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

Posted by samzenpus on from the old-school dept.

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.”'"

3 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Engineering isn't a secret club by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm glad some people still attempt projects like these without engineering degrees.

    1. Re:Engineering isn't a secret club by History's+Coming+To · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Even the most qualified engineers on the planet sometimes resort to "getting a bigger hammer", or trial and error. You know the Saturn V rocket? One of the biggest and most complex things ever made by humans? They had problems with the combustion plate, basically a big disc of metal that the fuel is sprayed through before igniting. The combustion kept becoming unstable to the point where it was an explosion rather than a burn, and they knew it was something to do with the pattern of holes. No amount of mathematics and computing "power" back then was enough to find a solution, so they took a bunch of plates and drilled holes in them at random until they found one that worked for long enough to launch the vehicle "safely".

      --
      Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
    2. Re:Engineering isn't a secret club by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      If he used common sense then he's obviously not an engineer.

      That's right. If he were an engineer, he would have thought of all the reasons why it couldn't be done. Whereas by being "uneducated" he was too ignorant to know that it couldn't be done.

      Years ago, my dad worked for a businessman that only had a high school diploma but an idea for a medical device. The engineers said it couldn't be done. The biz guy told them to STFU or get out . The engineers finally figured it out by trial and error because what they were doing was never taught in engineering schools.

      The biz guy made tens of millions. The engineers got their $25K/year and laid off after the project was done - this was back in the 70s.

      I can't remember the guy's name.