In 2004, Toyota’s gas-electric hybrid, the Prius, won Consumer Reports’ customer satisfaction survey. Not only is this latest innovation from Toyota taking over the road but it is helping Toyota close the gap in beginning the world’s largest automobile producer, a distincition that GM has held for decades.
Innovators
In Canada, Engineering Week took place from March 1 - 9, 2008
At the end of last year we ran a poll with our newsletter readers and the results are presented below. The telephone conceived by Alexander Graham Bell was the top vote getter. Radioactivity by Marie Curie, electricity as developed by Michael Faraday, and the atomic bomb project headed by J. Robert Oppenheimer were all tied for second with our readers. The next most popular innovators were Wilhelm Roentgen’s X-rays and Archimedes contributions to mechanics and mathematics. Bringing up the rear was Edwin Hubble and his discovery of the expanding universe.
The poll also listed a few other innovators that did not register with our readers. These innovators included Dorothy C. Hodgkin and her work on X-ray crystallography, Robert Noyce and his invention of the integrated circuit (IC) and Robert Goddard who developed rocket propulsion that triggered the Space Age.
Please check out two web links, "20th Century Achievements" and "Ridiculed Innovators," that were recently added to Koslowsky's Favorite Sites to your left.
Many innovators during the past century worked to improve our quality of life. Other innovators who were initially ridiculed for some of their ideas were later vindicated. Galileo, Robert H. Goddard, Nikola Tesla, and Alfred Wegener are just a few who suffered ridicule during their lifetime.
Innovator of the Month
This page features a new innovator each month. It is an eclectic list of scientists, engineers, and technologists. The table below highlights coverage provided for some of these great contributors in the Newsletter, 'A World Perspective.'
| Month | Innovator | Century |
|---|---|---|
| January 2009 | 20th | |
| December 2008 | 21st | |
| November 2008 | 19th | |
| October 2008 | 19th | |
| September 2008 | 17th | |
| August 2008 | 3rd BC | |
| July 2008 | 18th | |
| June 2008 | Al-Khwarizmi Al-Biruni | 9th |
| May 2008 | 18th | |
| April 2008 | 19th | |
| March 2008 | 19th | |
| February 2008 | 17th | |
| January 2008 | 19th | |
| December 2007 | 20th | |
| November 2007 | 20th | |
| October 2007 | 20th | |
| September 2007 | 19th | |
| August 2007 | 21st | |
| July 2007 | 16th | |
| June 2007 | 13th | |
| May 2007 | 5th AD | |
| April 2007 | 19th | |
| March 2007 | 20th | |
| February 2007 | 20th | |
| January 2007 | 20th | |
| December 2006 | 19th | |
| November 2006 | 20th | |
| October 2006 | 19th | |
| September 2006 | 3rd BC | |
| August 2006 | 18th | |
| July 2006 | 20th | |
| June 2006 | 20th | |
| May 2006 | 17th | |
| April 2006 | 16th | |
| March 2006 | 17th | |
| February 2006 | 19th | |
| January 2006 | Murray Gell-Mann | 20th 20th |
| December 2005 | 20th | |
| November 2005 | 20th | |
| October 2005 | 20th | |
| September 2005 | Johannes Kepler | 17th 17th |
| August 2005 | 20th | |
| July 2005 | 20th | |
| June 2005 | 17th | |
| May 2005 | Nikola Tesla | 19th 20th |
| April 2005 | 20th | |
| March 2005 | 20th | |
| February 2005 | 19th | |
| January 2005 | | 18th |
| December 2004 | | 18th |
| November 2004 | | 19th |
The Vitruvian Man, popularized by Leonardo Da Vinci, is actually named for the Roman architect Vitruvius, who first created the image. Vitruvius designed Roman temples based on the proportions of the human body, believing them to be perfect. He was a supporter of the Sacred Geometry of Pythagoras, developed in Greece, and believed the perfection of the human body was due to the fact that the extended limbs of a perfectly proportioned human fit into both a circle and a square.
The Pythagorean tradition stated the circle represents the spiritual realm while the square defines material existence. Consequently, the human body represents the perfect marriage of spirit and matter in all of its harmonius proportions.
Leonardo was one of a number of artists who attempted to depict Vitruvius' perfect man. His version is considered the most accurate depiction of the human body.
Sandro Del-Prete provides a change of perspective and this work of art features Leonardo.
 |  |
|---|
Featured Innovator
On September 22, 2005, I attended a presentation featuring Leslie Berlin, PhD, of Stanford University and her book, “The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley.” As part of her quest to capture the history of Silicon Valley, she discovered that Noyce, co-inventor of the microchip is “too important a figure to be forgotten.” Some readers of Ms. Berlin's book view her work as an aspect of the “soul of technology” - very appropriate with her first book based on the son of a pastor from Iowa. Robert Noyce has been called the Edison and Ford of California's Silicon Valley. Like Thomas Edison he was an inventor, known mostly for the microchip, and like Henry Ford he was a manufacturing company innovator building Fairchild Semiconductor and then Intel Corporation with cofounder Gordon Moore.
Early on in life, Noyce found his way from Iowa to California to work for the most difficult William Shockley, a Nobel Prize winner for co-inventing the transistor. He was part of a group of what Shockley called the “hottest minds” in Mountain View. After developing many ideas and finding it difficult to work for the ultimate micromanager in Shockley, Noyce and seven others left to form Fairchild Semiconductor. Noyce took the role as head of Research and Development, becoming its General Manager after the first GM left. Under his guidance for a decade, Fairchild Semiconductor grew to 10,000 employees and amassed $12M in profits.
In 1968, Noyce and Moore decided to form NM Electronics, the precursor to Intel Corporation. As the company thrived, it became too large to be managed by “gut feel,” an approach Noyce preferred. In 1975, Noyce moved to board chair, Gordon Moore became President and CEO, and Andy Grove, one of the company's earliest employees, assumed a formal senior management role. Noyce stepped down from the board chair in 1979 and pursued his love of coaching and mentoring others. In the 1980s, he formed the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) with four other senior industry executives to fight the incursion of Japanese interests on the semiconductor business. His success is measured by the continued success of American innovation in electronics in the 21st century. Noyce also mentored young entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs (now CEO of Apple and board member of Disney), in part, because he loved to stay in touch with exciting new ideas.
His early death in 1990 likely cost him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2000, which was awarded to Kilby for the microchip invention and two others. However, Noyce would have been content with the impact he had on all of the people he coached and mentored during his life. He believed smart people made smart decisions and erred on the side of assuming people would do the right thing. He despised the micromanagement approach of many and loved the management by walking around style of leadership. His legacy will become what he did every day: “giving people a sense of value for their work and instilling confidence in them.”
Thanks to Leslie Berlin for her feedback on this article.
| An Integrated Circuit or IC is a thin chip consisting of at least two interconnected transistors as well as passive components like resistors. Typical chips are 1 cm in size or smaller, and contain millions of interconnected devices. Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby independently invented the integrated chip. These ICs are part of an OC192 transceiver. |  |
|---|
 | These ICs are Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) chips built by Mostek for use on the IBM PCJr personal computer manufactured in 1983. |
|---|
Technical Innovation of the Month
- the Evolution of the Hard Disk Drive
Before we get into the evolution of the HDD, a storage media, lets briefly review how we got to this point. People thirst for information. Data, in part, is just another way to describe information. Information or data includes facts and figures. The newspaper represents these as text strings and numbers, a form of language that has standardized how we read and interpret data. The Internet does the same thing in a digital format. Simply use your computer to connect to the world wide web and search for your favorite newspaper story to read digitally. A sheet of music or a compact disc (CD) contains data too. The sheet of music covered in symbols of musical notes allows us to reproduce the sound with our hands and a keyboard or the CD encoded with digital ones and zeroes allows our music player to faithfully reproduce the sound for us to listen to. A VHS tape or DVD disc are two forms of media that contain data; the tape stores visual images and sound in analog form played on a video cassette recorder while the disc provides the same function, but in digital form played on a DVD machine. Both faithfully reproduce images for us to watch. Whether we are using language to understand text, sound to enjoy music, or sight to absorb images, we are experiencing a digital media evolution that is synthesizing every human experience into binary code - strings of ones and zeroes.
Recall the days when our storage technologies relied on isolation and separation. Silent films or “talkies” relied only on sight and were stored on film. The phonograph produced only sound and required cylindrical wax disks to house the music. Ink and quill and then typewriters relied on language to generate text stored on paper. Each type of media - film, wax disks, and paper - were unique storage devices, physically isolated from each other. They separated the senses in terms of sight, sound, and language. Today, this separation is blurring because of the computer, which operates in a digital world.
Our personal computer uses a centralized storage device, the HDD, which stores letters (language text strings), spreadsheets (numbers and their relationships), music (sound), and photos and videos (images). To get at this large amount of information, a database management program, built into the computer, allows access and/or the ability to modify any portion of this database. This is easily done because everything on your computer has been stored as strings of 1s and 0s or bits. Relatively very few of these bits are needed to represent text, more are needed to capture sound, and a large amount are needed to house video information. The power of today’s digital computer allows the user to manipulate and synthesize any of this data because it has all been reduced to the language of bits. Take a bit of text as a title for your digitized home video footage, sprinkle some more bits of sound across the video file for the background music and you have synthesized three types of media into one - the digital movie. Film did not have to be spliced to achieve your goal. Only computer editing skills were needed to map the different text, sound, and video files into a cohesive presentation and then “burn” the finished product to a digital disc to share with others. The computer’s database, accessing it’s HDD digital files, easily accommodates each of these representations of information because they have all been converted into digital format (strings of 1s and 0s or bits). It is becaue of our Cultural Evolution pushing the technology - the thirst for more information, quickly accessible - that compels the HDD technology to rapdily evolve to house the every increasing amount of digital storage needed for preserving or manipulating the human experience.
Grochowski began his presentation by giving us a broad technology discussion on HDD. An important metric in the world of hard drives, the heart of a personal computer, is the amount of storage they have, known as areal density [1]. From 1956 to 2006, there has been an 89 million times increase in areal density. At this rate the capacity is doubling at least every two years, faster even than the integrated chip progress described by Moore's Law.
Similarly, over the past fifty years, the HDD form factor has shrunk from two feet (24 inches) with 5 Mb of storage to only 0.85 inches with 4,000 Mb of storage. In terms of size, Ed believes the form factor evolution has ended. “This is as small as it gets,” he said. Over the years, many innovations were brought to the HDD realm. Some of these include implementation of secondary actuators (which increases the fine resolution of the recording tracts to enable greater storage), adoption of perpendicular recording, implementation of tunnel magnetoresistance [2], use of long data sectors, and advanced channel electronics, to name a few. In the HDD market, there has been a 2 to 3 year lag time between lab demonstration and product shipment. This trend has been consistently observed since 1990. It is amazing how engineers over the last few decades have improved HDD performance in almost every respect: reliability, capacity, speed and power usage to name a few.
Paper tape, punch cards, magnetic tape, and then floppy disks[3] were used for computer storage until the hard disk drive came to the fore. The 1950s brought a key technological breakthrough in disk design, when IBM engineers produced read/write heads that could be suspended above the surface of the disk. Contact of the head with the media surface was no longer needed. The IBM System 305 RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control), introduced on September 13, 1956 was the first implementation. The two-foot form factor stored 5 million characters on fifty disks. This translates into an areal density of about 2,000 bits per square inch. In comparison, today's drives sport areal densities on the order of billions of bits per square inch.
In 1984, the first 3.5-inch CD-ROM drives were shipped and "Grolier's Electronic Encyclopedia" contained on one of them followed in 1985. The 3 1/2-inch IDE drive was initially a drive on a plug-in expansion board, or ‘hard card,’ developed by Quantum. Their ‘hard card’ included the drive on the controller which, in turn, evolved into an Integrated Device Electronics (IDE) hard disk drive. The controller was integrated onto the printed circuit on the bottom of the hard disk drive. An example of this kind of integration is shown below in a Maxtor 3.5” 10 Gb hard drive built in 1999 for one of Apple Computer’s early G3 iMacs.
Ed suggested that standards needed to be established for areal density, since different manufacturers use different criteria. However, in other areas, market forces have driven product evolution. This is seen in the ever shrinking size of the HDDs from 5.25” to 3.5” to 2.5” to 1” to 0.85.” These form factors, the external dimensions of the HDD, have not been made larger at any time, since the smaller sizes have the most value. Computer manufacturers have pushed “the smaller is better paradigm” since it gives them less heat to dissipate, better seek times to speed data processing, less vibrations for greater stability, and the like. Form factors are important to computer makers and their peripherals for compatibility. This means that custom disk drives do not have to be made to fit different computer companies. HDDs are designed to be installed on the inside of the laptop, desktop computer, or large MP3 player and are produced in one of many standard configurations.
Ed highlighted that the bit aspect ratios are generally less than five and approaching one. Data density is approaching the 100 - 1000 range with data rates greater than 100 Gb/s for the 3.5-inch form factor. Reliability now exceeds 1,400 khrs, the MTBF of almost every disk drive currently produced.
The shrinking bit cell gives a density on the order of 200 Gb/ square inch. Furthermore, the price per gigabit keeps dropping and is now on the order of 50¢ per gigabyte for large systems.
One area open for further improvement is the head-media spacing. It is currently on the order of 10 nanometers (nms) but industry experts believe they can ‘fly lower.’ Achieving a separation between the read/write head and the disk media of 8 nm appears doable. Coupled with this improvement are better seek times, brought down to the 2 to 5 millisecond (ms) range. Continued correction for errors at a 1x10E-12 level will be a challenge.
Competing technologies include NAND, NOR Flash, NROM Flash, and MRAM, part of a list of 13 that Ed is tracking. These are the most challenging alternating technologies for HDD. Note that Apple Computer moved from HDDs to Flash in 2005 on their iPod Nanos. It was the Nano predecessor, the iPod Minis, which drove the demand for 1-inch, 4 GB HDDs a few years ago[4]. Flash now dominates because, for the smaller capacity (less than 8 GB) required by MP3 players, it is now cheaper than HDD. Its a matter of economics for the designer. Flash also wins on battery life and ruggedness over HDD, but HDD write speeds are three times better (80 Mb/s versus 32).
Notes:
[1] Areal density refers to the number of bits per square inch of storage surface. With disk drives, it represents the number of bits per inch (bpi) times the number of tracks per inch (tpi). Areal density has increased from two thousand bits per square inch to 100 gigabits per square inch during the past 50 years.
[2] The tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR) effect results from two ferromagnets separated by a thin insulator, on the order of 1nm. In 1995, room temperature TMR was discovered after renewed interest from the discovery of the giant magnetoresistive effect (GMR). It forms the foundation of magnetic random access memory (MRAM) and read sensors in hard disk drives.
[3] Following on the use of casette tapes to store programs, the 5.25 inch magnetic floppy disk drives appeared on the market. In 1980, Seagate's ST-506 became the first drive in the 5.25-inch form factor. The IBM PCJr was one of the first popular personal computers to use this technology. Below are two images of this floppy disk drive used to run programs.
Top View: IBM PCJr Magnetic Floppy Disk Drive, 5.25 inches
Front View: IBM PCJr Magnetic Floppy Disk Drive, 5.25 inches
 | Prior to scientific associations and businesses establishing their own laboratories, scientific innovation and experimentation were performed in home made laboratories. This plaque represents the place where Boyle and Hooke performed many of their experiments - Boyle's home in Oxford, England. |
|---|
 | This is believed to be the first working electric light bulb Thomas Edison successfully built. |  |
|---|
Hayabusa’s Technical Innovations
June 2006 UpdateHayabusa verified that asteroid Itokawa is a “rubble pile” asteroid. This means that Itokawa, 180 million miles from earth, is a pile of rock and dust loosely packed together. The piecemeal character of such asteroids is due to collisions with other objects in space. Itokawa is the first “rubble pile” asteroid discovered, a type thought to be the most common for near-earth orbit celestial bodies.
Hayabusa overcame the mission’s biggest challenge by successfully landing the six-meter probe and firing its metal ball to collect samples before taking off again. This phase of the mission was made more difficult due to the potato-shaped asteroid (540 meters long and 270 meters wide) spinning and having a very low gravity. This environment made it challenging for Hayabusa to land and stick to the jagged surface.
The probe’s successful November 2005 landing was its second attempt. It had already touched down on the asteroid a few days earlier but failed to collect material because of a technical glitch preventing Hayabusa from communicating with Earth.
JAXA's First Major Space Mission
The December 2005 Newsletter featured a tidbit on Japan’s little-noticed Hayabusa (“Falcon”) mission to a distant rock in the Solar System, asteroid Itokawa. To maximize success of the mission to safely land on the asteroid, pick-up samples, and take-off again, two key innovations are being used to reach the target.
Ion engine technology is being used to provide propulsion. In this scheme, the engine ionizes xenon gas and electrically accelerates the ions and emits them to provide forward motion. [Remember one of Newton’s Laws of Motion from high school physics? For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.] This is a highly efficient process. Hayabusa is demonstrating this technology, which has been featured in science fiction books for decades. It is a leading propulsion candidate for future planetary exploration too.
Autonomous Navigation System (ANS) technology is another innovation used by Hayabusa. This technology allows the asteroid to be approached without human intervention. ANS uses an optical navigation camera and light detection and ranging software to determine the distance to the asteroid as it makes its approach in space. Adjustments are automatically made to ensure Hayabusa’s alignment and speed are just right for a safe landing.
Instead of the eagle has landed, we have the “falcon has landed,” to coin a variant of Armstrong’s famous moon landing sound byte of 1969.
To collect samples, Hayabusa uses a hopping robot to traverse the asteroid’s surface.
Upon returning to Earth, Hayabusa will jettison a re-entry capsule to make the dangerous journey through the atmosphere.
Japan is providing the world with a crucial experiment in space engineering from engine propulsion, to robotic sample collection, and systems guidance technology.
What if...
What if Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Descartes, or Telsa had never lived?How different would our world be?
What about Michelangelo, Voltaire, or Bach?
Many people wonder if our world would be as advanced today if the famous astronomers, mathematicians, physicists, philosophers, and artists had never lived.
Yes it most definitely would.
Typically the heroes of discovery and innovation - the ones who become famous - are not the ones performing the day-to-day tasks which advance civilization. Furthermore, great discoveries and ideas appear in one area while many others already working along the same lines are never heard from. If the known discoverers hadn’t lived, these others would have made the same discoveries and we would be reading about them in the history books. Scientific progress continues because the next steps build upon earlier steps, similar to the building of a pyramid. The application of science is performed by engineers. In modern day society, the engineering occupation is the most underappreciated group. These folks have designed and built society’s infrastrucutre including almost every building, roads, bridges, water and sewage systems, electrical distribution systems, communications infrastructure, schools, libraries, museums, hospitals, and more. Engineers build, apply new scientific principles, and pass on the knowledge. They are unsung heroes, but alas, they are replaceable. Creative people, such as sculpturers, poets, writers, painters, composers, and musicians are not so. They are irreplaceable. Their contributions are unique and would never have been duplicated if they had not lived to produce them.
Galileo's work, the "Starry Messenger," was a major contribution to science with his observational methodology and to astronomy through his characterization of the Moon's surface and discovery of four satellites orbiting Jupiter.
bravenet.com