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The Engineer Among Us
From his home in LAS's Department of Chemical Engineering, a professor cum radio personality is demystifying engineering.
If it has been awhile since you've admired the ingenuity of VelcroTM or the elegance of a microchip, Bill Hammack would like two-and-a-half minutes of your time. That is all he thinks it will take for you to begin believing, as he does, that engineering and life are one and the same.
LAS chemical engineer Bill Hammack records one of his weekly spots for public radio.
Every Tuesday morning, Hammack's voice wafts into 18,000 homes across central Illinois via the local public radio station, WILL AM580. In witty vignettes aimed at nonengineers, he shows how engineering is palatable—even beautiful! fun! relevant!
A bona fide engineer, Hammack graduated from the University of Illinois in the late 1980s with both a master's and doctorate in chemical engineering. But 10 years of teaching aspiring engineers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh left him longing to make a broader impact. Armed with a love of performance—inherited from his theater professor father—he returned to Illinois in 1997, and at the prompting of Charles Zukoski, head of the Department of Chemical Engineering (yes, it is in LAS), he began preaching the gospel of engineering.
"The public image of engineers is as unimaginative drones," says Hammack. "People can appreciate the creativity or structure of a poem. Well, what about the art of a two-liter plastic pop bottle?"
And what of it? Apparently, as Hammack happily informs, the inventor of the ubiquitous pop bottle was none other than Nat Wyeth, the son and brother, respectively, of the famous American painters N.C. and Andrew Wyeth. Like his famous brother, Nat had been grilled by his artist father on the value of simplicity. When Nat was later challenged to design a plastic bottle strong enough to hold carbonated beverages, he succeeded where others had failed by seeking simplicity. Strength required weaving the long strands of molecules into some kind of net. Rather than trying to accomplish this by manipulating the tiny molecules, as other engineers had, Wyeth tried a puff of air. It splattered molten plastic over a mold, resulting in a tic-tac-toe-like weave. You see, Hammack concludes, the world is a hidden web of engineers and engineering. "And I want to be the public's tour guide through this web."
With technology infiltrating all areas of life, the importance of people understanding its strengths and pitfalls goes beyond an engineer's self-esteem, says Hammack. "As a society, we have to make decisions about cryptography and landfills. Those are all engineering. That's the hidden web. And it is neither good nor bad nor neutral. It will change our lives, and we have to decide what we want to accept."
The far-reaching impacts of technology are reasons that Hammack's outreach role is timely and that his unusual berth within a liberal arts and sciences college makes sense. Only U of I and the University of California, Berkeley, house their chemical engineering departments within liberal arts and sciences colleges to encourage greater collaboration with chemistry. Given that both universities' schools of chemical sciences—the name for the administrative structure that unites both departments—are ranked at the top nationally, indicates there is something right about this formula.
"The greatest kick I get out of the shows," says Hammack of his radio spots, "are the emails I receive from wives, brothers, and friends of engineers who thank me for helping them understand the other person. I help them to understand the engineering mind-set, which is always about end results, about the social and cultural constraints of a product."
That pragmatic mind-set is evident in how Hammack has engineered the production of his radio spots. Topics are inspired by current events or pulled from his 18-inch-thick idea file. Writing and researching is scheduled for the first one to two hours of each morning. The weekly taping sessions are allotted half an hour, with the tape-editing back in his office taking about two hours. A software program he wrote automatically posts the week's radio spot to his website (www.engineerguy.com) the morning it is broadcast. Two years of voice lessons erased his Indiana accent. He studied novels to learn storytelling. And he learned to write on deadline by establishing strict time limits—relying on craft, not inspiration.
This fall Hammack is working with a public radio producer from Minneapolis to analyze the marketing appeal of the 100 spots he already has under his belt. The analysis will be crass compared with the exacting methodologies he is accustomed to. The marketing formula of "one-third experience, one-third audience reaction, and one-third black box" makes Hammack shudder. But he'll get over it. After all, good results offer a chance to convert the nation.
By Holly Korab
Fall 2001