about faraway places and long-ago times. One summer during high school I read through all of those Will and Ariel Durant books about civilization, which my parents had bought ages before from a book club, probably for just a few dollars. And I have a passion for dates: 1066, 1492, 1776—that kind of stuff. So I ended up studying history. Putting that together with my liking for gadgets—and maybe the engineering genes in my family—the history of technology seemed a likely choice. If things had gone differently I would have been in Atlanta right now, writing my thesis on the development of machine tools in early nineteenth-century England. Instead, here I am on a foreign shore, wondering how I can possibly write down the story of what has happened.
When our seminar group was reading
The most I have been able to do in these pages is summarize the events in bare outline. I hope some day to take my notes, along with the minutes I’ve kept at many meetings, add in such materials as I can glean from other survivors, and put together a more complete chronicle. But even that will be just a beginning. A host of historians and philosopher-poets will be needed to bear witness to the phenomenon through which we have lived in the past twelve months. Luckily, there were aboard our ship, the
In this slight journal, I have interwoven my private experiences with the historical facts, jotting down what I see and hear, and a little bit of what I feel. My history professors would not have approved. They discouraged expressions of personal sentiment in academic papers. And if my father knew that I was commingling my personal memoirs with his officially commissioned history, he would not be at all pleased. But for now, he is much too busy to think about such a minor matter.
I should explain that my father, as president of the AAES, is sort of provisional co-ruler of our group, along with the captain of the ship. The local folk—we call them Inlanders since that’s where they live in relation to us, settled as we are along the coast—they have political leaders of their own. Matters of common concern are managed by what we call the Coordinating Committee, about which more later.
I cannot say enough about how wonderfully the people have behaved. I had seen it many times on television or read about it in books—survivors of floods, fires, or earthquakes working together bravely and steadfastly. Well, now I’ve experienced it firsthand. There is something about common danger—and shared tragedy—that brings out wondrous human qualities. It can’t last forever, of course; but for a year now the group’s conduct—with few exceptions—has been exemplary. The ship’s crew, established in functional units, with a formal, military-type chain of command, performed splendidly, and the rest of us pitched in as needed with a minimum of selfishness or malingering. Since the passenger list was comprised mainly of AAES people, we have a ready-made corporate structure. Nobody talks very much about exercising authority, but the organizational chart has come in handy. We used it in the earliest days for distributing information, food, and shelter, and for matching volunteers to appropriate tasks. It was convenient that AAES is a “society of societies,” thus providing communities within communities.
Unlike doctors, lawyers, and other professionals, American engineers have never had a single, central organization to which individual members of the profession belong. Since the founding of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1852, the main organizing thrust of the profession has been along the lines of separate technical disciplines—civil, mechanical, electrical, chemical, and so forth. Efforts to join together continually ended in failure, often in acrimony. Even after the creation of the AAES in 1980, there were quarrels and disaffections, almost dissolution. The gala cruise on which we embarked last Christmas season was to celebrate not only the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the AAES, but also the commitment of more than fifty engineering societies to a new era of cordial collaboration.
In planning this extravagant venture, however, my father was inspired by a vision that far transcended the realm of professional organizations. His grand conception was to bring together the most talented, creative engineers in the world, and to have them, as a council of experts, consider the state of technology as we moved forward in the new millennium. His recruiting efforts were incredibly successful. We have among us an array of engineering talent that could not be matched anywhere.
It was no great trick to enlist the ruling cliques of many of the constituent societies, the presidents, executive directors, and trustees. These people thrive on board meetings and professional get-togethers. They were sure to greet the idea of a seminar cruise with delight. But my father is wise enough to know that these organizational leaders, astute as they may be, are not the world’s greatest engineers. The prodigies, the geniuses, the true pacesetters were all too busy with their technical activities, not likely to be running volunteer associations.
Acting with a committee, but doing most of the work himself, my father compiled a list of the engineers best qualified to make the seminar an event of global significance. His most important decision—especially considering how things turned out—was not to rely upon the elders of the profession, but rather to seek out people at the so- called cutting edge. He began by inviting the one hundred engineers, ages thirty to forty-five, who were selected competitively by the National Academy of Engineering to attend a “Frontiers of Engineering” meeting in Irvine, California, the previous year. Hailing from industry, academe, and the government laboratories, these individuals are by definition at the forefront of technological activity. Then further nominations were solicited worldwide, from national academies, professional societies, corporations, and universities.
The selection committee sought representation from all the major engineering disciplines, and also from the various engineering career tracks, such as research, development, manufacturing, and teaching. They also looked for ethnic diversity and gender equity (although they had to deal realistically with the fact that only 10 percent of the world’s engineers are women). My father was determined to have international representation, and even though the organization being celebrated is American, about 20 percent of the participants were from nations outside the United States.
Compiling the list of invitees, while of course challenging, was simplicity itself compared to the seemingly insurmountable difficulty of arranging for them to attend. How is one to persuade several hundred of the busiest, most productive people in the world to take seventeen days out of their lives to attend a seminar on a cruise ship? Here my father came up with an idea so wondrous, and carried it out with such mastery, that I have never ceased to marvel at his accomplishment.
He took as his theme the desperate need for technologists to address, in an integrated way heretofore unknown in human history, the scourges of hunger, disease, and privation. He dreamed of engineers joining together in an effort to ameliorate the age-old calamities of poverty, war, and injustice, and the relatively new menaces of environmental degradation and large-scale terrorism. Bring our best technological minds together, he argued, and let them devote their attention to the big picture, looking up for a brief period from the concerns of their workaday world.
What should we be doing about energy, food, water, health care, education, disarmament, communications, urban blight, population pressures, and fanatical terrorists…? This was the time for a holistic, interdisciplinary review of our engineering abilities vis-a-vis our most vexing human problems. This was the time for such a new beginning, just as the end of World War II was the time to found the United Nations. In the first decade of the new millennium, the world was free from cold war and superpower tensions. We had grown rich—at least some of us. Computers, the Internet, and genetic engineering had put powerful new forces at our disposal. Engineers could accomplish much, not just by meeting and talking but by having the world take note of their meeting.
Dad took his vision to the Pacific coast, to Bill Gates and his zillionaire colleagues and competitors. To fund the proposed conference, my father sought an outlandish amount of money. But in the larger scheme of things, and especially in the high-flying high-tech world, the sum was relatively insignificant: a mere $30 million. He had in mind a group of fifteen hundred people at a cost of $20,000 each, which covered the cost of the trip, including $5,000 per head for spending money. Only with an extravagant gesture, he argued, can we attract the best and brightest to our enterprise. And only with the best and brightest can the enterprise succeed.
