83-Year-Old Inventor Wins $40,000 3D Printing Competition

harrymcc writes "The Desktop Factory Competition was a contest to create an open-source design for a low-cost machine capable of turning cheap plastic pellets into the filament used by 3D printers, with a prize of $40,000. The winner is being announced today — and he was born during the Hoover administration. I interviewed 83-year-old retiree Hugh Lyman — a proud member of the maker movement — for a story over at TIME.com. From the article: 'Lyman describes himself as an “undergraduate engineer” — he studied engineering from 1948-1953 at the University of Utah, but didn’t earn a degree. Though he holds eight patents, he says he’s “not educated enough to be able to do calculations of torque and so forth.” So implementing his contest entry “was trial and error. I tinkered with it and used common sense.”'"

Comments

Re:Engineering isn't a secret club

[Opportunist]

Duh. Of course. Since that insect is verifiably flying, obviously it IS possible.

The point is that science THOUGHT it is impossible, so if they had to design a bumblebee they wouldn't even have tried. Can't be done, case closed. But science made a mistake here: They THOUGHT they had everything considered, but they have not, as you point out, they assumed rigid wings.

It's very hard for a scientist with an established mindset to think outside the box, something people without a set mind are pretty good at. And this was what allowed us to create things that others didn't think of, because we managed to do just that. There were a lot of people with very different approaches to the problem, a few of them even far from having anything to do with IT before. Believe it or not, these were the guys with the best ideas. Simply because they weren't locked in the ways.

That's also why in our meetings everyone was encouraged to come up with ideas, and we were often sent to brainstorming meetings in departments we had no expertise in, simply because that allowed a point of view the "established" group wouldn't think of.

Believe me, it gives you quite a high to sit in an exec meeting, make a "stupid" remark, have the room go silent and eventually hear someone say "that's brilliant".