THE
biography of an individual scientist cannot be expected to be of
general interest except when there has been a spectacular achievement or
a colorful personality or both. The present case has no claim to
either. Some students may find encouragement in knowing that something
can be accomplished in spite of much floundering with objectives that do
not seem as clear as they will in retrospect.
Picture taken at the Educational Testing Service (ETS) on the occasion of the dedication of Thurstone Hall; April 14, 1962.
From
left to right:Bob Thurstone, Conrad Thurstone, J.P. Guilford, Harold
Gulliksen, Clyde Coombs, Henry Chauncey, Thelma Thurstone, Fritz
Thurstone, Lyle Jones, Jim Regan, Harold Bechtoldt, Dorothy Adkins,
Ledyard Tucker, Paul Horst, Bob Abelson, and Fritz Fredrickson
Both
of my parents were born in Sweden. In order to get some education
my father joined the Swedish army and became an instructor in
mathematics and fortifications. In later life he was a Lutheran
minister, a newspaper editor, and a publisher. My mother, born Sophie
Strath, had a very good voice and a strong interest in music. My sister,
Adele, is two years younger than I. Both of us were started at the
piano when we were quite young. My sister was the better student, both
in high school and at the piano. She finished a Bachelor of
Music degree.
My parents changed the family name, which was
Thunström, because it was so frequently mispronounced and misspelled. I
have never joined any Swedish clubs and I have had very few contacts
with Swedes until recently when I have become acquainted with Swedish
psychologists.
I was born in Chicago on May 29, 1887, but my
elementary education was in many scattered places, including Berwyn in
Illinois, Centerville in Mississippi, a public school in Stockholm,
Sweden, a boys' school in Stockholm, a grade school and a high school in
Jamestown, New York.
At the age of fourteen it was expected that I
would be confirmed in the Lutheran church. This was a problem because I
declined to learn the catechism. When it became evident that this was
really awkward, there was a conference with my father and another
Lutheran minister and myself. I was offered the proposition that if I
would select any three questions in the catechism to which I was willing
to learn the answers, then I would be confirmed. I accepted
this proposal and thus I was officially confirmed in the Lutheran
church. When I accepted this proposal, my seniors really won the case
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because I read the catechism voluntarily in order to select the
three questions to which I would be willing to memorize the answers.
The
only honor that I received in high school was a first prize of
thirty dollars in the Prendergast competition in geometry. With the
prize money I bought a second-hand bicycle and a box Kodak which was the
starting point for my work in photography. This is still my principal
hobby. When I was a high school sophomore I had my first publication. It
was a short letter to the
Scientific American,published in June,
1905. At that time there was a good deal of discussion about the
hydroelectric power companies at Niagara Falls. The power companies were
accused of diverting so much water to their power plants that
the beauty of Niagara Falls was being ruined. I proposed a very simple
solution for the conflict between the power companies and the tourist
interests. This is what I wrote:
"How to Save Niagara"
"To the Editor of the
Scientific American:
"There
has lately been much discussion on how to save Niagara Falls. I take
here the liberty to describe a method for utilizing the greater part of
the energy in the falls without injuring in the least the beauty of the
falls and without necessitating any engineering structures in the
vicinity of the falls.
"Suppose a dam, constructed across Niagara
River, a few miles above the falls or at the beginning of the river. Let
the gates of the dam be closed half of the time and opened half of the
time, making the river flow, say, twelve hours in daytime. There would
be no danger of overflow when the gates are shut, with the large area of
Lake Erie above the dam. It is evident that twice the regular flow of
the river could be extracted from Lake Erie in the daytime. Let the
regular flow pass over the falls and take a quantity equal to half the
regular flow continually for power purposes. This would give about
3,500,000 horsepower without injuring in the least the beauty of the
falls. The gates of the dam could he open, say, nine hours in the day
and three hours in the night, in order to make it possible to see the
falls also at night. It seems to me that if these arrangements
were possible, it would give a great amount of power and at the same
time save the destruction of the falls.
Louis L. Thunström.
Jamestown, N. Y., June 20, 1905."
[1]
There was a comment in one of the national magazines that I was proposing a way in which we could eat our cake and have it, too.
Engineering
Every
high school student has probably puzzled at some time about the
old problem of trisecting an angle. As a high school sophomore I worked
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out a French curve which could be used with a straight edge
for trisecting any angle but, of course, the solution was not within
the restrictions of Euclidian geometry. In a freshman class in
analytical geometry at Cornell, I learned how to write the equation for
that curve and I showed the solution to my instructor. Professor
Hutchinson told me that he knew over twenty solutions to that old
problem but that he had never seen this particular one before. The
solution was published in theScientific American,and this was my second publication.[2]I also learned a good deal of physics in high school by puzzling about the old problem of perpetual motion.
At
Cornell I started in civil engineering but changed to
electrical engineering. Perhaps I should have majored in physics,
instead. In the basement of Rockefeller Hall I worked with one of the
physics instructors, Dr. Nasmith, who was studying the singing arc. I
set up some experiments in the transmission of sound through a light
beam by projecting the sound into an arc and receiving the light beam on
a selenium cell. The idea was eventually to record the variations in
light intensity on the edge of a motion-picture film by means of
a cylindrical lens, but we never got that far. At the same time I was
playing with a new design for a motion-picture camera and projector. In
this design every point on the screen is continually lighted so that
there is no dark interval or flicker. The film moves uniformly through
the projector without any intermittent motion. These two effects are
accomplished by means of two rotating sets of mirrors which keep the
distance from the film to the objective constant, even though the film
is moving continuously. This machine was actually built
and demonstrated. But it was not until several years later that I
demonstrated it in New York.
In the engineering school I had great
admiration for Professor Dexter Kimball. His course on machine design
was probably the best arranged instruction that I have even seen. For
example, when several hundred students were working on the design of a
shaper, he had the problems so arranged that no two students were
working on exactly the same problem. In his lectures on machine design
I acquired many ideas that have been useful in other contexts. He
pointed out, for example, that in a design problem one starts at the
cutting edge and that the frame is the last thing to be designed. The
uninitiated probably sees the frame first and his impulse might be to
design the frame and then to hook the mechanism onto the frame, which is
the most ineffective way to proceed. Kimball's admonition that one
should start to solve a problem at the cutting edge is a useful idea in
many other contexts. In a committee session one can sometimes be helped
by formulating as precisely as possible what is to be accomplished. That
is the cutting edge of the problem. An organizational outline might
then correspond to the frame of a machine.
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In
one of his lectures Professor Kimball described some
psychological characteristics in the history of a machine such as the
sewing machine or the lathe. In the early stages in the development of a
machine the designer introduces decorative effects which have nothing
to do with function. It is as if the designer were trying to compensate
for the inadequacy of the design even though he may not be aware of it.
In the more mature stages of a machine its beauty is found in the close
relation between design and function. These ideas were well illustrated
with lantern slides of the history of mechanical devices. I remember
thinking at the time that the curlicues on automobiles were
certainly examples of nonfunctional additions. If we look at the
automobile designs today (1950), we must admit evidence of immaturity
even now. The useless and expensive shapes of automobile bodies and the
distracting decorations on the automobile dashboard are evidence of the
immaturity of present automobile design, and this is forty years after
Professor Kimball's lectures on that subject.
Ever since my
undergraduate days I have been interested in the psychological aspects
of machine design, especially as regards human limitations
in visual-motor coordination in the controls. During the Second World
War a lot of military equipment was designed under pressure of time with
inadequate consideration for this problem. The results were often
serious. One does not have to go far to see examples of design defective
because of psychological factors.
While in the engineering
school, I became interested in the possibility of studying the learning
function as a scientific problem. Partly in this connection I visited
several lectures in psychology. One of these was a lecture by Professor
Bentley on the higher thought processes, and I heard a lecture
by Titchener. I remember being interested in his lecture but curious
about his extremely formal and pompous manner. I certainly had no idea
that I would myself be lecturing in the same subject. Boring finished
his engineering degree at Corned several years ahead of me, but I did
not know him at that time. In the senior year I was elected a member of
the electrical engineering fraternity, Eta Kappa Nu, an honor that I
appreciated all the more because I did not earn it on scholarship.
The
motion-picture machine problem had interested me off and on for
several years during high school and college. Since Thomas Edison was
manufacturing one of the best known motion-picture projectors at that
time, I arranged to demonstrate my model in his laboratory in East
Orange, New Jersey. A demonstration was arranged in 1912 and I went
there with my working model. I met Mr. Edison and his chief engineer,
Bliss, and several other men who expressed considerable interest in the
model. They spent a good deal of time on it and they were evidently
considering the possibilities of marketing this type of projector. They
told me finally that it would
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be necessary to retool their whole plant for the manufacture of
a machine of such radical design and that they were unwilling to do so;
they said they had no doubt that the new type of projection would
eventually be generally used, because it entirely eliminated the
flicker. At that time the flicker was much more of a problem than it is
in present machines. It was then that Mr. Edison offered me an
assistantship in his laboratory. Immediately after being graduated with a
mechanical engineer's degree, I went to work in Mr. Edison's laboratory
in East Orange. I saw him daily and I had a very good chance to observe
his work habits.
Thomas Edison was a man of strong convictions
and he did not have much admiration for university education. For every
experimental failure he seemed to produce three more experiments to try.
In this sense he seemed to be tireless. The cot in his office was
probably used for lying down to think about his problems as often as it
was used for sleep. Thomas Edison seemed to have a startling fluency of
ideas, which often ranged far from the immediate problem. He seemed to
have an absolutely endless array of stories; very few of them were fit
for publication. If problem-solving ability is to be studied
scientifically and experimentally, it will be advisable to include
studies of different kinds of fluency. Edison was interested in
educational motion pictures but he had rather inadequate ideas on that
subject. Even now, nearly forty years later, motion pictures have not
found their proper place in the teaching process. When motion pictures
are used in teaching, they usually cover so many ideas for each minute
of the film that they are intelligible only to those who already know
the subject. Effective teaching must be much more deliberate and it must
include judicious repetition and summary. I have seen few motion
pictures that satisfy this fundamental criterion for teaching
effectiveness.
In the fall of 1912 I decided to return to a
university with a good graduate school, and I accepted an instructorship
in descriptive geometry and drafting in the engineering college at the
University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
In my freshman classes I
had two students who have won distinction in their respective fields and
who are now on the University of Chicago faculty
They were Karl
Holzinger, who is professor of Education, and Thorfin Hogness, who is
now professor of chemistry and director of the Institute of
Radiobiology.
While teaching in the engineering college for two
years, I had my first instruction in psychology from Professor Herbert
Woodrow and from Professor J. B. Miner. Woodrow taught experimental
psychology and he was very generous with the engineering instructor who
became interested in the experimental study of the learning function.
Ir
Soekarno dikenal sebagai Presiden pertama Republik Indonesia dan juga
sebagai Pahlawan Proklamasi, Soekarno yang biasa dipanggil Bung Karno,
lahir di Blitar, Jawa Timur, 6 Juni 1901 dan wafat pada tanggal 21 Juni
1970 di Jakarta. Saat ia lahir dinamakan 
