Scottish inventor John Logie Baird had a lot of ingenious ideas, not all of which caught on. His phonovision was an early attempt at video recording, with the signals preserved on phonograph records. His noctovision used infrared light to see objects in the dark, which some experts claim was a precursor to radar.

But Baird earned his spot in history with the televisor. On 26 January 1926, select members of the Royal Institution gathered at Baird’s lab in London’s Soho neighborhood to witness the broadcast of a small but clearly defined image of a ventriloquist dummy’s face, sent from the televisor’s electromechanical transmitter to its receiver. He also demonstrated the televisor with a human subject, who observers could see speaking and moving on the screen. For this, Baird is often credited with the first public demonstration of television.

John Logie Baird [shown here] used the heads of ventriloquist dummies in early experiments because they didn’t mind the heat and bright lights of his televisor. Science History Images/Alamy

How the Nipkow Disk Led to Baird’s Televisor

To be clear, Baird didn’t invent television. Television is one of those inventions that benefited from many contributors, collaborators, and competitors. Baird’s starting point was an idea for an “electric telescope,” patented in 1885 by German engineer Paul Nipkow.

Nipkow’s apparatus captured a picture by dividing it into a vertical sequence of lines, using a spinning disk with perforated holes around the edge. The perforations were offset in a spiral so that each hole captured one slice of the image in turn—known today as scan lines. Each line would be encoded as an electrical signal. A receiving apparatus converted the signals into light, to reconstruct the image. Nipkow never commercialized his electric telescope, though, and after 15 years the patent expired.

The inset on the left shows how the televisor split an image (in this case, a person’s face) into vertical lines. Bettmann/Getty Images

The system that Baird demonstrated in 1926 used two Nipkow disks, one in the transmitting apparatus and the other in the receiving apparatus. Each disk had 30 holes. He fitted the disk with glass lenses that focused the reflected light onto a photoelectric cell. As the transmitting disk rotated, the photoelectric cell detected the change in brightness coming through the individual lenses and converted the light into an electrical signal.

This signal was then sent to the receiving system. (Part of the receiving apparatus, housed at the Science Museum in London, is shown at top.) There the process was reversed, with the electrical signal first being amplified and then modulating a neon gas–discharge lamp. The light passed through a rectangular slot to focus it onto the receiving Nipkow disk, which was turning at the same speed as the transmitter. The image could be seen on a ground glass plate.

Early experiments used a dummy because the many incandescent lights needed to provide sufficient illumination made it too hot and bright for a person. Each hole in the disk captured only a small bit of the overall image, but as long as the disk spun fast enough, the brain could piece together the complete image, a phenomenon known as persistence of vision. (In a 2022 Hands On column, Markus Mierse explains how to build a modern Nipkow-disk electromechanical TV using a 3D printer, an LED module, and an Arduino Mega microcontroller.)

John Logie Baird and “True Television”

Regular readers of this column know the challenge of documenting historical “firsts”—the first radio, the first telegraph, the first high-tech prosthetic arm. Baird’s claim to the first public broadcast of television is no different. To complicate matters, the actual first demonstration of his televisor wasn’t on 26 January 1926 in front of those esteemed members of the Royal Institution; rather, it occurred in March 1925 in front of curious shoppers at a Selfridges department store.

As Donald F. McLean recounts in his excellent June 2022 article “Before ‘True Television’: Investigating John Logie Baird’s 1925 Original Television Apparatus,” Baird used a similar device for the Selfridges demo, but it had only 16 holes, organized as two groups of eight, hence its nickname the Double-8. The resolution was about as far from high definition as you could get, showing shadowy silhouettes in motion. Baird didn’t consider this “true television,” as McLean notes in his Proceedings of the IEEE piece.

In 1926, Baird loaned part of the televisor he used in his Selfridges demo to the Science Museum in London.PA Images/Getty Images

Writing in December 1926 in Experimental Wireless & The Wireless Engineer, Baird defined true television as “the transmission of the image of an object with all gradations of light, shade, and detail, so that it is seen on the receiving screen as it appears to the eye of an actual observer.” Consider the Selfridges demo a beta test and the one for the Royal Institution the official unveiling. (In 2017, the IEEE chose to mark the latter and not the former with a Milestone.)

The 1926 demonstration was a turning point in Baird’s career. In 1927 he established the Baird Television Development Co., and a year later he made the first transatlantic television transmission, from London to Hartsdale, N.Y. In 1929, the BBC decided to give Baird’s system a try, performing some experimental broadcasts outside of normal hours. After that, mechanical television took off in Great Britain and a few other European countries.

The BBC used various versions of Baird’s mechanical system from 1929 to 1937, starting with the 30-line system and upgrading to a 240-line system. But eventually the BBC switched to the all-electronic system developed by Marconi-EMI. Baird then switched to working on one of the earliest electronic color television systems, called the Telechrome. (Baird had already demonstrated a successful mechanical color television system in 1928, but it never caught on.) Meanwhile, in the United States, Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) attempted to develop a mechanical color television system based on Baird’s original idea of a color wheel but finally ceded to an electronic standard in 1953.

Baird also experimented with stereoscopic or three-dimensional television and a 1,000-line display, similar to today’s high-definition television. Unfortunately, he died in 1946 before he could persuade anyone to take up that technology.

In a 1969 interview in TV Times, John’s widow, Margaret Baird, reflected on some of the developments in television that would have made her husband happy. He would enjoy the massive amounts of sports coverage available, she said. (Baird had done the first live broadcast of the Epsom Derby in 1931.) He would be thrilled with current affairs programs. And, my personal favorite, she thought he would love the annual broadcasting of the Eurovision song contest.

Other TV Inventors: Philo Farnsworth, Vladimir Zworykin

But as I said, television is an invention that’s had many contributors. Across the Atlantic, Philo Farnsworth was experimenting with an all-electrical system that he had first envisioned as a high school student in 1922. By 1926, Farnsworth had secured enough financial backing to work full time on his idea.

One of his main inventions was the image dissector, also known as a dissector tube. This video camera tube creates a temporary electron image that can be converted into an electrical signal. On 7 September 1927, Farnsworth and his team successfully transmitted a single black line, followed by other images of simple shapes. But the system could only handle silhouettes, not three-dimensional objects.

Meanwhile, Vladimir Zworykin was also experimenting with electronic television. In 1923, he applied for a patent for a video tube called the iconoscope. But it wasn’t until 1931, after he joined RCA, that his team developed a working version, which suspiciously came after Zworykin visited Farnsworth’s lab in California. The iconoscope overcame some of the dissector tube’s deficiencies, especially the storage capacity. It was also more sensitive and easier to manufacture. But one major drawback of both the image dissector and the iconoscope was that, like Baird’s original televisor, they required very bright lights.

Everyone was working to develop a better tube, but Farnsworth claimed that he’d invented both the concept of an electronic image moving through a vacuum tube as well as the idea of a storage-type camera tube. The iconoscope and any future improvements all depended on these progenitor patents. RCA knew this and offered to buy Farnsworth’s patents, but Farnsworth refused to sell. A multiyear patent-interference case ensued, finally finding for Farnsworth in 1935.

While the case was being litigated, Farnsworth made the first public demonstration of an all-electric television system on 25 August 1934 at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. And in 1939, RCA finally agreed to pay royalties to Farnsworth to use his patented technologies. But Farnsworth was never able to compete commercially with RCA and its all-electric television system, which went on to dominate the U.S. television market.

Eventually, Harold Law, Paul Weimer, and Russell Law developed a better tube at their Princeton labs, the image orthicon. Designed for TV-guided missiles for the U.S. military, it was 100 to 1,000 times as sensitive as the iconoscope. After World War II, RCA quickly adopted the tube for its TV cameras. The image orthicon became the industry standard by 1947, remaining so until 1968 and the move to color TV.

The Path to Television Was Not Obvious

My Greek teacher hated the word “television.” He considered it an abomination that combined the Greek prefix telos (far off) with a Latin base, videre (to see). But early television was a bit of an abomination—no one really knew what it was going to be. As Chris Horrocks lays out in his delightfully titled book, The Joy of Sets (2017), television was developed in relation to the media that came before—telegraph, telephone, radio, and film.

Was television going to be like a telegraph, with communication between two points and an image slowly reassembled? Was it going to be like a telephone, with direct and immediate dialog between both ends? Was it going to be like film, with prerecorded images played back to a wide audience? Or would it be more like radio, which at the time was largely live broadcasts? At the beginning, people didn’t even know they wanted a television; manufacturers had to convince them.

And technically, there were many competing visions—Baird’s, Farnsworth’s, Zworykin’s, and others. It’s no wonder that television took many years, with lots of false starts and dead ends, before it finally took hold.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the September 2024 print issue as “The Mechanical TV.”

Few devices are as crucial to people’s everyday lives as their household appliances. Electrical engineer Erika Cruz says it’s her mission to make sure they operate smoothly.

Cruz helps design washing machines and dryers for Whirlpool, the multinational appliance manufacturer.

Erika Cruz

Employer:

Whirlpool

Occupation:

Associate electrical engineer

Education:

Bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering, Industrial University of Santander, in Bucaramanga, Colombia

As a member of the electromechanical components team at Whirlpool’s research and engineering center in Benton Harbor, Mich., she oversees the development of timers, lid locks, humidity sensors, and other components.

More engineering goes into the machines than is obvious. Because the appliances are sold around the world, she says, they must comply with different technical and safety standards and environmental conditions. And reliability is key.

“If the washer’s door lock gets stuck and your clothes are inside, your whole day is going to be a mess,” she says.

While appliances can be taken for granted, Cruz loves that her work contributes in its own small way to the quality of life of so many.

“I love knowing that every time I’m working on a new design, the lives of millions of people will be improved by using it,” she says.

From Industrial Design to Electrical Engineering

Cruz grew up in Bucaramanga, Colombia, where her father worked as an electrical engineer, designing control systems for poultry processing plants. Her childhood home was full of electronics, and Cruz says her father taught her about technology. He paid her to organize his resistors, for example, and asked her to create short videos for work presentations about items he was designing. He also took Cruz and her sister along with him to the processing plants.

“We would go and see how the big machines worked,” she says. “It was very impressive because of their complexity and impact. That’s how I got interested in technology.”

In 2010, Cruz enrolled in Colombia’s Industrial University of Santander, in Bucaramanga, to study industrial design. But she quickly became disenchanted with the course’s focus on designing objects like fancy tables and ergonomic chairs.

“I wanted to design huge machines like my father did,” she says.

A teacher suggested that she study mechanical engineering instead. But her father was concerned about discrimination she might face in that career.

“He told me it would be difficult to get a job in the industry because mechanical engineers work with heavy machinery, and they saw women as being fragile,” Cruz says.

Her father thought electrical engineers would be more receptive to women, so she switched fields.

“I am very glad I ended up studying electronics because you can apply it to so many different fields,” Cruz says. She received a bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering in 2019.

The Road to America

While at university, Cruz signed up for a program that allowed Colombian students to work summer jobs in the United States. She held a variety of summer positions in Galveston, Texas, from 2017 to 2019, including cashier, housekeeper, and hostess.

She met her future husband in 2018, an American working at the same amusement park as she did. When she returned the following summer, they started dating, and that September they married. Since she had already received her degree, he was eager for her to move to the states permanently, but she made the difficult decision to return to Colombia.

“With the language barrier and my lack of engineering experience, I knew if I stayed in the United States, I would have to continue working jobs like housekeeping forever,” she says. “So I told my husband he had to wait for me because I was going back home to get some engineering experience.”

“I love knowing that every time I’m working on a new design, the lives of millions of people will be improved by using it.”

Cruz applied for engineering jobs in neighboring Brazil, which had more opportunities than Colombia did. In 2021, she joined Whirlpool as an electrical engineer at its R&D site in Joinville, Brazil. There, she introduced into mass production sensors and actuators provided by new suppliers.

Meanwhile, she applied for a U.S. Green Card, which would allow her to work and live permanently in the country. She received it six months after starting her job. Cruz asked her manager about transferring to one of Whirlpool’s U.S. facilities, not expecting to have any luck. Her manager set up a phone call with the manager of the components team at the company’s Benton Harbor site to discuss the request. Cruz didn’t realize that the call was actually a job interview. She was offered a position there as an electrical engineer and moved to Michigan later that year.

Designing Appliances Is Complex

Designing a new washing machine or dryer is a complex process, Cruz says. First, feedback from customers about desirable features is used to develop a high-level design. Then the product design work is divided among small teams of engineers, each responsible for a given subsystem, including hardware, software, materials, and components.

Part of Cruz’s job is to test components from different suppliers to make sure they meet safety, reliability, and performance requirements. She also writes the documentation that explains to other engineers about the components’ function and design.

Cruz then helps select the groups of components to be used in a particular application—combining, say, three temperature sensors with two humidity sensors in an optimized location to create a system that finds the best time to stop the dryer.

Building a Supportive Environment

Cruz loves her job, but her father’s fears about her entering a male-dominated field weren’t unfounded. Discrimination was worse in Colombia, she says, where she regularly experienced inappropriate comments and behavior from university classmates and teachers.

Even in the United States, she points out, “As a female engineer, you have to actually show you are able to do your job, because occasionally at the beginning of a project men are not convinced.”

In both Brazil and Michigan, Cruz says, she’s been fortunate to often end up on teams with a majority of women, who created a supportive environment. That support was particularly important when she had her first child and struggled to balance work and home life.

“It’s easier to talk to women about these struggles,” she says. “They know how it feels because they have been through it too.”

Update Your Knowledge

Working in the consumer electronics industry is rewarding, Cruz says. She loves going into a store or visiting someone’s home and seeing the machines that she’s helped build in action.

A degree in electronics engineering is a must for the field, Cruz says, but she’s also a big advocate of developing project management and critical thinking skills. She is a certified associate in project management, granted by the Project Management Institute, and has been trained in using tools that facilitate critical thinking. She says the project management program taught her how to solve problems in a more systematic way and helped her stand out in interviews.

It’s also important to constantly update your knowledge, Cruz says, “because electronics is a discipline that doesn’t stand still. Keep learning. Electronics is a science that is constantly growing.”

Senate hearings, a post office ban, the resignation of the director of the National Bureau of Standards, and his reinstatement after more than 400 scientists threatened to resign. Who knew a little box of salt could stir up such drama?

What was AD-X2?

It all started in 1947 when a bulldozer operator with a 6th grade education, Jess M. Ritchie, teamed up with UC Berkeley chemistry professor Merle Randall to promote AD-X2, an additive to extend the life of lead-acid batteries. The problem of these rechargeable batteries’ dwindling capacity was well known. If AD-X2 worked as advertised, millions of car owners would save money.

Jess M. Ritchie demonstrates his AD-X2 battery additive before the Senate Select Committee on Small Business.National Institute of Standards and Technology Digital Collections

A basic lead-acid battery has two electrodes, one of lead and the other of lead dioxide, immersed in dilute sulfuric acid. When power is drawn from the battery, the chemical reaction splits the acid molecules, and lead sulfate is deposited in the solution. When the battery is charged, the chemical process reverses, returning the electrodes to their original state—almost. Each time the cell is discharged, the lead sulfate “hardens” and less of it can dissolve in the sulfuric acid. Over time, it flakes off, and the battery loses capacity until it’s dead.

By the 1930s, so many companies had come up with battery additives that the U.S. National Bureau of Standards stepped in. Its lab tests revealed that most were variations of salt mixtures, such as sodium and magnesium sulfates. Although the additives might help the battery charge faster, they didn’t extend battery life. In May 1931, NBS (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST) summarized its findings in Letter Circular No. 302: “No case has been found in which this fundamental reaction is materially altered by the use of these battery compounds and solutions.”

Of course, innovation never stops. Entrepreneurs kept bringing new battery additives to market, and the NBS kept testing them and finding them ineffective.

Do battery additives work?

After World War II, the National Better Business Bureau decided to update its own publication on battery additives, “Battery Compounds and Solutions.” The publication included a March 1949 letter from NBS director Edward Condon, reiterating the NBS position on additives. Prior to heading NBS, Condon, a physicist, had been associate director of research at Westinghouse Electric in Pittsburgh and a consultant to the National Defense Research Committee. He helped set up MIT’s Radiation Laboratory, and he was also briefly part of the Manhattan Project. Needless to say, Condon was familiar with standard practices for research and testing.

Meanwhile, Ritchie claimed that AD-X2’s secret formula set it apart from the hundreds of other additives on the market. He convinced his senator, William Knowland, a Republican from Oakland, Calif., to write to NBS and request that AD-X2 be tested. NBS declined, not out of any prejudice or ill will, but because it tested products only at the request of other government agencies. The bureau also had a longstanding policy of not naming the brands it tested and not allowing its findings to be used in advertisements.

AD-X2 consisted mainly of Epsom salt and Glauber’s salt.National Institute of Standards and Technology Digital Collections

Ritchie cried foul, claiming that NBS was keeping new businesses from entering the marketplace. Merle Randall launched an aggressive correspondence with Condon and George W. Vinal, chief of NBS’s electrochemistry section, extolling AD-X2 and the testimonials of many users. In its responses, NBS patiently pointed out the difference between anecdotal evidence and rigorous lab testing.

Enter the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC had received a complaint from the National Better Business Bureau, which suspected that Pioneers, Inc.—Randall and Ritchie’s distribution company—was making false advertising claims. On 22 March 1950, the FTC formally asked NBS to test AD-X2.

By then, NBS had already extensively tested the additive. A chemical analysis revealed that it was 46.6 percent magnesium sulfate (Epsom salt) and 49.2 percent sodium sulfate (Glauber’s salt, a horse laxative) with the remainder being water of hydration (water that’s been chemically treated to form a hydrate). That is, AD-X2 was similar in composition to every other additive on the market. But, because of its policy of not disclosing which brands it tests, NBS didn’t immediately announce what it had learned.

The David and Goliath of battery additives

NBS then did something unusual: It agreed to ignore its own policy and let the National Better Business Bureau include the results of its AD-X2 tests in a public statement, which was published in August 1950. The NBBB allowed Pioneers to include a dissenting comment: “These tests were not run in accordance with our specification and therefore did not indicate the value to be derived from our product.”

Far from being cowed by the NBBB’s statement, Ritchie was energized, and his story was taken up by the mainstream media. Newsweek’s coverage pitted an up-from-your-bootstraps David against an overreaching governmental Goliath. Trade publications, such as Western Construction News and Batteryman, also published flattering stories about Pioneers. AD-X2 sales soared.

Then, in January 1951, NBS released its updated pamphlet on battery additives, Circular 504. Once again, tests by the NBS found no difference in performance between batteries treated with additives and the untreated control group. The Government Printing Office sold the circular for 15 cents, and it was one of NBS’s most popular publications. AD-X2 sales plummeted.

Ritchie needed a new arena in which to challenge NBS. He turned to politics. He called on all of his distributors to write to their senators. Between July and December 1951, 28 U.S. senators and one U.S. representative wrote to NBS on behalf of Pioneers.

Condon was losing his ability to effectively represent the Bureau. Although the Senate had confirmed Condon’s nomination as director without opposition in 1945, he was under investigation by the House Committee on Un-American Activities for several years. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover suspected Condon to be a Soviet spy. (To be fair, Hoover suspected the same of many people.) Condon was repeatedly cleared and had the public backing of many prominent scientists.

But Condon felt the investigations were becoming too much of a distraction, and so he resigned on 10 August 1951. Allen V. Astin became acting director, and then permanent director the following year. And he inherited the AD-X2 mess.

Astin had been with NBS since 1930. Originally working in the electronics division, he developed radio telemetry techniques, and he designed instruments to study dielectric materials and measurements. During World War II, he shifted to military R&D, most notably development of the proximity fuse, which detonates an explosive device as it approaches a target. I don’t think that work prepared him for the political bombs that Ritchie and his supporters kept lobbing at him.

Mr. Ritchie almost goes to Washington

On 6 September 1951, another government agency entered the fray. C.C. Garner, chief inspector of the U.S. Post Office Department, wrote to Astin requesting yet another test of AD-X2. NBS dutifully submitted a report that the additive had “no beneficial effects on the performance of lead acid batteries.” The post office then charged Pioneers with mail fraud, and Ritchie was ordered to appear at a hearing in Washington, D.C., on 6 April 1952. More tests were ordered, and the hearing was delayed for months.

Back in March 1950, Ritchie had lost his biggest champion when Merle Randall died. In preparation for the hearing, Ritchie hired another scientist: Keith J. Laidler, an assistant professor of chemistry at the Catholic University of America. Laidler wrote a critique of Circular 504, questioning NBS’s objectivity and testing protocols.

Ritchie also got Harold Weber, a professor of chemical engineering at MIT, to agree to test AD-X2 and to work as an unpaid consultant to the Senate Select Committee on Small Business.

Life was about to get more complicated for Astin and NBS.

Why did the NBS Director resign?

Trying to put an end to the Pioneers affair, Astin agreed in the spring of 1952 that NBS would conduct a public test of AD-X2 according to terms set by Ritchie. Once again, the bureau concluded that the battery additive had no beneficial effect.

However, NBS deviated slightly from the agreed-upon parameters for the test. Although the bureau had a good scientific reason for the minor change, Ritchie had a predictably overblown reaction—NBS cheated!

Then, on 18 December 1952, the Senate Select Committee on Small Business—for which Ritchie’s ally Harold Weber was consulting—issued a press release summarizing the results from the MIT tests: AD-X2 worked! The results “demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that this material is in fact valuable, and give complete support to the claims of the manufacturer.” NBS was “simply psychologically incapable of giving Battery AD-X2 a fair trial.”

The National Bureau of Standards’ regular tests of battery additives found that the products did not work as claimed.National Institute of Standards and Technology Digital Collections

But the press release distorted the MIT results.The MIT tests had focused on diluted solutions and slow charging rates, not the normal use conditions for automobiles, and even then AD-X2’s impact was marginal. Once NBS scientists got their hands on the report, they identified the flaws in the testing.

How did the AD-X2 controversy end?

The post office finally got around to holding its mail fraud hearing in the fall of 1952. Ritchie failed to attend in person and didn’t realize his reports would not be read into the record without him, which meant the hearing was decidedly one-sided in favor of NBS. On 27 February 1953, the Post Office Department issued a mail fraud alert. All of Pioneers’ mail would be stopped and returned to sender stamped “fraudulent.” If this charge stuck, Ritchie’s business would crumble.

But something else happened during the fall of 1952: Dwight D. Eisenhower, running on a pro-business platform, was elected U.S. president in a landslide.

Ritchie found a sympathetic ear in Eisenhower’s newly appointed Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks, who acted decisively. The mail fraud alert had been issued on a Friday. Over the weekend, Weeks had a letter hand-delivered to Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield, another Eisenhower appointee. By Monday, the fraud alert had been suspended.

What’s more, Weeks found that Astin was “not sufficiently objective” and lacked a “business point of view,” and so he asked for Astin’s resignation on 24 March 1953. Astin complied. Perhaps Weeks thought this would be a mundane dismissal, just one of the thousands of political appointments that change hands with every new administration. That was not the case.

More than 400 NBS scientists—over 10 percent of the bureau’s technical staff— threatened to resign in protest. The American Academy for the Advancement of Science also backed Astin and NBS. In an editorial published in Science, the AAAS called the battery additive controversy itself “minor.” “The important issue is the fact that the independence of the scientist in his findings has been challenged, that a gross injustice has been done, and that scientific work in the government has been placed in jeopardy,” the editorial stated.

National Bureau of Standards director Edward Condon [left] resigned in 1951 because investigations into his political beliefs were impeding his ability to represent the bureau. Incoming director Allen V. Astin [right] inherited the AD-X2 controversy, which eventually led to Astin’s dismissal and then his reinstatement after a large-scale protest by NBS researchers and others. National Institute of Standards and Technology Digital Collections

Clearly, AD-X2’s effectiveness was no longer the central issue. The controversy was a stand-in for a larger debate concerning the role of government in supporting small business, the use of science in making policy decisions, and the independence of researchers. Over the previous few years, highly respected scientists, including Edward Condon and J. Robert Oppenheimer, had been repeatedly investigated for their political beliefs. The request for Astin’s resignation was yet another government incursion into scientific freedom.

Weeks, realizing his mistake, temporarily reinstated Astin on 17 April 1953, the day the resignation was supposed to take effect. He also asked the National Academy of Sciences to test AD-X2 in both the lab and the field. By the time the academy’s report came out in October 1953, Weeks had permanently reinstated Astin. The report, unsurprisingly, concluded that NBS was correct: AD-X2 had no merit. Science had won.

NIST makes a movie

On 9 December 2023, NIST released the 20-minute docudrama The AD-X2 Controversy. The film won the Best True Story Narrative and Best of Festival at the 2023 NewsFest Film Festival. I recommend taking the time to watch it.

The AD-X2 Controversy www.youtube.com

Many of the actors are NIST staff and scientists, and they really get into their roles. Much of the dialogue comes verbatim from primary sources, including congressional hearings and contemporary newspaper accounts.

Despite being an in-house production, NIST’s film has a Hollywood connection. The film features brief interviews with actors John and Sean Astin (of Lord of The Rings and Stranger Things fame)—NBS director Astin’s son and grandson.

The AD-X2 controversy is just as relevant today as it was 70 years ago. Scientific research, business interests, and politics remain deeply entangled. If the public is to have faith in science, it must have faith in the integrity of scientists and the scientific method. I have no objection to science being challenged—that’s how science moves forward—but we have to make sure that neither profit nor politics is tipping the scales.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the August 2024 print issue as “The AD-X2 Affair.”

References

I first heard about AD-X2 after my IEEE Spectrum editor sent me a notice about NIST’s short docudrama The AD-X2 Controversy, which you can, and should, stream online. NIST held a colloquium on 31 July 2018 with John Astin and his brother Alexander (Sandy), where they recalled what it was like to be college students when their father’s reputation was on the line. The agency has also compiled a wonderful list of resources, including many of the primary source government documents.

The AD-X2 controversy played out in the popular media, and I read dozens of articles following the almost daily twists and turns in the case in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Science.

I found Elio Passaglia’s A Unique Institution: The National Bureau of Standards 1950-1969 to be particularly helpful. The AD-X2 controversy is covered in detail in Chapter 2: Testing Can Be Troublesome.

A number of graduate theses have been written about AD-X2. One I consulted was Samuel Lawrence’s 1958 thesis “The Battery AD-X2 Controversy: A Study of Federal Regulation of Deceptive Business Practices.” Lawrence also published the 1962 book The Battery Additive Controversy.

You have a closed box. There may be a live cat inside, but you won’t know until you open the box. For most people, this situation is a theoretical conundrum that probes the foundations of quantum mechanics. For me, however, it’s a pressing practical problem, not least because physics completely skates over the vital issue of how annoyed the cat will be when the box is opened. But fortunately, engineering comes to the rescue, in the form of a new US $50 maker-friendly pulsed coherent radar sensor from SparkFun.

Perhaps I should back up a little bit. Working from home during the pandemic, my wife and I discovered a colony of feral cats living in the backyards of our block in New York City. We reversed the colony’s growth by doing trap-neuter-return (TNR) on as many of its members as we could, and we purchased three Feralvilla outdoor shelters to see our furry neighbors through the harsh New York winters. These roughly cube-shaped insulated shelters allow the cats to enter via an opening in a raised floor. A removable lid on top allows us to replace straw bedding every few months. It’s impossible to see inside the shelter without removing the lid, meaning you run the risk of surprising a clawed predator that, just moments before, had been enjoying a quiet snooze.

The enclosure for the radar [left column] is made of basswood (adding cat ears on top is optional). A microcontroller [top row, middle column] processes the results from the radar module [top row, right column] and illuminates the LEDs [right column, second from top] accordingly. A battery and on/off switch [bottom row, left to right] make up the power supply.James Provost

Feral cats respond to humans differently than socialized pet cats do. They see us as threats rather than bumbling servants. Even after years of daily feeding, most of the cats in our block’s colony will not let us approach closer than a meter or two, let alone suffer being touched. They have claws that have never seen a clipper. And they don’t like being surprised or feeling hemmed in. So I wanted a way to find out if a shelter was occupied before I popped open its lid for maintenance. And that’s where radar comes in.

SparkFun’s pulsed coherent radar module is based on Acconeer’s low-cost A121 sensor. Smaller than a fingernail, the sensor operates at 60 gigahertz, which means its signal can penetrate many common materials. As the signal passes through a material, some of it is reflected back to the sensor, allowing you to determine distances to multiple surfaces with millimeter-level precision. The radar can be put into a “presence detector” mode—intended to flag whether or not a human is present—in which it looks for changes in the distance of reflections to identify motion.

As soon as I saw the announcement for SparkFun’s module, the wheels began turning. If the radar could detect a human, why not a feline? Sure, I could have solved my is-there-a-cat-in-the-box problem with less sophisticated technology, by, say, putting a pressure sensor inside the shelter. But that would have required a permanent setup complete with weatherproofing, power, and some way of getting data out. Plus I’d have to perform three installations, one for each shelter. For information I needed only once every few months, that seemed a bit much. So I ordered the radar module, along with a $30 IoT RedBoard microcontroller. The RedBoard operates at the same 3.3 volts as the radar and can configure the module and parse its output.

If the radar could detect a human, why not a feline?

Connecting the radar to the RedBoard was a breeze, as they both have Qwiic 4-wire interfaces, which provides power along with an I2C serial connection to peripherals. SparkFun’s Arduino libraries and example code let me quickly test the idea’s feasibility by connecting the microcontroller to a host computer via USB, and I could view the results from the radar via a serial monitor. Experiments with our indoor cats (two defections from the colony) showed that the motion of their breathing was enough to trigger the presence detector, even when they were sound asleep. Further testing showed the radar could penetrate the wooden walls of the shelters and the insulated lining.

The next step was to make the thing portable. I added a small $11 lithium battery and spliced an on/off switch into its power lead. I hooked up two gumdrop LEDs to the RedBoard’s input/output pins and modified SparkFun’s sample scripts to illuminate the LEDs based on the output of the presence detector: a green LED for “no cat” and red for “cat.” I built an enclosure out of basswood, mounted the circuit boards and battery, and cut a hole in the back as a window for the radar module. (Side note: Along with tending feral cats, another thing I tried during the pandemic was 3D-printing plastic enclosures for projects. But I discovered that cutting, drilling, and gluing wood was faster, sturdier, and much more forgiving when making one-offs or prototypes.)

The radar sensor sends out 60-gigahertz pulses through the walls and lining of the shelter. As the radar penetrates the layers, some radiation is reflected back to the sensor, which it detects to determine distances. Some materials will reflect the pulse more strongly than others, depending on their electrical permittivity. James Provost

I also modified the scripts to adjust the range over which the presence detector scans. When I hold the detector against the wall of a shelter, it looks only at reflections coming from the space inside that wall and the opposite side, a distance of about 50 centimeters. As all the cats in the colony are adults, they take up enough of a shelter’s volume to intersect any such radar beam, as long as I don’t place the detector near a corner.

I performed in-shelter tests of the portable detector with one of our indoor cats, bribed with treats to sit in the open box for several seconds at a time. The detector did successfully spot him whenever he was inside, although it is prone to false positives. I will be trying to reduce these errors by adjusting the plethora of available configuration settings for the radar. But in the meantime, false positives are much more desirable than false negatives: A “no cat” light means it’s definitely safe to open the shelter lid, and my nerves (and the cats’) are the better for it.

The Large Hadron Collider has transformed our understanding of physics since it began operating in 2008, enabling researchers to investigate the fundamental building blocks of the universe. Some 100 meters below the border between France and Switzerland, particles accelerate along the LHC’s 27-kilometer circumference, nearly reaching the speed of light before smashing together.

The LHC is often described as the biggest machine ever built. And while the physicists who carry out experiments at the facility tend to garner most of the attention, it takes hundreds of engineers and technicians to keep the LHC running. One such engineer is Irene Degl’Innocenti, who works in digital electronics at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which operates the LHC. As a member of CERN’s beam instrumentation group, Degl’Innocenti creates custom electronics that measure the position of the particle beams as they travel.

Irene Degl’Innocenti

Employer:

CERN

Occupation:

Digital electronics engineer

Education:

Bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering; Ph.D. in electrical, electronics, and communications engineering, University of Pisa, in Italy

“It’s a huge machine that does very challenging things, so the amount of expertise needed is vast,” Degl’Innocenti says.

The electronics she works on make up only a tiny part of the overall operation, something Degl’Innocenti is keenly aware of when she descends into the LHC’s cavernous tunnels to install or test her equipment. But she gets great satisfaction from working on such an important endeavor.

“You’re part of something that is very huge,” she says. “You feel part of this big community trying to understand what is actually going on in the universe, and that is very fascinating.”

Opportunities to Work in High-energy Physics

Growing up in Italy, Degl’Innocenti wanted to be a novelist. Throughout high school she leaned toward the humanities, but she had a natural affinity for math, thanks in part to her mother, who is a science teacher.

“I’m a very analytical person, and that has always been part of my mind-set, but I just didn’t find math charming when I was little,” Degl’Innocenti says. “It took a while to realize the opportunities it could open up.”

She started exploring electronics around age 17 because it seemed like the most direct way to translate her logical, mathematical way of thinking into a career. In 2011, she enrolled in the University of Pisa, in Italy, earning a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 2014 and staying on to earn a master’s degree in the same subject.

At the time, Degl’Innocenti had no idea there were opportunities for engineers to work in high-energy physics. But she learned that a fellow student had attended a summer internship at Fermilab, the participle physics and accelerator laboratory in Batavia, Ill. So she applied for and won an internship there in 2015. Since Fermilab and CERN closely collaborate, she was able to help design a data-processing board for LHC’s Compact Muon Solenoid experiment.

Next she looked for an internship closer to home and discovered CERN’s technical student program, which allows students to work on a project over the course of a year. Working in the beam-instrumentation group, Degl’Innocenti designed a digital-acquisition system that became the basis for her master’s thesis.

Measuring the Position of Particle Beams

After receiving her master’s in 2017, Degl’Innocenti went on to pursue a Ph.D., also at the University of Pisa. She conducted her research at CERN’s beam-position section, which builds equipment to measure the position of particle beams within CERN’s accelerator complex. The LHC has roughly 1,000 monitors spaced around the accelerator ring. Each monitor typically consists of two pairs of sensors positioned on opposite sides of the accelerator pipe, and it is possible to measure the beam’s horizontal and vertical positions by comparing the strength of the signal at each sensor.

The underlying concept is simple, Degl’Innocenti says, but these measurements must be precise. Bunches of particles pass through the monitors every 25 nanoseconds, and their position must be tracked to within 50 micrometers.

“We start developing a system years in advance, and then it has to work for a couple of decades.”

Most of the signal processing is normally done in analog, but during her Ph.D., she focused on shifting as much of this work as possible to the digital domain because analog circuits are finicky, she says. They need to be precisely calibrated, and their accuracy tends to drift over time or when temperatures fluctuate.

“It’s complex to maintain,” she says. “It becomes particularly tricky when you have 1,000 monitors, and they are located in an accelerator 100 meters underground.”

Information is lost when analog is converted to digital, however, so Degl’Innocenti analyzed the performance of the latest analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and investigated their effect on position measurements.

Designing Beam-Monitor Electronics

After completing her Ph.D. in electrical, electronics, and communications engineering in 2021, Degl’Innocenti joined CERN as a senior postdoctoral fellow. Two years later, she became a full-time employee there, applying the results of her research to developing new hardware. She’s currently designing a new beam-position monitor for the High-Luminosity upgrade to the LHC, expected to be completed in 2028. This new system will likely use a system-on-chip to house most of the electronics, including several ADCs and a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) that Degl’Innocenti will program to run a new digital signal-processing algorithm.

She’s part of a team of just 15 who handle design, implementation, and ongoing maintenance of CERN’s beam-position monitors. So she works closely with the engineers who design sensors and software for those instruments and the physicists who operate the accelerator and set the instruments’ requirements.

“We start developing a system years in advance, and then it has to work for a couple of decades,” Degl’Innocenti says.

Opportunities in High-Energy Physics

High-energy physics has a variety of interesting opportunities for engineers, Degl’Innocenti says, including high-precision electronics, vacuum systems, and cryogenics.

“The machines are very large and very complex, but we are looking at very small things,” she says. “There are a lot of big numbers involved both at the large scale and also when it comes to precision on the small scale.”

FPGA design skills are in high demand at all kinds of research facilities, and embedded systems are also becoming more important, Degl’Innocenti says. The key is keeping an open mind about where to apply your engineering knowledge, she says. She never thought there would be opportunities for people with her skill set at CERN.

“Always check what technologies are being used,” she advises. “Don’t limit yourself by assuming that working somewhere would not be possible.”

This article appears in the August 2024 print issue as “Irene Degl’Innocenti.”

In 1993, well before Google Glass debuted, the artist Lisa Krohn designed a prototype wearable computer that looked like no other. The Cyberdesk was an experiment in augmented reality. At a time when computers were mostly beige and boxy, Krohn envisioned a pliable, high-tech garment that fused fashion with function.

Krohn studied art and architectural history at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) before completing an MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., in 1988. With the Cyberdesk, she tapped into a cultural moment in which artists, techies, writers, and others were celebrating the convergence of humans and machines and eagerly anticipating our cyborg future.

What is Lisa Krohn’s Cyberdesk?

Although a working prototype of the Cyberdesk was never built, the yellow eyepiece suggested a retinal display.Lisa Krohn and Christopher Myers

The Cyberdesk, made of resin, plastic, metal, and glass, was meant to be worn like a necklace. The four circles along the breastbone are a four-key keyboard with a large trackball at the top center; the user would use the keyboard and trackball to make selections from menus of options. A small microphone lies against the throat, and an earpiece hooks into the left ear. Krohn imagined the yellow tube in front of the right eye as a retinal scan display that would project a laser beam directly onto the back of the eye, creating a screen centered in the user’s field of vision. In the back, there is a port suggestive of some type of neural link. The Cyberdesk was intended to run on energy harvested from the body’s movement and the sun.

A port on the back of the Cyberdesk was intended as a neural link.Lisa Krohn and Christopher Myers

Krohn, along with Chris Myers, a student at the Art Center School of Design, made two models of the Cyberdesk, but it was never turned into a working prototype. The underlying technology wasn’t there yet, although there were engineers who were experimenting with similar ideas. For example, Krohn knew about work on virtual retinal displays at the University of Washington’s Human Interface Technology Laboratory, but she didn’t pursue a collaboration.

And so Krohn’s design existed as “strategic foresight, speculative technology, predictive design, or design fiction,” she told me in a recent email. Krohn imagined a possible future, one in which, as she notes on her company’s website, “person and machine merge into one seamless collaborative super-being!” In other words, a cyborg.

The Cyberdesk wasn’t the only piece of cyborg gear that Krohn designed. In 1988, before the age of smartphones and Web searches, she imagined a wrist computer that combined satellite navigation, a phone, a wristwatch, and a regional information guide. Made of a flexible plastic, it could be folded up and worn as a decorative cuff when not being used as a computer.

Lisa Krohn also designed a flexible wrist computer that could be folded up when not in use. Lisa Krohn

Krohn designed the wrist computer prototype before “wearable” became a common way to refer to a portable device that incorporates computer technology. Futurist Paul Saffo is credited with first using the term “wearable computer” in an article in InfoWorld in 1991. Saffo predicted the first wearables would be worn on the belts of maintenance workers and then be extended to deskless, information-intensive tasks, such as conducting store inventories. He also suggested a game console consisting of a tiny display integrated into sunglasses and paired with a power glove. Nowhere did he consider technology as a fashion accessory, and I suspect he wasn’t even considering women when he made his predictions.

Meanwhile, Steve Mann was working on ideas for mediated vision as a graduate student at MIT. Mann was first inspired to build a better welding mask that would protect the welder’s eyes from the bright electric arc while still allowing a clear view. This led him to think about how to use video cameras, displays, and computers to modify vision in real time. Both Krohn and Mann ran into similar real-world challenges: cellphones, the Internet, civilian GPS, and online databases were still in their infancy, and the hardware was heavy and clunky. While Mann built boxy functional prototypes that he demoed on himself, Krohn imagined more speculative technology.

Each “page” of the Krohn’s phonebook represents a separate function—dial phone, answering machine, and printer. Lisa Krohn, Sigmar Willnauer, and Tony Guido

Krohn also worked on utilitarian business technologies. In 1987, she designed a prototype for the phonebook, an integrated phone with answering machine and printer. Each “page” of the phonebook had its own function, and an electric switch automatically changed to that function as the page was flipped, with instructions printed on the page. That intuitive design was in sharp contrast to most answering machines of the time, which were clunky and not particularly easy to use.

The phonebook was an example of “product semantics,” which holds that a product’s design should help the user understand the product’s function and meaning. At Cranbrook, Krohn studied under Michael and Katherine McCoy, who embraced that theory of design. Krohn and Michael McCoy wrote about that aspect of the phonebook in their 1989 essay “Beyond Beige: Interpretive Design for the Post-Industrial Age”: “The casting of [a] personal electronic device into the mold of [a] personal agenda is an attempt to make a product reach out to its users by informing them about how it operates, where it resides, and how it fits into their lives.”

Lisa Krohn championed cyberfeminism and cyborgs

Lisa Krohn designed the Cyberdesk in 1993, at a time when wearable computers existed mainly in science fiction. Dietmar Quistorf

The Cyberdesk as well as the wrist computer were early examples of designs influenced by cyberfeminism. This feminist movement emerged in the early 1990s as a counter to the dominance of men in computing, gaming, and various Internet spaces. It built on feminist science fiction, such as the writings of Octavia Butler, Vonda McIntyre, and Joanna Russ, as well as the work of hackers, coders, and media artists. Different threads of cyberfeminism developed around the world, especially in Australia, Germany, and the United States. While mainstream depictions of cyborgs continued to tilt masculine, cyberfeminists challenged the patriarchy by experimenting with genderless ideas of cyborgs and recombinants that melded machines, plants, humans, and animals.

The feminist theorist and historian of technology Donna Haraway kindled this cyborgian drift through her 1985 essay, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” published in the Socialist Review. She argued that as the end of the 20th century approached, we were all becoming cyborgs due to the breakdown of lines dividing humans and machines. Her cyborg theory hinged on communication, and she saw cyborgs as a potential solution that allowed for a fluidity of both language and identity. The essay is considered one of the foundational texts in cyberfeminism, and it was republished in Haraway’s 1990 book, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.

Krohn imagined a possible future, one in which “person and machine merge into one seamless collaborative super-being!” In other words, a cyborg.

Krohn and McCoy’s 1989 essay also highlighted communication as a central problem in modern design. Mainstream consumer electronics, they argued, had reached a monotonous uniformity of design that favored manufacturing efficiency over conveying the product’s intended function.

Both Haraway and Krohn saw opportunities for technology, especially microelectronics, to challenge the restrictions of the past. By embracing the cyborg, both women found new ways to overcome the limits of language and communication and to forge new directions in feminism.

Cyberdesk 2.0

I had the privilege of meeting Lisa Krohn when she participated in a roundtable on the Cyberdesk at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology. The assembled group, which included curators and conservators from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (each of which has a Cyberdesk prototype in its collection), considered a possible Cyberdesk version 2.0. What would be different if Krohn were designing it today?

In 2023, Krohn reimagined the Cyberdesk. It now incorporates technology that hadn’t been available 30 years earlier, such as sensors to monitor brainwaves, hydration, and stress levels.Duvit Mark Kakunegoda

The group focused their discussion around the idea of “design futuring,” a concept promoted by Tony Fry in his 2009 book of the same name. Design futuring is a way to actively shape the future, rather than passively trying to predict it and then reacting after the fact. Fry describes how design futuring could be used to promote sustainability.

In the case of the Cyberdesk 2.0, a focus on sustainability might lead to a different choice of materials. The original resin provided a malleable material that could mold to the contours of the body. But its long-term stability is terrible. Despite best practices in conservation, the Cyberdesk will likely turn into a goopy mess in the not-too-distant future. (In a previous column, I wrote about a transistorized music box owned by John Bardeen that suffers from the same basic problem of decaying materials, which in curatorial circles is known as “inherent vice.”)

The panelists considered alternatives like biomaterials, and they discussed the entire product life cycle, the challenges of electronic waste, and the mining of rare earth elements. They wondered how the design process and the global supply chain might change if such factors were considered from the start, rather than as problems to be solved later.

These are just a few of the ideas that percolated while historians, artists, curators, and conservators considered the Cyberdesk. Now imagine if a few engineers were also present. To me, that would have been a really worthwhile discussion. Not only can art unlock creative design and push innovations in new directions, it also allows us to reflect on technology in daily life. And artists can learn from engineers about new materials, technologies, and possibilities. Working together, technology and design no longer need the modifiers speculative and predictive. Engineers and artists can create the future reality.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the July 2024 print issue as “The Wearable Computer as Bling.”

References​

I first learned about Lisa Krohn’s Cyberdesk and design theory at the Society for the History of Technology’s conference in Los Angeles in 2023, during the session “Revisiting Lisa Krohn’s Cyberdesk (1993), a cyberfeminist concept model.”

Both the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art have featured their respective Cyberdesks in exhibits and online articles. Note that the difference in the colors—SFMOMA’s is white, while Cooper Hewitt’s is brown—is due to the instability of the plastics and resin, as well as variations in the materials.

As I considered Krohn’s cyborg designs, I couldn’t help but recall Donna Haraway’s classic essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” a foundational text in cyberfeminism. Forty years on, we are more cyborgian than Haraway originally posited. Her challenges to traditional notions of identity still resonate with today’s nuanced discussions of gender. Addressing algorithmic bias and generative AI training may be a new frontier for cyberfeminism.

When it comes to motorsports, the need for speed isn’t only on the racetrack. Engineers who support race teams also need to work at a breakneck pace to fix problems, and that’s something Aakhilesh Singhania relishes.

Singhania is a senior applications engineer at Bosch Engineering, in Novi, Mich. He develops and supports electronic control systems for hybrid race cars, which feature combustion engines and battery-powered electric motors.

Aakhilesh Singhania

Employer:

Bosch Engineering

Occupation:

Senior applications engineer

Education:

Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, Manipal Institute of Technology, India; master’s degree in automotive engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

His vehicles compete in two iconic endurance races: the Rolex 24 at Daytona in Daytona Beach, Fla., and the 24 Hours of Le Mans in France. He splits his time between refining the underlying technology and providing trackside support on competition day. Given the relentless pace of the racing calendar and the intense time pressure when cars are on the track, the job is high octane. But Singhania says he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I’ve done jobs where the work gets repetitive and mundane,” he says. “Here, I’m constantly challenged. Every second counts, and you have to be very quick at making decisions.”

An Early Interest in Motorsports

Growing up in Kolkata, India, Singhania picked up a fascination with automobiles from his father, a car enthusiast.

In 2010, when Singhania began his mechanical engineering studies at India’s Manipal Institute of Technology, he got involved in the Formula Student program, an international engineering competition that challenges teams of university students to design, build, and drive a small race car. The cars typically weigh less than 250 kilograms and can have an engine no larger than 710 cubic centimeters.

“It really hooked me,” he says. “I devoted a lot of my spare time to the program, and the experience really motivated me to dive further into motorsports.”

One incident in particular shaped Singhania’s career trajectory. In 2013, he was leading Manipal’s Formula Student team and was one of the drivers for a competition in Germany. When he tried to start the vehicle, smoke poured out of the battery, and the team had to pull out of the race.

“I asked myself what I could have done differently,” he says. “It was my lack of knowledge of the electrical system of the car that was the problem.” So, he decided to get more experience and education.

Learning About Automotive Electronics

After graduating in 2014, Singhania began working on engine development for Indian car manufacturer Tata Motors in Pune. In 2016, determined to fill the gaps in his knowledge about automotive electronics, he left India to begin a master’s degree program in automotive engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

He took courses in battery management, hybrid controls, and control-system theory, parlaying this background into an internship with Bosch in 2017. After graduation in 2018, he joined Bosch full-time as a calibration engineer, developing technology for hybrid and electric vehicles.

Transitioning into motorsports required perseverance, Singhania says. He became friendly with the Bosch team that worked on electronics for race cars. Then in 2020 he got his big break.

That year, the U.S.-based International Motor Sports Association and the France-based Automobile Club de l’Ouest created standardized rules to allow the same hybrid race cars to compete in both the Sportscar Championship in North America, host of the famous Daytona race, and the global World Endurance Championship, host of Le Mans.

The Bosch motorsports team began preparing a proposal to provide the standardized hybrid system. Singhania, whose job already included creating simulations of how vehicles could be electrified, volunteered to help.

“I’m constantly challenged. Every second counts, and you have to be very quick at making decisions.”

The competition organizers selected Bosch as lead developer of the hybrid system that would be provided to all teams. Bosch engineers would also be required to test the hardware they supplied to each team to ensure none had an advantage.

“The performance of all our parts in all the cars has to fall within 1 percent of each other,” Singhania says.

After Bosch won the contract, Singhania officially became a motorsports calibration engineer, responsible for tweaking the software to fit the idiosyncrasies of each vehicle.

In 2022 he stepped up to his current role: developing software for the hybrid control unit (HCU), which is essentially the brains of the vehicle. The HCU helps coordinate all of the different subsystems such as the engine, battery, and electric motor and is responsible for balancing power requirements among these different components to maximize performance and lifetime.

Bosch’s engineers also designed software known as an equity model, which runs on the HCU. It is based on historical data collected from the operation of the hybrid systems’ various components, and controls their performance in real time to ensure all the teams’ hardware operates at the same level.

In addition, Singhania creates simulations of the race cars, which are used to better understand how the different components interact and how altering their configuration would affect performance.

Troubleshooting Problems on Race Day

Technology development is only part of Singhania’s job. On race days, he works as a support engineer, helping troubleshoot problems with the hybrid system as they crop up. Singhania and his colleagues monitor each team’s hardware using computers on Bosch’s race-day trailer, a mobile nerve center hardwired to the organizers’ control center on the race track.

“We are continuously looking at all the telemetry data coming from the hybrid system and analyzing [the system’s] health and performance,” he says.

If the Bosch engineers spot an issue or a team notifies them of a problem, they rush to the pit stall to retrieve a USB stick from the vehicle, which contains detailed data to help them diagnose and fix the issue.

After the race, the Bosch engineers analyze the telemetry data to identify ways to boost the standardized hybrid system’s performance for all the teams. In motorsports, where the difference between winning and losing can come down to fractions of a second, that kind of continual improvement is crucial.

Customers “put lots of money into this program, and they are there to win,” Singhania says.

Breaking Into Motorsports Engineering

Many engineers dream about working in the fast-paced and exciting world of motorsports, but it’s not easy breaking in. The biggest lesson Singhania learned is that if you don’t ask, you don’t get invited.

“Keep pursuing them because nobody’s going to come to you with an offer,” he says. “You have to keep talking to people and be ready when the opportunity presents itself.”

Demonstrating that you have experience contributing to challenging projects is a big help. Many of the engineers Bosch hires have been involved in Formula Student or similar automotive-engineering programs, such as the EcoCAR EV Challenge, says Singhania.

The job isn’t for everyone, though, he says. It’s demanding and requires a lot of travel and working on weekends during race season. But if you thrive under pressure and have a knack for problem solving, there are few more exciting careers.

This article appears in the July 2024 print issue as “Aakhilesh Singhania.”

In 1870, William Thomson, mourning the death of his wife and flush with cash from various patents related to the laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable, decided to buy a yacht. His schooner, the Lalla Rookh, became Thomson’s summer home and his base for hosting scientific parties. It also gave him firsthand experience with the challenge of accurately predicting tides.

Mariners have always been mindful of the tides lest they find themselves beached on low-lying shoals. Naval admirals guarded tide charts as top-secret information. Civilizations recognized a relationship between the tides and the moon early on, but it wasn’t until 1687 that Isaac Newton explained how the gravitational forces of the sun and the moon caused them. Nine decades later, the French astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace suggested that the tides could be represented as harmonic oscillations. And a century after that, Thomson used that concept to design the first machine for predicting them.

Lord Kelvin’s Rising Tide

William Thomson was born on 26 June 1824, which means this month marks his 200th birthday and a perfect time to reflect on his all-around genius. Thomson was a mathematician, physicist, engineer, and professor of natural philosophy. Queen Victoria knighted him in 1866 for his work on the transatlantic cable, then elevated him to the rank of baron in 1892 for his contributions to thermodynamics, and so he is often remembered as Lord Kelvin. He determined the correct value of absolute zero, for which he is honored by the SI unit of temperature—the kelvin. He dabbled in atmospheric electricity, was a proponent of the vortex theory of the atom, and in the absence of any knowledge of radioactivity made a rather poor estimation of the age of the Earth, which he gave as somewhere between 24 million and 400 million years.

William Thomson, also known as Lord Kelvin, is best known for establishing the value of absolute zero. He believed in the practical application of scientific knowledge and invented a wide array of useful, and beautiful, devices. Pictorial Press/Alamy

Thomson’s tide-predicting machine calculated the tide pattern for a given location based on 10 cyclic constituents associated with the periodic motions of the Earth, sun, and moon. (There are actually hundreds of periodic motions associated with these objects, but modern tidal analysis uses only the 37 of them that have the most significant effects.) The most notable one is the lunar semidiurnal, observable in areas that have two high tides and two low tides each day, due to the effects of the moon. The period of a lunar semidiurnal is 12 hours and 25 minutes—half of a lunar day, which lasts 24 hours and 50 minutes.

As Laplace had suggested in 1775, each tidal constituent can be represented as a repeating cosine curve, but those curves are specific to a location and can be calculated only through the collection of tidal data. Luckily for Thomson, many ports had been logging tides for decades. For places that did not have complete logs, Thomson designed both an improved tide gauge and a tidal harmonic analyzer.

On Thomson’s tide-predicting machine, each of 10 components was associated with a specific tidal constituent and had its own gearing to set the amplitude. The components were geared together so that their periods were proportional to the periods of the tidal constituents. A single crank turned all of the gears simultaneously, having the effect of summing each of the cosine curves. As the user turned the crank, an ink pen traced the resulting complex curve on a moving roll of paper. The device marked each hour with a small horizontal mark, making a deeper notch each day at noon. Turning the wheel rapidly allowed the user to run a year’s worth of tide readings in about 4 hours.

Although Thomson is credited with designing the machine, in his paper “The Tide Gauge, Tidal Harmonic Analyser, and Tide Predicter” (published in Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers), he acknowledges a number of people who helped him solve specific problems. Craftsman Alexander Légé drew up the plan for the screw gearing for the motions of the shafts and constructed the initial prototype machine and subsequent models. Edward Roberts of the Nautical Almanac Office completed the arithmetic to express the ratio of shaft speeds. Thomson’s older brother, James, a professor of civil engineering at Queen’s College Belfast, designed the disk-globe-and-cylinder integrator that was used for the tidal harmonic analyzer. Thomson’s generous acknowledgments are a reminder that the work of engineers is almost always a team effort.

Like Thomson’s tide-prediction machine, these two devices, developed at the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, also looked at tidal harmonic oscillations. William Ferrel’s machine [left] used 19 tidal constituents, while the later machine by Rollin A. Harris and E.G. Fischer [right], relied on 37 constituents. U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey/NOAA

As with many inventions, the tide predictor was simultaneously and independently developed elsewhere and continued to be improved by others, as did the science of tide prediction. In 1874 in the United States, William Ferrel, a mathematician with the Coast and Geodetic Survey, developed a similar harmonic analysis and prediction device that used 19 harmonic constituents. George Darwin, second son of the famous naturalist, modified and improved the harmonic analysis and published several articles on tides throughout the 1880s. Oceanographer Rollin A. Harris wrote several editions of the Manual of Tides for the Coast and Geodetic Survey from 1897 to 1907, and in 1910 he developed, with E.G. Fischer, a tide-predicting machine that used 37 constituents. In the 1920s, Arthur Doodson of the Tidal Institute of the University of Liverpool, in England, and Paul Schureman of the Coast and Geodetic Survey further refined techniques for harmonic analysis and prediction that served for decades. Because of the complexity of the math involved, many of these old brass machines remained in use into the 1950s, when electronic computers finally took over the work of predicting tides.

What Else Did Lord Kelvin Invent?

As regular readers of this column know, I always feature a museum object from the history of computer or electrical engineering and then spin out a story. When I started scouring museum collections for a suitable artifact for Thomson, I was almost paralyzed by the plethora of choices.

I considered Thomson’s double-curb transmitter, which was designed for use with the 1858 transatlantic cable to speed up telegraph signals. Thomson had sailed on the HMS Agamemnon in 1857 on its failed mission to lay a transatlantic cable and was instrumental to the team that finally succeeded.

Thomson invented the double-curb transmitter to speed up signals in transatlantic cables.Science Museum Group

I also thought about featuring one of his quadrant electrometers, which measured electrical charge. Indeed, Thomson introduced a number of instruments for measuring electricity, and a good part of his legacy is his work on the precise specifications of electrical units.

But I chose to highlight Thomson’s tide-predicting machine for a number of reasons: Thomson had a lifelong love of seafaring and made many contributions to marine technology that are sometimes overshadowed by his other work. And the tide-predicting machine is an example of an early analog computer that was much more useful than Babbage’s difference engine but not nearly as well known. Also, it is simply a beautiful machine. In fact, Thomson seems to have had a knack for designing stunningly gorgeous devices. (The tide-predicting machine at top and many other Kelvin inventions are in the collection of the Science Museum, in London.)

Thomson devised the quadrant electrometer to measure electric charge. Science Museum Group

The tide-predicting machine was not Thomson’s only contribution to maritime technology. He also patented a compass, an astronomical clock, a sounding machine, and a binnacle (a pedestal that houses nautical instruments). With respect to maritime science, Thomson thought and wrote much about the nature of waves. He mathematically explained the v-shaped wake patterns that ships and waterfowl make as they move across a body of water, which is aptly named the Kelvin wake pattern. He also described what is now known as a Kelvin wave, a type of wave that retains its shape as it moves along the shore due to the balancing of the Earth’s spin against a topographic boundary, such as a coastline.

Considering how much Thomson contributed to all things seafaring, it is amazing that these are some of his lesser known achievements. I guess if you have an insatiable curiosity, a robust grasp of mathematics and physics, and a strong desire to tinker with machinery and apply your scientific knowledge to solving practical problems that benefit humankind, you too have the means to come to great conclusions about the natural world. It can’t hurt to have a nice yacht to spend your summers on.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the June 2024 print issue as “Brass for Brains.”

References

Before the days of online databases for their collections, museums would periodically publish catalogs of their collections. In 1877, the South Kensington Museum (originator of the collections of the Science Museum, in London, and now known as the Victoria & Albert Museum) published the third edition of its Catalogue of the Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus, which lists a description of Lord Kelvin’s tide-predicting machine on page 11. That description is much more detailed, albeit more confusing, than its current online one.

In 1881, William Thomson published “The Tide Gauge, Tidal Harmonic Analyser, and Tide Predicter” in the Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institute of Civil Engineers, where he gave detailed information on each of those three devices.

I also relied on a number of publications from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to help me understand tidal analysis and prediction.

Oh me, oh mesh! Many journalists in this business have at least one pet technology that’s never taken off in the way they think it should. Hypersonic passenger planes, deep-sea thermal-energy power plants, chording keyboards—all have their adherents, eager to jump at the chance of covering their infatuation. For me, it’s mesh radio systems, which first captivated me while I was zipping around downtown Las Vegas back in 2004. In that pre-smartphone, practically pre-3G era, I was testing a mesh network deployed by a local startup, downloading files at what was then a mind-boggling rate of 1.5 megabits per second in a moving car. Clearly, mesh and its ad hoc decentralized digital architecture were the future of wireless comms!

Alas, in the two decades since, mesh networking has been slow to displace conventional radio systems. It’s popped up on a small scale in things like the Zigbee wireless protocol for the Internet of Things, and in recent years it’s become common to see Wi-Fi networks extended using mesh-based products such as the Eero. But it’s still a technology that I think has yet to fulfill its potential. So I’ve been excited to see the emergence of the open-source Meshtastic protocol, and the proliferation of maker-friendly hardware around it. I had to try it out myself.

Meshtastic is built on top of the increasingly popular LoRa (long-range) technology, which relies on spread-spectrum methods to send low-power, low-bandwidth signals over distances up to about 16 kilometers (in perfect conditions) using unlicensed radio bands. Precise frequencies vary by region, but they’re in the 863- to 928-megahertz range. You’re not going to use a Meshtastic network for 1.5-Mb/s downloads, or even voice communications. But you can use it to exchange text messages, location data, and the like in the absence of any other communications infrastructure.

The stand-alone communicator [bottom of illustration] can be ordered assembled, or you can build your own from open-source design files. The RAKwireless Meshtastic development board is based around plug-in modules, including the carrier board, an environmental sensor, I/O expander board, radio module, OLED screen, and LoRa and Bluetooth modules.James Provost

To test out text messaging, I bought three HelTXT handheld communicators for US $85 each on Tindie. These are essentially just a battery, keyboard, small screen, ESP32-based microcontroller, and a LoRa radio in a 3D-printed enclosure. My original plan was to coerce a couple of my fellow IEEE Spectrum editors to spread out around Manhattan to get a sense of the range of the handhelds in a dense urban environment. By turning an intermediate device on and off, we would demonstrate the relaying of signals between handhelds that would otherwise be out of range of each other.

This plan was rendered moot within a few minutes of turning the handhelds on. A test “hello” transmission was greeted by an unexpected “hey.” The handhelds’ default setting is to operate on a public channel, and my test message had been received by somebody with a Meshtastic setup about 4 kilometers away, across the East River. Then I noticed my handheld had detected a bunch of other Meshtastic nodes, including one 5 km away at the southern tip of Manhattan. Clearly, range was not going to be an issue, even with a forest of skyscrapers blocking the horizon. Indeed, given the evident popularity of Meshtastic, it was going to be impossible to test the communicators in isolation! (Two Spectrum editors live in Minnesota, so I hope to persuade them to try the range tests with fewer Meshtastic users per square kilometer.)

I turned to my next test idea—exchanging real-time data and commands via the network. I bought a $25 WisBlock meshtastic starter kit from RAKwireless, which marries a LoRA radio/microcontroller and an expansion board. This board can accommodate a selection of cleverly designed and inexpensive plug-in hardware modules, including sensors and displays. The radio has both LoRa and Bluetooth antennas, and there’s a nice smartphone app that uses the Bluetooth connection to relay text messages through the radio and configure many settings. You can also configure the radios via a USB cable and a Python command-line-interface program.

In addition to basic things like establishing private encrypted channels, you can enable a number of software modules in the firmware. These modules are designed to accomplish common tasks, such as periodically reading and transmitting data from an attached environmental sensor plug-in. Probably the most useful software module is the serial module, which lets the Meshtastic hardware act as a gateway between the radio network and a second microcontroller running your own custom IoT application, communicating via a two- or three-wire connection.

The Meshtastic protocol has seen significant evolution. In the initial system, any node that heard a broadcast would rebroadcast it, leading to local congestion [top row]. But now, signal strength is used as a proxy for distance, with more-distant nodes broadcasting first. Nodes that hear a broadcast twice will not rebroadcast it, reducing congestion [bottom row].James Provost

For my demo, I wired up a button and an LED to an Adafruit Grand Central board running CircuitPython. (I chose this board because its 3.3-volt levels are compatible with the RAKwireless hardware.) I programmed the Grand Central to send an ASCII-encoded message to the RAKwireless radio over a serial connection when I pressed the button, and to illuminate the LED if it received an ASCII string containing the word “btn.”

On the radio side, I used a plug-in I/O expander to connect the serial transmit and receive wires. The tricky part was mapping the pin names as labeled on the adapter with the corresponding microcontroller pins. You need to know the microcontroller pins when setting up the receive and transmit pins with the serial module, as it doesn’t know how the adapter is set up. But after some paging through the documentation, I eventually found the mapping.

I pressed the button connected to my Grand Central microcontroller, and “button down” instantly popped up on my handheld communicators. Then I sent “btn,” and the LED lit up. Success! With that proof of concept done, pretty much anything else is doable as well.

Will makers building applications on top of Meshtastic lead to the mesh renaissance I’ve been waiting for? With more hands on deck, I hope to see some surprising uses emerge that will make the case for mesh better than any starry-eyed argument from me.