Dartmouth Engineer

Co-inventor: Professor Paul E. Queneau

LEADER OF THE PACK: A QSL reactor, co-invented by Professor Paul E. Queneau, produces 150,000 tons of lead and lead alloys and 100,000 tons of sulphuric acid annually at the Berzelius plant in Stolberg, Germany. Photograph courtesy of Berzelius Stolberg GmbH.

When the National Academy of Engineering honored Professor Paul E. Queneau with membership in 1981, the citation noted his “innovative leadership in the invention and commercial development of efficient technology for extraction of nickel, copper, and cobalt.” In the world of smelting, he’s also known for getting the lead out.

Queneau devoted his entire career to metal. During the Depression, the Columbia grad labored at the International Nickel Company’s (INCO) alloy furnaces in West Virginia. “It was hard, dangerous work,” he says, but metallurgy hooked him, and he moved up in the company.

Army service — he rose to colonel — in the European theater during World War II galvanized him. “What I saw and experienced over there has driven me ever since,” he says. “Who do you think designed all those tools of mass destruction? It was engineers! We as engineers now have a responsibility to modernize technology, save energy, and protect the environment.”

Returning to R&D at INCO, Queneau helped develop energy-efficient, environmentally friendly smelters with breakthrough oxygen technology that reduced the needed amount of coal and decreased sulfur emissions.

Professor Paul E. Queneau in 2008. Photograph by Mark Woodward.

Soon after becoming a professor at Thayer School in 1971, Queneau joined with Purdue University Professor Reinhart Schuhmann Jr. and the German firm Lurgi to invent a continuous smelter that boosts efficiency and cleanliness. Compacted pellets of sulphide concentrate and flue dust dissolve in a molten bath that is injected with oxygen, producing lead and lead oxide. The lead sinks to the bottom and is siphoned off. The lead oxide flows to the far end of the reactor. Along the way, submerged injectors blow powdered coal into the lead oxide to reduce it to lead. Sulphur dioxide in the off-gas is converted to commercially usable sulphuric acid. Remaining flue dust is mixed into new pellets, and the process starts again.

Queneau Schuhmann Lurgi, a.k.a. QSL, reactors are in use in Canada, Korea, and Germany, churning out lead without spurning the environment.

For more photos, visit our Research and Innovations set on Flickr.

Co-inventor: Professor Frank Austin

By Lee Michaelides

X-RAY VISION: Frank Austin, class of 1895, x-rayed his own hand. Photograph courtesy of New Hampshire Profiles magazine.

The medical X-ray, like many inventions, is the result of different people working simultaneously on the same idea. Weeks after German scientist Wilhelm Roentgen announced in late 1895 the discovery of a “mysterious light” emitted from Crookes tubes, scientists and engineers from all over the world began experiments. One such person was Frank Austin, class of 1895, a physics assistant at Dartmouth and later a professor at Thayer. Using equipment he built, Austin made a number of X-ray photographs, including one of his own hand in late January of 1896. On February 3, 1896, at Austin’s suggestion, Hanover physician Dr. Gilman Frost and his brother, physics professor Edwin Frost, took a diagnostic X-ray of local schoolboy Eddie McCarthy’s broken wrist.

Until recently, Dartmouth had undisputed bragging rites for the first medical X-ray. Then Yale claimed that one of its physicists made an X-ray image on January 27, 1896.

“If Yale’s physicist, Arthur Wright, preempted the Dartmouth group,” writes Dr. Peter Spiegel ’58 DMS’59, a Dartmouth radiologist who has done extensive research on the history of the X-ray, “it remains unreported and unsubstantiated, at least in the scientific literature. The Dartmouth group went one step further. The taking of the first clinical X-ray in America was captured by photographer Henry H. Barrett and so remains the first scientific experiment recorded by photographic means.”

— Lee Michaelides is a contributing editor at Dartmouth Engineer.

Editor’s Note: The photograph to which Dr. Spiegel refers actually was taken by H.H. Langill with the assistance of Henry H. Barrett.

Frank Austin urged Dr. Gilman Frost to take the first medical X-ray. Left to right: physicist Edwin Frost, patient Eddie McCarthy, Gilman Frost, and Gilman’s wife, Margaret Mead Frost. Photograph by H.H. Langill and Henry H. Barrett; from Dartmouth College Archives.

LIFESAVERS: The Kantrowitz brothers, Adrian, left, and Arthur, right, helped heart patients. Photograph by Ralph Morse/Time & Life Pictures.

Inventors: Professor Arthur Kantrowitz and Dr. Adrian Kantrowitz

A dynamic duo for solving problems of engineering in medicine, Thayer professor Arthur Kantrowitz and his brother Adrian learned early on that Arthur’s passion for physics and Adrian’s interest in medicine could combine into a powerful force for innovation.

As kids they built an electrocardiograph machine out of old radio parts, and later — when Adrian became a doctor and Arthur a professor of engineering physics — they paved the way for open-heart surgery with their early version of a heart-lung machine. Their projects together continued from there. They developed a left ventricular assist device, introduced electrical stimulation of paralyzed muscles, pioneered the implantable pacemaker, and invented the intra-aortic balloon pump (IABP).

IABP is a small balloon that fits in the aorta and counter-pulsates with the heart. This action both decreases myocardial oxygen demand and increases myocardial oxygen supply. A computer controls the flow of helium into and out of the balloon. Helium is used because its low viscosity allows it to travel quickly through the long connecting tubes and lowers the risk of rupturing the balloon and causing a harmful embolism.

The IABP is credited with saving hundreds of thousands of lives. The device was used on Arthur himself to ease the effects of heart failure during his final hours. Both brothers died in November 2008, just 15 days apart. [See In Memoriam.]

—Catharine Lamm

For more photos, visit our Engineering in Medicine, Faculty and Instructors, and Research and Innovations Flickr page.

PEDAL TO THE MEDAL: Brian Mason ’03 Th’04, ’05, in red shirt, and his Aquaduct colleagues created a winner. Photo courtesy of Brian Mason ’03 Th’04, ’05

Inventor: Brian Mason ’03 Th’04, ’05

In many parts of the world, people have to walk or motor miles to collect water. Then they have to boil it to purify it. The process not only consumes time but fuels.

Brian Mason ’03 Th’04, ’05 and four colleagues at IDEO, a design firm in Palo Alto, Calif., came up with a better idea. They invented the “Aquaduct,” a mobile filtration vehicle that makes it possible for people in the developing world to fetch and transport a family’s daily supply of water. By the time riders pedal home, some of the water is already filtered and ready to drink. The rest can be filtered later by stationary cycling.

The idea was so good that it recently won the grand prize in Google’s first Innovate or Die Pedal-Powered Machine Contest, which challenged teams across the country to create pedal-powered solutions to offset climate change. The Aquaduct beat out 101 other entries.

The ingenious bike attaches a peristaltic pump to the pedal crank to draw water from a large tank and filter it into a removable dispenser. Mason says that the project reminded him of Thayer School’s hands-on introductory course. “It was like working on ENGS 21 but in the real world,” he says.

Mason and his teammates donated their $5,000 prize money to KickStart, a nonprofit that develops and markets new low-cost technologies in Africa.

The bike hasn’t yet made it into production, but Mason is hopeful. “We are working to find funding to continue the project, as it needs more development,” he says. “It has received lots of press and excitement from around the world.”

More than 750,000 people have already watched the team’s winning presentation of the Aquaduct on YouTube.

For more photos, visit our Research and Innovations Flickr page.

Loomis rowed the Connecticut River his own way.

Inventor: Warren Loomis ’62 Th’65

By Lee Michaelides

No doubt about it: Warren Loomis ’62 Th’65 was a forwarding-looking guy. In the early 1960s, when there were exactly two computers at Dartmouth, he took a keen interest in the new technology. After his first employer, the pioneering Time Share Corp., downsized him out of a job, he formed his own software company, Logic Associates. The two-man outfit soon became a Loomis-only enterprise as the company struggled to find its niche. But Loomis persevered, and a quarter century later the Upper Valley-based firm had 120 employees and sales of $17 million. He sold the company in 2000, and turned his engineering skills to recreation.

Loomis had taken up rowing, and he thought rowers should see where they were going, not where they’d already been. He designed a rowboat that combines the motion of a rowing machine with a rear-mounted propeller. Then he and his sons, Aaron and Jason, founded the Faceforward! company to manufacture and sell the novel craft. Next he developed a set of real-time performance tools to measure speed, power, and efficiency in small boats.

By the time Loomis died last November, neither of his rowing innovations matched the financial success of his software start-up. But they illustrate what son Jason says was a favorite saying of the late inventor: “The guy with the most tries wins.”

— Lee Michaelides is a contributing editor at Dartmouth Engineer.

For more photos, visit our Research and Innovations Flickr page.

Strohbehn, left, and Roberts launched image-guided surgery with their breakthrough operating microscope.

Inventors: Professor John Strohbehn and Dr. David Roberts DMS’75

Ever since early humans drilled holes into patients’ heads in paleolithic neurosurgery, doctors have longed for a way to navigate the brain and pinpoint lesions. In the 1970s computerized tomography (CT) produced amazing two-dimensional images of the brain, but the only way to use the scans as navigational guides during surgery was via a cumbersome metal frame that ringed the patient’s head, got in the surgeon’s way, and (ouch!) had to be screwed directly into the skull.

In the early 1980s Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center neurosurgeon David Roberts DMS’75 asked Thayer Professor John Strohbehn to create a better solution: an instrument that could map CT data onto the visual field of a microscope to produce a precise three-dimensional (a.k.a. stereotactic) view of the brain. Working together in Strohbehn’s lab at 7 a.m. — before Roberts’ clinical hours and Strohbehn’s classes — they created an operating microscope that was stereotactic, frameless, and precise. They tested their prototype in the operating room in 1983 and patented the invention three years later.

The frameless stereotactic operating microscope was a hit. Not only was it more comfortable for the patient, it was the beginning of image-guided surgery.

Today every neurosurgical operating room in the world is equipped with an updated version of Strohbehn and Roberts’ invention. You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to know that brain surgery would now be unthinkable without it.

For more photos, visit our Research and Innovations Flickr page.

Inventor: Professor Fred Hooven ’25A

Professor Fred Hooven ’25A. Photograph by Douglas Fraser

In a memorial tribute to Professor Fred Hooven ’25A, former Thayer School Dean Myron Tribus described Hooven as a classical engineer who “viewed the world’s problems in terms of their potential solutions.” Hooven spent his career solving many problems for science, commerce and fun.

Born in 1905, Hooven grew up in Dayton, Ohio, not far from the Wright brothers. At 5 he befriended Orville. At 15 he sought his advice on building planes. Years later, Hooven used the Wrights’ wind tunnel data to design a paper airplane that beat 10,000 other entries in the “duration aloft” category of Scientific American’s Great American Paper Airplane Contest.

Hooven, an MIT grad, invented many devices for airplanes, including a radio compass that is still in use. He designed a short-wave radar system for bombers during World War II and invented ignition and landing systems for other planes. Turning to other fields, he developed brake shoes used in all GM vehicles for 25 years and a front-wheel drive system installed in several GM models. He even invented the first successful heart-lung machine. By the time he died in 1985, he held 38 patents in avionics, automotive technology, and medical technology.

Amelia Earhart holds the radio compass she used in 1937 on her last flight. Hooven, wished she had taken the one he invented. Photograph courtesy of Purdue University Libraries, Archives and Special Collections

Hooven became a legend, however, not because of who used his inventions, but because of someone who didn’t.

“Before Miss Earhart took off on her Round-the-World flight she removed from her plane a modern radio compass that had been installed and replaced it with an older, lighter-weight model of much less capability. I am the engineer who had invented and developed the radio compass that was removed, and I discussed its features with Miss Earhart before the installation was made,” wrote Hooven in a scholarly paper published in 1982 about Amelia Earhart’s final flight. To the end he believed that had she used his radio compass she would have found Howland Island — and a safe landing.

—Lee Michaelides

Photograph courtesy of Dartmouth College archives

Inventor: Professor James Browning ’44

By Lee Michaelides

Half a century ago Thayer Professor James Browning ’44 was nicknamed Hanover’s firebug for his study of flame stability and combustion. In early work on Project Squid, a government-funded study of propulsion, Browning experimented with methyl naphthalene, which smells like gasoline-soaked mothballs. Not only did his lab reek, but news clips from the era reported that as Browning “passed people on the street on his way homeward, he was the subject of many curious glances from people who suddenly realized who was defiling the usually ‘pine-scented’ atmosphere of Hanover.”

Browning will be remembered best not for his smell but for inventions that fired up the Upper Valley economy. In the 1950s he created a plasma torch that produced flames twice as hot as the sun’s surface. Passing nitrogen or hydrogen through a high-intensity electric arc, the torch cut metal like butter. Browning and Thayer colleague Merle Thorpe founded Thermal Dynamics Corp. to manufacture the device. Within three years the start-up had sales of $1 million. A decade later, Thayer Professor Robert Dean and Richard Couch ’64, Th’65 formed Hypertherm Inc. to produce a water-injection plasma torch that was nine times hotter than the sun. Today that company employs 500 people.

Meanwhile, Browning invented a high-temperature rocket drill called the “Thermoblast.” In 1977 he used it to pierce Antarctica’s 1,400-foot-thick Ross Ice Shelf so scientists could study the water underneath. Drilling time: nine hours — a cool use of a hot technology.

For more photos, visit our Research and Innovations set on Flickr.

Inventor: Otis Ellis Hovey

Otis Ellis Hovey, Dartmouth 1885, Thayer 1887, had two words of advice about what it takes to be an engineer: “Hard work.” To which he added, “You want more than this? Well, I would add ‘common sense.’ So many engineers fail because they do not have the last quality.”

Hovey was, by all accounts, a hard worker, and he had a lot more common sense than his Dartmouth classmate and cousin Richard Hovey, author of the drinking song “Eleazar Wheelock.” As the assistant chief engineer of American Bridge Company Otis Hovey worked on some of the biggest projects of his era, including designing the superstructure of the Belle­fontaine Bridge across the Mississippi and designing and building six emergency dams for the Panama Canal.

Hovey was also the authority on moveable bridges. He wrote the subject bible — Moveable Bridges, published in 1926 — and held patents on three moveable bridge designs which he dubbed Types O, E, and H (which just happen to be his initials.)

Hovey's retractable emergency locks for the Panama Canal swung into place like a moveable bridge.

Hovey’s success didn’t come from common sense alone. The man had imagination. In 1895, at the age of 30, he designed a 3,200-foot bridge across the Hudson River — twice as long as the Brooklyn Bridge (then the world’s longest). Visiting Turkey, he designed a pontoon bridge across Constantinople’s Golden Horn. Though neither bridge was built, his plans displayed his signature blend of diligence, intelligence, and originality.

In his later years Hovey was regularly mistaken for look-alike Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes. Hovey served on the Thayer Board of Overseers from 1907 until his death in 1941.

— Lee Michaelides

Fore more photos, visit our Research and Innovations set on Flickr.

Former Thayer School research professor Sydney Alonso (left) and Cameron Jones ’75, Th’77 (right), watch Dartmouth music Professor Jon Appleton play the Synclavier I, the world’s first digital synthesizer.

Inventors: Sydney Alsonso, Cameron Jones ’75, Th’77

The Moog synthesizer, the prime electronic instrument of the 1970s, linked a piano keyboard to an analog computer — but it had no memory. Wanting something better, Dartmouth music professor and composer Jon Appleton turned to Thayer School.

The resulting Synclavier was the world’s first digital synthesizer. Built in 1975 by Thayer School research professor Sydney Alonso and programmed by then-B.E. candidate Cameron Jones ’75, Th’77, the Synclavier pioneered digital sampling, hard-disk recording, and professional sound editing. It was just what Appleton wanted. “It did so many things, and the software was so beautifully integrated,” he says.

Alonso and Jones left Dartmouth and went into business, founding New England Digital Corporation in 1977. The Synclavier rapidly became the Rolls Royce of the music industry. Despite price tags ranging from $75,000 to $500,000, the Synclavier was the instrument of choice for Sting, Stevie Wonder, Frank Zappa, and many others. When jazz guitarist Pat Metheny asked how he could plug in, Synclavier engineers worked with him to develop a guitar interface. Pianist Oscar Peterson’s wish for better response led to the touch-sensitive keyboard. Lucasfilm’s interest in the sound editor function resulted in a new software interface that made post-production editing as easy as music recording.

Throughout the 1980s Synclavier led all comers. But as personal computers flooded the market with low-cost digital samplers and audio editing software, Synclavier sales faltered. In 1992 New England Digital Corporation closed its doors.

Today a hundred or so die-hard customers keep the Synclavier alive. Hardware and software are available online.

For more photos, visit our Research and Innovations set on Flickr.