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By Leonard McDonnell |
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IN order to be a superhero it seems there are two prerequisites – the ability to perform spectacular feats and anonymity. The first is self-evident – I mean, derr, if you can’t perform spectacular feats the interview is over. But the need for anonymity is an enigma. Sure, it is obviously convenient. The last thing you need when you’re a busy superhero is your “Bat Phone” running 24/7 with cries for help from people who really are just too lazy or stupid to solve their own problems. However, “convenience” does not completely explain the mystery. There is something fundamental about superheros that shields them from public gaze. It appears to be linked to the suppression of ego and lack of charisma. In fact they tend to be anti-egotists – introverts. Now I know what you're thinking – Batman, Superman, introverts? Have you seen their costumes, you dick? But these flamboyant vigilantes aren’t real superheros, they’re fictional characters. They are caricatures of superheros created by egotists. Egotists depict superheros as narcissists who feel somehow compelled to at least try to conceal their insatiable need to be the centre of attention. Hence their outrageous garb tends to include a mask. Like a string bikini, it’s a faint flag of modesty fluttering in a gale of rampant exhibitionism. Real superheros don’t need masks or costumes, because they are actually invisible. I discovered their existence quite by accident when I stumbled over the keys to their camouflage. When I peered behind their curtain I was astonished by what I found. Their influence permeates every facet of our modern life. I suddenly realised just how dependant we mortals are on them. They are continuously performing spectacular feats, day-in day-out right in front of our faces and yet we just can’t see them. We walk by, oblivious, humming to the tune on our ipod. They are everywhere, controlling our lives. They regularly hold mass meetings right in the middle of our capital cities where they honour esteemed members and bestow awards for magnificence, but I guarantee you won’t read a word about it in the newspapers or hear a mention on the television. By some mysterious conjuring, they have induced a somnolent, narcotic effect on the community – their camouflage cloaks their activities no matter how spectacular or astounding. We called for their help recently when the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan crippling the nuclear power stations, and when BP’s Macondo well exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, when floods and cyclones ravaged Australia and an earthquake shattered Christchurch. So powerful is their magic that when I expose their identity their spell will immediately kick in. You will be overcome first with a sense of disappointment. Feeling let-down you will not notice the veil quietly closing as your attention is diverted elsewhere and they drift back into invisibility. These superheros are our engineers. Throughout history, engineers performing spectacular feats have transformed the human race from a tribe of clever monkeys who poked sticks into holes to get the ants out into what we are today. It’s a process that continues at an ever-accelerating pace – yet how many of us could name just three of them? It was engineers who built the pyramids, the Acropolis, the Roman aqueducts, the Great Wall of China, the steam engine, the combustion engine, aeroplanes, spacecraft. It was engineers who moved vast armies across theatres of war and delivered the devastating ordinance that changed the political course of history. Yet when we think back over all these events, or read the historic literature, there is not a lot to recall these engineers. As a society we focus on the egotists – the charismatic political leaders, generals, admirals, or decorated heroes. “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender...” What was implied by Churchill but never stated was: “Exactly how we will achieve all this will be up to the engineers.” “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." Again the missing quote: “Exactly how we will get there and back will be up to our engineers.” We know who went to the Moon, we know who sent them, but who knows who got them there and back? Every time we get behind the wheel of a car, step on to a train or a plane or into an elevator, or drive over a bridge we put our lives into the hands of these superheros with their algorithms. Fictional Hollywood superheros have bi-polar personas. One is the charismatic, gaudy exhibitionist who uses super powers to save the world in spectacular fashion. The other is the opposite – a nerdy, introverted character who blends into the community with a bland, everybody camouflage, shunning like kryponite the limelight that we egotists bask in. This logic would suggest that for a real superhero trying to blend into Hollywood, the modern egotists’ Holy See, these poles would be reversed. Consider Hedy Lamarr – here’s a superhero who disguised herself as an egotistic megastar in tinsel town. Feted as “the most beautiful woman in the world”, her adoring fans were oblivious to the superhero who was busy trying to save the world and who had a hand in changing the future course of mankind. In the dark days of World War II, Lamarr applied her covert electronic engineering skills along with a Hollywood neighbour, avant-garde composer George Antheil, to design something they knew the US Navy desperately wanted – a secure torpedo guidance system. However, their frequency hopping communications design, US Patent 2,292,387, was ahead of the electronics technology of the day and so it did not see service during that war. It first saw action 20 years later when the heat was turned up to boiling in the Cold War. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, as the world and the human race moved towards the brink of destruction, the Lamarr-Atheil anti-eavesdropping technology was used by the US Navy to develop secure communications between its ships, blockading Cuba. The Lamarr-Atheil spread-spectrum communications system, originally based on the idea of synchronised pianola reels, lies behind a range of modern secure wireless communications applications in systems from US defence satellites, to radio transmissions, to mobile phones. Lamarr helped save life on earth, including mankind, from destruction, yet managed to avoid being named along with other Hollywood egotists Oprah Winfrey, Marilyn Monroe and Lucille Ball on Time Magazine’s list of The 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century. Instead Lamarr is remembered for her beauty – and for being the first woman to get her tits out in a feature film. So how exactly did she do it? Remain invisible that is – not get her tits out. How do these engineers so effectively hide their activities? How do they construct mammoth buildings, fly millions of people around the world, tunnel beneath our cities, put a man on the Moon, wrap the globe in an instant-communications network, span vast waterways with dangling steel without ever really being noticed? Given that drunken pop stars can have their faces splashed across news outlets around the world just by falling down outside a nightclub, or swearing at a photographer. As I said, I think I have discovered the secret to the engineers’ powers of invisibility – it’s the pencils they use. Those seemingly stupid little retractable pencils that look like pens. Only engineers, or people who think like engineers, can use these pencils. If an egotist like me tries we keep breaking the lead until we fling the contraption at the wall in frustration. My father was an engineer. As a child I recall how he used to correct my maths homework using his stupid retractable pencil. I was never any good at maths. When forced to do my homework, I would sit gazing blankly at the hostile sums my teacher set and try to remember a morsel of what she said in class. But nothing would come. Instead my mind would wander off to some distant imaginary land where whatever I was doing would make me a superhero and the centre of everyone’s admiration. Then my father, knowing I was making no progress, would fold his newspaper and place it on the coffee table and come over to help me. He would take his magic pencil out of his shirt pocket. “These sums aren’t that hard,” he would say while pressing the button on the end and focussing on getting it just right before releasing the button, closing the tiny jaws around the protruding lead. “All you have to remember is that ...” After dragging me back from my imaginary land where everything I did was magnificent, he would then humiliate me by doing each of my equations with his pencil asking me questions along the way like “what’s 13 minus four?” I would look blank. “13 minus four?” Silence. “Surely you know what 13 minus four is!?” What he didn’t realise was that whatever the question, I couldn’t hear it. Instead all my mind was processing was the situation of me sitting here being tested and judged by my father and failing on every count. He would just persist doing my equations in the margin of my exercise book. His sums and his process didn’t match my teacher’s in any way. But surprisingly his answers were always right. “That’s not how WE do it,” I would feebly suggest. “We use New Maths.” “Maths, is maths, however you do it,” he would say before leaving me ashamed, as he went back to reading his paper. My father never talked about his work. With his slide rule, theodolite and magic pencil he changed the lives of many people in the UK, Africa and Australia. These people are not aware of his role in their lives. Engineers don’t cut the ribbon when their work is done. In Nigeria he built roads and bridges. This was a time when there was very little infrastructure in the country. He had to improvise on a lot of the services taken for granted in a modern, developed country – services such as ready-mixed concrete. My father had to mix his own concrete for the bridges and culverts on site with local labourers. He was constantly getting out his little pencil and adjusting the formulas of the mix in order to prevent cracking in the piles under the variable wet and dry tropical conditions. “How are the piles going Peter?” the other expats would joke back at the club, suggesting he may have had an unspeakable medical condition. When an engineer constructs an all-weather road to an otherwise remote town or village they profoundly change the outlook of that society and its people forever. The same goes for connecting |
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Penciling in our destiny |
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