INSTRUMENTATION by Ralph H. Müller
Use of instrumentation a n d electronics in teaching considered essential notwithstanding vigorous opposition by some educators a n d foundations HE editorial in the current issue of T Instruments and Control Systems
[32, No. 3, 375 (1959)] has to be read to be believed. It is entitled "AntiHardwarism, a Threat to American Education and the Instrument Industry." For some three years a Pittsburgh group has worked with a public high school system, attempting to upgrade a physics curriculum by introducing instrumentation and electronics. This program has been relentlessly and vigorously opposed by university groups and the national foundations. Despite this, of 56 students who took this program in its first year, 41 are now in college. We quote from the editorial by Dean J. D. Ryder of Michigan State University, who says, "To join science with hardware results in the training of technicians, which is not the objective of the university." The mental roadblock is obvious. The anti-hardware philosophy has blinded this man to the obvious fact that modern scientific apparatus is scientific, and that it can be used effectively to teach science. Dean Ryder also states in one of his editorials in the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers—"many of our departments have made advances in removing the hardware and are attacking the subject at a high science level." When the foundations get into the act, Editor Aronsen of Instruments and Control Systems tells us : One of the things we get is a Visiting Scientist Program in Physics, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, in which 100 prominent physicists are paid to visit high schools and colleges and chat with physics teachers. (Cost: Hundreds of thousands of dollars to date. Results: Some nice chats.) Another thing you get is a highschool physics curriculum designed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (and supported by several national foundations) wherein the highschool professor is urged to use toothpicks, bamboo rods, and wood blocks to
illustrate the principles of physics. Toothpicks are "academic"; an actual instrument is "vocational." (Cost of this course has been several million dollars to date. Results : Lots of wood blocks.) At our age, we hesitate to talk of the "good old days" (daze) but when our well heeled country is reduced to the penury of teaching its youth with "kiddy-blocks," we wax nostalgic. It is still possible to flabbergast our friends by stating that we attended a Manual Training High School. When we add that one third of the teachers were Ph.D.'s, we are suspected of downright lying. To support the facts and to make them understandable, we hasten to add that this period was on the eve of World War I, long before John Dewey started to collect powdered unicorn's hoofs, laudanum, condensed moonbeams, and other ingredients for the witches' brew which became Progressive Education. The physics laboratory was a thing of beauty. It was headed by a Ph.D. from the University of Strasbourg. He was also secretary of the Franklin Institute and his assistant held a master's degree and was the nephew of Henry Augustus Rowland. The laboratory was a real physics laboratory, presided over by physicists—and incidentally— excellent teachers. The elegant apparatus was all imported from Leybold u. Nachfolger in Cologne, because the American instrument industry was almost nonexistent at that time, and the use of toothpicks was eschewed by all except the lower strata of society. One gained immediate respect for such equipment and promptly inferred that physics was a precise, orderly, and respectable profession. It was years later at the university that we witnessed a lecture demonstration made with very poor equipment at which the professor said, "Gentlemen, the experiment has failed, but the principle remains the same." Humorous—but not convinc-
The cultural features of that high school would be completely incomprehensible to a modern educator. If we were simultaneously studying Greek civilization in one classroom, making an original design based upon a Greek motif in the art department, and later hammering it out in wrought iron at a naming forge, we, in youthful excitement, believed we were beginning to understand the whole story of artistic creation. Let any dyspeptic votary of the arts stand in the Loggia at Florence and gaze at Benvenuto Cellini's "Perseus with the Head of Medusa" and think he understands this jovial Renaissance rogue's art. With that work, and his enchanting chalices, Cellini was master of every detail. He was a gifted artist and a superb technician. He might curse and abuse his technicians and laborers, but when the casting was to be done he did it and no one danced more nimbly than he to avoid the bouncing globules of molten bronze as they spilled over the foundry floor. Technicians indeed! Would our deans and foundation executives be content to have the surgeon spout Latin and let the hospital orderly remove their appendixes? A truly great artist, musician, surgeon, scientist, or engineer is master of every detail of his profession and can do any part of it as well as or better than a technician. Whenever he loses that competence, becomes wholly dependent upon his technicians, and what is worse, begins to despise technicians, it is high time for him to get behind a desk, \vrite memoranda and edicts, and begin to order the work and affairs of better men. Moreover, he will be better paid for his services. This is no catastrophe threatening the instrument industry nor will it in any way diminish the use of instruments in research and technology. It is just another example of muddy thinking in some low and high places. Nor will this disdain for craftsmanship and skill have too serious effect upon our youth. Although most students get VOL. 3 1 , NO. 5, MAY 1959
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INSTRUMENTATION
FUNDAMENTAL OH STRETCHING WATER BANDS RANGE: 2.50-2.65 microns
RESOLUTION: 1 cnï1 (6Â)
The above curve illustrates the high resolution that users of Cary Model 14 Spectrophotometers are getting for measurements in the near-IR region. The Model 14's ability to resolve such fine structure is a feature not ordinarily found in a general purpose instrument having a wide wavelength range (1860 À-2.65 microns). In most of the ultraviolet-visible region, resolving power of the Model 14 is better than 1Â. High resolving power is just one of many features that make the Model 14 so useful. A broad wavelength range, a wide choice of scanning and chart speeds, accommodation of a variety of types and sizes of sample cells, stray light of less than 1 ppm, photometric reproducibility better than .004 in absorbance even at high absorbance, and many special accessories suit the Model 14 to a wide variety of spectrophotometric problems requiring fast, accurate analyses. These and other performance features have made it the preferred recording spectrophotometer of leading research laboratories throughout the world.
Details of these benefits and complete specifications on the M o d e l 14 a r e y o u r s f o r t h e a s k i n g . W r i t e f o r D a t a File A12-59.
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poor advice, they manage to struggle along. One or two inspiring and competent teachers make up for all the martinets and light-weights. We all do well to recall the history of the American apparatus and instrument industry and that it is less than a half century old. That it is largely responsible for our prosperity and technical supremacy, is easily demonstrated. That any person in his right mind can imagine that a scientist or engineer can do without the best instrumental resources available is incomprehensible. Nor can such devices be relegated to the exclusive use of so-called technicians. Suppose we consider the scientist ready to make some precise measurements. He turns on switches and nothing happens. More twiddling of dials and more snapping of switches. He calls the technician, who crawls under the chassis, changes a few tubes, checks resistors, capacitors and wiring, connects an oscilloscope, and checks a dozen wave forms. In a little while, he emerges, flips a few more switches, reads a few meters, and then announces that the instrument is in perfect order and on calibration. The scientist introduces the specimen, pushes the correct button (after a second attempt). The recorded data are sent to the computing center, encoded by a lady technician, and the collated data are returned to the scientist who finds that the results fit an equation derived many years ago (by someone else). Question: Which is the scientist and which is the technician? There are several fields of research in which it can be stated that the technical and instrumental aspects are far more complicated than the scientific problem on which they are brought to bear. If the performance, the precision, and reliability of the results depend very largely upon the technician and are but poorly or vaguely understood by the scientist, one must ask again, who is the technician? Let the scientist who disdains instruments, gadgets, and electronic nuisances and values only the results which they furnish him in some ill-understood way take heed. He may come to grief or have to change his attitude. It happened a thousand years ago! In the ancient universities of Padua, Bologna, and Paris, the professors of medicine lectured from a pulpit. Clad in semi-ecclesiastical robes and bearing princely decorations they proclaimed the infallible doctrines of Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen. Students were bored, then as now, by pontifical utterances and they didn't perk up until a group of technicians entered the scene. These venturesome and courageous
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technicians were beginning to disect cadavers in the lecture hall and, to use a m o d e r n and inelegant expression, "making a monkey of the learned p r o fessor." Students are not nearly so stupid as their mentors believe, and what was exposed before their eyes be came a realistic a p p r o a c h to t h e p r a c tice of medicine and surgery. T h e p r o fessors droned on, quoting t h e alleged location of t h e heart, liver, spleen, and the spirit, b u t t h a n k s to the technicians, their true location and function were a p p a r e n t to anyone who could see. T h e lectures continued u n a b a t e d , as mellifluous as a sonorous Gregorian chant, b u t the students sought out t h e technicians and learned as m u c h as they could from them. I n t h e contemporary traditions of the union hierarchy, this could have led to a serious jurisdictional dispute, b u t all honor to the medieval professors of medicine (or was it good business sense?) ; the professors p u t their robes in m o t h balls and joined the techni cians, and medicine became an experi mental factual science, leaving specula tion, theory, and divination to the philosophers and the theologians. Let us m a k e no mistake ! T h e recent emphasis on mathematics and the sound grounding on fundamental prin ciples has paid off handsomely. N o in telligent person would insist u p o n a closed loop of string bearing three, four, and five knots, equally spaced, in order to prove P y t h a g o r a s ' principle, even if the practical E g y p t i a n s did use t h e scheme t o lay out precise right angles for their pyramids. W h a t we may rightly object to, is t h e inference, or t h e downright claim, t h a t all t h e laws of physical science came as a revelation to the h u m a n mind—as if they were handed down by Moses along with t h e sacred tablets. Our science has been a magnificent interplay between sound measurement and inspired dreams. T o the scientist who, in contemporary style, likes to dress u p lousy measure ments (we use the t e r m advisedly) with second-order differential equations and a b u n d a n t statistical analysis, let us point out gently t h a t there are never more t h a n three or four outstanding theoretical giants in a century. The rest of us m u s t measure, count, and compare, with patience and diligence— and never more t h a n 3 feet away from our technicians. W h e n we continue to hear such pon tifical statements from high places, statements which are in flat contradic tion to the most elegant practices in physical science, we can begin to under stand the nervous freshman's Spooner ism as he sought an interview—"Is t h e Bean dizzy?"
