Today, we ask what's inside a black box. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
The word "black box" hasn't
been in our vocabulary very long. It first meant a
closed array of electronic gear. But it's come to
mean any function that's hidden from sight. In
fact, it's practically turned into a metaphor for a
retreat from understanding how things function.
When we call the flight recorder of an airliner a
"black box," we acknowledge that it's to be opened
only under the most dire circumstances.
When I was a kid, we stocked radio tubes on the
shelf like light bulbs. When one burned out, we
replaced it. Today's radios have transistors in
them. If one fails, we replace the radio itself.
Radios are black boxes -- I have almost no idea
what's in mine. Our calculators, car transmissions,
and clocks have all become black boxes. Even their
labels tell us they can be opened only by factory
How well do you do with questions like, "How often
does a spark plug fire as an automobile engine
turns over?"; "What's a universal joint?"; or "What
does a carburetor do?" You aren't likely to know
these things today, because cars themselves have
become black boxes. Once upon a time a car owner
could look right into the transmission of his
Model-T Ford. More than that, he had to know how to
fix it if he wanted it to keep running.
The automobile used to be a marvelous teacher of
applied mechanics. The radio taught a whole
generation about electronic circuitry. I got my
grounding in internal combustion, aerodynamics, and
electric circuitry by building model airplanes.
That was a real ground-up activity in 1943.
Of course, young people today know all sorts of
things their parents didn't know at the same age.
But there's a price. We handle very sophisticated
systems; but we're not trained to look inside the
black boxes that surround us. The price is that our
knowledge itself becomes black-boxed. A person who
knows about computers may not understand anything
about cars. John Donne's poetry might remain a
black box for a student of 19th-century Russian
Educating strong and capable engineers means
teaching students that the black boxes around them
aren't Pandora's boxes. They can be opened. We want
them to know that what one fool can do, another
fool can also do -- that they're smart enough to
open anyone else's black box. That invention means
working inside black boxes.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds