Creativity

I recently had lunch with a friend who is in the automotive trade (go figure) just so we could catch up with each other. Like yours truly, he has a past filled with various types of sports cars and now otherwise collectable vehicles. As usually happens with car guys, we found ourselves reminiscing about some of our old iron.

The discussion continued through email after our lunch that day; he forwarded me the link to an internet article discussing the ten most beautiful engines ever made. I am a form follows function kind of guy, not a spit and polish sort. I found myself at odds with the author in a few cases. To me beauty is found in originality, not just execution. Engineering from a time when all was new fascinates me; the designs of men like Charles Kettering, Zora Arkus Duntov and Fred Offenhauser get my attention.

Those of you who drive a Bugatti Veyron can stop reading now, you will find this tedious.

You see man (as in a creature, not as in a gender) is unique in his ability to plan, adapt, design, build and create; no other animal that draws breath or swims has these same holistic capacities. And really the whole reason motorized transportation exists today is that man recognized centuries ago that there was an advantage in being able to move more and do it faster than was possible with just draft animals or by carrying it over his shoulder.  Development of the wheel brought with it continued imagination as to how we could gain more advantage from it.

And so as fleet operators today we have greater choice among many global offerings to continue to do more, do it faster and do it more economically than ever before in history. 100 years ago a Mercedes Benz sporting a 274CI engine (developing an unheard of 115 HP!) won the French Grand Prix with an average speed of 65.66 MPH. This year the Mercedes F1 car was touting a hybrid powertrain with 1/3 the displacement, building 8 times the power and pushing over 3 times the speed potential of that 1914 winner.

The 1914 Grand Prix was the last GP run prior to the Great War, and unfortunately there is no mechanism capable of encouraging technological development at a faster pace than the war machine.  As this is the year of that horrible conflict’s 100^th anniversary, we can only hope that there isn’t someone with an itchy palm on the red button this time around. But much of what we enjoy today in the transportation industry came out of a military development.

By all means, let’s effectively use all the technology available to us today in transportation. But let’s not take what we have for granted, or disregard the efforts, intent and passion of the people who developed it for us. It’s only when we have a grasp of the back-story that we can effectively move the ball forward.