The Journey from Academic to Entrepreneur

In this episode of The Engineering Passion Express, we take you on a journey from a time when there were no reliable weather forecasts. Ships, planes and even family vacations were ruined by the lack of understanding how weather systems form and evolve.

This story is told through the lens of Lewis Fry Richardson, one of the academic pioneers who worked on the mathematical foundations of weather prediction. He is a good foil to John Davis from episode 1 who invented the lane machine!

Join me and learn where Lewis Fry Richardson failed, and how he had come up with a fantastical factory concept for predicting the weather at a time when the idea of the modern computer hadn't yet been invented!

In this episode you'll get insight on how our values, and identities shape the kinds of problems we solve. 

Show Notes and Links

The Engineering Passion Express is about growing knowledge and the passion for engineering. 

It is my hope, that this grows into a powerful community where people share knowledge, or their passions and find happiness in their pursuits of making things better by thinking like an engineer. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Welcome to the Engineering Passion Express. I'm your host, Brandon Donnelly. You're listening to Season 1, Episode 2, a continuation of Picking the Right Problems. On the last episode, we looked at John Davis, the founder of Keggle, who invented the bowling lane oil machine. This episode, we'll look at Lewis Fry Richardson, who worked on predicting the weather back in the 1910s and 1920s. When studying fluid behavior, Lewis Fry Richardson created a little rhyme. Big worlds have little whirls that feed on velocity. Little whirls have lesser whirls, and on and on to viscosity. Now this is just a rhyme that helps students remind themselves of how fluid behaves, but it's also true for historical events and how the world behaves. In this episode, we're going to continue on discussing picking the right problems. Lewis Fry Richardson will serve as sort of a foil to John Davis. While John was a practical man and an entrepreneur, Richardson was more of an academic. While John is sort of post-war, Richardson is right in the heart of World War I. So there's a lot of interesting dynamics between the two that we can discuss at the end. If you go back in time, the world wasn't always filled with science. In fact, the scientific revolution really kicked off around the time of Newton in the 1650s. And we had this rapid accumulation of scientific knowledge that really didn't exist prior to that. You had Newton inventing calculus and coming up with the equations of motion and the generalized theory around it. And then later, others would take those equations of motion and come up with applied theory, like the Navier-Stokes equations, that governed how fluid flow based on the equations of motion. And that applied theory came 150 to 200 years later, and then from that applied theory you have practical applications, like the weather prediction, which would come another 70 years later, and still wouldn't quite be completed until the invention of the computer and the building of ENIAC in the 1950s. So, all in all, the scientific revolution is this big whirl that's changing everything about the way the world operates and has operated for the thousands of years beforehand. And you and me and everybody listening to this are part of that revolution as engineers. Breaking off from the scientific revolution in an era just before World War I, there were all of these little whirls of science that were coming off of these big, massive scientific discoveries. So a little world example would be transportation. In 1912, you have the Titanic. A little bit before that, in 1903, you have the flight at Kitty Hawk and the Wright brothers becoming the first manned air flight. And then you have other people making ground in aviation around this time, such as Charles Rolls, who did the first double crossing of the English Channel in an airplane. And there's also little whirls in other branches of science. You have germ theory coming about. You have chemistry and physics with J.J. Thompson finding the electron in 1897 and winning the Nobel Prize for that in 1906. So this era around the 1910s and the early 1900s is filled with all these fascinating things going on in science. And if you go just before that, into the 1880s, that's where our main character today, Louis Fry Richardson, was born in 1881. He was born into a highly religious Quaker family, yet he studied science and mathematics under a number of Greek teachers at Bootham Science School, Durham and King's College, and one of his professors was J.J. Thompson, the man who discovered the electron as a key component of the atom. So he was surrounded with great scientific minds all throughout his life. And he would eventually go on to get a job at the meteorological office that was established even before he was born back in 1854 to help mariners avoid sailing into storms, since aviation was becoming an evolving field, and planes obviously are even more sensitive to the weather than ships. It was time for the meteorological office to take their work even more seriously. And Louis Fry Richardson, with his scientific and mathematical training, thought that that would be a good place to bring his work. Now, not every whirl in history is good. There are plenty of dark whirls. World War I saw two and a half million men enlist in the UK military. It brought some lesser whirls along with it, such as the scientific revolution of the gun, specifically the machine gun, and in order to combat those, trench warfare was also created. The new field of aviation had its own whirl. The concept of dropping bombs from an airplane became something new. Sometimes in history, these worlds make us think, maybe we don't want to do this, but if we don't, somebody else is going to. At the time of World War One, and particularly as a devout Quaker who was raised in a highly religious household, Richardson was against fighting in the war. He was a conscientious objector, one of nearly 16,000. Richardson himself was caught up in the big whirl of the scientific revolution, as that's what he was raised on, and that's how he was trained to think. But this littler whirl of World War One was feeding. And he and others couldn't see themselves escaping it. When his country forced him to make a choice, he looked within for answers. He couldn't escape participating in some manner, so he turned to prayer for advice, and believing God answered him directly, he joined the ambulance corpse, befitting his greater good moral philosophy. He still witnessed horrific effects of war, he still faced chaos and the destruction of humanity, and he looked for a means of coping. Oftentimes, when faced with such difficulty, moral ambiguity, lack of security, we turn to things that we know and that we understand, or at least feel we understand. Up until this point, Lewis Fry Richardson's career had been at the meteorological office. And the military also needed better weather prediction in order to save lives and make military operations more successful. Richardson had the meteorological experience, and he had the education to make this into something. It became his ambition to apply science and mathematics to weather prediction to be able to correctly forecast weather hours or days in advance. It was his escape from the sad reality that was happening around him during this crazy period in the world. Richardson was able to think up the forecast factory. Now here's a British sounding accent to read you Lewis Fry Richardson's description of his grand designs for the weather-predicting forecast factory.

SPEAKER_00: 9:02

After so much hard reasoning, may one play with a fantasy. Imagine a large hall like a theatre, except that the circles and galleries go right round through the space usually occupied by the stage. The walls of this chamber are painted to form a map of the globe. The ceiling represents the north polar regions, England is in the gallery, the tropics in the upper circle, Australia on the dress circle, and the Antarctic in the pit. A myriad of computers, or people who compute are at work upon the weather of the part of the map where each sits, but each computer tends only to one equation or part of an equation. The work of each region is coordinated by an official of higher rank. Numerous little night signs display the instantaneous values so that neighbouring computers can read them. Each number is thus displayed in three adjacent zones so as to maintain communication to the north and south on the map. From the floor of the pit, a tall pillar rises to half the height of the hall. It carries a large pulpit on its top. In this sits the man in charge of the whole theatre. He is surrounded by several assistants and messengers. One of his duties is to maintain a uniform speed of progress in all parts of the globe. In this respect, he is like the conductor of an orchestra in which the instruments are slide rules and calculating machines. But instead of waving a baton, he turns a beam of rosy light upon any region that is running ahead of the rest, and a beam of blue light upon those who are behind hand. For senior clerks in the central pulpit, are collecting the future weather as fast as it is being computed and dispatching it by pneumatic carrier to a quiet room. There it will be coded and telephoned to the radio transmitting station. Messengers carry piles of used computing forms down to a storehouse in the cellar. In a neighbouring building there is a research department where they invent improvements. But there is much experimenting on a small scale before any change is made in the complex routine of the computing theatre. In a basement, an enthusiast is observing eddies in the liquid lining of a huge spinning bowl. But so far the arithmetic proves the better way. In another building are all the usual financial, correspondence, and administrative offices. Outside are playing fields, houses, mountains, and lakes. For it was thought that those who compute the weather should breathe of it freely.

SPEAKER_01: 11:04

That was Lewis Fry Richardson's description of the forecast factory. In modern day would never be the architecture of the solution because computers exist. Computers not in the form of people performing computations, but computers in the form of CPUs and GPUs that solve millions of equations in fractions of a second and can easily coordinate amongst themselves and perform all of this with far more accuracy and less error than the three to sixty-four thousand estimated humans it would have taken to carry out this process. Still, it's nice to know that people dream grand dreams even when they don't see an alternate route for practical technology. In Richardson's wildest dreams, he likely did not understand that today I would have a computer in front of me that could fit on my lap and whose computational power would exceed all of those computers sitting in that great hall that he imagined calculating by hand by millions of times. What it would have required is a business model in the form of understanding who's going to pay for it, which would have been much more likely during the war, as if you could tell the government, we can predict weather, and our enemies will not be able to, then it's highly possible that you could get funding for a country seeking an edge in war. Post-war. The weather is still important. There's still uses for aviation, especially as it's starting to take a commercial twist post-war. There's agricultural applications for understanding the weather. But things weren't like today. You couldn't get a thousand subscribers or a million subscribers all on a credit card. That just wasn't a thing. So you were mostly looking to either some sort of government, military funding, academic funding, and you would have had to be somebody who was very business savvy and entrepreneurial minded to make this work. Now, having thought of this while the war was going on, the war would end eventually, and the world would need to get back to normal, putting those horrific events in the past and sharing a vision of a brighter future. However, for Richardson, this is where his ideas would meet their reality. First, predicting the weather was an impractical amount of manual labor. Richardson did months of hand calculations in order to predict a six-hour advanced weather prediction. And even that produced an unrealistic answer. Unfortunately, the nature of weather systems is chaotic. Small rounding errors or uncertainties in starting conditions compound quickly and make long forecasts nearly impossible. And finally, there really wasn't real-time instrumentation and the tools needed for accurate measurement to introduce accurate boundary conditions. So when you take that with the chaotic nature and small uncertainties quickly spiraling into larger ones, it made it very difficult for the time period that Lewis Fry Richardson was in to have powerful weather prediction capabilities. All of those technical challenges could have been overcome with enough desire, passion, seek for funding, but Lewis Fry Richardson was facing a number of internal dilemmas. And these are something that I think most people don't think about when they choose their problem. The first is that Louis Fry Richardson was trying to discuss the academic nature of weather prediction. But due to his conscientious objector status in the war, he wasn't allowed to hold an academic post. And that lowered his chances of being taken serious or gaining funding from the government. Richardson also had a strong sense of moral beliefs tied to his Quaker upbringing. While at the time he was doing this work, he thought predicting the weather was a good avenue for somebody who wanted to help in a nonviolent way. However, once somebody pointed out that weather prediction could be used to assist in chemical weapons deployment, he stopped working on it. He felt that it no longer was in alignment with his morals, and that there was other mathematical and scientific problems that he could work on. I think this is interesting for anybody who's read about the development of the atomic bomb. Because this very much contrasts with Oppenheimer, who may have been concerned about the usage of the nuclear weapon that they were creating in the Manhattan Project, but understood directly that if they don't do this work, somebody else might. And if somebody else controls such power, then it is very likely that you want to be closer to it rather than at the whims of somebody else. And lastly, Richardson faced a dilemma of identity or an identity crisis. Is he an academic? Or is he a businessman entrepreneur? To bring the forecast factory to life, you definitely need to be more of the latter. But most of Lewis Fry Richardson's experience was being around academics, like J.J. Thompson, who discovered the electron. That doesn't turn into a business, but predicting weather forecasts, that certainly is. So Richardson made his choice. He moved on from the problem. He cited resistance of being taken seriously as a conscientious objector, the fact that it could be used for chemical weapons, and the fact that he had other academic pursuits worth chasing after. In Lewis Fry Richardson's case, not all was lost. In the 1950s, ENIAC was the first computer to do processing on the weather phenomenon. Richardson would hear about this work a few years before his death, providing him some relief that his work did contribute to the larger base of scientific knowledge in society. Ultimately, he would not derive many financial benefits from the efforts that he had put forth. Especially when we compare Louis Fry Richardson to John Davis. The first is a simple comparison where they were similar. And that's that experiences lead us to the problems we tackle. John Davis built the bowling lane oil machine because he was working as a lane man and saw a problem with consistency in the lanes. Lewis Fry Richardson tackled weather prediction because he was raised going to scientific schools and colleges and then worked in the meteorological office. Both of those experiences, for both of those men, drove them to pick the problems they wanted to work on. It's possible that both of these people let life take them to the places that they were in, and then from there sought to solve challenges that they found. But if you're not like that, and you know that you have a specific area, whether it's automotive or aerospace or something that you want to tackle, and you're not there today, then you need to get there because you won't see the problems and the challenges that exist without that experience. The second item that you can take away from this is that your identity can get in the way. If you feel like you're entrepreneurial, you need to be entrepreneurial. If you feel like that's not you, you need to either change your opinion if you want to be, or you need to be comfortable with who you are. And the example here is that John Davis, from the first episode, his identity was that he was a lane oil mechanic. And he was solving problems for other lane oil mechanics. And over time solving these challenges, he grew into more of a businessman. So your identity can shift. But in Richardson's case, I believe that he spent most of his life believing he's an academic. And while academics solve complex challenges in mathematics and they come up with theories, they don't necessarily come up with the real-world application, which is generally more of an entrepreneur's gambit. So if you're not very clear on your identity, maybe you need to think about it more and really know who you are before you choose what sort of problems you work on. Now I think less often, and particularly in times of peace rather than war, people don't always ask themselves, are they morally aligned with their work? But I think you can't do your best work if you're really not into it. I can think of a industry that's growing at the moment, the cannabis industry. And there's probably all sorts of engineers working on problems and equipment for extraction devices, creating all sorts of things related to that industry. If you're against the usage of that product, then perhaps that's not the right industry for you to be in. So before you get started on a project, or take a role, it might behoove you to think, am I morally aligned with this work, or is there anything that could come up that I will not agree with in this space? Another point to take away here is in the first episode, we talked about how the lane oil machine proliferated amongst bowling centers because it was seen as a weapon for improving the customer experience. And once your competition had it, you needed to have it too. I believe Richardson missed a real opportunity here because weather prediction certainly falls under the same category. That if Richardson could have convinced the military during wartime that weather prediction was going to be critical for their success in the war, and that it would be a competitive advantage in the war, he could have easily found the funding to create his forecast factory. And today, weather prediction obviously exists in a number of forms. There's the news is showing you what the weather is, there's weather sites that you can get subscriptions to, weather apps. The value was there. But the moral alignment with that was not in Richardson's favor. Neither was his identity as an academic. He would have had to be an entrepreneur pitching high-ranking military officials or high-ranking government officials that money needs to be allocated to this because it's going to give us an unfair advantage in the war. It's going to save lives. Another takeaway is that the morality aspect that stopped him from doing this is a bit ironic. Because yes, it can be used for warfare, but it could have also been used to end the war more quickly by giving one side an unfair advantage, which could have saved lives. When it comes to that, obviously it's a bit of, it just depends on your perspective and how you feel, but sometimes we let things cloud our vision of a greater good. And finally, I'd like to come back to Louis Fry Richardson's saying: big worlds have little worlds that beat on velocity, little worlds have lesser worlds and on and on to viscosity. Some of the worlds that we're being caught up in today that are shaping everything is artificial intelligence, energy, and electrification. And in recent history, even COVID was a temporary lesser whirl that's still shaping things like work from home and other sort of work methods. And so oftentimes we're at the mercy of these worlds that are kind of changing everything about the way we work. But one thing that I'd like to point out about that saying, as he points out, there's lesser and lesser and lesser worlds until you get to viscosity. And viscosity is essentially just resistance. So one thing to note is if you're picking a whirl to get caught up in that you think is going to change the world, if it's too small, you're actually too close to all the resistance. And there won't be enough will, money, interest to bring that to life. How you decide that it's too small, that's very problem specific, and it's very based on perspective. This is a very generalized word of caution, but aiming too low can lead to more failure than aiming too high. It's been great creating these first two episodes, and there are many more ideas to come. You can help this podcast be successful by ensuring to subscribe or keep checking back to find out when there's new episodes released. I would love to connect with you on LinkedIn. You can find my LinkedIn profile on the episode description page. And if you would connect with me there, that would be greatly appreciated as I'm trying to build an engineering community who's happy to connect and share and discuss episodes. And you're free to reach me there at any time. For a quick teaser on the topic for the next episode, please stay tuned after the music, and I'll give you a few hints about what we'll be talking about and who we may be looking at as a case study. On the next episode, we're going to talk about finding the right people. And that's something that today may seem easy, but it's actually an underutilized skill. And historically, this was not an easy concept. And I'm gonna go back in the past over a hundred years and talk about a very specific figure in Chicago's history, and how he was put in charge of bringing together a big group of incredible thinkers to build something amazing. And we'll talk about how if you want to do something big, you're gonna need to find the right people, and how you can go about doing that. So I look forward to seeing you back here on our next episode. Thank you for being such a faithful subscriber and so interested in our future episodes.