MovieChat Forums > Flash of Genius (2008) Discussion > Engineer's must have been idiots back th...

Engineer's must have been idiots back then

posted 15 years ago by aland-16
12 replies | jump to latest

I'm no expert by any means, but why were intermittent wipers so difficult to design. This was the era of transistors and other solid state circuitry, why in the heck was Ford even trying to accomplish this mechanically?

I could understand if the whole concept of making a wiper activate at different intervals was the crux of the issue, but Ford already knew what they wanted to do, they just didn't know how to accomplish it.

I would think any high school kid that tinkered around with electronic's in his parent's basement could have come up with a circuit to do this, as long as they knew up front, what the device had to do.

[–] thirdofsix 15 years ago

If they were idiots back then, I would love to hear about your marvelous invention. I hope it is the Star trek transporter, after all, you know that you want to move people from this place to that, how hard can that be?

It was the begining of the solid state era, not 40 years into it as we are now and Dr. Kearns was the first to build a reliable electrical circuit. Todays systems have changed little from what he came up with so many decades ago.

[–] aland-16 15 years ago

I never said I was an expert or an inventor, but apparently you are both. First off Bell Labs produced a practical transistor in 1947. This story took place more than 13 years after that, so by that time solid-state devices had come a long way.

If you recall the point in the movie where Kearns was trying to negotiate a deal to buy a large sum of transistors and the Motorola rep makes a comment that supplying a large amount would be no problem. Sounds to me like the transistor was being widely used for various applications at this point in time, it was hardly a newcomer to the world of electronic design.

Most likely the so-called engineers at Ford didn't really have the time to work on this, after all they were busy thinking about how to make the futuristic Pinto explode in a rear end collision.

[–] alvink 15 years ago

aland16,

have you ever heard the saying, 'an elephant is a horse that was designed by a committee'. i would go one farther, and say that 'an elephant is a horse that was designed by a large company's design team'.

large company's design teams are not free-flowing think tanks, they are politically driven entities, with the members interested in one thing only, CYOA!

find out what the boss wants, do it, and then convince him that it was his idea, that's how to get ahead in the business.

true original thought is not welcome in the big companies any more than it is in big government, because any original idea would not be a) what the boss wanted, b) already checked out by the thought police, c) already checked out by the bean counters, and therefore frightening to the corporate (or government) sheep that have managed to float to the top, like the scum that they are.

believe me, back then just as now, if the boss said 'i think that a mechanical thing is needed', the whole design team is going to go, 'baaa, baaaaa, baaaaa, mechanical thing, baaaa', and sheeplike, ignore all other avenues !

i've worked in american industry, aland16, in both the private and public sector, and i know what i'm talking about.

it's like you said, it was difficult to explore the possibilities of the transistor, when doing what the boss wanted on the pinto was soooo much more rewarding, wouldn't you say?

[–] aland-16 15 years ago

alvink,

Your response makes perfect sense. I guess you have to experience this issue from the inside out, to really understand how screwed up it is.

[–] bazz-a-1 15 years ago

Sorry to be pedantic but I believe the well known version of the saying you mention is " a camel is a horse designed by a committee". Both are nicely apt.

[–] ted2112 14 years ago

oh, shut-up..

[–] gordonator 15 years ago

I think OP's point is we're talking about a time where satellites were being launched in to space and sending the photographs back to earth. The question is WHY steal Kearns particular design when the concept is fairly simple given the technology available.

[–] nicver 15 years ago

Kearns design was indeed a flash of genius. Not everything was found easily and right away in electrical engineering. Many of the designs and schematics we now take for granted and bread and butter came out just as this: flashes of genius.

To make it simple: what he designed is a known as a gate, where transistors as logic gates are activated by capacitors after they were loaded to the point where they have to discharge. Now it's easy to use this current to power a little light bulb or an LED, but to power a windshield wiper that is another issue, as you'd need BIG transistors and BIG capacitors if you were to use the same current, and his solution was indeed simple in design and cost, but not simple as in obvious (as in it's easy to solve 2 + 2 = ?).

I could explain it but without the ability to draw a schematic here, it's going to be an issue.

Note that transistors were still a novelty in the 60s and transistor radios were very expensive, let alone TVs.

[–] jriley555 (8530) 7 years ago

realize this is an old thread, but...

firstly see dhenderson's post below....

transisters were fairly new, but valves/tubes were not, and functioned exactly the same way.

when xisters are opened in saturation mode (used as a switch), their resistivity is low, which reduces heat generation. clearly, the design was original, but i also have a hard time seeing it as a terribly difficult application. keep in mind, the analog/linear circuitry in televisions at that time was far more complex, by comparison. you likely have an RC tank, with the R variable (a varistor ganged to the front panel control), which gives you a tunable charging time / wiper interval, and when the RC tank charged gate voltage reaches threshold, the saturation-biased transistor/s fire, shunting current to the motor. you need some relays to reset the gate and RC tank per wiper circuit. etc.

lets put it this way - you didnt need a PhD then, or now. that said, getting ANY product ready for market, in terms of reliability, maintainability is never a trivial process.

[–] bigwave916 15 years ago

I'm always amazed at people who throw rocks at technology that predates their experience.

Yeah! No *beep* it's easy now since it's already been done. I worked on an EFI system years ago that people criticise now, until I ask them to describe the difference between their PC that they have now and the one they had when the system was developed.

[–] dhenderson-2 14 years ago

In the early 60s, solid state devices were pretty fragile (Germanium transistors - pretty crap) and to design a circuit for automobile use that had to cope with high current, vibration, heat, bumps, humidity, etc, was actually fairly difficult. Sure, the basic resistor/capacitor timer wasn't unknown, but Kearns simple design would have depended on proper application and usage of a transistor that was rugged and reliable enough to withstand the abuse it would have been subjected to.
It's a fair bet that the Motorola company had not long brought out a suitable transistor and Kearns happened to be the first one to see its use in this application [1]. In another few weeks or months somebody else would have, without a doubt - hence why the patent dates are so important.
I'm willing to bet that somebody in Ford was actually working along the same lines and what we saw from Ford was the classic "not invented here" syndrome applied in retrospect. Basically, Ford's noses were put mightily out of joint when it became known within the company that one department had offered an outsider a chance to make himself millions and in the meantime another department was busily working on their own solution, thence tried to wriggle out of it by keeping it in-house, as Ford did for many of their components and sub-assemblies.

[1] I've experienced this myself, when a new device has hit the market and I've seen an application for it that seems to be dead obvious, but nobody picks up on it for ages.

[–] Sam-953-169285 9 years ago

I am watching the movie now and the issues of high current, vibration, heat, bumps, humidity and so on are not mentioned in the initial invention. I think he does imply that an electronic solution would be more reliable than a mechanical one when he pursues the electronic solution.