What does success look like

this is a talk about hope

and i think hope is important and in

this talk i’m going to deal with it in

two senses

in the first sense hope is important for

everyone

in this period after kovid and i always

think in the morning after you know for

many years after i heard a quote from

nelson mandela

when i get up i think mandela said it’s

not how many times that i get knocked

down it’s how many times i get back up

again

that is what you should use to judge me

and that’s not just important for

everyday life i think that’s also

important in engineering and i’m pro

vice chancellor for engineering and

physical sciences here at queen’s

and that means as part of my job i want

to inspire the thousands of students

that come here

with both the resilience that mandela’s

quote illustrates but also something

about creativity

and creativity is something that i don’t

think people meet very often in

engineering they’re kind of familiar

with

people in white coats or whatever you

know people in in

you know looking at engines in cars

during during tests or

or services but engineering is really

about creativity

and there’s a really good example of

that a lady called lillian bland who

conducted the first powered flight in in

ireland

back in 1903 the wright brothers had

successfully flown

in north carolina and lillian read about

their exploits and began to build

gliders and models

over a period of time between 1908 and

1911

and she eventually reached the point

where

she’d made enough progress to put an

engine into her

into her airframe and unfortunately

there was no manufacturer of aviation

engines in ireland and so she ordered

one from from

from the mainland and she went across to

collect the engine after lots and lots

of delays and when she went to the

factory

i think one thing you have to remember

is that these engines were really

experimental at the time

and to generate enough power to fly the

propeller was

bigger than me and the first time they

demonstrated the engine to lillian

uh the power created by it was so great

that the propeller disintegrated

and almost uh injured and killed all the

people that were witness to it

but she didn’t let that daunt her and

she took the engine back

and fitted it to the aircraft and even

in tests

the first time that she tried the engine

it destroyed part of the airframe

and so she had to rebuild the aircraft

twice before it was before the aircraft

itself was strong enough even to begin

to think about a test flight

another thing to remember is that

lillian was testing her ideas

in northern ireland she wasn’t testing

it in the beach on a beach in

in the united states

and it took her it was 12 miles to cycle

from her home to the field where she

could begin to fly the aircraft

and it took her five weeks before the

rain stopped enough

for her to conduct the first test

flights that again

illustrates something about perseverance

in engineering

anyway when she got to the test field

and she was about to fly the aircraft

she realized that she couldn’t put

enough fuel into the fuel tank

because of the way the engine was

fitting into the airframe

and so showing true ingenuity of an

engineer

she ended up fitting a whiskey bottle to

the engine

but then she couldn’t fill the whiskey

bottle and so

in order to get the fuel into the

whiskey bottle the satch attached to the

engine she had to steal her aunt’s

hearing aid and that’s like a

cone thing that they used in those days

and so you can imagine that the

tremendous amount of

well courage ingenuity creativity

and just basic engineering knowledge to

even get to that to that stage

lilian’s story is instructive because

she realized that her

her tests if you like were not really

going anywhere

because the engine that she fitted

wasn’t really powerful enough to sustain

the flight

that she imagined so she got several

hundred meters but no further

and to put a stronger or larger engine

into the aircraft would have destroyed

the airframe

and so her father who was worried about

her being an engineer

uh persuaded her to give up her test

flights by effectively bribing her with

a car which at the time was the

you know the the object she wanted to

pioneer with um

the most now lillian’s story is

interesting because she immigrated to

canada

and died in the 1970s and so our lives

overlapped by uh by a small amount of

time

but i never had the fortune to meet her

but i remember her all the time

and if we look back about say five or

six years ago

i was working as part of a team to

plan for long duration human space

flight so

for those of you that might have seen

the hollywood film the margin it was

that kind of scenario

how can we put how can we keep people

alive long enough for example on the

surface of mars

to conduct scientific experiments and to

bring them home safely

and one of the things i had to do is

in preparation for that was to look at

the apollo missions and see how they

planned for those

and i can remember some of the kind of

weird ingenuity that the early nasa

astronauts and engineers

resorted to in their planning so for

example

the early plans for the apollo missions

considered sending two or three

spacecraft to the moon at the same time

with the idea that if one got into

trouble they could transfer

across the fleet if you like and that

was borrowing ideas from the mayflower

and the early american

explorers or the explorers to the

americas

another idea that they had was if

something happened to the to the crew

on the surface of the moon how would

they stay alive long enough for a rescue

mission if anything could like that

could be planned

and so they they experimented with

edible spacecraft

so a material that was you know

sufficient to keep them alive by eating

small parts of the lander

unfortunately that’s not a very good

story because at the end the astronauts

tasted the material and they said that

they would rather die than have to live

on this on this

on this material that they were building

the spacecraft of

we come back to the mars missions what

we were looking at was writing a

computer program

that would enable the astronauts to use

the resources that they had on the

spacecraft

to keep them alive so people may have

seen the apollo 13 film for example

where people had to use the the

ground team’s advice to reconfigure the

spacecraft to get them back

after an explosion and a problem on the

on the spacecraft now

in the case of the mars missions we were

trying to write computer programs to do

that

and at the heart of it i think was

fundamental problems

in trying to instill creativity instill

ingenuity instill courage

instill all of the things that lillian

bland

exhibited in a computer program and

there’s kind of a twist at the end of

this which is that

uh we made a certain amount of progress

but i never thought we ever got close to

approximating what lillian exhibited

but at the end of it engineers started

to ask well

if we can do this for a spacecraft in

other words write a program that helps

us to detect problems and resolve

problems in a spacecraft

maybe what we could do is write a

computer program that looks for

signs of mental illness or stress in the

crew

and at that point i felt that we’d come

full circle and that we were back to

for those of you that may have seen the

film 2001 by stanley kubrick

the computer howl that takes control of

the spacecraft

so i don’t know what the what the

barriers for human ingenuity and

computer programming are into the future

but i do know

that we need to be guided by the hope

and optimism

of lillian bland i think she shows the

correct use of technology to inspire us

and to challenge us and if we pay too

much attention to the science fiction or

the

or the dark ideas of hollywood then

i think that we won’t progress in the

same way that we would

if we had the optimism of both lillian

and mandela

thank you