One of the many people that make Houston such a remarkable place is John Lienhard, the longtime University of Houston engineering professor who is the author and voice of the popular KUHF radio series — Engines of our Ingenuity — which is carried across the nation by more than 40 National Public Radio affiliates. As Professor Lienhard describes it, Engines is “a mix of history, engineering and science. The programs describe the machines that make civilization run, and the people who devise them.”
Lienhard recently completed his 2,000th segment of Engines, so the Chronicle’s science writer Eric Berger used the occasion to interview Professor Lienhard. A part of the interview is here, and Eric’s podcast of the entire 30-minute interview is here. The following is Professor Lienhard’s response to Eric’s inquiry as to what he considers the greatest invention:
I don’t like to identify “greatest inventions.” I think inventions flow and swirl and intertwine with one another. There was a wonderful piece by Salman Rushdie where he described stories as flowing like different colors in a great sea, and what you do is dip in and pull out one of those stories. But they’re intermixed and intertwined with other stories. There’s the constant flow and ebb of stories, and the same is true of invention. And there’s another reason. In the book I finally say we’re in trouble when we talk about inventions. The airplane was not an invention. It was something else. I give it a word, multigenium. … They are these accrued inventions that we finally point out and say this is the final thing, like Wright Brothers’ airplane, or Morse’s telegraph, which followed something like 70 years of working with electric telegraphy. We call that thing in a finished form the invention, but it’s not an invention.
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The Houston Rockets are off to Austin for pre-season training camp and, although the basketball team hasn’t achieved much lately, Rockets owner Les Alexander recently joined for the first time fellow Houston professional sports franchise owners Bob McNair (the Texans) and Drayton McLane (the Stros) on the Forbes 400 Richest Americans list. Alexander came in at no. 322 on the list with an estimated net worth of $750 mil.
