TQI_S2018_01

They had mainframe computers though. There was no such thing as a PC okay, personal computer. And in fact I was the first person in this department to word process my thesis. My doctoral thesis is right and left justified. I did it on the mainframe computer at MIT okay. And that was back in the early 70s. When I remember we got a little computer for the lab, it had 4K of storage okay. It was a Wang computer with 4K of storage. My first word processor had 64K of memory. Anyway, actually original Apple II had 64K. You know, you don't even know what that means today, right? 4K, that's an email. Anyway, in any case. Anyone ever heard of the Wang Center downtown, the big Performing Arts Center okay? Well, Dr. Wang sold these little computers, which we paid like in '70 we paid like $4,000 for this 4K computer okay. It was probably, if you could look at the Moore plots and stuff, he probably was a dollar a bit back then for memory okay. Prices have come down.

Anyway, so I have no idea how many people are going to come. Someone emailed me yesterday and said, is this an online course or a live course or both? And the answer is, it's both. But the students are more and more turning it into an online course, which is fine, and we're trying to adapt to that, and I'll talk about that as we go on.

Go on. It's now 9:05 so I can start lecturing. I'm Tom Eagar and the other two lecturers are here. Dr. Simone Belmar, raise your hand so they can tell, okay, and he has extra hair. And then in the back with less hair is Steve Lyons. They're both, well we're all three MIT grads so far as that goes. I actually have a permanent office here. The other two, this is a temporary office for Simone for the last ten years, and Steve actually works for a law firm. Actually the law firm even has his brother's name — no, his name. And Steve will be here to lecture except when he has to go to lecture in front of the Supreme Court. Are you doing that this year? No, see, he already did that. Oh okay, so what was that case? See, that's what everyone always wants to know — is, did you win? Okay, what was the case? Yeah okay, he'll talk about it. So you got to take his course okay.

So the three of us will be lecturing live. There is a sign-in sheet that's going around because I don't trust the Registrar. There are actually, in the last couple of years this room was full on the first day of class, was sort of standing room only, and the next day was down considerably, because some students, many students, will take this as an online course. You see Brian's in the back and he's videotaping, and we have a couple of other students who will be here that I pay. I've been paying students to videotape my class for the last 26 years. And what happened, well, I'll tell the story someday, but I was the first person at MIT ever to offer credit at a distance okay. Now it was because of me. I was part of an experiment called the Do Something committee and we actually did something, and I was the one who did the experiment. Video and tutored video instruction is what they call it at Stanford, and they were way ahead of MIT on that.

The schedule is every day until we complete. And if you go to Stellar, you'll find a list of who's lecturing which day. This is on Stellar as of about half an hour ago. Today's an intro and we'll all talk. Tomorrow I'll lecture, Thursday Simone will lecture, and Friday Steve will lecture. So you'll get one of each of us this first week, and then it goes by who's in town that day that week okay. So the next week, like next week, I'm not around at all, and so it will be Simone and Steve. And then the week after that I do three days. Anyway, so you will have to follow if you're taking one of the modules. Each one of us is going to be doing a live module, and there's about a dozen or more video modules from prior years, and I'll explain some of that.

The time is 9 to 10 a.m. in this room, and it turns out I get students — how many people here are from the Materials department? Okay great. How many people from Mechanical Engineering? Okay. How many people from the Sloan School? Okay. Anybody I miss, what department? Yes — civil engineering, I've heard of that, it's number one right? Yes. Architecture, great. So we've got three schools represented and five departments or whatever okay. It's not uncommon. And the one time I can find other than four o'clock Friday afternoon to lecture, which I'm not going to do okay, is nine o'clock. And so, but because of that, like a lot of the Sloan people, they have classes that start at 8:30. So that's why I've made it into an online course. It was originally started as an online course back in 1991 or '92, whenever.

We will finish the live lectures in the first half this semester, actually before spring break okay. You'll have papers due — that's what your assignment is, and I'll give you more details on that. I like to call it flexibility in a stress-free environment, and I'll talk a little bit about my teaching philosophy a little bit. There are many modules. If you go to the website over the years, and I've gotten — the years that I've listed, the oldest one up here is probably the casting one. There were ones before that going 25 years before, but they may only go back for these topics for me. And so this is supposed to be a structural materials course, you know, welding metallurgy, material selection, deformation processing, casting. And there's some things that I've been slipping in, like what is engineering okay, just things that I'm interested in. And I've been slipping more and more into the economic side of things so far as that goes.

Doctor Belmar has been doing these for a number of years as well, and he tends to be a mechanical behavior metallurgist by background, but he's been doing structural materials — materials, structural materials processing. But this year he's going into, well I'll let you introduce what you're going to talk about this year, but it's going to be startups okay. Neil Jenkins, who's still in Ohio, who was one of my doctoral students, and then he went on and got an MD, and one year when I was on sabbatical he actually taught non-destructive evaluation of the human body. What does a doctor look for when you walk into their office for a physical exam? And I'll tell you the secret: touch, smell, taste, sound, and what's the other? I don't remember. Okay, because the five senses okay, they use their five senses, and they smell you, and there are certain diseases that have different odors okay. So anyway, and he talks about that for 12 lectures. And Steve Lyons has been lecturing a number of times on law and technology, and he's going to be giving those live. And you don't always get someone with his type of professional qualifications and practice teaching at MIT.

What are your requirements? This is a 12-unit course. That means about 36 lectures live or by video. And that means six modules. The modules used to be 12-lecture modules and you had to take three, because the students — and not just the students here but the MITx students — they want things in smaller bites. And so I guess last semester is when we started this, we're going to six-lecture modules. So now you have to take 36 lectures and watch them either live or on video, and they're all on the website. You just click on eager-tot.mit.edu [eagar-tqi.mit.edu], and it was updated last night so everything's up to date. Some of them are double modules because back when we were doing 12, you'll get credit for two modules of your six by doing one of those. You don't have to come to class again if you don't want to listen to the three of us live on the topics we're doing this term. I've had undergraduates take this course three times, not because they had to repeat it but because you can do different modules, and it actually says that in the catalog. So some students have taken this course — 10% of their undergraduate education has been this course in various forms. So you get to design your own course. If you're interested in casting there's one on casting. I've been talking to Mike Tarkanian about doing a six-lecture module on cast okay, in the future. Anyway, so 36 lectures, six single modules or double modules in some cases.

And when you go to the website and you click on it, it'll tell you all of — all the lectures now are on YouTube. Anybody in the world — I get emails from South Africa thanking me for my lectures okay. So I was sort of doing MITx before MITx existed. You've got to prepare, what, this next month — oh not this next month, but a one-page outline of each lecture module, and we have some of these on the website, and we can talk about that. But I will talk a little bit later about, a lecturer can only get across one or two ideas in an hour okay. Everything else is just developing those ideas. And you have to learn to synthesize what they said in that lecture okay, in an elevator talk okay, one or two lines that summarizes what the person described. And it's amazing to me, as I review these, students watch the same modules and you read what they got out of it, what they synthesized, and it's like they watched two different things. But it's because you see things through your own eyes okay, and that's fine. I mean as long as you're learning something that's fine.

So you will have to prepare three to six pages by the end of the term describing what you got out of each lecture, within one or two sentences. So you can put six or eight of these on one page, and that's why it's not a lengthy assignment. But every time you watch a lecture, just say at the end, well what did I learn, and write it down. And you get to submit it okay at the end of the term. That's not too hard. It says a 10-page paper, yes, okay. I don't want more than 10 pages because we have to read them okay. But it can be on any topic of your choice. I mean some students do pole-vault poles, which are an interesting — very interesting composite material. Why? Because they do pole vaulting on the MIT track team okay. Other people do old doorknobs and the designs in these European, you know, four or five hundred year old European buildings, what do the doorknobs look like. I mean one student did adobe, and I didn't know there were two types of adobe, one made from mud and the other one made from manure okay. Do you know the advantage of manure adobe? Keeps the flies away. They smell a little bit. Anyway.

And then you have to have your 10-page paper in, and I've got some dates here later, by about April 1st, that time frame. And then you will have to review three or four other students' papers okay and edit and comment on them, because your papers are going to be published in the MIT Series in Materials and Technology, which is a website associated with this course. And if you want to see some previous papers, you can go there and see last year's or the year before's course papers. The student has to maintain the ownership but must assign the rights to MIT. Steve can justify all this for me — he helped me get the form. But this is one way for you to learn about some of the ownership rights that go with things, and your rights when you publish things. It should be editable by future students so use Microsoft Word, most people have access to that. Ten page maximum plus texts and figures and tables, so it could be an 80-page document if you want, but I only want to read ten pages.

You need to reference your sources in a scientific way. An article paraphrasing a Wikipedia article will not count. And Brian knows how to do the search on the plagiarism websites. So he actually found four or five that I reviewed, and I didn't take action last fall, but I spent a little bit of time after he pointed them out to me. I'd like more than just two or three references. Here's this — this is all you're really doing for the course, is a ten page paper on something you're interested in. Come on, you must be interested in something besides Wikipedia okay. And I'd like — although people have been doing — writing an author biography, tell me who you are, where you came from okay, that would go on, and so other people would know. So the topics really are anything you want. This is something I put together a couple of years ago when we started doing this, but now you can actually go see what other students have done. Any topic you like. And my thesis is you do a better job if you're talking about something that's interesting to you okay. And there's nothing wrong with paraphrasing your thesis and turning it into a ten page document, assuming your thesis interests you okay.

Don't be too general. I don't want a description, and the old MIT joke about the final exam — it was very brief, it just said, describe the universe and give three examples okay. I don't want that. And some people say well, I'm going to talk about how automobiles are made. Oh sure okay, six hundred billion dollar worldwide industry and you're going to describe it in ten pages? Only I would have to do that okay. Don't be too broad, don't try to cover too much. And I want to know what you think. I'm not just interested in your reviewing something. MIT students actually often have opinions and ideas and different ways of looking at things, so I want to plagiarize that from you okay. So I don't think we need that.

So the grading. No quiz, no tests, no quizzes, no finals. Yay okay. I hated them when I was a student okay, and so I thought, well why do I make students go through it okay. I don't even like grading them, and I certainly don't like making them up. Do you know how hard it is to write a good thermodynamics question? It takes two days to write an unambiguous question. However, that's why you get ambiguous questions okay on your exams, because it's too hard to write a good question okay. So I solved that problem, I don't do it okay.

Your submission, these are the due dates. You're supposed to, by the 23rd, which is not that far away, a half page telling me what you're going to write about. And I don't want, "I'm going to describe the universe and give three examples." I want something fairly specific, like how softballs are made, or how softballs differ from baseballs, hardballs, or something like that okay. And something that can be done in ten pages. There's no issue here of collusion. The dean's office sends me, the chair of the faculty every year — every semester sends me — "you have to tell the students what is appropriate behavior so that we don't get them sent to the Committee on Discipline for plagiarism or cheating or whatever." How can you cheat on a quiz if there's no quiz? So I resolve that problem okay. There's nothing wrong with talking to your classmates about anything you want in this class okay. You could learn more from your classmates than you can from the lecturers.

Evaluate on your paper and participation in editing the others' papers. Your papers due by the 23rd — that's right before spring break, that's why I did that. It's not April 1st, just before spring break, and there's actually some advantages to you for that. Anyway, edits of three or four others — once you turn them in, we will probably pick topics that have some similarity and then we will ask a group of three or four students to edit each other's papers. Editing them doesn't mean — or reviewing them does not mean editing them. You can, you know, point out the typos, but you don't have to rewrite paragraphs. You can just say "unclear" okay, which means they got to rewrite it, right, if it is unclear. You don't just say that to be nasty okay. And your final paper is due May 11th. But the editing of the others is due on the 26th, so you have about two weeks in there to make the edits of what will go on the website okay. So it's sort of like doing a review paper of a real published paper in the scientific literature.

Student: [inaudible question about timing]

No, the in-person lectures will hopefully be done by March 10th. I'm in — February, yeah, March 10th. It is sort of a half-semester class. We front-load everything into every day okay. Well, you don't have to prepare for anything. I mean we'll give you some reading, but you're not going to be quizzed on it, so if you don't do it, whose fault is that? I mean I'm not paying tuition okay. If I was paying your tuition I'd want you to do some of the work, but I'm not paying it, I don't even get very much of it okay. So look, if you come to this class because you're trying to please me, then you're just wasting your time okay. You should be coming to the class to try to learn something, and that could be a challenge here, but anyway.

Completion of three one-page outlines — I told you about that, that's on the modules. I said three, I should have said six — three to six depending on the modules, but it's only supposed to be about three pages total, because it's like two or three lines on each lecture okay. 36 lectures, you put 12 on a page, that's three pages okay. So that's what's required. And you have all semester to do it, but if you're smart you'll have it all done essentially by spring break okay. If you have your ten page paper done by spring break, you're done. Half semester, yeah. You'll get three or four other papers to read in April. It shouldn't take you more than half an hour to read those three ten-page papers and edit them. And then you will get comments back from the other students, it shouldn't take you more than an hour. So yes it is a full semester course, and there's a whole four hours worth of work in the second half of the semester. Right? So you're right okay.

In fact, that brings up the old Joel Moses story. Joel Moses was the professor — event — head of Electrical Engineering, then Dean of Engineering, and then Provost here at MIT back in the old days. And Joel — Joel's now retired but — was, he had a big beard, you know, very rabbinical. In fact he had some rabbinical training. In fact, they always like to tell the story when he was head of Electrical Engineering and they just hired Hesus [Jesús] del Alamo as a faculty member in Electrical Engineering. And Joel wrote a letter telling Hesus [Jesús] that he was being offered the job as an assistant professor. He says, "Dear Jesus, welcome to the promised land. Moses." And so Joel had some humor. Anyway, Joel — the only time I didn't see him laugh at a joke — he used to have the head of Civil Engineering tell a joke to begin every Engineering Council meeting. And this particular head of Civil Engineering was on his last day on Engineering Council, he was stepping down, and Joel says, well tell us your last joke. And the guy says, what's the difference between an Engineering Council and a daycare center? And nobody knew. And the answer was, a daycare center has adult leadership. Joel didn't laugh at that okay. He didn't particularly appreciate that joke. I thought it was pretty good myself.

But getting back to Joel's joke about "you're right too" — so he was telling this story about this rabbi who, these two men came to see him, and the first one was complaining about the other person. And the rabbi listens to him and he says, you're right. And then the other person tells his side of the story, and the rabbi says, you're right. And the rabbi's wife, who's in the background, says, rabbi how can they both be right? He says, you're right too. So, you're right, it's a half-semester course or a full semester course — we're all right okay. So there's the five requirements. You will learn something by reading the other students.

Student: [question about the three summaries]

Yes — three summaries, that's just from the old days, I should enter that. Three to six, three to six pages of summaries — whatever you want. I'm trying to get you to get them down to one or two sentences summaries. I don't want a half-page summary on each lecture, 'cause I got to read it okay. You got to multiply by all the students. It's really, it's for you okay, it's not for us. I mean, you know, I get different things out of the lecture. The students learn from each other.

And so what happened, as I put these things in the wrong places — so I'm going to be teaching Total Quality Management, and I'll get to that tomorrow okay. Why am I teaching Total Quality Management this semester? Because I've been listening to Total Quality Management for years, and once — when one of the heads of department, twenty-five years ago or 20 years ago, I actually had a bunch of undergraduates in the Chipman Room, and I said, well, have any of you ever heard of Total Quality Management, what is it? And one of the students says, "it's BS." And I said, well, you may be right, but why do some of the top CEOs of the country believe it is a revolution in manufacturing okay? And so we're going to spend six hours exploring what it is and whether it's a revolution. And the bottom line is, you're both right okay. It is both. And it has some real content, and so I'm going to try to help you understand which part is which okay. And Simone — there you go, he can tell you what he's doing.

Simone Belmar: Thank you. So a couple things. First of all, I'm Simone Belmar, I was a PhD here in Course Three, I graduated in 2006. I worked a lot in consulting — technical consulting for an engineering firm, a little bit like some of the big ones that you hear, doing a lot of failure analysis but also involved in project design and modification with respect to materials. So my background, as Professor Eagar mentioned, is mechanics and materials. It does come into how I lecture. So with respect to what's available online on the Stellar, there's a six-hour on physical metallurgy, it goes through the formation of essentially metals and plastics — how a Hawaiian island rope is different than something that's been injection molded, things like that — talks about heat treatment and corrosion. A lot of people that attended that class over the past few years really liked how in two hours I can explain metal corrosion and all those galvanic effects in a simple way. So that's a six-hour module that's available, from past fall — I did that last fall, so it's very recent.

Simone Belmar: The other six-hour that I posted — and those have the notes with them, the PDFs as well, and they're all in a zip file for each module — so the second one is structural materials in service. So over there it's talking very specifically about material selection but then how you specify material, so how you tell the shop what to use and how to do that. It talks about some of the specific details for processing, and then it moves on to more the usage aspects, on factors of safety, and then there are examples of failure analysis. So it's a little bit more applied. There's a discussion on welding in there, and it's a very all-encompassing six hours.

Simone Belmar: So what I'm going to do this semester live — and I hope for some participation with you — because I am going through a process of starting a company from the ground up. And it's not all done, but I've been talking to a lot of people about it, and that's probably a good time for me to have this as a lecturer, because let's say two years from now, it's either going to be really good or really bad, and I won't remember what has been needed for me over the past three years. So I started three years ago, I have a team, and we're developing essentially a new kind of hardness tester. It's very different — it works by frictional sliding, to some extent it's an extension of my thesis. It's a portable device to go out, test bridges, test pipelines for the yield strength, very precise. And for the market it's something new because right now they have to do cut-outs, things like that. So it's a big change for the users not to have data, now they can have that data. And we just went from last year — our sales, the revenue of making this test, we went from $200,000 in 2016, last year was $500,000, and we're definitely going between $1 and $2 million this year. So we're just really taking this up, and we're supported by the National Science Foundation.

Simone Belmar: So as far as the content of these six hours that I'll give a lot of next week, starting Thursday and then a lot of it next week, I'm going to teach you a little bit from personal experience but also what I have seen, and what the National Science Foundation is teaching us, which is very different than what our customers want to do sometimes. So your customer would be like, "well, get it done and then we'll talk." No, this is not how it works. If you really want this, you're going to work with us now. It's a tied — the National Science Foundation taught us to do things, and it's a lot of discipline, it's a lot of work to go from essentially nothing to a piece of equipment. So it's a test instrument that we're going to talk about. Professor Eagar, when he discusses material innovation, points out that if you're going to put a new material on an aircraft — it's one of the modules over the years — it's going to take more than 10 years even if the material is ready to go. Well, that is not how we can function nowadays in thinking of innovation. There's not even a large company that's going to put money towards something that may have returns in — you know, maybe the university, but maybe — but even that I don't know.

Simone Belmar: So the, you know, the short time-span required to go into an innovation cycle, I believe, is one of the drivers where a lot of times it's taken on by small organizations, startups. We'll talk a little bit about that. But I think the main idea is, I want to emphasize what everybody will call R&D, research and development. It's such a broad term because it has two completely different concepts. The concept of research, that's relatively fundamental, and then the development is just before you're ready to go into operation okay. So in my mind, between those two, you do make some inventions. After you've done some research, you think about the stuff and maybe you have some great ideas. They have to turn into a real innovation, so something that is actually practical and serves a purpose. Then you can do engineering to make sure that it's going to fulfill a specific need, and then the development aspect is where it depends which company you work for. But like now, we have a tool, it's been blind-tested, it's proven it works, it's got all the specifications. For some of our customers they still call it R&D, but for them it is not research, it's development, it's how they can take it into their normal operation.

Simone Belmar: So we're really going to cover a lot of the basics, and it doesn't matter to me — I'm going to teach the class assuming some of you are going to work for big companies, some of you can become professors, and some of you may be more on the technical side like I have been. So I'm going to try to address all aspects. I have a friend who works for a very big consulting firm that buys startups — that's what they do okay. They invest and they pay a lot. I wish I was developing something they could buy. So I'm going to describe a little bit the process so you're aware. And I do want to say, it's my strong opinion, if you get something out of the class — that it is a very important part of today's economy at this point, startup companies. And that's the belief of the National Science Foundation. So it was really highly supported by the Obama administration, I think it is still supported by the Trump administration, to invest in small companies to go and take a problem and resolve it in a time frame that just wouldn't happen as part of our larger games. So I think that was ten minutes.

Tom: It was actually about 25 or 30 years ago that some people in Washington did studies and found that all the new jobs were created in small companies. Well, there's a good reason for that, we can talk about why the reason is. But Congress said, we're going to take 10% of all the research money that we give away and we're going to put it in small business innovation research, SBIR. Well, they've been doing it for 25 years and they've seen thousands of startup companies, some succeed or fail. And the National Science Foundation, which is a big surprise to me when someone explained it to me, has a course that they force you — if you get a grant, you must take this week-long course. And so he's going to give you the abbreviated version of that week-long NSF course, which is based on billions of dollars worth of research in startup companies and what they've learned for 25 years okay.

Simone Belmar: So right, this instrument innovation, when evaluated, customers just want their report, and they want us going to the site without help. But so we have our narrator, so it's the whole game, and we have... well...

Steve Lyons: You may be asking, what is a lawyer doing standing up in front of a material science class? You may, in fact, you may be asking, why do I have to sit through a material science class where some lawyer gets to stand up and present something to me? And the answer to that, I hope, is that Professor Eagar and Simone and I have identified an important gap in the education here at MIT. While we train you all to be great researchers, great scientists, to be the tops in your field in material science and civil engineering, in all kinds of science, what we don't teach you anything about here is how to protect those inventions, how to protect those ideas, how to protect the innovation that you're taught here, that we try to bring out of you and tell you to go out in the real world and apply as entrepreneurs.

Steve Lyons: And what we hope to do here is to provide you with the armor plating that you need in order to protect those important innovations, those inspirations, those ideas, the product of your hard work. Some of the ideas you have today may be the best ideas you ever have in your entire life. And some of you here — Simone being I think patient zero as far as this is concerned — some of the innovations that they developed as doctoral students here providing them with a means to make a living, and hopefully a very lucrative one as time goes on. The things that you'll learn here you're going to apply hopefully in real life, and the question is, how do you protect those innovations, those ideas, that intellectual property?

Steve Lyons: And so what I'm doing here standing up in front of you is hopefully providing you with the key to protecting that intellectual property. We'll discuss what intellectual property is, how you encounter it. You may find it unusual that a lawyer is standing up in front of you here in a material science class, but let me assure you, from the minute you cross the threshold of the Infinite Corridor here, in this class, in this school, you're in contact with intellectual property every step of the way. Whether it happens to be yours, someone else's, whether it happens to be published on the walls, or appear online, or in a book, or in another student's paper, you're constantly bombarded with intellectual property, and you need to know how to protect yours and respect the intellectual property rights of others.

Steve Lyons: So hopefully what I'm going to be able to do here is construct a course, mold it to your specific circumstances, because if anything, if I've taught — if I've learned anything from the years I've been doing this, especially in the last six months where students continue to contact me with their own intellectual property problems — this is something that you may not realize you're encountering now on a day-to-day basis, but as time goes by you'll be feeling more sensitive to it, and you're going to find more and more that this is going to be something important to you. So I'm going to design and provide you with the information and the course that allows you to protect the inspiration, the ideas, the intellectual property that you through your own hard work here at the school are going to be able to develop, and hopefully, like Simone and many others that have come through this course, provides you with a way to make a living as you cross the threshold into the real world.

Steve Lyons: And I can only tell you one thing — I can only tell you one thing — that you're all very lucky to be in this course. If I were a student here again, the first thing I would do is I would sign up on this list to take Professor Eagar's course. He really is one of the old old-fashioned lecturers here. He's — I call him the Rosetta Stone of MIT. He is the type of professor that I had when I was going here. You don't find too many people like Professor Eagar nowadays here. Some people would say that's a good thing, but I say that's not a good thing. And you're very lucky to be in this course. I think you're going to enjoy it very much. Thank you.

Tom: Questions? I win — that's it, that's a dead object that no one can understand. Yes, question?

Student: [question about finding the modules on YouTube]

It should be clearer now that Neil posted things last night. But yes, if you just go to YouTube it's impossible — I tried to do that. But if you go to my website it will give you the YouTube modules, and you can click on each one in order, and it will say 1 of 12, 2 of 12, 3 of 12, and you can probably figure out the sequence from there okay. Yes, other questions?

Okay well, you're going to learn a number of things in this class that hopefully you didn't know. For example, let's say you heard me say Course One — Civil Engineering — is number one. Do you know why? Okay. No, no, there's a reason. Many times there is a reason. The first engineering school in the world — I get to tell this — some people are going to hear this other times because I find some excuse to tell it every year — the first engineering school in the world was École Polytechnique in France in the 18th century. And the word engineer in French means "maker of war machines." Comes from the Latin, means ingenuity and things like that, but in French, engineer meant maker of war machines.

And the first engineering school in the United States was West Point in 1797 or thereabouts. And until 1845, the commandant of West Point had to come from the Corps of Engineers okay. In 1823, the second engineering school in the United States was formed. It's called Rensselaer Polytechnic, in Troy New York. Anybody from Troy? Of course not — all of you live in a decent neighborhood okay. But Troy developed an engineering program that they called civil engineering, to distinguish it from military engineering. Ah, now we know why they're called civil engineers, when everybody says it's an oxymoron anyway. And why, what were they doing in New York State in 1823 that they needed civil engineers? Yes — they were building the Erie Canal. Very good. See, things sort of fit together when you understand the context. So in some ways this is also a history class.

But to tell you the rest of the history, the next school that claims they were an engineering school in the United States was the University of Michigan in 1845. Anybody from Michigan? Well, I'll tell you they're all a bunch of liars because they didn't have any students except bears and opossums back in 1845 in Michigan. Give me a break okay. The next engineering school was MIT in 1861. But they didn't have any money until the Morrill Act, and that's another story which I won't go into. But in 1865, MIT was named — or in 1863, after the Morrill Act, they were named land-grant college of Massachusetts. They were given some land, and they opened their doors after the Civil War in 1865. And of course Course One was civil engineering because that's the only type of engineering, other than military engineering, they might have known of. That's why it's Course One at MIT. And Two — William Barton Rogers wanted to teach the mechanical arts, that's Mechanical Engineering. And Three was — now you all got hard — was geology, mining, and things like that. Metallurgy didn't come into the name until 1883. Never mind okay.

But the next part of the story, for you business school guys, I'm going to tell you the origin of Harvard's engineering school okay. From 1873 to 1917, Harvard tried to purchase MIT three times. From 1914 to 1917, students were getting a degree from both institutions. They had merged, until the Supreme Court of Massachusetts — now we're getting into the law — said you can't use the Gordon McKay trust funds at Harvard. Gordon McKay was a wealthy merchant who gave Harvard ten million dollars. You can't use the Gordon McKay trust funds to purchase the land-grant college of Massachusetts, which was MIT. So they were shot down. I have also been told, but I haven't confirmed it, the MIT faculty had a vote, turned it down. I don't think that's necessarily true since they had actually merged. But nonetheless.

So MIT had just finished building this building — it was finished in 1917, the one you're sitting in okay, my office and everything else. MIT was broke. We were bankrupt for having built these buildings. But we got out of bankruptcy because an anonymous donor, later shown to be George Eastman of Eastman Kodak — Building Six right there is called the Eastman Building. You didn't know that, it has a name. It has a little brass plaque of George Eastman. Go touch his nose, make it shiny — keep it shiny because other people have been there before you. Anyway, so MIT got out of bankruptcy.

In the meantime, Harvard didn't have an engineering school, but Andrew Carnegie had given them $100,000 to buy some land in Allston. And so the Supreme Court said they couldn't do it in 1917, and in 1921 they opened a building in Allston, and they called it — come on, what's the Harvard building in Allston — it's called the Harvard Business School. Who was on the faculty? Frederick W. Taylor was one of the people on the faculty. He's known as the father of industrial management, also known as industrial engineering okay. Harvard never thought they had an engineering school. In fact, back in the 1980s when they started coming out with the US News & World Report — who's the number one school in this and that — after about five or six years, Harvard actually showed up number eight on the top engineering schools in the country. And Derek Bok was the president of Harvard, and someone says, well what do you think about Harvard showing up at number — what is it, number eight in engineering, 'cause that's pretty good considering we don't even have an engineering school okay.

So there's now — I can add a little more to this story. What's the current name of the Harvard engineering school? Paulson, okay. So last Friday night I was having dinner with some neighbors, and this one person is — he's the Sloan grad I mentioned, who's an MIT, he's a Sloan grad who's now on the faculty at Harvard Business School. And Harvard is building their new engineering campus right across the road from Harvard Business School. That's not just because they had some land there. That was planned. When I was on Engineering Council back in the 1990s, Joel Moses, who had spent his sabbatical at Harvard Business School, came back to say they're planning to try to create an MIT up the river. And they had these plans back in the 1990s and maybe even before, because they were seeing that the world was going towards technology okay.

And MIT had an advantage because Jerry Wiesner was the president of MIT when I was a student. Said that MIT is a university polarized around science, which is true. We don't have everything, but what we have is very good. Most of the Sloan School faculty have never been to business school. I can tell you a story about that, but anyway. Harvard decided that to be the best business school in the future, you had to be associated with an engineering school. So a donor, Mr. Paulson, gave six hundred million dollars — or four hundred million, I can't remember the number — to Harvard to strengthen their business school. And what did they do? They gave it to the engineering school across the street, and they named it the Paulson School of Engineering. I'm sure there was a little more detail that I don't have in all this. But Harvard is in direct competition now.

This is not the first time they've ever been in direct competition. How many people have ever heard of the Harvard School of Public Health? Yeah. What was it originally? What was its name? It was the Harvard-MIT School of Public Health. And someone in the 1920s, a Harvard alum, gave them a big pot of money if they would take MIT's name out of it. And Harvard all through the 1950s was in deathly fear that MIT was going to start a medical school. But MIT kind of looked at it and said, it's expensive to be a medical school okay. There's a great story on that.

When Chuck Vest was Provost at Michigan and was offered the job of being president at MIT, he called up Dave Ragone. And I've heard this story directly from both Chuck Vest independently and Dave Ragone independently. Dave Ragone was a graduate of this department. He went on to Dartmouth, to be I think Dean at Dartmouth. He was Dean at Michigan, maybe Provost — I think he became Provost at Michigan — and he gave Chuck Vest tenure when he was an administrator, that's when Chuck Vest got tenure at Michigan. Anyway, they knew each other. He went on to be president of Case Western Reserve, and after eight years there he came back to MIT, and we taught thermodynamics together, and he did venture capital in the afternoon. He was worth a lot of money. He's still alive, wonderful guy. If you want to have lunch with someone, he would love to have lunch with an MIT person, just to talk. Anyway, so getting back to — I was talking about Paulson and business schools.

One night — I can't remember what I was talking about or where I was going with that story. That kind of does break — yes?

Simone Belmar: Yeah, he's only worth so much, and you have to pursue it and then try to just to protect it. It's also that from an idea, it's something that you try out, and then any of it, right? Oh, and that's a big process, and it's really what makes it something that's successful, is something that's...

Tom: Right, hopefully. Thank you, fellow, that gave me time to remember the rest of my story. So when Chuck Vest wanted to know whether he should accept the job of president of MIT, he called Dave Ragone. And Dave said, "Chuck, there's two reasons why you should accept the presidency of MIT. One, they don't have a football team, and two, they don't have a medical school." And that was why Chuck Vest accepted the presidency. So MIT didn't start a medical school. Instead, they started the Division of Health Sciences and Technology, so you can get the degree of both Harvard and MIT in medicine, Rosetta — so yeah. You've been here long enough, you learn all kinds of dirt.

So anyway, have a good time, we enjoyed talking with you. We'll figure out whether you're online or whether you're live by who shows up in the next few days okay. Thanks.