Racing toward the next generation of engineers

          If a society is going to move ahead in today’s modern world, that society is going to have to generate engineers. Machines have to be designed, they have to be built, they have to receive and use electricity and they have to efficiently use some sort of fuel. Today’s machines increasingly are monitored, governed and even operated by computer chips and those chips have to be designed to work within the parameters of their machine. Some machines move and that means they need aerodynamic engineering.

          But fewer engineers are coming out of our universities than in the past. In the post-war era, when airplanes and space travel captured the imaginations of our people, engineering was a highly-valued skill and our universities produced many of them. Mechanical, electrical, aerodynamic and other types of engineers seemed to come from every college in the country. We led the world in pretty much everything and it was largely due to our plethora of engineers.

          When America split the atom, a scientist figured out how to do it and a mechanic built it. When Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier, he flew a plane designed by a team of engineers. Neil Armstrong was the first human to step foot on the moon and, you guessed it, engineers made it possible. Thanks Goodness for the space race; it gave us Tang and Velcro.

          But universities and colleges now crank out fewer engineers. Fewer high school students are interested. Engineering is mathematics and math is dull. High schools, junior highs and elementary schools are tasked with so much today, they have very little time to actually teach students. Mediocracy is acceptable now and excellence is largely ignored. State and federal governments now pour an unharnessed volume of money to help struggling students but very little thought is given for those who excel. For that reason, students who might have been very good at some form of engineering never get the encouragement to reach for that worthy goal.

          Gloom and doom stuff, to be sure. But don’t worry, the answer to our engineering shortfall already exists. In fact, the answer has been around for more than one hundred years. For some, the answer has been a part of their daily lives for generations and it is something America is already good at. Some of our largest, best-known and most successful corporations have been involved since the beginning. In fact, people watch it on television every week.

          Automobile racing.

          Think I’m wrong? You are entitled to your opinion, but I’m right and you are wrong.

          School aged kids should be exposed to the wonder that is a modern-day racing car. They need structural engineering to protect the drivers in the event of a crash, electrical engineering to make every part work together, computer engineering to monitor and govern every component on the car, material engineering to create and build the tires that keep the cars on the track and whatever kind of engineering it is that creates the surface the cars run on, well, racers need that too.

          Race cars in every form of the sport keep getting faster. That doesn’t happen by accident, squads of engineers are needed to continue to push the edge of the envelope.

          The operating systems in a modern race car are fantastic. Take a National Hot Rod Association Top Fuel car as an example. The technology in one of those things is fantastic. The Pro Mod class is really dynamic because the rules allow so many different types of engines and fuel systems, technology competes against technology in that category.

          It seems clear to me that educators should look for ways to spark an interest in the sciences and racing is an obvious way to do so. If a student takes an interest in the sport and decides to look at the engineering sciences as a possible future pathway, it doesn’t matter if that student never joins the sport’s workforce. If they become mathematicians or air quality management scientists or design new prosthetic limbs or help develop the next generation of airplanes, all that matters is that we have our engineers. Maybe some kid, tweaked by the racing bug, will develop a clean fuel for the propulsion of all these machines we build.

          If it is needed to help create interest in the engineering sciences, I can guarantee that the auto racing industry will get behind the effort. No industry better understands the need to reach school kids. Think I’m wrong? Guess again. Every engineer you’ve ever heard of was a kid once. Racing can help find more engineers among today’s kids.

          What could be better than that?

          Thanks for reading.

The 2016 SPEEDY Awards

Hard to believe that it is that time again, but it is time for our annual Speedy Awards. We have somewhere around 7,146 members of the Speedy Awards Commission, but my vote is the only one that counts, so who really cares about all those other people?

NEWS STORY OF THE YEAR: America’s two leading political parties each nominated a candidate for president that nobody liked. Then America got mad when one of those candidates won.

SPORTS STORY OF THE YEAR: Cubs win!! Cubs win!!

Runnerup: Mickey Dale is elected to the Imperial Valley High School Football Coaches Hall of Fame for his media work.

IT’S CONFUSING BUT THIS IS MY BLOG AND NOT YOURS TEAM OF THE YEAR AWARD: The Alabama Crimson Tide for winning the 2016 national football championship game.

HOLY HEADACHE AWARD: To NASCAR driver Dale Earnhart Jr. for sitting out much of the season with concussion symptoms and then winning NASCAR’s Most Popular Driver Award again anyway. That’s like a pitcher winning the Cy Young Award without pitching after the All-Star game.

GONNA MISS ‘EM AWARD: To announcers Vin Scully and Vern Lundquist, who retired in 2016. Gonna miss those voices.

ORGANIZER OF THE YEAR AWARD: To Amy Elder, President of the Tallmadge, Ohio Primetimers Club.

THE STEVE YOUNG MONKEY OFF HIS BACK AWARD: To drag racer Ron Capps for winning the NHRA Funny Car World Championship. Capps would have been elected to most racing Halls of Fame anyway after his racing days are over, but now he is a world champ and we can’t imagine any Hall that would ignore his career. Well done.

DEAD ON ARRIVAL AWARD: The Damn Good Colleague Award has been awarded to six public relations representatives in the drag racing industry. Five of the six either lost or left their jobs within two months of winning the award. One of the five managed to return to drag racing later the following season. The award has been discontinued.

SEASON OF THE YEAR AWARD: To Winter for not showing up in Northeastern Ohio.

WORST DECISION OF THE YEAR AWARD: To the San Diego Chargers for deciding to move to Los Angeles. The decision was made in 2016, we are sure. The Chargers want to play in a bigger stadium so they might end up playing on a 32,000-seat soccer field for a while. There are high schools stadiums in Texas that hold more fans. Little Eddie used to say it on the Zachery All commercials, “That just don’t make sense.”

A Bad Day for Mother

          During the Civil War, the Confederate Army had a policy of grouping soldiers from specific locations together in companies. For example, the soldiers Company A of a given regiment might all have been from a given county in Alabama. The idea was that the soldiers were more likely to serve honorably if each man knew that if he was accused of cowardice, if he stole the possessions of the other soldiers or if he deserted, the word would get back home and that soldier would be treated accordingly at home.

          You might remember the famous quote from Joshua L. Chamberlain, commander of the 20^th Maine during its legendary defense of the Union left flank on Little Round Top during the battle of Gettysburg. Chamberlain instructed his brother, Tom, to move to the other side of the regiment when the shooting started. Joshua Chamberlain said famously that if the brothers stood together, one Confederate bullet could get lucky and then it would, “be a bad day for mother.”

          Jump ahead roughly 10 weeks and another mother did have a bad day.

          Ancil (or Ansel) Lee, Jackson Lee and Martin Lee were brothers serving in Company A of the Fourth Battalion in Hilliard’s Legion, an Alabama outfit. During the battle of Chickamauga, the Legion fought as part of Brigadier General Archibald Gracie’s Brigade and was a part of the famous charge up Horseshoe Ridge September 20, 1863. The attack was among the bloodiest of the entire war. Gracie’s Brigade attacked with 1,782 men. 92 of those men were killed and 618 more were wounded. The Fourth Battalion alone lost 15 killed and 87 wounded for a total of 102 casualties out of 205 members who started up the side of that Ridge. Eight of the wounded later died of their wounds.

          And two of the dead were brothers Jackson and Martin Lee. The Lees were from Butler County, Alabama. Jackson was about 29 when he died and Martin was two years younger. It was a bad day for their mother.

          Statistics like the number of men who fell attacking or defending that Ridge can be ugly to look at, but those stats are still just numbers. When you add names to those statistics, such as Privates Jackson Lee and Martin Lee, then the numbers start to mean something.

          The Fourth Battalion was on the left side of Gracie’s attacking line and Company D was likely the second company from the left within the Fourth. As the assault began, the Fourth had to stop and lay on its arms as another regiment, which had attacked the same Ridge earlier, pulled back. As a result, according to the commanding officer of the Fourth, the battalion’s momentum was slowed. Of the Legion’s four battalions, the Fourth was the lone member that did not reach the top of the Ridge. Eventually, its ammunition spent, the Fourth pulled back off that bloody hillside. Gracie’s Brigade, which included two regiments plus the Legion, carried the day for the Confederates, moving the Union defenders off of their defensive positions and taking the hill.

Only one of the three Lees knew of the victory. His brothers died fighting for a cause that we know today was both flawed and terrible. The intent here is not to praise the Confederate cause. Slavery remains an ugly fact of American history and we are well rid of it, even if bigotry remains as a blot on our society that also needs eliminating.

Still, I can’t help but think of the bad day in Butler County when so many families got the bad news that their loved ones were killed or maimed. War is a terrible thing. If we really want to rid ourselves of the curse of battle, we need our young to understand what war is. Teach them the history and they’ll get the message: This is what happens when cooler heads do not prevail.

           Thanks for reading.

Stats, Facts and Disease

          Statistics tell you information. They tell you simple facts that can frequently be bent to your will to win an argument or be used the same way to prove you wrong. They tell you something but they don’t tell you a story.

          When you read that three quarters of all Civil War deaths were due to disease, it tells you what happened but it does not tell you the story. In today’s antiseptic world, the idea of that many deaths of young and previously healthy people to the ravages of disease seems preposterous. But it happened and the dead piled up. If you accept the death toll of the Civil War as 600,000 soldiers, then roughly 450,000 men died of disease during that conflict.

          Hilliard’s Legion was an Alabama outfit that was raised by Henry Washington Hilliard, a famous politician of antebellum Alabama. The Legion originally included five battalions of soldiers, one of which was an artillery unit and another a cavalry unit. The cavalry battalion was transferred and merged with a Georgia outfit to become the 10^th Confederate Cavalry Regiment and is thus removed from this discussion.

          The rest of the Legion was raised between March and July of 1862, roughly 3,000 men split into four battalions. A part of the artillery battalion became an independent command but the remainder of the artillery battalion fought as infantry.

          And as soon as they came together in Montgomery, Alabama in the summer of 1862, the Legionaires started dying.

          A sample from the Third Battalion, one of the Legion’s three original infantry battalions: Private of Company B Miles Thrower enlisted April 7, 1862 and died just more than two months later on June 12. Irwin Raley, a private in the same company as Thrower, enlisted the same day as Thrower but died earlier, on June 7.

          Jones Roberts was a Private in Company C, enlisting April 5, 1862. He died October 20. Jesse Smith was a 23-year-old when he enlisted on May 3 of that year and was placed in Company C. He died October 25.

          Hilliard’s Legion did not see combat until September 20, 1863 at Chickamauga, about 18 months after the Legion was formed. Plenty of its members died during the attack on Horseshoe Ridge at Chickamauga but those deaths were different. The Legion’s dead at Horseshoe Ridge were the result of rifle fire.

          The diseases that thinned the ranks of the Legion and Civil War armies on both sides were due to poor sanitary conditions and other like issues that we have mostly eradicated today. The leading killer in Civil War camps was dysentery and it is difficult to think of a more miserable killer. But there were other maladies that killed.

          Still in the Third Battalion, Privates James B. Cox, James M. Graves and Raley all died of the measles. Private Green B. Knowles’ cause of death is listed as Brain Fever.

          We don’t have the exact enlistment date for Van B. Tomme, a Private in Company B, but he enlisted that spring and died the following June 12. John H. Townsend, a private in C Company, enlisted in May and died in December.

          Your Loyal Blogger has bolded the names of the soldiers to emphasize the point that this is a human story. We do not like the Rebel cause today, and for good reason. But the men on the other side of the Civil War, the soldiers in the Union army, suffered the same hardships and died of the same diseases.

          The American Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery. The war and the resulting amendments to our Constitution ended slavery in our part of North America, thank Goodness. Slavery and the end of slavery were the primary cause and effect of the war. A less-discussed result of the Civil War was a better understanding of the importance of mass sanitation. Society benefitted from what we learned about getting rid of sewage and human waste.

          It is true that statistics are facts, but not all facts are statistics. Some facts are human stories.

          Thanks for reading.