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