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NYTimes.com Article: Necessity Is the Mother of Invention
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (jimmbswu@ALUM.MIT.EDU)
Mon Dec 1 11:03:26 2003
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Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2003 20:40:16 -0500
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From: jimmbswu@ALUM.MIT.EDU
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Necessity Is the Mother of Invention
November 30, 2003
By PAGAN KENNEDY
Striding down a hallway at M.I.T., Amy Smith has a bucket
in one hand and a length of string in the other. The brain
behind such creations as the phase-change incubator, she is
on her way to the Charles River to retrieve some dirty
water for her next class. As she lopes along, Smith
describes the ordeals of testing water in remote villages.
Her words spurt out. She's a woman on fast-forward, and she
does not so much talk as download information.
We reach the massive front doors of M.I.T.'s main building,
and she pushes out into the crisp air and roar of traffic.
Without interrupting her disquisition on water-testing, she
perches sidesaddle on a banister. Elegantly poised, she
slides down the handrail, still talking.
She lands on the sidewalk with a practiced leap. ''You
slide faster in the winter,'' she says, ''when you've got a
wool coat on.''
If you're an inventor and you ride the banister below the
pillared entrance of a university, there's a good chance of
coming off as way too cute, like Robin Williams playing an
inventor in a Disney movie. But Smith can get away with
this kind of flourish. She is, after all, one of the
brightest minds in a movement that sets out to prove that
the best technology can be cheap and simple. The banister
is a perfect example: it requires less energy than the
stairs, and it's free.
In a culture that hails mobile phones and plasma-screen
televisions as the great innovations of our time, Smith is
gloriously out of step. She designs medical devices and
labor-saving machines for people who live at the far end of
dirt roads in Africa. Her inventions cost anywhere from a
few hundred dollars to a few pennies. ''You can't
understand how important a grain mill is,'' she says,
''until you've spent three hours pounding grain and gotten
a cup and a half of flour.'' It is this kind of
understanding -- of tedium, of tired muscles, of hunger
pangs -- that Smith brings to her work.
An hour later, in Smith's ''D-lab'' class, students gather
around a huge, black-topped slab of a table. It's the first
semester of design lab, and these undergrads are learning
about the politics of delivering technology to poor
nations, how to speak a little Creole and the nitty-gritty
of mechanical engineering; during the midsemester break,
they will travel to Haiti, Brazil or India. There, they
will act as consultants in remote villages, helping locals
solve technical problems. Oh, yes, and the students will
also test village drinking water for dangerous bacteria.
Today, Smith is training them to do that. Using a small
pump, the students draw the Charles River water through a
filter. Smith points to a piece of the testing rig -- what
looks like a silver barbell. ''This test stand costs
$600,'' she says. ''Personally, I find that offensive.''
When the students work in the field, she says, they will be
using a far cheaper setup -- one that she patched together
herself for about $20, using a Playtex baby bottle. ''You
can do a lot more testing for the same amount of money.''
Now the students have made cultures of Charles River water
in petri dishes. The next step is to incubate the petri
dishes for an entire day at a steady temperature. But how
do you pull that off in a lean-to in Haiti, with no
electricity for miles around? Again, Smith has a solution.
She passes around a mesh bag of what appears to be white
marbles. The ''marbles'' contain a chemical that, when
heated and kept in an insulated environment, will stay at a
steady 37 degrees Celsius for 24 hours. The balls are the
crucial ingredient in one of Smith's inventions -- a
phase-change incubator that requires no electricity. The
design won her a 1999 Collegiate Inventors award. She says
she hopes that the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention will soon endorse her incubator. ''From there
it's not a big step to go to the Red Cross,'' she says. One
day it could be a key piece of equipment at rural health
clinics, where doctors depend on intermittent electricity
or none at all. Smith has founded a company to handle the
exigencies of getting her incubators up and running and out
into the field. ''I have 6,000 of these balls on their way
here from China as we speak,'' she says.
Now, Smith wants to demo a bacteria test in the dark. She
asks a student to cut the lights. He flips a switch. For a
moment, nothing happens, and then the room vibrates with a
mechanical hum and panels close over a bank of skylights in
the ceiling. All crane their necks to watch. The panels
move in menacing slo-mo, like something out of a James Bond
movie. A few people giggle, as if they have suddenly become
aware of the contradictions thrumming in this room --
they've come to one of the best-financed technical
institutes in the world to learn how to work with Playtex
baby bottles.
A few weeks from now, Smith will give them one of their
toughest lessons in the gaps between first world and third.
The students will spend a week surviving on $2 a day in
Cambridge -- the equivalent of what the average Haitian
earns. Last year, Jamy Drouillard, who was a teacher's
assistant for Smith's class, performed the assignment along
with his students. Drouillard grew up in Haiti, but that
didn't give him any special edge. He laughs, remembering
his chief mistake. ''I bought a bunch of Ramen noodles, a
packet of hotdogs, a bunch of spaghetti and some ketchup,''
he says. ''It got sickening after Day 3. Actually, before
Day 3. I should have mixed and matched instead of buying
five boxes of spaghetti. In Haiti, people come up with
creative ways of varying their food intake.'' He said the
assignment drove home Smith's point quickly: living at
subsistence level requires enormous creativity. The African
farmwoman who finds a way to make a scrap of land yield
enough cassava root for her family is as much an inventor
as any M.I.T.-trained engineer.
Last year, at an academic dinner with a plentiful buffet,
Smith pulled out crackers from her pocket and nibbled while
colleagues feasted around her; she was sticking to the
$2-a-day assignment in fellowship with her students.
In the late 1980's, as a Peace Corps volunteer, Smith was
stationed in Ghanzi, then a backwater of Botswana, down a
dirt road that could take as long as three days to travel.
''Nobody wanted to live there,'' she says. ''You got sent
there for punishment if you did badly in a job.''
Smith grew up in a comfortable, academic family. Her father
taught electrical engineering at M.I.T.; her mother taught
junior-high math. At the dinner table, the family would
chitchat about ways to prove the Pythagorean theorem. In
her first couple of years in the Peace Corps, she missed
the kind of people she had known growing up in the orbit of
M.I.T. -- people willing to engage, for instance, in
passionate discussion about the innards of a motor. ''I'd
run into development workers who had no clue about
engineering. They wouldn't understand that there was a way
you could solve a problem.''
In 1987, Smith returned home to Lexington, Mass., for her
mother's funeral. Wandering through a supermarket after the
service, she marveled at the lunacy of her own country: an
entire aisle just for soup? It seemed impossible to bridge
the gap between America and Botswana.
About a year later, Smith was gazing out the window of her
room, studying the expanse of the Kalahari Desert pocked by
thorn bushes. Suddenly, she says, she understood the arc of
her life: she would learn how to be an engineer and bring
her skills to a place like this. So she applied to graduate
programs and ended up back at M.I.T. in 1990.
Sometime after she got there, a professor suggested that
she try to solve a problem that bedevils people who live in
rural Africa. It involves the hammer mill, a no-frills,
motorized grain mill that women use to grind sorghum or
millet into flour. The hammer mill can do a job in just a
few minutes that might otherwise take hours, which makes it
a hotly coveted item in developing nations. But there's a
built-in flaw: the mill uses a wire-mesh screen. When that
screen breaks, it cannot easily be replaced, because parts
like that are scarce in Africa and not easy to fabricate.
So for lack of a wire screen, grain mills often end up in
the corner of a room, gathering dust.
What was needed was something that could not only match the
efficiency of the hammer mill but also use materials
available to a blacksmith in Senegal. A group of M.I.T.
students had come up with some ideas, but Smith, who had
ground sorghum by hand in Botswana, knew they weren't fast
enough. So she devised a system based on an elegantly
simple element: air. She redesigned the machine to use the
air passing through the mill to separate particles. The
smaller ones -- aka flour -- get carried out while the
larger ones stay behind. The resulting machine would cost a
quarter of what its predecessors had and use far less
energy.
For her work as an inventor, including the screenless
hammer mill, Smith became the first woman ever to win a
Lemelson-M.I.T. Student Prize. Past recipients of the
high-profile award for inventing include David Levy, who
patented not only the smallest keypad in the world but also
a surgical technique that speeds the splicing of severed
blood vessels.
Smith's entire life is like one of her inventions, portable
and off the grid. At 41, she has no kids, no car, no
retirement plan and no desire for a Ph.D. Her official
title: instructor. ''I'm doing exactly what I want to be
doing. Why would I spend six years to get a Ph.D. to be in
the position I'm in now, but with a title after my name?
M.I.T. loves that I'm doing this work. The support is
there. So I don't worry.'' It was a good thing that she won
the Collegiate Inventors award in 1999, she says, because
back then she was stretching a three-month graduate-student
stipend to last for a year and didn't know how she'd pay
her rent. The $7,500 prize came just in time.
Likewise, the inventors who most inspire her will never
strike it rich. ''There are geniuses in Africa, but they're
not getting the press,'' she says. She gushes about
Mohammed Bah Abba, a Nigerian teacher who came up with the
pot-within-a-pot system. With nothing more than a big
terra-cotta bowl, a little pot, some sand and water, Abba
created a refrigerator -- the rig uses evaporation rather
than electricity to keep vegetables cool. Innovations that
target the poorest of the poor don't have to be complicated
to make a big difference. The best solution is sometimes
the most obvious.
Smith, of course, aims to design such hidden-in-plain-sight
tools and deliver them to the needy. But she also wants to
change people's understanding of what it means to be an
inventor. To this end, she is a co-founder of the Ideas
(Innovation Development Enterprise Action) competition at
M.I.T.; students work with a community partner to solve a
problem for the disenfranchised. Last year's winners, for
instance, included a team that developed a kit for removing
land mines so that farmers in places like Zimbabwe no
longer have to improvise with hoes and rakes.
Success in the Ideas competition, as well as in the kind of
design that Smith pursues, requires humility, because your
masterpiece may end up looking like a bunch of rocks or a
pile of sand. And since you'll be required to do extensive
fieldwork to understand the problem you're solving, it also
demands the skills of a crack Peace Corps volunteer,
someone who remains cheerful even when the truck breaks
down, the food runs out and you're the one who has to sleep
next to the goat.
Women have the advantage here, unlike other branches of
engineering. ''I know how to be self-deprecating,'' Smith
says. ''The traditional male engineer is not taught that
way.'' That engineer, were he trying to figure out an
agricultural problem in Botswana, might consult with men,
but that wouldn't get him very far. ''In Africa, the women
are the farmers. Women invented domesticated crops. If
you're talking to the right people, they should be a group
of elderly women with their hair up in bandannas.''
As improbable as it may sound, Smith's brand of invention
is moving into the mainstream. That is because her clients
-- the disenfranchised in Africa, Haiti, Brazil, India --
are increasingly able to secure loans. The concept of
microfinance, which first took off in the 1970's in
Bangladesh, has gathered force throughout the developing
world, giving impoverished people the capital they need to
start small businesses and buy materials. According to
Elizabeth Littlefield of the Consultative Group to Assist
the Poor, a microfinance group within the World Bank, the
integration of tiny loan-making operations into mainstream
banking could bring billions of new consumers into the
global marketplace over the next few decades. There have
already been some surprising strides made. In India, for
example, banks have set up solar-powered kiosks in
out-of-the-way villages, giving clients access to financial
services in places where there is not even electricity. But
what will they invest in? The rural poor will need machines
designed for their needs. And that will, in turn, create
demand for new kinds of technologies.
In a barbecue pit near the M.I.T. student center, pale blue
smoke streams out of a trash can and twists in the
direction of the tennis courts. It smells of caramel. Shawn
Frayne, a gangly guy with a shock of black hair, sticks a
lighter down into the can. He's trying to get a fire going.
He holds up one of his finished products -- a piece of
charcoal that looks like a jet-black hamburger patty. It's
made out of the parts of the sugarcane that aren't edible
-- that is, trash. These humble wads could help to solve a
number of problems in Haiti: poor people would be able to
make their own charcoal rather than having to pay for the
prefab variety, forests would no longer have to be cut down
to make wood charcoal and local entrepreneurs could use the
recipe to set up small businesses.
Frayne graduated from M.I.T. last year. He didn't like
school much, except for Smith's design class, to which he
is so devoted that he volunteered to put finishing touches
on several inventions the class started last year. ''I
learned in an economics class that if someone has a good
idea and they can implement it in a third-world country,
they can dramatically change the economy of the country,''
Frayne says. ''I was surprised by how much technology can
affect the well-being of a people.''
Smith herself stands by, trying to keep the wind from
whipping her blond hair into her face. ''We're working on a
portfolio of designs like this charcoal that we can show to
the Peace Corps or to N.G.O.'s, groups that are trying to
help people start up small businesses,'' she says.
Frayne ducks down, pointing to the base of the trash can.
''If we were in Haiti, we'd use dirt to seal up the bottom
of the can,'' he says. ''But I couldn't find any dirt
around here, so I used duct tape.''
Smith nods approvingly. ''In Cambridge, duct tape is the
equivalent of dirt,'' she says. She loves duct tape and all
it stands for. She knows how to make a hammock and a
kaleidoscope out of duct tape. It's a very useful material,
no doubt, but if she were on her $2-a-day budget, she'd
probably have to buy it on layaway.
Pagan Kennedy is a frequent contributor to the magazine and
last wrote about biodiesel fuel.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/magazine/30MIT.html?ex=1071242815&ei=1&en=0af1ff45c4712f27
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