The Tinkerers Read online

  At Iowa State, MacDonald fell under the influence of the school’s dean, Anson Marston, a strong proponent of the emerging “good roads” movement. Inspired by Colonel Albert Augustus Pope, a Civil War veteran who sold the country’s first “safety bicycle,” the good roads movement was founded to protect the legislative right of cyclists.

  Think about that: modern highways were conceived of to increase the popularity of bicycles, not cars. It took an awful lot of tinkering to retrofit that idea into the highway system that ultimately helped make the United States both an economic and military superpower.

  Learning of his pupil’s experiences growing up, Marston encouraged MacDonald to write his senior thesis on the need for highways in Iowa farm country. Shortly after MacDonald’s graduation, when the state legislature gave $3,500 to Iowa State College in 1904 to form a committee to study Iowa’s highways and how they could be improved to help farmers, Marston appointed MacDonald the committee’s chief engineer at a salary of $1,000. At the advent of the automobile age, MacDonald became the first evangelist for highways. In his job to improve Iowa’s roads, he discovered rampant fraud in the construction industry that compromised the safety of the state’s bridges and culverts. Many would quickly fail, allowing disreputable construction firms to rebuild them again. Traveling the state by horse and by train, the young MacDonald was a standard-bearer for sound construction practices.

  A somber man partial to single-breasted dark suits with matching vest and tie, MacDonald exuded authority, though he also was a private man uninterested in cultivating a public image. The short, stocky MacDonald nonetheless became one of the most powerful and influential forces in twentieth-century America, an engineer with a tinkering spirit who recast the nation’s roads in a plan of his own device.

  In 1919, MacDonald was tapped by the secretary of agriculture to become chief of the federal Bureau of Public Roads in Washington, DC. His success over the next fifty years was determined by this one job offer. It was both a matter of being in the right place at the right time and having the right skills to get the job done correctly. In July 1916, President Woodrow Wilson had authorized the Federal Aid Road Act, which granted $75 million to the federal Bureau of Public Roads. But World War I interfered in the bureau’s progress, creating material and labor shortages. Engineers were taken away from state highway agencies and sent to Europe to help the war effort, and constant military traffic from Midwest and East Coast headed for Europe shredded roads that were poorly built to begin with.

  When Thomas Harris MacDonald arrived three years later in Washington, the Bureau of Public Roads was in a major rut.

  First of all, the bureau had spent a mere $500,000 of the $75 million it had been funded with and had constructed only twelve and a half miles of highway. The federal oversight of the organization, originally considered to be its greatest asset, proved to be its undoing. Federal regulations and imperious federal engineers slowed down construction.

  Second, despite a federal mandate, there was no requirement that roads constructed in one state or county link up to those in others. Improved stretches of highway were often stranded in largely unimproved areas. A consensus began building among members of Congress that the Bureau of Public Roads should be eliminated and replaced with a national highway commission. The idea was that local road planning would be traded for the federally controlled construction of three or four roads spanning the whole country.

  But MacDonald had little interest in consensus. Despite his deeply conservative nature, MacDonald was a tinkerer at heart, intent on drawing from his fifteen years of experience in Iowa to solve a problem that would determine America’s future in a way few understood at the time. There were two things he had come to understand as imperatives for getting things done in highway construction: technical expertise and cooperation.

  Informed by the concept of federalism, the evolving partnership of state and federal governments, MacDonald began crafting a revolutionary approach to building modern roads. While political seeming in nature, MacDonald’s perspective was actually forged from his years of trial and error as a civil engineer focused on road construction. He learned during those years that maintaining an openness and desire to find common ground among dissenting interests was key to creating a well-operating network of roads. He thought of the highways as a machine that needed to be tinkered with to achieve optimum efficiency. He had experienced in Iowa that local road-building left solely to its own instincts had a tendency toward corruption. And the ineffectual Bureau of Public Roads showed him that a purely national approach could lead to confusion and waste.

  Rather than viewing the national highway system as a network of roads, MacDonald viewed it as a network of organizations. Initially, he welcomed any organization that supported his cause. Among the groups he recruited were the American Automobile Association, the Rubber Association of America, the Portland Cement Association, the National Paving Brick Manufacturer’s Association, and the American Road Builders Association. In fact, MacDonald welcomed any group that endorsed his cause of constructing roads with federal aid girded by proven engineering and economic means.

  When he couldn’t find an organization that addressed the issues he cared about, he created one: the Highway Education Board. Remarkably modern seeming in both its mission and its scope, the board was designed by MacDonald to convince Americans of the vital nature of a national highway system. The group distributed fact-laden booklets and films to schools. Its speakers lectured to school assemblies. It even ran essay contests for high school students and awarded engineering college scholarships.

  But perhaps his greatest creation was the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO), which MacDonald founded in 1914. The name made it sound like just another cog in the bureaucratic machine, and it later turned into one of the most influential lobbying groups in Washington. But its genius wasn’t in its ability to lobby members of Congress, though it excelled at advising legislators about highway matters and even assisted them in writing legislation, but rather its role as a nexus for technical expertise. As one of the nation’s first technocrats, he built a system of scientific procedures to ensure that roads were being built with the best and most appropriate materials available and in the proper size and location.

  The Bureau of Public Roads became a center for research that conducted meticulous studies relating to the best ratio of sand for mixing concrete to the proper pouring conditions and curing times. Subsequently, Congress came to rely on and trust the accuracy and detail of the bureau’s reports, which couched its analyses of highway needs and conditions within a rigorously tested body of facts; and state highway departments soon began creating their own research labs, in an effort to apply MacDonald’s principles to their own local road conditions.

  In collaboration with General John J. Pershing, MacDonald created a chart of roads needed for military defense routes known as the “Pershing map,” which became the blueprint for an interstate highway system.

  MacDonald spoke of his highway machine as a “complete and economical highway transport service throughout the nation.” At an American Association of State Highway Officials annual meeting in 1926, he compared it to what he identified as the only two other “great programs of highway building within recorded history”: the Roman Empire under the rules of Julius Caesar and Constantine, and Napoleon’s France. The US program was the only one, he pointed out, that had occurred in a democracy.

  Thomas Harris MacDonald had the breadth of vision to lay out the fundamentals of the interstate highway system, but not to predict its phenomenal aftereffects. For example, MacDonald was nearly fanatical in his opposition to toll highways, fearing they hindered “freedom of the road.”

  By the early 1920s, the United States was the world’s dominant car culture, with 9 million autos on the road, representing 90 percent of the cars worldwide. The threat was no longer whether there would be enough highways to foster the American economy and the country’s militar
y prowess. The threat now was whether there would be enough road capacity. The dramatic increase in road traffic prompted legislators to push for more funding for highway construction.

  The burgeoning industries surrounding the manufacturing of automobiles also had an interest in an acceleration of road building. Steel workers, rubber manufacturers, gas station owners, insurance firms, construction companies, oil refineries, and cement plants all had a major stake in the highways of the future. The idea that the need for more highways would be a cause that needed promoting by a team of Washington lobbyists rapidly fell to the wayside. Though, of course, the lobbyists stayed and continued to hammer their agenda far after its path was clean-windshield clear.

  By 1936, MacDonald had become an interstate-promoting juggernaut. That year, the federal government provided $225 million for highway building; MacDonald participated in 160 meetings with 85 different members of the House of Representatives and Senate. He also spent ample time before House and Senate Committees making his voice heard on highway legislation.

  But MacDonald’s most challenging battle would be against the construction of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Franklin D. Roosevelt had summoned MacDonald the year earlier to reveal his plan for a series of transcontinental interstate toll highways—three east to west and three north to south—that Roosevelt dubbed superhighways. Armed with economic statistics as well as charts, maps, and heaps of construction data, MacDonald made the case for why toll roads didn’t make sense from an economic perspective (most drivers couldn’t afford them, transcontinental traffic was light).

  At first, his mountain of data seemed to have done the trick. The six superhighways remained unfunded. A world in turmoil by 1939 had prompted Roosevelt to focus on the strength of the US military instead of domestic transportation issues. The task of strengthening the ranks of US forces proved to be a sufficient employment engine, at least initially, to delay any transcontinental highway plans. American industry created thousands of jobs to address the new defense needs of the country.

  But Roosevelt remained unconvinced by MacDonald’s negative assessment. He saw superhighways as a way to spur job growth as well as a means of getting reelected for a third term. Even though defense contracts dominated much of government spending, there was still a small allotment available to build the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

  Pennsylvania had long constituted a difficult journey for both travelers and commerce. Its widely variegated topography posed a challenge, including the numerous peaks of the Appalachian range. Back to the era of George Washington and even before, the trip from Philadelphia westward was accomplished at a rate of only forty miles every two days, at best, due to poorly maintained back roads.

  In the post–Civil War era, the Pennsylvania Railroad and William Henry Vanderbilt’s New York Central Railroad constructed parallel railroad tracks across Pennsylvania. Vanderbilt was trying to retaliate for the Pennsylvania Railroad’s construction of parallel tracks to its tracks up the Hudson River. From November 1883 to August 1885, thousands of workers, many of them Italian immigrants, toiled to lay railroad beds and track through rocky western Pennsylvania. J. P. Morgan finally intervened and convinced Vanderbilt to stop building.

  But Pennsylvania’s traffic needs continued to increase. The only existing main road from east to west was US Route 30, parts of which are still known as the Lincoln Highway. Even into the 1930s, persistent vertical climbs and excessive truck traffic slowed the three-hundred-mile trip from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh to about ten hours on a good day and as many as fourteen hours on a bad one.

  In late 1938, the Pennsylvania Turnpike became an inevitability after the Public Works Commission gave its formal approval. While MacDonald continued to disapprove of the plans for a toll road, he was nonetheless cooperative as the plans for the Pennsylvania Turnpike moved forward, opening in October 1940 to rave reviews. In the end, MacDonald was forced to concede that the Pennsylvania Turnpike was a success, both from an engineering and economic perspective. “Every feature of modern road design contributing to a strong, durable roadway and a smooth, uninterrupted flow of traffic has been incorporated in the design,” MacDonald later wrote. “The highway represents the best in American practice based on a long experience in road building.”

  In the next decade, the country built even more toll highways, primarily in the northeast, in anticipation of increased traffic. The Maine Turnpike, the New York Thruway, the New Hampshire Turnpike, and the New Jersey Turnpike became popular motorist routes and generated millions for state treasuries.

  The profitability of these interstate highways, which were built not out of need but rather out of enterprise, was a direct refutation of MacDonald’s formulation. Still, these new roads were faster and safer than their predecessors, a testament to MacDonald’s early push for prioritizing engineering in the road-building process.

  As for the fate of toll roads, the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission had repeatedly promised to eliminate tolls once the bonds used to build the highway were paid off. But that pledge was quietly put to rest, as the needs of the impending war dictated the construction of more highways, which were nicely paid for by the surge in toll revenues.

  Still, Thomas Harris MacDonald’s vision of an “open source” interstate highway system prevails. While nothing MacDonald imagined directly resulted in a single, tangible object, his tinkering had an immeasurable effect on the way the United States developed during the twentieth century. MacDonald had big ideas, and the time and resources to pursue them. Propelled by his optimism and dilettantism, he was able to shape the nation’s roads to a vision he saw in his head. And he did it all as a cog in a larger machine, without the degree of individual recognition we normally associate with tinkerers.

  In the decades ahead, however, tinkering would take on a renewed energy as the pursuit of bold individuals, eager to draw attention and prominence to their pursuits.

  CHAPTER 3

  CONTEMPORARY TINKERER FINDS HIS WAY

  DEAN KAMEN COMES AS CLOSE AS anyone alive to embodying a tinkerer in the classic American tradition. At least, anyone with a Long Island accent. That may sound flip, but it’s just my way of saying that Kamen makes tinkering look easy. In recent years, he also has developed some strong ideas about how the United States should fix what he regards as an innovation brain drain and has instituted one of the higher-profile attempts to address the problem.

  Born in 1951, in Rockville Centre, New York, Kamen displayed all the familiar tinkerer traits at an early age. As an adolescent, he was a dilettante who was naturally good at math but got poor grades due to his tendency to pursue only topics that were of interest to him. Meanwhile, he preferred to read books that genuinely interested him such as Isaac Newton’s Principia and the works of Galileo.

  Instead of the usual teenage preoccupations like sports and music, Kamen got caught up in electronics. In the mid to late sixties, one could walk into Radio Shack and find enough interesting electronic parts to figure out how to build something simple like a transistor radio. Kamen instead started tinkering with the latest semiconductors and solid-state supertransistors, particularly ones called thyristors, which can control alternating currents. Kamen realized these neat little devices, frequently used in light dimmers, allowed one to “see” music by synchronizing the sound waves to the lights. Eventually he created a light box, which, when plugged into a stereo system, turned on and off in time with the music. He put on light shows for his friends in his family’s basement.

  At sixteen, feeling pressure to get a summer job, Kamen followed a lead provided by his uncle, a dentist, who told him he knew the people who worked on the electronics at the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The job he eventually got was working for the man who created slideshows for the museum, among other clients. The job was to build cabinets to house the slide projectors, which typically gave off a lot of extraneous light. The work was pretty menial, and Kamen quit after a few weeks—the
job bored him.

  But while working at the museum, Kamen got to visit the Hayden Planetarium, built alongside the Museum of Natural History in 1935, and regarded as the most technologically advanced planetarium ever since. But Kamen was surprised by how old-fashioned and cumbersome the planetarium’s lighting system seemed. Thanks to his electronics experiments and the light boxes he created, he knew he could improve the synchronization capabilities of the planetarium’s lighting rig with SCRs (silicon-controlled rectifiers) and TRIACs (triodes for alternating current). The resulting system would eliminate much of the manual labor then required to put on a show at the planetarium.

  Making the most of his access, Kamen barged in to the office of the museum’s chairman and tried to sell him on the idea of upgrading the planetarium’s lighting system. The chairman, justifiably skeptical of this brash young man, rebuffed him. But Kamen was not to be deterred. Using parts bought at Radio Shack, he designed the sophisticated light show he had imagined, in his basement over the next few weeks. Gaining entrance to the museum with his employee pass, he hooked up his invention to the planetarium’s existing light system. The first time he tried it, his circuit board blew up, producing nothing but smoke. Panicked because the summer was nearing its end, Kamen was forced to start from scratch. When he finally got it to work, he invited the chairman to experience it. Angry at first, the chairman was ultimately impressed with Kamen’s fully automated system and eventually hired him to install the system at four other museums, including the Chicago Museum of Science. He paid Kamen $2,000 for each system.

  Before long Kamen was selling his light contraptions to local rock bands and customizing multiprojector slideshows for other clients—and he had just graduated high school. Kamen would go on to college at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts in 1971, but he had little interest in formal learning, with the exception of courses on physics and engineering. He didn’t concern himself with grades and degree requirements. On weekends, he drove back home to manage his light-box business, now known as Independent Prototype. By his sophomore year, in 1972, Kamen was earning around $60,000 a year from his growing business, more than both of his parents’ salaries combined.