Engineer explains it all on the radio

Henry Baumgartner
ASME NEWS

On Tuesdays, Illinois residents tuning into "Morning Edition" or "All Things Considered" are likely to hear Bill Hammack say something like this: "I'm here to talk to you about my underwear. I have new underwear, and I love it because I'm an engineer. Perhaps I should explain."

Well, yes, Bill, perhaps you should.

And Hammack — radio perform-er, engineering professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a member of ASME — does explain, taking his weekly radio audience of 75,000 to 100,000 people on a verbal tour covering Mao Zedong, DuPont and molecules held together with paper clips, and ending with the development of nylon.

Every week for the last couple of years Hammack has produced an elegant and entertaining essay about some aspect of engineering, focusing on common articles found in everyday life.

In one program, Hammack described how the invention of Velcro was inspired by a walk in the woods that left an engineer's socks covered with burrs. In studying how the burr attached itself to the yarn of his sock, that engineer determined the same principle would make a great fastener. And so Velcro, a name combined from the words velvet and crochet, was born.

Thousands of Illinois residents hear ASME member Bill Hammack's weekly radio show "Engineering and Life," which highlights the contributions engineers have made to everyday life.

Hammack has discussed the origins of the typewriter and of potholes, as well as the amazing career of Leon Theremin, who in the 1920s invented an early electronic instrument that would eventually inspire the development of the synthesizer, and who was later kidnapped by the KGB. Another piece described the story of Spam — the canned meat, not the electronic variety.

His talks, lasting just two or three minutes, are heard on the University's radio station, WILL, and on several other stations in Illinois. Hammack said he is now exploring ways to syndicate the show across the United States.

Last June, he set up a Web site, www.engineerguy.com, where anyone may either read or listen to the entire archive of his programs. All of his radio segments are archived on a CD, which several teachers have purchased and used in their classrooms.

Hammack came to his twin interests in engineering and performance early in his life by way of his parents; his mother was a biologist, his father a professor of theater. As a child, he liked to perform magic tricks. But Hammack is especially fond of radio as a medium. He records the tapes at a radio studio, but nowadays he edits them himself. "It makes me a better radio performer," he noted.

At the University of Illinois, Hammack, a chemical engineer, teaches regular engineering courses as well as a special non-major course that explains engineering in a larger societal context to non-engineers, including students of history, business and even dance. He joined ASME because he likes to keep track of all sorts of engineering, and to know what's going on in various areas of the field.

Does he ever worry that he will run out of topics? "No. If you'd asked me that a couple of years ago, I might have said yes. I was worried about that at the beginning, but now I'm not."

He finds having to write a new item every week a useful discipline. "You just have to do it," he says. And he gets considerable feedback from his listeners, too.

Hammack pointed out that the program is aimed at the general public, rather than at engineers. "Some teachers actually used my CD in fourth and fifth grade classes," he noted.

"I felt there was a need to do something like this," he explained. "I think that the normal view people have of technology is that it's a force that overtakes us. But that's a passive way to view it," Hammack said. "Technology reflects us, and we should be more concerned with shaping it."

Hammock hopes that his broadcasts will help demystify and humanize technology. "People think, mistakenly, that the programs are about how things work," he said. "But actually, they are about a humanistic view of science, and how it affects us."

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