports of Europe and worked on the systems of Amsterdam, London, and Hamburg. He missed Russia, though, and returned in 1913 when he was pardoned by the czarist government. He established a think tank for mining called the Institute of the Surface and Depths of the Earth, and founded a journal.

He worked with the Provisional Government set up after the collapse in 1917, which got him into trouble again. When the Bolsheviks took power in October 1917, he was arrested as a collaborator. He was in and out of prison for the next two years, until they finally realized his innocence and his talents. He was allowed to resume control of his Institute, became head of the Russian Technical Society, and consulted on a wide variety of projects.

His honesty continued to get him into trouble, however. He was quite critical of the direction of Soviet industrialization. His main objections were:

1. Top-down planning was too rigid. No allowance was made for local conditions.
2. There was too much emphasis on large systems and large results. Although there are economies of scale in factories and mines, it is also possible for small enterprises to efficiently exploit small markets and ore beds.
3. Not enough attention was paid to the overall system. It made no sense to build a steel mill close to iron ore but not close to coal or to users of the steel, as was done at Magnitogorsk.

Here is one of the workers at Magnitogorsk in 1931. People went from being sheep herders to steel workers. Dressed in rags and working in horribly unsafe conditions, they still got things done. The Soviets portrayed their sacrifices as heroic, but most were prisoners and many were killed in senseless accidents. For a fascinating and horrifying account of Magnitogorsk, have a look for “Behind the Urals – An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel” by John Scott, 1942. Scott is a sympathetic to what the Soviets are doing, but sees very well the cost of this kind of development.

None of Palchinsky’s dissents made him a capitalist, though. He believed strongly in central planning and disdained the profit motive. He was also critical of American innovations such as time-motion studies, believing that they were another means of over-stressing workers, even though Taylorism was popular with the Bolsheviks.

Overall he called for engineers to have a broader view of their activities, and for engineers to have broader participation in the planning process. This is what killed him. Throughout the twenties, Stalin systematically eliminated independent sources of political power. Technocrats like Palchinsky were associated with Bukharin, one of Stalin’s rivals. By arresting him and his comrades, Stalin could discredit his rival and remove a challenge to his authority.

Palchinsky was arrested in April 1928. After a secret trial, he was executed by firing squad in May 1929. The first news his wife Nina had of his death was a short newspaper article charging him with being an enemy of the Revolution. She was left friendless and alone. She fled to a remote province and took a job as a nurse’s assistant. As she sat in a movie theater one evening, she was horrified to see a film describing her husband as one of the leading counter-revolutionaries in 1917. A person she barely knew stood up and shouted “We have a Palchinsky among us!” She was arrested, sent off to the camps, and never heard of again.

Engineers are quick learners by profession, and here was a lesson no one could miss. Engineers kept their heads down and meddled no more in wider issues. Specialization became extreme. Graham tells of one young woman who told him she was a ball-bearing engineer for paper mills. He responded “Oh, you must be a mechanical engineer.” She rejoined, “No, I am a ball-bearing engineer for paper mills”, and in fact had a degree in that exact subject.

Management by ignorant commissars, total disregard for local conditions, total disregard for the attitudes and abilities of workers, and extreme compartmentalization of function – these are ingredients for massive failure. That failure is by now familiar. In Graham’s metaphor, dissidents like Palchinsky are the ghosts that haunted the regime, reminding them of the consequences of their actions and predicting dire results. Those warnings have all come true, resulting in the crippling and impoverishment of a great nation. This is one spirit that the Soviets should have listened to.

Feb-96

Edwin Howard Armstrong (1890 – 1954) Invented Most of Radio

Armstrong is the most important engineer on this list, and one of greats of the 20th century. Most of the greats are known for one or two key innovations: Widlar and the op amp, Cray and vector supercomputers, Sutherland for both Sketchpad and flight simulation. Armstrong had three: regeneration, superheterodyning, and frequency modulation. He was the last of the line of heroic individual American inventors, and he came to a particularly American end – death by lawyers. His last struggles also bear on questions that are puzzling to this day, such as why AM radio hasn’t been swept away by FM.

Here he is in the late 1940s, looking like a particularly unsympathetic banker, but showing the fierce and uncompromising attitude that ultimately did him in.

The reference here is “Edwin Howard Armstrong – Man of High Fidelity” by Lawrence Lessing, 1956. Lessing was a personal friend, and saw in Armstrong’s suicide the triumph of blind corporate power over individual achievment. It’s a heated book, but an engrossing read.

Armstrong was born into a large Presbyterian family in Manhattan (something that doesn’t happen today) in 1890. His people were energetic and affable, but of no visible creativity. The only thing that distinguished his childhood from that of a million other middle-class kids was an attack of St. Vitus Dance (rheumatic fever) when he was nine. It kept him out of school for two years, and left him with a tic in his shoulder and jaw for the rest of his life. He soon caught up in school but was always a serious kid. He was fascinated by Marconi’s adventures and soon learned all there was to know about wireless.

He enrolled in electrical engineering at Columbia, and in 1913, while still an undergrad, made his first great discovery, regeneration. At that time Lee De Forest’s audion tube, the first triode vacuum tube, had been around for several years. No one had done much with it, though, because De Forest himself didn’t understand how it worked and because it was a really poor amplifier. Armstrong discovered that the gain of a triode amplifier could be enormously increased by feeding some of the amplifier output back into the input, i.e. by using positive feedback. Given enough feedback, the amplifier became a stable and powerful oscillator, perfect for driving radio transmitters. Given a little less feedback, the amplifier became a more sensitive radio receiver than anything else at the time. Other people had come upon feedback at about the same time, but Armstrong characterized it and understood it in a way that made it practical for real use.

De Forest heard of Armstrong’s work, and immediately directed his own research into regenerative techniques. He quickly filed patents on variants of the technique, and then in 1920, started attacking Armstrong’s patents on it. He was infuriated that such a young man had used his own tubes better than he had. De Forest merits a note on this list of his own, since he founded and drove into bankruptcy 25 different companies. He was also married and divorced three times. His only success was the audion tube, so he was determined to gain control of its use. He was backed up by AT&T, who stood to gain enormously if they could control a fundamental circuit of radio.

The patent fight lasted fourteen years, cost over a million dollars, and went in front of the Supreme Court several times. De Forest’s entire evidence of priority was a 1912 note in a lab book that a particular circuit emitted a howl when tuned a certain way. The howl was because feedback caused the circuit to oscillate, but he didn’t understand that and didn’t pursue it. AT&T’s lawyers, however, managed to get a sympathetic ruling from a technically ignorant judge in Philadelphia. Given one such ruling, they could beat any appeals by saying that judgement had already been rendered. They beat the Supreme Court appearances by so obscuring the issues that the Court refused to hear the case.

So they broke Armstrong’s patent. AT&T’s publicists also went into high gear, and to this day you’ll see De Forest credited with regeneration.

Fortunately for Armstrong, he had plenty more ideas where that came from. While working for the Army during World War I, he came up with the superheterodyne, a subtle and elegant technique for improving reception and tuning at the same time. It’s quite difficult to build an amplifier that will work at high frequencies, such as the ones radio uses, and also difficult to build a tuning filter than can select a narrow band of frequencies and yet be adjusted across a range of frequencies. The filter must tune in one station and reject all others, but then change to tune in other stations. It’s easy, however, to build a tunable oscillator. If the oscillator signal is added to an incoming radio signal, a beat signal will result that has a frequency of the difference between the two. A fixed filter can be built to narrowly select this beat frequency, and pass it on to a low-frequency amplifier. As the oscillator frequency is varied, different radio frequencies will be moved down to the beat frequency and so selected. In other words, a variable oscillator and a fixed, narrow filter can do the work of a variable narrow filter. This technique is used in practically every radio to this day.

Here are Armstrong and his wife Marion on their honeymoon in 1923. She was the secretary of the president of RCA, David Sarnoff. He brought one of the first superheterodyne sets with them – the very first beach boom box.

Westinghouse paid hundreds of thousands for the rights to the superheterodyne. Armstrong also made a deal with RCA for a similarly innovative circuit, the super-regenerative receiver. This would drive an amplifier right to the edge of oscillation and then kill the gain to avoid a squeal. If done at more than 20 kHz, the ear couldn’t pick up the variation in gain, and a lot more gain could be gotten out of one tube. This wasn’t as profound as his other innovations, but it netted him a big block of RCA stock and made vastly more money than all of his other ideas.

In his whole career Armstrong never became an employee. Instead he was on the faculty of Columbia for a salary of one dollar a year, since his patents paid him much more than the university could. He never taught classes, but they were honored to have him. It gave him access to a broad intellectual circle and research resources. He rented lab space in their basement. He never incorporated, and did all his work with only a couple of assistants, some of whom went on to significant work of their own.

The patent fight with De Forest was exhausting and humiliating. When the courts turned against him and the publicists referred to him as “that discredited inventor”, he resolved to show them all. This was in the early thirties, when Armstrong himself was in his early forties. Although this is past the creative prime for most engineers, Armstrong came up with his greatest invention of all, frequency modulation (FM).

In conventional, amplitude modulation (AM), the strength of a radio signal is proportional to the strength of the audio signal that is being transmitted. Unfortunately, the natural world is full of similarly modulated signals, which are then heard as static. In FM, the frequency of the main signal is varied instead of its amplitude. Since few natural sources vary in the same way as an FM signal, interference is much less.

FM had been tried in the 20s and rejected. It was thought to be a way to pack more signals into a given frequency band. Detailed mathematical analysis showed that a narrow-band FM signal would always sound worse than an AM signal of the same power.

Armstrong’s insight was that an FM signal didn’t have to have a narrow range of frequencies. It could vary over a wide range, say five times as wide as an AM signal, and have a far better signal-to-noise ratio. The mathematics for FM had been correct, but confining. By relying on experiment and physical reasoning, Armstrong got beyond the equations. This in turn laid the foundations for information theory, which quantifies how bandwdith can be exchanged for noise immunity.

He first got FM working in 1933. He showed it to RCA, who had most of his licenses, but they were oddly unimpressed. RCA had at that point made vast investments in AM. All of their transmitters and all of the millions of radios that they had sold used it, and the investment was not depreciated. Radios were now commodities, and sold entirely based on price, not quality. RCA told itself that consumers didn’t care what the music sounded like from their radios, they just wanted to get it as cheaply as possible. They spent a couple of years evaluating the technique and then declined to license it.

Fine, said Armstrong. He went ahead with licenses to smaller companies. He designed the complete system of transmitter, antennas, and receivers, and set up pilot broadcasting services in New York and New England in 1939. People were entranced. This was the highest quality medium for music of the day, much better than the phonographs, and before the Germans perfected tapes.

RCA immediately struck back by petitioning the FCC to give FM’s frequency assignments (around 50 MHz) to television, which was just starting up at the time. Their attack was so obvious, however, that the FCC chairman, a New Dealer named Fly, instead gave the whole band from 44 to 50 MHz to FM. This would have been TV Channel 1, and it’s still missing from the TV dial. He also required TV sound to be carried as FM.

Since RCA couldn’t lick ’em, they decided to join ’em. They offered Armstrong a million dollars for his patents, but no subsequent royalties. Armstrong refused. Every other licensee paid royalties, and he felt that giving such a deal to RCA would be unfair to the companies that had actually worked with him instead of against him. Before the battle could really get heated up, though, a somewhat larger struggle, World War II, began.

Everybody used FM during the war. Armstrong allowed the military to use his patents royalty-free for the duration, a gesture that no company could make and that even he, with his lab expenses, could barely afford. Mobile FM communications were of tremendous value in the thrusts and parries across Europe and the Pacific. He himself worked on continuous-wave radar, but didn’t get anything deployed before the war’s end.

RCA had not rested in the meantime. In 1945 it and a bloc of other radio companies convinced the FCC to move the FM band from 44-50 MHz to 88-108 MHz, where it is today. The nominal reason was to prevent “ionospheric disturbance”, but no one was quite clear on what this was. The TV channel right above 50 MHz with its FM sound channel didn’t seem to suffer from it. What it did do, though, was to immediately obsolete all the transmitters and receivers that had been built. To add insult to injury, the FCC also voted to severely limit FM’s broadcasting power, and disallow radio relays from central stations to mountaintop antennas. Instead, the FM broadcasters had to send their material over AT&T’s coax cables at exorbitant rates.

The overall, and intended, result was to cripple FM broadcasting. These machinations allowed AM to survive even down to the present day. No programming of any audio quality is offered on AM any more. It was obsoleted more than 60 years ago, but is kept alive by inertia and regulation.

After this defeat, Armstrong grimly set out to redesign all his systems. He got them working again at the higher frequencies by 1948, but that was his last engineering achievment. RCA had been building FM receivers using his patents for the previous eight years without paying him a dime. His patents only had two years left to run. It was time for them to pay.

He brought a patent infringement suit against them in 1949. Armstrong himself was called on to be the first witness. RCA’s lawyers kept him on the witness stand for an entire year with niggling and irrelevant questions. Another two years elapsed when RCA was called upon to reveal the mountain of research it had done on FM in the 30s. The capstone of this was when David Sarnoff himself claimed that RCA had invented FM all by itself without any help from Armstrong. After a claim like that, Armstrong would hear no talk of settlement.

By 1953, Armstrong’s licenses and patents had all expired. His crushing legal bills and research expenses brought him to near bankruptcy. A bitter argument with his wife on Thanksgiving day caused her to leave him. She went to live with her sister in Conneticut.

On January 31, 1954, he wrote a two-page letter to her and left it on his apartment desk. He dressed neatly in an overcoat, hat, scarf, and gloves, and walked out a 13th story window. He hit a third story overhang, and so his body wasn’t discovered until the next day.

His wife Marion continued his suits. Unlike Armstrong she was willing to compromise. She settled with RCA for over a million dollars, then went after other companies like Sylvania and CBS that had also infringed his patents. She conclusively won all her cases and collected millions, although the last holdout, Motorola, didn’t give up until the Supreme Court ruled against them in 1967, thirteen years after Armstrong’s death.

According to Armstrong’s biographer, Lessing, true innovation is always the work of individuals or small groups. Radio is built around seven inventions made by only nine people. Plastics are based on the work of five independent scientists, four German and one American, and only the last, Wallace Carrothers, did significant work within a company, Du Pont. (Oddly enough, he was also a suicide.) Atomic energy is the work of a small group of refugee Europeans. Innovation is lightning in the brain, and that doesn’t happen in committee meetings.

According to ads that Microsoft ran recently in the Wall Street Journal, a country’s true innovators are its companies. It’s an extraordinary claim, especially from a company not known for innovation. The corporatist attitude seems to be as alive today in Microsoft as it was in RCA’s and AT&T’s attempts to discredit Armstrong. RCA was long ago swallowed up by General Electric, and even AT&T is fading these days, but the publicity machine lives on. Only the organization produces; the individual is just a cell in its body.

Most engineers go along with this, for it does take a lot of people to get things done. Lots of people contribute to any project’s success – should they all be slighted for the sake of one person’s ego? No, but in emphasizing the team over the individual, we risk emphasizing the organization over the engineer. The company becomes paramount and its people become interchangeable resources.

Armstrong was not a company man, yet he gave more to radio than RCA ever did. He gave to his country as well in both world wars. His example shows how Microsoft has it wrong. The true source of a country’s innovations are not its companies, but its citizens.

Feb-96

General Mitrofan Nedelin (- 1960) Baiknonur Launch Manager

d 1960 Baikonur, USSR

Contributed by Bill Higgins, HIGGINS@FNAL.FNAL.GOV

Field Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin supervised launch crews at the then-secret base in Kazakhstan which was home to the Soviet space program. On 24 October 1960 they attempted to launch a Mars probe R-16 ballistic missile with a launch window rapidly closing and a lot of prestige on the line. Nothing happened. The first stage failed to ignite and the rocket just sat there.

The Commander in Chief of the Strategic Rocket Forces ordered a team of engineers to the pad to inspect it– maybe they could fix whatever was wrong and still make the launch window. The vehicle was fully fueled, pyrotechnics armed, etc., and this violated not only all safety rules but common sense as well. But Nedelin was a brave leader, so he too emerged from the control bunker and joined his men at the rocket.

Meanwhile, the launch order caused at least one thing to work properly– a sequencer counting down time to ignition of the fourth stage. This poor beast thought it was on its way to Mars, and not sitting atop a busted, fully fueled booster at Baikonur Cosmodrome. Several minutes after the countdown ended, the fourth-stage engine ignited. Fifty-six More than a hundred people died, including Marshal Nedelin.

There is a lot of detail on the Soviet explosion (but not much on Field Marshal Nedelin himself) in James Oberg’s books *Red Star in Orbit* and *Uncovering Soviet Disasters*. The incident was shrouded in mystery and it took decades for Western analysts of the Soviet space effort to figure it out.

Oct-96

Postscript, Sep-2001, from Robert G. Kennedy III (robot@ultimax.com):

Nedelin’s crew was testing the R-16 ballistic missile, not sending a deep space probe to Mars. The Mars probe failure on the pad 10 days earlier often gets confused with the Nedelin Disaster, which killed more like 100 people, not 56. The Soviets didn’t manage to land on Mars until 1971 (and that was a crash landing).

Asif Siddiqi’s recent book, /Challenge to Apollo/ (US GPO, 2000), or Jim Harford’s biography of Sergei Korolyov, /Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon/ (Wiley, 1997) have much more accurate info than Jim Oberg’s early books which were written before the Wall came down.

To your list of doomed engineers, you might well add Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who was the Soviet equivalent of Germany’s Guderian, France’s deGaulle, and Britain’s Liddell-Hart. An military engineer/tactician, he developed a variety of highly advanced weapons and fighting before he was liquidated by Stalin along with most of the Red Army’s brains in 1937.

Henry Smolinksi and Hal Blake (- 1973) Flying Cars

d 1973 Van Nuys, California

Contributed by Bill Higgins, HIGGINS@FNAL.FNAL.GOV

Henry Smolinski and Hal Blake founded Advanced Vehicle Engineers in Van Nuys, California. Their gimmick: put flight instruments and controls in a 1971 Ford Pinto. Saw the cabin and front engine off a twin-boom Cessna Skymaster, and attach the rest of the aircraft to the rear of the Pinto with the wings over the roof and the pusher engine snugged up against the hatchback. Fly the Pinto to an airport near your destination, unlatch it from the wings, and drive it where you want to go. No need for rental cars…

It worked (though the aero-engine failed on the maiden flight, and the pilot had to *drive* back to the hangar). It got great publicity, as flying automobiles always do; see *Hot Rod* for August 1973, page 116. It got a distributor: Galpin Ford of Sepulveda, California.

Alas, sometime late in 1973, Smolinski and Blake climbed aboard the “Mizar” and rolled down the runway. During the takeoff, the peculiar marriage of wheels and wings divorced, and the Advanced Vehicle Engineers found themselves sailing through the California sky in a very un-advanced vehicle, a wingless Pinto.

With the death of the two principal developers, the Mizar project dissolved. The world is still waiting for production of a commercial roadable aircraft.

(While you’re waiting, I recommend a look at *From Wheels to Wings*, by Prof. Palmer Stiles of the Florida Institute of Technology. It’s a collection of drawings from significant flying-car patent documents. These pictures would improve the fantasy life of any motorist.)

Oct-96

Later: Feb-2002

Robert Munro found a whole page on the Mizar, with pictures and description, taken from the 1973 “Complete Ford Book”:

Mitzar, Flying Pinto?

Yes, the flying car looks just as ridiculous as you would expect.