Today, a parable about childhood's end. 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 movie October
Sky told the story of four teenage West
Virginia boys who, in the late 1950s, built a
rocket that made it six miles into the sky. At the
same time, at least two of my colleagues were
building their own rockets, using the same
grass-roots methods. Sputnik had inspired a
generation to learn rocketry.
One of those colleagues has lent me a book titled
Rocket Manual for Amateurs. It came out in
1960. By then, he and all the other first
generation of rocket boys had gone on to college.
This book is meant to make things easier for a new
crop of teenagers.
When I start turning pages, I'm astonished. This
truly is rocket science. Here is an excellent
grounding in chemistry, fluid mechanics,
trigonometry. It's all wonderfully demystified.
Indeed, if you read the book Rocket Boys
— the basis for the October Sky movie —
you'll find four boys learning all this from
scratch, and by trial and error. The book tells how
to make fuel, shape a nozzle, select materials,
measure the height of ascent, arrange a control
center, build test stands. It talks about
expansion ratios and applied mechanics.
And yet it loses something along the
way. How to define the loss? The rocket boys of the
late fifties created their own questions. They
found out that, to create a supersonic jet, a
nozzle had to first converge, then diverge. They
learned that a rocket fuel cannot just explode like
gunpowder, and that the location the rocket's
center of gravity is important. They'd seen
Sputnik, and set out with great determination, to
Learning to stay alive while you handled the
serious dangers of rocketry was another
trial-and-error process that young mechanics and
inventors would be denied after the 1950s. This
manual goes into great detail describing protective
measures and first aid. Now you'd learn safety
first, and rocketry second.
Something shifted just after Sputnik. We became
postmodern; we became circumspect. The chasm
between the Rocket Boys and this manual is vast.
Every fiber of common sense tells us to learn how
first, and then do. Learn to be safe
before you play with fire.
Yesterday I went for X-rays. I'd suffered a blow to
the chest and the pain persisted. Had I broken a
rib? No, but the X-ray revealed other ribs, long
broken, healed over, and forgotten. My growing up
in the thirties and forties yielded so many bumps
and scars — who's to keep track? I was lucky to
live, while others died or were maimed.
So this lovely manual was written after-the-fact.
It sums up what the last wild children of
twentieth-century modern American had learned. And
it embodies a pernicious
have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too problem. Our children
need to find new inventive risks and dangers
without killing themselves. I don't know
how that's possible, but it certainly is essential.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
Brinley, Capt. B. R., Rocket Manual for
Amateurs. New York: Ballentine Books, Inc.,
The two "rocket boy" colleagues at UH are Lewis
Wheeler and Alan (Russ) Geanangel. I am grateful to
Russ Geanangel for lending me the Brinley book.
For more on "The Rocket Boys" see Episode 1421.
The Rocket Manual's specification of a safe
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-2003 by John H.