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Feats of Strength: The Coed and the Defensive Lineman
Years ago, in my junior year in college (University of Michigan), I took a materials and metallurgy class. It was the distribution class for engineers not specializing in materials and metallurgy. (My major was naval architecture and marine engineering. The class was also populated with civil engineering, chemical engineering, aerospace engineering, and electrical engineering majors.)
For most of us it was our only exposure to the mysteries of metals. It was a two-credit course, which met Tuesdays and Thursdays. While interesting, most of us were there because it was a requirement for graduation.
That did not diminish the enthusiasm of the professor – who was really into his subject. He viewed the class as an opportunity to recruit more students into materials engineering. (He would have been more successful if it were a sophomore-level course. By the time we were juniors we had enough invested in our majors – most of which was not transferable if we switched majors – to make a change unattractive.)
He was big on in-class demonstrations of the day’s topic. One day the topic was strain hardening (or work hardening). Many metals form a uniform matrix of atoms in pure form. If you take a chunk of copper, heat it up, and let it cool down slowly, the chunk cools into a single giant crystal. That makes the piece ductile, easy to bend. If you bang on the chunk, the matrix deforms. This creates smaller crystals within the piece. Suddenly it does not bend as easily. The crystals tend to be irregularly shaped, and when two crystals rub against each other they stick.
Apply enough force and the crystals break into more crystals, also irregularly shaped, which makes it still harder to bend. Work a piece of metal enough and eventually it breaks along the crystal boundaries. You can test this yourself with a tab-top on a soda or beer can. It is easy to bend the first time, gets harder to bend each time you bend it back and forth (strain hardening) and eventually breaks off.
That was the lecture he gave us one Thursday. He finished it with a practical demonstration. Throughout the talk, a one-inch-diameter copper rod, roughly three feet long, sat on his lectern. Just before the class ended, he announced he wanted to give a demonstration of strain hardening, and held up the rod.
He then asked a coed to come up to the front of the classroom. Call her Miss Jones. (This was far enough back in time, the mid-1970s, when a college professor could still refer to a female student as a coed – and address her as Miss – without being sent to reeducation camp.) Women engineering students were still fairly rare back then. Of a class of about 35 students, six were female. Jones was not the largest woman in the class. Although healthy, and probably into athletics, she was on the small side.
The professor gave her the rod and asked her to bend it as far as she could, like a pretzel, if possible.
She took the rod and pulled the ends. She finally gave up at about a 75-degree bend. The professor asked her to describe what it was like. She said the first 30 degrees of bend was easy. The next 30 were a strain, but she could not move it much past that. He thanked her and had her return to her seat.
One of the members of the class was on the University of Michigan football team. He was not a first-string player. I think he was third-string in his defensive line position, but he was on traveling squad. Although he had a football scholarship, yes, he was a legitimate engineering student. This was back in the days when you still could be a football player and a student at a top-20 school, at least at Michigan. He was using the scholarship for a free engineering education, not an NFL career. Let’s call him Mr. Smith.
After Miss Jones sat down, the professor said, “Mr. Smith, would you come up here and straighten the rod?” Smith knew he was being set up, but gamely he tried to straighten the rod. He failed of course. I think he opened it a degree or two. The professor thanked Mr. Smith and ended with a few words about how we had seen a practical demonstration of strain hardening, and ended the class.
The next Tuesday, the bent rod was on the lectern again. The professor started out by saying that after thinking about it over the weekend perhaps he had been unfair to Mr. Smith. You could generate greater strength by moving your arms together than by moving them apart. He invited Miss Jones to the front of the class again and asked her to straighten the rod.
She protested that if Mr. Smith could not do it, it would not be possible. But the professor asked her to try anyway. She picked up the rod, pulled the two ends apart – and (to her astonishment) pretty well straightened it out.
Smith was then asked to come up and bend it. He figured out what was coming, but a football player from the Bo Schembechler era did not give up. He took the rod, and tried mightily. Muscles bulging, he bent it a few degrees.
“Does anyone want to tell me what happened?” the professor asked.
After a minute of silence, someone said, “You annealed it.”
Of course, that is exactly what happened. Before the first class he had put the rod in an annealing oven, heated it red-hot, then let it slowly cool. This eliminated the grain boundaries. The rod cooled to one giant uniform matrix, allowing a fairly weak member of the class to easily bend it. Bending it created enough crystal boundaries that one of the strongest members of the class could not bend (or unbend) it further. After the first day he had popped it in the oven again, and let it cool from Thursday afternoon to Tuesday morning, ensuring it would form a uniform matrix.
It was a demonstration possible only because of the five-day wait, but was one everyone in the class remembered.
Published in Group Writing
On certain websites. ;)
We had a guy in my physics class (brilliant guy, he invented counting one day) who, the day we did the Slinky experiment, was left with the Slinkies by himself for approximately 30 seconds by his lab partner before yelling out “Whoops” and being caught in a tangle of Slinkies covering him head to foot.
Unsurprisingly, they never turned in their lab report that week.
I took a similar class outside my major. The professor laid a six foot long pane of tempered glass between two chairs, then jumped up on it and bounced up and down with his full body weight. The glass flexed probably 6 inches but didn’t break. He jumped back down, then grabbed a needle nose pliers and pinched the corner of the pane. It shattered into 10,000 tiny pieces.
Bet he didn’t repeat the experiment the next class.
Depends. At a campus like Texas Tech or Texas A&M, yes. At UC-Berkeley, no.
You’re gonna have to explain that one to me.
Often times the best lessons are the ones you learn by accident. In high school freshman chemistry we had a lab, I forget what exactly the original process was, but you stick a burning split in one test tube to demonstrate oxygen is present. You stick another splint into another test tube to watch it go out, therefore no oxygen is present. One of the screw ups says to me “watch this”. He then takes a completely new test tube out of the cupboard, sticks a burning splint in it and it goes out. The test was completely useless for determining the absence of oxygen.
Then he dropped the test tube and broke it, and got yelled at by the teacher. Science wasn’t the only thing I learned that day.
Probably fake news.
Physics is last because it requires math, and you don’t want to scare away the less numerically-inclined. Chemistry also uses math, though not near as much. Biology, at least at the high school level, doesn’t have it (or at least didn’t before), which means it’s the easiest.
I student-taught at a high school a year ago, where they had decided to switch physics and chemistry the fall before. Thus, the default science for sophomores was physics. But it wasn’t just your normal physics class; no, it was the Physics With Technology class (known around the state as Physics With ‘Tards – though no one (besides the one teacher who suddenly left the state in the summer) would say that, for obvious reasons). A much less math-intensive course, focusing more on laboratory methods and the like. But it still had some math, because physics without math is just a bunch of demos. Requires a bit of algebra, donchaknow. And boy howdy, that little bit of algebra was waaaay beyond the capabilities of these sophomores. Or at least, that’s what you’d think by the amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth that happened. Now, think of a normal physics class, where you’ll need to know some trig, maybe even derivatives, and you can figure out how it comes last in the series.
Outstanding. Thank you, Seawriter.
(This post reinforces the fact that once I get enough white space in my life, I want a forge. Ricochet Blades, anyone?)
I’ve had some interesting experiences with blades.
Teacher was lecturing (3 hour class, remember), we’re all taking notes, all of a sudden Randy yells out “Guys, come see! I’ve discovered a pattern!”
Several of us head over (the teacher was really cool with us) and Randy showed us:
“Look… Take 1 and add 1, you get 2. Take 2 and add one, you get 3. Take 3 and add 1, you get 4. 2, 3, 4… it’s a pattern!”
Me: “Congratulations, you’ve discovered counting. Great work.”
He was friends with Fred Saberhagen’s kids and knew Fred. As a huge fan of the “Berserker” series, this killed me.
(And, yes, I was being sarcastic in describing Randy as “brilliant”.)
The ends of the bell curve are like that. I could see a flat out genius getting in both those situations. Maybe the counting would be a bit more complex.
Well, take it from me, Randy was no genius. The most profound thing he ever said was, “Don’t date a freshman, they don’t put out.”
Or maybe it was “Ouch, that hurts!” Thirty seconds after our teacher told us not to touch some piece of high voltage equipment. I think it was a spark table. And he wasn’t being funny, he’d just been shocked by the thing.
The world needs people like that – if only to serve as a bad example.
This dude was a walking mistake. I’ve only barely scraped the surface of the things he said over that year. :)