Engineers Need Poetry, Too. Just ask Michael Pupin
Once upon a time, as all the best stories start, a small Serbian shepherd boy protected his village's cowherd from cattle thieves. To be precise, he did this with several other boys in the community. Working at night, the boys kept cows from being lured away by the thieves. As part of this, they communicated with each other via sound. Writing much later, no longer a boy, the man remembered that "each boy had a knife with a long with a long wooden handle. The knife was stuck deep into the ground. A sound was made by striking against the wooden handle, and the boys, lying down and pressing their ears close to the ground, had to estimate the direction and distance of the origin of sound. Practice made us quite expert in this form of signalling. We knew at that time that the sound travelled through the ground far better than through the air, and that a a hard and solid ground transmitted sound much better than the ploughed-up ground. We knew, therefore, that the sound produced this way near the edge of the pasture-land could not be heard in the soft ground of the corn-fields stretching along the edge."
This "herdsmen's summer school," as he called it, was an unorthodox schoolroom. It was also effective. When political instability and a dearth of educational opportunities sent the boy to America (where he landed with a nickel in his pocket), these experiences helped him develop critical technology to improve a new invention: the telephone.
His name was Mihajlo Pupin (he changed it to Michael in the US). He wrote about his journey from penniless immigrant to successful inventor in his Pulitzer Prize winning book From Immigrant to Inventor, originally published in 1923. It was not an easy path: factory work, manual labor at a farm, hours of studying, forging relationships, sacrificing leisure time for learning. Pupin eventually made his way to Columbia University, then Cambridge, then the University of Berlin. Returning to America, he became a professor of electromagnetics at Columbia.
He excelled in studying forms of sound wave engineering. Dabbled in x-ray. Loved radio technology. And poetry. Yes, poetry. Reading his autobiography, it is clear that he saw no divide between STEM practices and the liberal arts. For him, they helped make a human an integrated whole.
This love of poetry started in his early years. Remembering again his boyhood in rural Serbia he wrote that "reading and writing did not flourish in Idvor [his village] in those days, but poetry did." Later, when studying for admittance to Columbia, he memorized large portions of the Iliad and speeches by Cicero for his oral exams. He admitted that he "wanted to show off," but also described how much he loved the "wonderful mental exhilaration which a young student gets from reading aloud and memorizing the words of Homer and Cicero." After the exam, "the professors were greatly surprised and asked me why I had taken so much trouble. I told them it was no trouble, because Serbs delight in memorizing beautiful lines... I told them also of illiterate Bab Batikin, the minstrel of my native village, who knew most of the old Serbian ballads by heart." Memorizing poetry a problem?! I can almost hear the young Serbian's astonishment as he answered them. How could it be it a bother to dwell with words of beauty?
I wonder that, too, as I look at the landscape surrounding the liberal arts today. All too often, the liberal arts are treated as a liability to students pursuing the more "worthwhile" college pursuits of engineering, science, and technology. Scientists like Pupin rejected this bifurcation, though, and celebrated all the ways humans handle sound: in poetry, music, well-written words, and in technology. Perhaps we should lean our own ears down to the ground of the past and listen to this idea a bit more...
Sometimes it is OK to judge a book by its cover. I stumbled across this book at a secondhand book sale & decided to purchase it based only on the title and unique cover art (it cost me more than a nickel...).