The Edison In You: Simple Steps to Becoming a Great Engineer

Arvind Padmanabhan © 2013. http://theinfinitebit.wordpress.com
THE INFINITE BIT
• A book about digital technology
from the days of telegraphy to
modern Internet
• Narrated in simple language
without mathematical proofs or
equations
• Buy it on Amazon.com
Website:
http://theinfinitebit.wordpress.com
Today’s presentation is based on
research done for the book.

Have You Read Any of These?

The Edison In You
Simple
steps to
becoming
a great
engineer
Arvind
Padmanabhan
Version 1.1

What About Edison?
• Incandescent lamp, phonograph, electric
pen, carbon microphone, quadruplex
telegraph, kinetoscope, mimeograph,
fluoroscope, stock ticker, rechargeable
battery
• More than 1000 patents
• Set up a laboratory in the cellar at 7
• First business venture at 14
• Duplex telegraphy (1864-1872)
• New model of R&D: first R&D lab
• Emphasis on hard work
• Undaunted by failures
1847-1931

Some of Edison’s Inventions

Great Engineers

The Essence of an Engineer
• Solve problems
• Design systems
• Provide solutions
• Build things
• Innovate
• Improve lives

• What’s this?
– Identity, exploration, understanding
• If I do this, what will happen?
– Trigger, action, event, sequences
• What makes things happen?
– Cause-effect, dependence, relevance
• Can I control this?
– Mastery, design
An Engineer’s Questions

Understand Requirements
Understand
Requirements

Edison’s First (Useless) Patent
• Electric Vote
Recorder
– U. S. Patent 90,646
on June 1869
– “If there is any
invention on earth
that we don't want
down here, that is
it.” - Congressman
– “Anything that won’t
sell, I don’t want to
invent. Its sale is
proof of utility, and
utility is success.” -
Edison

Famous Remarks Gone Wrong
• This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously
considered as a means of communication. The device is
inherently of no value to us. – Western Union memo, 1876
• Fooling around with alternating current is just a waste of
time. Nobody will use it, ever. – Thomas Edison, 1889
• Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. - Lord
Kelvin, 1895
• The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial
value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in
particular? – David Sarnoff, 1920s
• I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. –
Thomas Watson, 1943
• 640K ought to be enough for anybody. – Bill Gates, 1981
• I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova
and in 1996 catastrophically collapse. – Robert Metcalfe,
1995

Black’s Negative Feedback Principle
Harold Black
1847-1931

The iPod Innovation (2001)
• Ultra-thin hard drive
– 1.8’’ hard drive, 0.2’’ thick
– Makes iPod fit in a pocket, 5 GB, 1000 songs
– MP3 CD: $150, holds 150 songs
• FireWire connectivity
– Copy 1,000 MP3 songs in just 10 minutes
– USB needed 5 hours
– 30 times faster than the competition
• Battery
– 10 hours of continuous playback
– Rechargeable lithium polymer
– Recharge to 80% within an hour via FireWire

The Right Perspective

Continuous Improvement
Understand
Requirements
Continuous
Improvement

Engineering is Iterative
Question
Explore
Design
Create
Assess
Improve

Paralysis by Analysis
• Too much information
• Waiting for more information via
additional research
• Distributed decision-making
process
• Considering too many
alternatives
• Too afraid to fail
• Highly analytical at the expense
of intuition
• Striving for perfection

In Pursuit of Perfection?
TIME TO
MARKET

The Morse Register
Engineering is rarely a
flash of insight. Most
often, it is a series of
improvements.

Transistor: Revolution or Evolution?
Audion 1906
Vacuum Diode
1904
Semiconductors
1870s-1950s

Improvements to GSM

Accommodate Constraints
Understand
Requirements
Continuous
Improvement
Accommodate
Constraints

The Classic Case of PCM

Tradeoff in Linear Filters

Examples of Tradeoffs

Constraints Always Exist
• Engineers don’t try to
eliminate constraints
– Work with and around
constraints
– Constraints can be
technical, economic,
social, environment,
political, ergonomic
• Engineers don’t aim
for perfection
– Attempt for precision
within known limits
– Closer to the constraint,
more challenging the
design

Creatively Different
Understand
Requirements
Continuous
Improvement
Accommodate
Constraints
Creatively
Different

Being Creative
• Think outside
the box. But
exactly how?
• Don’t look for
something.
• Habit.
Circumstance.
Peer pressure.
Comfort zone.

The Great Cipher
• xx
• Prior art
– Cipher at the level of
alphabets
– Monoalphabetic cipher
– Polyalphabetic cipher
• Enhanced Mono
– 17th century in the court
of King Louis XIV of
France
– Cracked only in the 19th
century by Etienne
Bazeries
– Cipher at the level of
syllables

Combine and Connect
Concatenated Code (1960s)
Turbo Code (1990s)
David
Forney
C. Berrou
A. Glavieux

Edison Effect (1883)
• The Inventive
Paradox
– Explore and look
beyond borders; focus,
keep things simple.
– Bad ideas are
sometimes good ideas
not pursued; where
there are many roads,
accept that some are
not worth exploring.

Serendipity
• The accident of finding something good
or useful while not specifically searching
for it
• Harold Black struggled with feedforward
amplifier for 4 years.
• Idea of negative feedback came while on
the way to office on a ferry from New
Jersey to Manhattan
• Let the subconscious do the work.
Engineer must be observant at all times.
New York Times
August 6, 1927

Cross-fertilize Ideas
The good effects of cross-fertilization are
transmitted by plants to the next generation.
Charles
Darwin
Innovation comes from people
meeting up in the hallways or
calling each other at 10:30 at
night with a new idea.
Steve Jobs
During the war, we all had to learn things we
didn’t want to learn to get the war won, so
we were all cross-fertilized. We were
impatient with conventions and had often
had responsible jobs very early.
Richard
Hamming

Fourier Inspires Ohm’s Law
Joseph Fourier
(1768-1830)
Georg Ohm
(1789-1854)
Hot Cold
Heat Flow
Thermal
Conductivity
High
Potential
Low
Potential
Charge Flow
Electrical
Conductivity

Smart Work Ethic
Understand
Requirements
Continuous
Improvement
Accommodate
Constraints
Creatively
Different
Smart
Work Ethic

Don’t Work Hard, Work Smart
• Incremental milestones
building up to specific goals
• Realistic, measurable goals
• Plan and prioritize
• Build a team
– Get wrong people off the bus
• Focus: quit what-not-to-do
– Apple's LISA ('83-'86) replaced
with Macintosh ('84)
– IBM sells PC business to
Lenovo (2004)

Spanners and Hammers
Grace Hopper
1906-1992
Engineering in many ways is first a
creation of tools before the products
themselves can be built.

Boeing 787 Dreamliner

20 Most Important Tools
Forbes, March 2006
• Abacus
– Chinese, Japanese
– At times, faster than an
electronic calculator
– Ancestor of slide rule
• Telescope
– Hans Lippershey (1608)
– Engineering aids science
– Galileo discovers Jupiter's
planets, analyzes sunspots

The Cumulative Effect
• Compound interest is the
most powerful force in the
universe. - Albert Einstein
• U235 nuclear fission
– Add one neutron, you get two
neutrons out
– Neutrons at generation n: 2n
• John Tukey (Bell Labs)
– “You would be surprised how much
you would know if you had worked as
hard as he has for as many years” -
his boss

Aim for More Than Ordinary
If you don't work on
important problems, it's
not likely that you'll do
important work.
Richard
Hamming
It is better to do the right
problem the wrong way
than the wrong problem
the right way.

Problems for the 21st Century
Source: NSF, 2008x

15 Global Challenges

Morally Responsible
Understand
Requirements
Continuous
Improvement
Accommodate
Constraints
Creatively
Different
Smart
Work Ethic
Morally
Responsible

The Manhattan Project
Otto Hahn
Lise Meitner
• Discoverers of nuclear fission
• Germany had the science but not the
technology
• The project (1942-1946)
• US, UK, Canada
• Szilárd, Wigner, Einstein, Fermi,
Frisch, Hamming, Shockley
I will have nothing to do
with a bomb!

The Bhopal Disaster
• December 1984, thousands dead, half
a million affected
• Engineering and regulatory errors
• Primary cause was water seepage
• Temperature and pressure gauges not
working
• Refrigeration shut off
• Gas scrubber shut off
• Alarm system failed
• Plant located near residential and
populated areas
Be a responsible engineer.
Avoid shortcuts. Follow the process.

Hubble's Optical Failure
Grinding of Hubble's primary mirror at Perkin-
Elmer, March 1979.
• Hubble telescope was launched
in 1990; primary mirror failure
detected on the third day.
• Cost of US$ 1.5 billion. Repaired
in 1993 at a cost of US$ 250
million
• Spherical aberration of 1/50th
of
human hair thickness
• Perkin-Elmer took 2.5 years to
polish it. Problem was known
during tests but assumed test
equipment was imprecise.
• Perkin-Elmer did not emphasize
the problem due to competition
• NASA did not manage the
delivery well

The Common Scapegoat
• Air Inter Flight 148, 1992. 87 dead.
9 survived. Crashed into a
mountain. Occurred during descent.
• Many disasters blamed on human
error were later found to be due to
poor engineering design.
• Confusion between settings by
degrees and fpm. 3300 fpm was set
instead of -3.3 degrees as desired.
• Display screen too small. Rapid
transition to new generation aircraft.
It was human error.

IEEE Code of Ethics
1. Accept responsibility for decisions
2. Avoid conflicts of interest; disclose them when they
exist
3. Be honest and realistic on claims/estimates
4. Reject bribery
5. Educate on technology and its application
6. Improve competence and disclose limitations
7. Criticize honestly to correct errors and attribute credit
8. Treat everyone fairly
9. Avoid injuring others by malicious action
10. Assist colleagues in their professional development

User Focus
Understand
Requirements
Continuous
Improvement
Accommodate
Constraints
Creatively
Different
Smart
Work Ethic
Morally
Responsible
User
Focus

Perception Gap: To Ask or Not to
Ask?
Source: Barnickel
Design, 2012
• Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants
so long as it is black. - Henry Ford
• If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get
the other person’s point of view and see things from that
person’s angle as well as from your own. - Henry Ford
• You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to
give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want
something new. - Steve Jobs
• Some people say, give the customers what they want, but
that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re
going to want before they do. - Steve Jobs
• You've got to start with the customer experience and work
back toward the technology–not the other way around. - Steve
Jobs
• New Coke 1985 formula: lasted only 3 months
• Microsoft product hiccups: Windows 3.0 (1990), Vista (2007),
8 (2012)

User-centric Design

Solutions versus Systems
• Customization
• Complex interfaces
• Incompatibility
• Performance issues

Beyond Engineering
Understand
Requirements
Continuous
Improvement
Accommodate
Constraints
Creatively
Different
Smart
Work Ethic
Morally
Responsible
User
Focus
Beyond
Engineering

Who Invented the Telephone?
• History remembers not those who just
invent in their garages and attics, but
only those who take their inventions
out into the open world.
Graham Bell
1847-1922
Antonio Meucci
1808-1889
Elisha Gray
1835-1901

The Three Wheels

The Person In You
• What do I really want?
• Am I happy at work?
• What are my core values?

The Three Circles
SKILL
NEED
INTEREST

The Eight Steps
Understand
Requirements
Continuous
Improvement
Accommodate
Constraints
Creatively
Different
Smart
Work Ethic
Morally
Responsible
User
Focus
Beyond
Engineering

E-mail: arvindpadmanabhan@yahoo.com.sg
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