Engineers who influenced me

Dean Kamen is the engineer and inventor of the Segway, the two-wheeled transportation device for one person that became very popular upon its release in 2001. Kamen also co-founded the FIRST organization with Woodie Flowers. A few years ago, I saw that Kamen developed a water purification system for third-world countries that worked with solar power. And did I mention he has a successful aerospace company? Kamen is one of those rare engineers whose work will touch at least a billion people in ways that improve their lives.

I met Dean Kamen before he was well known. That meeting took place decades ago, when he and I were judges for a “Best New Product” award presented each year around St. Patrick’s Day at National Manufacturing Week trade show in Chicago, IL. This industrial trade show was attended by many types of engineers, including OEM design engineers; facility engineers in charge of maintenance, repairs, and overhauls; mechanical engineers, electrical and electronics engineers, software engineers, and others.

I’m not sure if Kamen remembers the encounter, but I do. I was an editor for an engineering magazine at the time. Our readers were the design engineers who attended the show from all over the world. And they were from all different industries: medical, defense, aerospace, automotive, consumer electronics, alternative energy, and elsewhere. Judging the contest meant taking into consideration the diversity of engineering audience.

On the day of the judging competition, I remember Kamen walking into the judging room wearing his signature blue jeans with blue denim shirt. If my memory is accurate, he may have spoken as few as two sentences.

The first thing he did was ask the contest organizers from the trade show company if the Best New Product competition was open to everyone and every company at the show. “No,” replied the event coordinator. She indicated that Best New Product competition was limited to only show exhibitors who paid an entrance fee to be part of the competition. Well, that was all Kamen needed to hear. I could see in his face that he didn’t like the answer.

Although I can’t remember the exact words he used in his second sentence, the message was basically that he was not going to judge the competition and he would be withdrawing as a judge. And with that, he pretty much turned and walked out.

I was stunned and amazed. But I knew he was right. Part of me felt ashamed because I hadn’t thought to ask that question. And as an editor, I should have been the one who asked the question. But I didn’t. And that moment has always stuck with me. It reminds me that ethics are important to so many things in life. In my work, ethics can be expressed by being a good writer, a reporter, and editor. Fair. Accurate. Well researched. I want people to be able to trust what I say and write are true. So there must be ethics. A code. But at this competition where I should have been a leader, I failed to ask an important question about the ethics of the competition.

I think Kamen felt that limiting the number of competition entries to only those companies who paid a fee was unethical because the best new product (from his perspective) might be one from a company that didn’t enter the competition. He taught me that if you are going to put your name on something, you should first know what it is you are putting your name on. Then understand the implications of putting your name on it. It’s your reputation. It’s what makes you trustworthy, or not.

Years later, when I co-founded an online magazine for engineers called Entertainment Engineering, I still remembered what Kamen taught me. Being a trustworthy source for engineers was critical to the growth of the magazine’s readership across many industries and among many types of engineers. We had nearly 40,000 opt-in subscribers by our second year, most of whom were engineers and technical people who worked outside the entertainment industry.

While working as an editor at my magazine, I met many other incredible engineers who also influenced my life and career. Once I attended a software convention in New Orleans where Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was a guest speaker. After his lecture, the “Woz” was giving away copies of his book. I got one and was lucky enough to get him to sign my copy.

I remember reading his book iWoz over a weekend. It was a pleasure to read. There were things Woz wrote in the book about himself, and the way his mind works, that reminded me of people in my family.

I followed up on my meeting with questions for the Woz, which were emailed to him. He wrote back to me. When you get an email from Steve Wozniak, one of the ways you can tell it’s authentic is because his name appears upside down in your inbox. How many people would know how to have their name appear upside down in your Inbox? Having the name upside down is consistent with Woz’s fun personality. He still has a little kid inside him that comes out in the way he speaks and expresses himself. His energy.

I was able to use quotations from his response in an editorial piece I later wrote about creativity and product design engineering. From that interview, I gained valuable insight into the technical mind of this engineer, inventor, and philanthropist. Like Kamen, the Woz gave me insight into his creativity when engineering early Apple products, and how it can sometimes be a solo endeavor, especially early on in the design engineering process. For me, the Woz sets a good example for how engineers and people in general can do really profound and amazing things with their lives. In addition to creating Apple with Steve Jobs, Woz does lots of charity work. For example, he is responsible for getting tens of thousands of free computers into the hands of people who could not afford them. Like Kamen, his work has touched the lives of more than a billion people in positive ways.

Hugh Herr is a third engineer who has influenced my thinking about my approach to life and my approach to work in content development and marketing. He taught me it was ok to have an emotional connection to the subject matter on which you report. But don’t mis-understand my message here. Being objective and “third party” is important to being an editor. But I also learned that having a shared experience with someone – like not being able to walk — gives a reporter insight into his subject matter on a deeper level.

My emotional connection to Herr’s story was because at one point in my life I was unable to walk. I had to learn to walk again as an adult. My own story gave me insight into his story before I ever connected with him or asked him a single question. And like Herr, I came back in a way that surprised people. I felt like I knew a little bit about what he experienced, and that helped me ask him better questions.

Speaking of medical stories, I’ve encountered both doctors and engineers from the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in my work. Dave Horvath, a mechanical engineer, and Dr. Golding, a retired surgeon, developed an LVAD, or left ventricular assist device. LVADs help blood flow in patients whose hearts do not adequately pump blood. They gave me a wonderful story for a medical design engineering magazine that employed me at the time.

Years later, I got another great story out of the Cleveland Clinic’s Antonie J. van den Bogert. He had a great story for a magazine I helped start called Entertainment Engineering. Bogert developed computational models of the nuero-musculoskeletal system, which he used for medical rehabilitation and prosthetic at the Cleveland Clinic. He applied this computational system to “gait” stability and dynamic landing tasks of the human knee joint. Eventually, he would go on develop software from this work that was re-purposed from its original medical application. The software was eventually used for animated motion picture characters in The Matrix movies, Lord of the Rings, Shrek, and other Hollywood movie productions.

Writing this story helped open the portal to many other stories we would write for Entertainment Engineering. Not just movies. All kinds of cool stuff. Monday Night Football. Cirque du Soleil. Disney theme parks. U2 concerts. So we got to meet incredibly bright engineers doing very cool things in the name of entertainment and fun. There are too many to list here. It was my good fortune to be able to learn from them, not just about their crafts, but about my craft as well.

There are many engineers and inventors at Caterpillar, Inc. from whom I learned things about how the technical mind problem solves. One engineer at Caterpillar told me it was on Christmas day that he saw a better way to align large pieces of sheet metal prior to welding them together into earthmoving equipment. He was a production engineer, whose job included the handling and positioning of heavy sheets of steel during manufacturing operations. On Christmas day, he was putting together a doll house his granddaughter received as a Christmas present. The cardboard walls of the doll house were held together with a “tab and slot” design along the edges of the walls. They slid into each other at approximately a 90-degree angle. Dovetailed. He used a similar tab and slot design idea with the heavy sheet metal, which previously was very difficult to align and keep steady prior to welding the sheets of steel together. Problem solved, just by improving and transferring an idea in one application to a different application.

My experience working at Aerospace Maintenance Solutions, LLC also improved my thinking about content development. I like the mission of this company, which makes me want to work harder to support it. They repair high-value military aircraft components and return them to service for the U.S. Air Force, other branches of the U.S. military, the US Department of Homeland Security, and foreign militaries friendly to the US. The company saves U.S. taxpayers and aircraft operators millions of dollars by repairing rather than replacing aircraft components. And that brings me to another important point about content development. It helps to believe deeply in the purpose of your work and the subject matter of your content about work. The belief in your editorial mission fosters motivation and fuels hard work, both of which help move content quality towards the best it can be.

There have been many great engineers and technical people who taught me things that helped me understand their technologies, believe in the value of those technologies, and then learn how to communicate things about them. You can read about some of them in the pages that follow.