January 29, 2025 • 32 mins
In this episode of The Engineering Passion Express, we take you on a journey from a time when there were no reliable weather forecasts. Ships, planes and even family vacations were ruined by the lack of understanding how weather systems form and evolve.
This story is told through the lens of Lewis Fry Richardson, one of the academic pioneers who worked on the mathematical foundations of weather prediction. He is a good foil to John Davis from episode 1 who invented the lane machine!
Join me and learn where Lewis Fry Richardson failed, and how he had come up with a fantastical factory concept for predicting the weather at a time when the idea of the modern computer hadn't yet been invented!
In this episode you'll get insight on how our values, and identities shape the kinds of problems we solve.
Show Notes and Links
The Engineering Passion Express is about growing knowledge and the passion for engineering.
It is my hope, that this grows into a powerful community where people share knowledge, or their passions and find happiness in their pursuits of making things better by thinking like an engineer.
The Engineering Passion Express is about growing knowledge and the passion for engineering.
If you are a conference organizer and are looking for an engineering or scientific speaker to inspire or educate in a keynote presentation, please reach out to me on LinkedIn. You can find my profile below.
Thanks for listening,
Brandon Donnelly
Please connect with me on linkedin @ linkedin.com/in/brandondonnelly
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_01 (00:00):
Welcome to the Engineering Passion Express.
I'm your host, Brandon Donnelly.
You're listening to Season 1,Episode 2, a continuation of
Picking the Right Problems.
On the last episode, we lookedat John Davis, the founder of
Keggle, who invented the bowlinglane oil machine.
(00:21):
This episode, we'll look atLewis Fry Richardson, who worked
on predicting the weather backin the 1910s and 1920s.
(00:46):
When studying fluid behavior,Lewis Fry Richardson created a
little rhyme.
Big worlds have little whirlsthat feed on velocity.
Little whirls have lesserwhirls, and on and on to
viscosity.
Now this is just a rhyme thathelps students remind themselves
of how fluid behaves, but it'salso true for historical events
(01:12):
and how the world behaves.
In this episode, we're going tocontinue on discussing picking
the right problems.
Lewis Fry Richardson will serveas sort of a foil to John Davis.
While John was a practical manand an entrepreneur, Richardson
was more of an academic.
While John is sort of post-war,Richardson is right in the heart
(01:33):
of World War I.
So there's a lot of interestingdynamics between the two that we
can discuss at the end.
If you go back in time, theworld wasn't always filled with
science.
In fact, the scientificrevolution really kicked off
around the time of Newton in the1650s.
(01:55):
And we had this rapidaccumulation of scientific
knowledge that really didn'texist prior to that.
You had Newton inventingcalculus and coming up with the
equations of motion and thegeneralized theory around it.
And then later, others wouldtake those equations of motion
and come up with applied theory,like the Navier-Stokes
equations, that governed howfluid flow based on the
(02:18):
equations of motion.
And that applied theory came 150to 200 years later, and then
from that applied theory youhave practical applications,
like the weather prediction,which would come another 70
years later, and still wouldn'tquite be completed until the
invention of the computer andthe building of ENIAC in the
(02:42):
1950s.
So, all in all, the scientificrevolution is this big whirl
that's changing everything aboutthe way the world operates and
has operated for the thousandsof years beforehand.
And you and me and everybodylistening to this are part of
that revolution as engineers.
(03:07):
Breaking off from the scientificrevolution in an era just before
World War I, there were all ofthese little whirls of science
that were coming off of thesebig, massive scientific
discoveries.
So a little world example wouldbe transportation.
In 1912, you have the Titanic.
(03:30):
A little bit before that, in1903, you have the flight at
Kitty Hawk and the Wrightbrothers becoming the first
manned air flight.
And then you have other peoplemaking ground in aviation around
this time, such as CharlesRolls, who did the first double
crossing of the English Channelin an airplane.
(03:53):
And there's also little whirlsin other branches of science.
You have germ theory comingabout.
You have chemistry and physicswith J.J.
Thompson finding the electron in1897 and winning the Nobel Prize
for that in 1906.
So this era around the 1910s andthe early 1900s is filled with
(04:18):
all these fascinating thingsgoing on in science.
And if you go just before that,into the 1880s, that's where our
main character today, Louis FryRichardson, was born in 1881.
He was born into a highlyreligious Quaker family, yet he
studied science and mathematicsunder a number of Greek teachers
(04:41):
at Bootham Science School,Durham and King's College, and
one of his professors was J.J.
Thompson, the man who discoveredthe electron as a key component
of the atom.
So he was surrounded with greatscientific minds all throughout
his life.
And he would eventually go on toget a job at the meteorological
(05:03):
office that was established evenbefore he was born back in 1854
to help mariners avoid sailinginto storms, since aviation was
becoming an evolving field, andplanes obviously are even more
sensitive to the weather thanships.
It was time for themeteorological office to take
(05:25):
their work even more seriously.
And Louis Fry Richardson, withhis scientific and mathematical
training, thought that thatwould be a good place to bring
his work.
Now, not every whirl in historyis good.
There are plenty of dark whirls.
World War I saw two and a halfmillion men enlist in the UK
(05:50):
military.
It brought some lesser whirlsalong with it, such as the
scientific revolution of thegun, specifically the machine
gun, and in order to combatthose, trench warfare was also
created.
The new field of aviation hadits own whirl.
The concept of dropping bombsfrom an airplane became
(06:11):
something new.
Sometimes in history, theseworlds make us think, maybe we
don't want to do this, but if wedon't, somebody else is going
to.
At the time of World War One,and particularly as a devout
Quaker who was raised in ahighly religious household,
(06:32):
Richardson was against fightingin the war.
He was a conscientious objector,one of nearly 16,000.
Richardson himself was caught upin the big whirl of the
scientific revolution, as that'swhat he was raised on, and
that's how he was trained tothink.
(06:54):
But this littler whirl of WorldWar One was feeding.
And he and others couldn't seethemselves escaping it.
When his country forced him tomake a choice, he looked within
for answers.
He couldn't escape participatingin some manner, so he turned to
(07:14):
prayer for advice, and believingGod answered him directly, he
joined the ambulance corpse,befitting his greater good moral
philosophy.
He still witnessed horrificeffects of war, he still faced
chaos and the destruction ofhumanity, and he looked for a
(07:36):
means of coping.
Oftentimes, when faced with suchdifficulty, moral ambiguity,
lack of security, we turn tothings that we know and that we
understand, or at least feel weunderstand.
Up until this point, Lewis FryRichardson's career had been at
(08:01):
the meteorological office.
And the military also neededbetter weather prediction in
order to save lives and makemilitary operations more
successful.
Richardson had themeteorological experience, and
he had the education to makethis into something.
(08:23):
It became his ambition to applyscience and mathematics to
weather prediction to be able tocorrectly forecast weather hours
or days in advance.
It was his escape from the sadreality that was happening
around him during this crazyperiod in the world.
Richardson was able to think upthe forecast factory.
(08:49):
Now here's a British soundingaccent to read you Lewis Fry
Richardson's description of hisgrand designs for the
weather-predicting forecastfactory.
SPEAKER_00 (09:02):
After so much hard reasoning, may one play with a
fantasy.
Imagine a large hall like atheatre, except that the circles
and galleries go right roundthrough the space usually
occupied by the stage.
The walls of this chamber arepainted to form a map of the
globe.
The ceiling represents the northpolar regions, England is in the
gallery, the tropics in theupper circle, Australia on the
dress circle, and the Antarcticin the pit.
(09:24):
A myriad of computers, or peoplewho compute are at work upon the
weather of the part of the mapwhere each sits, but each
computer tends only to oneequation or part of an equation.
The work of each region iscoordinated by an official of
higher rank.
Numerous little night signsdisplay the instantaneous values
so that neighbouring computerscan read them.
Each number is thus displayed inthree adjacent zones so as to
(09:45):
maintain communication to thenorth and south on the map.
From the floor of the pit, atall pillar rises to half the
height of the hall.
It carries a large pulpit on itstop.
In this sits the man in chargeof the whole theatre.
He is surrounded by severalassistants and messengers.
One of his duties is to maintaina uniform speed of progress in
all parts of the globe.
In this respect, he is like theconductor of an orchestra in
(10:07):
which the instruments are sliderules and calculating machines.
But instead of waving a baton,he turns a beam of rosy light
upon any region that is runningahead of the rest, and a beam of
blue light upon those who arebehind hand.
For senior clerks in the centralpulpit, are collecting the
future weather as fast as it isbeing computed and dispatching
it by pneumatic carrier to aquiet room.
There it will be coded andtelephoned to the radio
(10:28):
transmitting station.
Messengers carry piles of usedcomputing forms down to a
storehouse in the cellar.
In a neighbouring building thereis a research department where
they invent improvements.
But there is much experimentingon a small scale before any
change is made in the complexroutine of the computing
theatre.
In a basement, an enthusiast isobserving eddies in the liquid
lining of a huge spinning bowl.
(10:49):
But so far the arithmetic provesthe better way.
In another building are all theusual financial, correspondence,
and administrative offices.
Outside are playing fields,houses, mountains, and lakes.
For it was thought that thosewho compute the weather should
breathe of it freely.
SPEAKER_01 (11:04):
That was Lewis Fry Richardson's description of the
forecast factory.
In modern day would never be thearchitecture of the solution
because computers exist.
Computers not in the form ofpeople performing computations,
but computers in the form ofCPUs and GPUs that solve
(11:29):
millions of equations infractions of a second and can
easily coordinate amongstthemselves and perform all of
this with far more accuracy andless error than the three to
sixty-four thousand estimatedhumans it would have taken to
carry out this process.
(11:50):
Still, it's nice to know thatpeople dream grand dreams even
when they don't see an alternateroute for practical technology.
In Richardson's wildest dreams,he likely did not understand
(12:12):
that today I would have acomputer in front of me that
could fit on my lap and whosecomputational power would exceed
all of those computers sittingin that great hall that he
imagined calculating by hand bymillions of times.
(12:58):
What it would have required is abusiness model in the form of
understanding who's going to payfor it, which would have been
much more likely during the war,as if you could tell the
government, we can predictweather, and our enemies will
not be able to, then it's highlypossible that you could get
(13:23):
funding for a country seeking anedge in war.
Post-war.
The weather is still important.
There's still uses for aviation,especially as it's starting to
take a commercial twistpost-war.
(13:43):
There's agriculturalapplications for understanding
the weather.
But things weren't like today.
You couldn't get a thousandsubscribers or a million
subscribers all on a creditcard.
That just wasn't a thing.
So you were mostly looking toeither some sort of government,
military funding, academicfunding, and you would have had
(14:08):
to be somebody who was verybusiness savvy and
entrepreneurial minded to makethis work.
Now, having thought of thiswhile the war was going on, the
war would end eventually, andthe world would need to get back
to normal, putting thosehorrific events in the past and
sharing a vision of a brighterfuture.
(14:31):
However, for Richardson, this iswhere his ideas would meet their
reality.
First, predicting the weatherwas an impractical amount of
manual labor.
Richardson did months of handcalculations in order to predict
(14:53):
a six-hour advanced weatherprediction.
And even that produced anunrealistic answer.
Unfortunately, the nature ofweather systems is chaotic.
Small rounding errors oruncertainties in starting
conditions compound quickly andmake long forecasts nearly
(15:19):
impossible.
And finally, there really wasn'treal-time instrumentation and
the tools needed for accuratemeasurement to introduce
accurate boundary conditions.
So when you take that with thechaotic nature and small
(15:42):
uncertainties quickly spiralinginto larger ones, it made it
very difficult for the timeperiod that Lewis Fry Richardson
was in to have powerful weatherprediction capabilities.
All of those technicalchallenges could have been
overcome with enough desire,passion, seek for funding, but
(16:12):
Lewis Fry Richardson was facinga number of internal dilemmas.
And these are something that Ithink most people don't think
about when they choose theirproblem.
The first is that Louis FryRichardson was trying to discuss
the academic nature of weatherprediction.
(16:36):
But due to his conscientiousobjector status in the war, he
wasn't allowed to hold anacademic post.
And that lowered his chances ofbeing taken serious or gaining
funding from the government.
Richardson also had a strongsense of moral beliefs tied to
his Quaker upbringing.
(16:58):
While at the time he was doingthis work, he thought predicting
the weather was a good avenuefor somebody who wanted to help
in a nonviolent way.
However, once somebody pointedout that weather prediction
could be used to assist inchemical weapons deployment, he
(17:18):
stopped working on it.
He felt that it no longer was inalignment with his morals, and
that there was othermathematical and scientific
problems that he could work on.
I think this is interesting foranybody who's read about the
development of the atomic bomb.
(17:40):
Because this very much contrastswith Oppenheimer, who may have
been concerned about the usageof the nuclear weapon that they
were creating in the ManhattanProject, but understood directly
(18:01):
that if they don't do this work,somebody else might.
And if somebody else controlssuch power, then it is very
likely that you want to becloser to it rather than at the
whims of somebody else.
And lastly, Richardson faced adilemma of identity or an
(18:27):
identity crisis.
Is he an academic?
Or is he a businessmanentrepreneur?
To bring the forecast factory tolife, you definitely need to be
more of the latter.
But most of Lewis FryRichardson's experience was
being around academics, likeJ.J.
Thompson, who discovered theelectron.
(18:50):
That doesn't turn into abusiness, but predicting weather
forecasts, that certainly is.
So Richardson made his choice.
He moved on from the problem.
He cited resistance of beingtaken seriously as a
conscientious objector, the factthat it could be used for
chemical weapons, and the factthat he had other academic
(19:10):
pursuits worth chasing after.
In Lewis Fry Richardson's case,not all was lost.
In the 1950s, ENIAC was thefirst computer to do processing
on the weather phenomenon.
Richardson would hear about thiswork a few years before his
death, providing him some reliefthat his work did contribute to
the larger base of scientificknowledge in society.
(19:34):
Ultimately, he would not derivemany financial benefits from the
efforts that he had put forth.
(20:00):
Especially when we compare LouisFry Richardson to John Davis.
The first is a simple comparisonwhere they were similar.
And that's that experiences leadus to the problems we tackle.
(20:20):
John Davis built the bowlinglane oil machine because he was
working as a lane man and saw aproblem with consistency in the
lanes.
Lewis Fry Richardson tackledweather prediction because he
was raised going to scientificschools and colleges and then
(20:43):
worked in the meteorologicaloffice.
Both of those experiences, forboth of those men, drove them to
pick the problems they wanted towork on.
It's possible that both of thesepeople let life take them to the
places that they were in, andthen from there sought to solve
(21:06):
challenges that they found.
But if you're not like that, andyou know that you have a
specific area, whether it'sautomotive or aerospace or
something that you want totackle, and you're not there
today, then you need to getthere because you won't see the
problems and the challenges thatexist without that experience.
(21:31):
The second item that you cantake away from this is that your
identity can get in the way.
If you feel like you'reentrepreneurial, you need to be
entrepreneurial.
If you feel like that's not you,you need to either change your
(21:52):
opinion if you want to be, oryou need to be comfortable with
who you are.
And the example here is thatJohn Davis, from the first
episode, his identity was thathe was a lane oil mechanic.
And he was solving problems forother lane oil mechanics.
(22:14):
And over time solving thesechallenges, he grew into more of
a businessman.
So your identity can shift.
But in Richardson's case, Ibelieve that he spent most of
his life believing he's anacademic.
And while academics solvecomplex challenges in
(22:37):
mathematics and they come upwith theories, they don't
necessarily come up with thereal-world application, which is
generally more of anentrepreneur's gambit.
So if you're not very clear onyour identity, maybe you need to
(23:00):
think about it more and reallyknow who you are before you
choose what sort of problems youwork on.
Now I think less often, andparticularly in times of peace
rather than war, people don'talways ask themselves, are they
morally aligned with their work?
But I think you can't do yourbest work if you're really not
(23:22):
into it.
I can think of a industry that'sgrowing at the moment, the
cannabis industry.
And there's probably all sortsof engineers working on problems
and equipment for extractiondevices, creating all sorts of
things related to that industry.
If you're against the usage ofthat product, then perhaps
(23:44):
that's not the right industryfor you to be in.
(24:05):
So before you get started on aproject, or take a role, it
might behoove you to think, am Imorally aligned with this work,
or is there anything that couldcome up that I will not agree
with in this space?
(24:25):
Another point to take away hereis in the first episode, we
talked about how the lane oilmachine proliferated amongst
bowling centers because it wasseen as a weapon for improving
the customer experience.
And once your competition hadit, you needed to have it too.
(24:48):
I believe Richardson missed areal opportunity here because
weather prediction certainlyfalls under the same category.
That if Richardson could haveconvinced the military during
wartime that weather predictionwas going to be critical for
(25:10):
their success in the war, andthat it would be a competitive
advantage in the war, he couldhave easily found the funding to
create his forecast factory.
And today, weather predictionobviously exists in a number of
forms.
There's the news is showing youwhat the weather is, there's
weather sites that you can getsubscriptions to, weather apps.
(25:33):
The value was there.
But the moral alignment withthat was not in Richardson's
favor.
Neither was his identity as anacademic.
He would have had to be anentrepreneur pitching
high-ranking military officialsor high-ranking government
(25:53):
officials that money needs to beallocated to this because it's
going to give us an unfairadvantage in the war.
It's going to save lives.
Another takeaway is that themorality aspect that stopped him
from doing this is a bit ironic.
Because yes, it can be used forwarfare, but it could have also
(26:17):
been used to end the war morequickly by giving one side an
unfair advantage, which couldhave saved lives.
When it comes to that, obviouslyit's a bit of, it just depends
on your perspective and how youfeel, but sometimes we let
things cloud our vision of agreater good.
And finally, I'd like to comeback to Louis Fry Richardson's
saying (26:41):
big worlds have little worlds that beat on velocity,
little worlds have lesser worldsand on and on to viscosity.
Some of the worlds that we'rebeing caught up in today that
are shaping everything isartificial intelligence, energy,
(27:01):
and electrification.
And in recent history, evenCOVID was a temporary lesser
whirl that's still shapingthings like work from home and
other sort of work methods.
(27:22):
And so oftentimes we're at themercy of these worlds that are
kind of changing everythingabout the way we work.
But one thing that I'd like topoint out about that saying, as
he points out, there's lesserand lesser and lesser worlds
until you get to viscosity.
And viscosity is essentiallyjust resistance.
(27:44):
So one thing to note is ifyou're picking a whirl to get
caught up in that you think isgoing to change the world, if
it's too small, you're actuallytoo close to all the resistance.
And there won't be enough will,money, interest to bring that to
(28:09):
life.
How you decide that it's toosmall, that's very problem
specific, and it's very based onperspective.
This is a very generalized wordof caution, but aiming too low
can lead to more failure thanaiming too high.
(28:45):
It's been great creating thesefirst two episodes, and there
are many more ideas to come.
You can help this podcast besuccessful by ensuring to
subscribe or keep checking backto find out when there's new
episodes released.
I would love to connect with youon LinkedIn.
You can find my LinkedIn profileon the episode description page.
(29:11):
And if you would connect with methere, that would be greatly
appreciated as I'm trying tobuild an engineering community
who's happy to connect and shareand discuss episodes.
And you're free to reach methere at any time.
For a quick teaser on the topicfor the next episode, please
stay tuned after the music, andI'll give you a few hints about
(29:34):
what we'll be talking about andwho we may be looking at as a
case study.
(31:30):
On the next episode, we're goingto talk about finding the right
people.
And that's something that todaymay seem easy, but it's actually
an underutilized skill.
And historically, this was notan easy concept.
And I'm gonna go back in thepast over a hundred years and
(31:54):
talk about a very specificfigure in Chicago's history, and
how he was put in charge ofbringing together a big group of
incredible thinkers to buildsomething amazing.
And we'll talk about how if youwant to do something big, you're
(32:17):
gonna need to find the rightpeople, and how you can go about
doing that.
So I look forward to seeing youback here on our next episode.
Thank you for being such afaithful subscriber and so
interested in our futureepisodes.
Welcome to the Engineering Passion Express.
I'm your host, Brandon Donnelly.
You're listening to Season 1,Episode 2, a continuation of
Picking the Right Problems.
On the last episode, we lookedat John Davis, the founder of
Keggle, who invented the bowlinglane oil machine.
(00:21):
This episode, we'll look atLewis Fry Richardson, who worked
on predicting the weather backin the 1910s and 1920s.
(00:46):
When studying fluid behavior,Lewis Fry Richardson created a
little rhyme.
Big worlds have little whirlsthat feed on velocity.
Little whirls have lesserwhirls, and on and on to
viscosity.
Now this is just a rhyme thathelps students remind themselves
of how fluid behaves, but it'salso true for historical events
(01:12):
and how the world behaves.
In this episode, we're going tocontinue on discussing picking
the right problems.
Lewis Fry Richardson will serveas sort of a foil to John Davis.
While John was a practical manand an entrepreneur, Richardson
was more of an academic.
While John is sort of post-war,Richardson is right in the heart
(01:33):
of World War I.
So there's a lot of interestingdynamics between the two that we
can discuss at the end.
If you go back in time, theworld wasn't always filled with
science.
In fact, the scientificrevolution really kicked off
around the time of Newton in the1650s.
(01:55):
And we had this rapidaccumulation of scientific
knowledge that really didn'texist prior to that.
You had Newton inventingcalculus and coming up with the
equations of motion and thegeneralized theory around it.
And then later, others wouldtake those equations of motion
and come up with applied theory,like the Navier-Stokes
equations, that governed howfluid flow based on the
(02:18):
equations of motion.
And that applied theory came 150to 200 years later, and then
from that applied theory youhave practical applications,
like the weather prediction,which would come another 70
years later, and still wouldn'tquite be completed until the
invention of the computer andthe building of ENIAC in the
(02:42):
1950s.
So, all in all, the scientificrevolution is this big whirl
that's changing everything aboutthe way the world operates and
has operated for the thousandsof years beforehand.
And you and me and everybodylistening to this are part of
that revolution as engineers.
(03:07):
Breaking off from the scientificrevolution in an era just before
World War I, there were all ofthese little whirls of science
that were coming off of thesebig, massive scientific
discoveries.
So a little world example wouldbe transportation.
In 1912, you have the Titanic.
(03:30):
A little bit before that, in1903, you have the flight at
Kitty Hawk and the Wrightbrothers becoming the first
manned air flight.
And then you have other peoplemaking ground in aviation around
this time, such as CharlesRolls, who did the first double
crossing of the English Channelin an airplane.
(03:53):
And there's also little whirlsin other branches of science.
You have germ theory comingabout.
You have chemistry and physicswith J.J.
Thompson finding the electron in1897 and winning the Nobel Prize
for that in 1906.
So this era around the 1910s andthe early 1900s is filled with
(04:18):
all these fascinating thingsgoing on in science.
And if you go just before that,into the 1880s, that's where our
main character today, Louis FryRichardson, was born in 1881.
He was born into a highlyreligious Quaker family, yet he
studied science and mathematicsunder a number of Greek teachers
(04:41):
at Bootham Science School,Durham and King's College, and
one of his professors was J.J.
Thompson, the man who discoveredthe electron as a key component
of the atom.
So he was surrounded with greatscientific minds all throughout
his life.
And he would eventually go on toget a job at the meteorological
(05:03):
office that was established evenbefore he was born back in 1854
to help mariners avoid sailinginto storms, since aviation was
becoming an evolving field, andplanes obviously are even more
sensitive to the weather thanships.
It was time for themeteorological office to take
(05:25):
their work even more seriously.
And Louis Fry Richardson, withhis scientific and mathematical
training, thought that thatwould be a good place to bring
his work.
Now, not every whirl in historyis good.
There are plenty of dark whirls.
World War I saw two and a halfmillion men enlist in the UK
(05:50):
military.
It brought some lesser whirlsalong with it, such as the
scientific revolution of thegun, specifically the machine
gun, and in order to combatthose, trench warfare was also
created.
The new field of aviation hadits own whirl.
The concept of dropping bombsfrom an airplane became
(06:11):
something new.
Sometimes in history, theseworlds make us think, maybe we
don't want to do this, but if wedon't, somebody else is going
to.
At the time of World War One,and particularly as a devout
Quaker who was raised in ahighly religious household,
(06:32):
Richardson was against fightingin the war.
He was a conscientious objector,one of nearly 16,000.
Richardson himself was caught upin the big whirl of the
scientific revolution, as that'swhat he was raised on, and
that's how he was trained tothink.
(06:54):
But this littler whirl of WorldWar One was feeding.
And he and others couldn't seethemselves escaping it.
When his country forced him tomake a choice, he looked within
for answers.
He couldn't escape participatingin some manner, so he turned to
(07:14):
prayer for advice, and believingGod answered him directly, he
joined the ambulance corpse,befitting his greater good moral
philosophy.
He still witnessed horrificeffects of war, he still faced
chaos and the destruction ofhumanity, and he looked for a
(07:36):
means of coping.
Oftentimes, when faced with suchdifficulty, moral ambiguity,
lack of security, we turn tothings that we know and that we
understand, or at least feel weunderstand.
Up until this point, Lewis FryRichardson's career had been at
(08:01):
the meteorological office.
And the military also neededbetter weather prediction in
order to save lives and makemilitary operations more
successful.
Richardson had themeteorological experience, and
he had the education to makethis into something.
(08:23):
It became his ambition to applyscience and mathematics to
weather prediction to be able tocorrectly forecast weather hours
or days in advance.
It was his escape from the sadreality that was happening
around him during this crazyperiod in the world.
Richardson was able to think upthe forecast factory.
(08:49):
Now here's a British soundingaccent to read you Lewis Fry
Richardson's description of hisgrand designs for the
weather-predicting forecastfactory.
SPEAKER_00 (09:02):
After so much hard reasoning, may one play with a
fantasy.
Imagine a large hall like atheatre, except that the circles
and galleries go right roundthrough the space usually
occupied by the stage.
The walls of this chamber arepainted to form a map of the
globe.
The ceiling represents the northpolar regions, England is in the
gallery, the tropics in theupper circle, Australia on the
dress circle, and the Antarcticin the pit.
(09:24):
A myriad of computers, or peoplewho compute are at work upon the
weather of the part of the mapwhere each sits, but each
computer tends only to oneequation or part of an equation.
The work of each region iscoordinated by an official of
higher rank.
Numerous little night signsdisplay the instantaneous values
so that neighbouring computerscan read them.
Each number is thus displayed inthree adjacent zones so as to
(09:45):
maintain communication to thenorth and south on the map.
From the floor of the pit, atall pillar rises to half the
height of the hall.
It carries a large pulpit on itstop.
In this sits the man in chargeof the whole theatre.
He is surrounded by severalassistants and messengers.
One of his duties is to maintaina uniform speed of progress in
all parts of the globe.
In this respect, he is like theconductor of an orchestra in
(10:07):
which the instruments are sliderules and calculating machines.
But instead of waving a baton,he turns a beam of rosy light
upon any region that is runningahead of the rest, and a beam of
blue light upon those who arebehind hand.
For senior clerks in the centralpulpit, are collecting the
future weather as fast as it isbeing computed and dispatching
it by pneumatic carrier to aquiet room.
There it will be coded andtelephoned to the radio
(10:28):
transmitting station.
Messengers carry piles of usedcomputing forms down to a
storehouse in the cellar.
In a neighbouring building thereis a research department where
they invent improvements.
But there is much experimentingon a small scale before any
change is made in the complexroutine of the computing
theatre.
In a basement, an enthusiast isobserving eddies in the liquid
lining of a huge spinning bowl.
(10:49):
But so far the arithmetic provesthe better way.
In another building are all theusual financial, correspondence,
and administrative offices.
Outside are playing fields,houses, mountains, and lakes.
For it was thought that thosewho compute the weather should
breathe of it freely.
SPEAKER_01 (11:04):
That was Lewis Fry Richardson's description of the
forecast factory.
In modern day would never be thearchitecture of the solution
because computers exist.
Computers not in the form ofpeople performing computations,
but computers in the form ofCPUs and GPUs that solve
(11:29):
millions of equations infractions of a second and can
easily coordinate amongstthemselves and perform all of
this with far more accuracy andless error than the three to
sixty-four thousand estimatedhumans it would have taken to
carry out this process.
(11:50):
Still, it's nice to know thatpeople dream grand dreams even
when they don't see an alternateroute for practical technology.
In Richardson's wildest dreams,he likely did not understand
(12:12):
that today I would have acomputer in front of me that
could fit on my lap and whosecomputational power would exceed
all of those computers sittingin that great hall that he
imagined calculating by hand bymillions of times.
(12:58):
What it would have required is abusiness model in the form of
understanding who's going to payfor it, which would have been
much more likely during the war,as if you could tell the
government, we can predictweather, and our enemies will
not be able to, then it's highlypossible that you could get
(13:23):
funding for a country seeking anedge in war.
Post-war.
The weather is still important.
There's still uses for aviation,especially as it's starting to
take a commercial twistpost-war.
(13:43):
There's agriculturalapplications for understanding
the weather.
But things weren't like today.
You couldn't get a thousandsubscribers or a million
subscribers all on a creditcard.
That just wasn't a thing.
So you were mostly looking toeither some sort of government,
military funding, academicfunding, and you would have had
(14:08):
to be somebody who was verybusiness savvy and
entrepreneurial minded to makethis work.
Now, having thought of thiswhile the war was going on, the
war would end eventually, andthe world would need to get back
to normal, putting thosehorrific events in the past and
sharing a vision of a brighterfuture.
(14:31):
However, for Richardson, this iswhere his ideas would meet their
reality.
First, predicting the weatherwas an impractical amount of
manual labor.
Richardson did months of handcalculations in order to predict
(14:53):
a six-hour advanced weatherprediction.
And even that produced anunrealistic answer.
Unfortunately, the nature ofweather systems is chaotic.
Small rounding errors oruncertainties in starting
conditions compound quickly andmake long forecasts nearly
(15:19):
impossible.
And finally, there really wasn'treal-time instrumentation and
the tools needed for accuratemeasurement to introduce
accurate boundary conditions.
So when you take that with thechaotic nature and small
(15:42):
uncertainties quickly spiralinginto larger ones, it made it
very difficult for the timeperiod that Lewis Fry Richardson
was in to have powerful weatherprediction capabilities.
All of those technicalchallenges could have been
overcome with enough desire,passion, seek for funding, but
(16:12):
Lewis Fry Richardson was facinga number of internal dilemmas.
And these are something that Ithink most people don't think
about when they choose theirproblem.
The first is that Louis FryRichardson was trying to discuss
the academic nature of weatherprediction.
(16:36):
But due to his conscientiousobjector status in the war, he
wasn't allowed to hold anacademic post.
And that lowered his chances ofbeing taken serious or gaining
funding from the government.
Richardson also had a strongsense of moral beliefs tied to
his Quaker upbringing.
(16:58):
While at the time he was doingthis work, he thought predicting
the weather was a good avenuefor somebody who wanted to help
in a nonviolent way.
However, once somebody pointedout that weather prediction
could be used to assist inchemical weapons deployment, he
(17:18):
stopped working on it.
He felt that it no longer was inalignment with his morals, and
that there was othermathematical and scientific
problems that he could work on.
I think this is interesting foranybody who's read about the
development of the atomic bomb.
(17:40):
Because this very much contrastswith Oppenheimer, who may have
been concerned about the usageof the nuclear weapon that they
were creating in the ManhattanProject, but understood directly
(18:01):
that if they don't do this work,somebody else might.
And if somebody else controlssuch power, then it is very
likely that you want to becloser to it rather than at the
whims of somebody else.
And lastly, Richardson faced adilemma of identity or an
(18:27):
identity crisis.
Is he an academic?
Or is he a businessmanentrepreneur?
To bring the forecast factory tolife, you definitely need to be
more of the latter.
But most of Lewis FryRichardson's experience was
being around academics, likeJ.J.
Thompson, who discovered theelectron.
(18:50):
That doesn't turn into abusiness, but predicting weather
forecasts, that certainly is.
So Richardson made his choice.
He moved on from the problem.
He cited resistance of beingtaken seriously as a
conscientious objector, the factthat it could be used for
chemical weapons, and the factthat he had other academic
(19:10):
pursuits worth chasing after.
In Lewis Fry Richardson's case,not all was lost.
In the 1950s, ENIAC was thefirst computer to do processing
on the weather phenomenon.
Richardson would hear about thiswork a few years before his
death, providing him some reliefthat his work did contribute to
the larger base of scientificknowledge in society.
(19:34):
Ultimately, he would not derivemany financial benefits from the
efforts that he had put forth.
(20:00):
Especially when we compare LouisFry Richardson to John Davis.
The first is a simple comparisonwhere they were similar.
And that's that experiences leadus to the problems we tackle.
(20:20):
John Davis built the bowlinglane oil machine because he was
working as a lane man and saw aproblem with consistency in the
lanes.
Lewis Fry Richardson tackledweather prediction because he
was raised going to scientificschools and colleges and then
(20:43):
worked in the meteorologicaloffice.
Both of those experiences, forboth of those men, drove them to
pick the problems they wanted towork on.
It's possible that both of thesepeople let life take them to the
places that they were in, andthen from there sought to solve
(21:06):
challenges that they found.
But if you're not like that, andyou know that you have a
specific area, whether it'sautomotive or aerospace or
something that you want totackle, and you're not there
today, then you need to getthere because you won't see the
problems and the challenges thatexist without that experience.
(21:31):
The second item that you cantake away from this is that your
identity can get in the way.
If you feel like you'reentrepreneurial, you need to be
entrepreneurial.
If you feel like that's not you,you need to either change your
(21:52):
opinion if you want to be, oryou need to be comfortable with
who you are.
And the example here is thatJohn Davis, from the first
episode, his identity was thathe was a lane oil mechanic.
And he was solving problems forother lane oil mechanics.
(22:14):
And over time solving thesechallenges, he grew into more of
a businessman.
So your identity can shift.
But in Richardson's case, Ibelieve that he spent most of
his life believing he's anacademic.
And while academics solvecomplex challenges in
(22:37):
mathematics and they come upwith theories, they don't
necessarily come up with thereal-world application, which is
generally more of anentrepreneur's gambit.
So if you're not very clear onyour identity, maybe you need to
(23:00):
think about it more and reallyknow who you are before you
choose what sort of problems youwork on.
Now I think less often, andparticularly in times of peace
rather than war, people don'talways ask themselves, are they
morally aligned with their work?
But I think you can't do yourbest work if you're really not
(23:22):
into it.
I can think of a industry that'sgrowing at the moment, the
cannabis industry.
And there's probably all sortsof engineers working on problems
and equipment for extractiondevices, creating all sorts of
things related to that industry.
If you're against the usage ofthat product, then perhaps
(23:44):
that's not the right industryfor you to be in.
(24:05):
So before you get started on aproject, or take a role, it
might behoove you to think, am Imorally aligned with this work,
or is there anything that couldcome up that I will not agree
with in this space?
(24:25):
Another point to take away hereis in the first episode, we
talked about how the lane oilmachine proliferated amongst
bowling centers because it wasseen as a weapon for improving
the customer experience.
And once your competition hadit, you needed to have it too.
(24:48):
I believe Richardson missed areal opportunity here because
weather prediction certainlyfalls under the same category.
That if Richardson could haveconvinced the military during
wartime that weather predictionwas going to be critical for
(25:10):
their success in the war, andthat it would be a competitive
advantage in the war, he couldhave easily found the funding to
create his forecast factory.
And today, weather predictionobviously exists in a number of
forms.
There's the news is showing youwhat the weather is, there's
weather sites that you can getsubscriptions to, weather apps.
(25:33):
The value was there.
But the moral alignment withthat was not in Richardson's
favor.
Neither was his identity as anacademic.
He would have had to be anentrepreneur pitching
high-ranking military officialsor high-ranking government
(25:53):
officials that money needs to beallocated to this because it's
going to give us an unfairadvantage in the war.
It's going to save lives.
Another takeaway is that themorality aspect that stopped him
from doing this is a bit ironic.
Because yes, it can be used forwarfare, but it could have also
(26:17):
been used to end the war morequickly by giving one side an
unfair advantage, which couldhave saved lives.
When it comes to that, obviouslyit's a bit of, it just depends
on your perspective and how youfeel, but sometimes we let
things cloud our vision of agreater good.
And finally, I'd like to comeback to Louis Fry Richardson's
saying (26:41):
big worlds have little worlds that beat on velocity,
little worlds have lesser worldsand on and on to viscosity.
Some of the worlds that we'rebeing caught up in today that
are shaping everything isartificial intelligence, energy,
(27:01):
and electrification.
And in recent history, evenCOVID was a temporary lesser
whirl that's still shapingthings like work from home and
other sort of work methods.
(27:22):
And so oftentimes we're at themercy of these worlds that are
kind of changing everythingabout the way we work.
But one thing that I'd like topoint out about that saying, as
he points out, there's lesserand lesser and lesser worlds
until you get to viscosity.
And viscosity is essentiallyjust resistance.
(27:44):
So one thing to note is ifyou're picking a whirl to get
caught up in that you think isgoing to change the world, if
it's too small, you're actuallytoo close to all the resistance.
And there won't be enough will,money, interest to bring that to
(28:09):
life.
How you decide that it's toosmall, that's very problem
specific, and it's very based onperspective.
This is a very generalized wordof caution, but aiming too low
can lead to more failure thanaiming too high.
(28:45):
It's been great creating thesefirst two episodes, and there
are many more ideas to come.
You can help this podcast besuccessful by ensuring to
subscribe or keep checking backto find out when there's new
episodes released.
I would love to connect with youon LinkedIn.
You can find my LinkedIn profileon the episode description page.
(29:11):
And if you would connect with methere, that would be greatly
appreciated as I'm trying tobuild an engineering community
who's happy to connect and shareand discuss episodes.
And you're free to reach methere at any time.
For a quick teaser on the topicfor the next episode, please
stay tuned after the music, andI'll give you a few hints about
(29:34):
what we'll be talking about andwho we may be looking at as a
case study.
(31:30):
On the next episode, we're goingto talk about finding the right
people.
And that's something that todaymay seem easy, but it's actually
an underutilized skill.
And historically, this was notan easy concept.
And I'm gonna go back in thepast over a hundred years and
(31:54):
talk about a very specificfigure in Chicago's history, and
how he was put in charge ofbringing together a big group of
incredible thinkers to buildsomething amazing.
And we'll talk about how if youwant to do something big, you're
(32:17):
gonna need to find the rightpeople, and how you can go about
doing that.
So I look forward to seeing youback here on our next episode.
Thank you for being such afaithful subscriber and so
interested in our futureepisodes.
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