Monday July 28, 2011 – Stewart Wolpin
When the Shuttle Atlantis makes its scheduled landing on July 21, two eras will end. The first and most obvious is America's taxpayer-funded adventure in space.
But the second is the latest science and technical inspirational era.
Throughout our history, both global but especially domestic, we've experienced events – good and bad, such as wars – that inspired a boom rush of intellectual or artistic activity related to that event. For instance, The Beatles on Ed Sullivan inspired a generation or two of kids to pick up guitars and start bands, Woodward and Bernstein inspired a generation of kids to join the student newspaper (I was one of them), and, the focus of this people-oriented tech blog, the American space program got our collective tech juices flowing.
For the consumer electronics business, the ending of America's space program could mean losing our future gadget inventors.
The Apollo effect
My dander gets raised each time some attention-seeking politician, mocking commentator or lame comedian mocks the space program as a drain down which billions of government money has been poured just to land some clowns on the moon or to provide MTV with a logo. Denigrating the space program displays an appalling ignorance of how our modern technology world came to be.
Dozens of engineers who played key roles in developing personal computers, digital cameras, cell phones and many of our other modern gadgets cite the space program as the reason they chose to pursue engineering. Plus, an enormous number of consumer products and technologies were developed or advanced for or around the space program, such as satellite communications and television, along with technologies used in health care, materials, food and other behind-the-scenes technologies, more than 6,300 by one count.
Our tax-funded space investment has paid off 100 fold in new technologies, industries and companies that wouldn't have existed without us landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.
Past and future inspiration
With no space program, America now has nothing to spark adolescent interest in tech and science, other than perhaps the existence of the current crop of cool gadgets themselves.
This may feel like an awkward segue, but I'm currently writing the bios for this year's CEA Hall of Fame inductees. I mention this because nearly all this years inductees – and those from years past – were inspired to enter a technical field by, something; for many, World War II, the desire to contribute something to the war effort, was that something.
(Interestingly, three of this year's inductees, SanDisk co-founder Eli Harare, co-Qualcomm founder Andrew Viterbi and home video game inventor Ralph Baer, were all Jews born outside the U.S. in the midst or wake of the Holocaust, their persecuted immigrant refuge background perhaps providing an added emotional need to technologically excel few of us could understand.)
But beyond inspiration from the world at war, most of this year's Hall of Famers found their futures from less grandiose fonts.
• When he wasn't reading, as a boy Baer spent most of his walking hours tinkering with his Erector Set.
• Bob Metcalfe, who invented Ethernet and founded 3Com, swore he'd one day earn a degree in electrical engineering from MIT after becoming addicted to the technology behind his beloved model trains.
• The childhood hero of Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, was Thomas Edison, a living legend throughout Shannon's youth in the tech-active 1920s.
• Long absences from his family members back in his native Italy from which his family escaped in the run-up to the war instilled in the young Viterbi a desire to find ways of communicating across political and geographical borders.
Since the modern state of war is unlikely to inspire any of today's youth to anything accept to avoid the military, and since the even soon-to-be late/lamented shuttle program isn't exactly as sexy as a manned mission to the moon or to Mars, we're going to have to figure out a way to boost interest in science and engineering if we're to have future inventors of future gadgets for us to pontificate on in this space.
In lieu of a big event, perhaps it is time for CEA to put its money where its Declaration of Innovation is and sponsor scholarships for electrical engineering students who need that extra inspiration to become the next Harari, Viterbi, Metcalfe, Shannon or Baer.
