"More With Less," Encounter Books, December, 2001

WHEN I WAS YOUNGER I used to have a bed-time fantasy. Before I fell asleep in my soft and cozy bed I pictured myself gliding through the frozen north woods at night in an electric powered snowmobile of my own design. Under a bubble canopy, I was warm and comfortable in a leather-padded reclining seat. As Vivaldi played softly on my stereo speakers, my instrument panel glowed a soft green and the front skis softly hissed through the snow at 4 mph. While I silently threaded my way through snow-covered trees, miles from civilization or the hope of outside aid, my cozy and efficient little machine kept me safe and warm even as I was enveloped by stark beauty of the frozen woods and icy indifference of the eternal stars.

I have no idea what a psychiatrist might make of my dream but the desire to use low-powered technology to get closer to nature is hardly a unique one. Many people have always preferred canoes to motorboats, bicycles to motorcycles and Cessna 150s to business jets. They aren’t deliberately obstinate or anti-technology and their preferences aren’t always related to specific concerns about global warming, oil reserves, ozone holes or even the much-repeated claim that Americans are only 5% of the world's population but consume 25% of its energy. Such people are not so much trying to save the world as expressing some deep inner sense that that some kinds of efficiency just feel natural and right.

In some quarters, however, this love for efficiency has a terrible reputation, conjuring up images of relentless assembly lines, aesthetically unconscious engineers and an ugly, anti-human world view, lacking compassion, empathy, sensitivity or soul. But there is reason to believe that there is a moral component to efficiency, that the yearning for efficiency can bring out the best in human beings, not the worst, and that idea of efficiency is not only not some terrible construct imposed on us by technology or profit-obsessed corporations but actually something that may very well be embedded in our genes and thus one of our most enduringly human traits.

Certainly it's hard to argue that it’s not present in the genes of some other species. As MacCready himself has noted, nature doesn't tolerate failed experiments. Mistakes get culled in a single generation. The losers leave no progeny. On the other hand, supremely efficient species, such as the wandering albatross, survive quite nicely in even hostile environments like Roaring Forties—an almost-mythic world of gale force winds and towering waves in the far South Atlantic and Pacific, nearly unimpeded by the presence of land. Such fierce storms sweep the albatross rookeries that the chicks, left alone by their parents, can only survive by clinging to their nests with beaks and feet. The adults ride out the storms over the ocean in the air. Far from suffering from the wind and waves, they use their tapering 11-foot wings to extract energy from wind gradients (sharp variations in velocity with altitude). By shuttling back and forth in the wind gradient an albatross can stay aloft all day virtually without flapping its wings at all. "Once it gets to ten meters," says MacCready, "its work is done for the day." A smaller relation, the black-footed albatross, routinely shuttles back and forth between Hawaii and the waters off San Francisco in search of food for its young, sleeping on the wing.

It’s not just birds who operate efficiently. John Lighton, a Nevada entomologist who has done pioneering work studying the metabolism of insects, says there is a good reason ants are so ubiquitous—for them the cost of walking is very low. Even so, harvester ants, when they go out searching for food, never venture more than about 100 yards from the nest, instinctively realizing that beyond that point it takes more energy to get the food home than they get out of it.

Mankind has long benefited from the survival value of efficiency. Nowadays , when virtually anyone, including the old, obese, lame, or pregnant, can get on an airplane and fly non-stop from Los Angeles to London, it’s easy to forget that for first 2.5 million years of human existence, man walked where he needed to go and for much of that time walking was not only the only way to get anywhere it was also the most efficient. Humans walked out of Africa, over Europe, across Asia, following the Bering Straits down through North America to the very tip of South America. As biologist Bernd Heinrich explains in Racing the Antelope, early man was an "endurance predator." While many animals had better physiology for running, such as longer, leaner legs or proportionally larger hearts, few animals had man’s hypertrophied sweating response which gave him far superior endurance during mid-day hunts on the African savannas.

Because early man (a descendant of bipedal savanna hunting apes from 6 million B.C.) was highly mobile, he was able easily to move from Africa to the northern European steppes to prey on the large herds of caribou, bison, and woolly mammoths. Before the climate warmed up at the end of the ice age, thus causing the big northern herds to disappear and forcing man to switch to agriculture, humans lived primarily off protein. They had strength and endurance. The hunting territory of a band of prehistoric men was 500 to 1500 square miles, far larger than that of any other primate and the same size as that of wolf packs, usually considered the widest ranging land predator.

On the chase all of man’s advantages came into play: his sweat glands kept him cool; the hair on his head protected him from the heat of the sun; his erect two-legged stance enabled him to keep his prey in sight; and his superior intelligence enabled him to envision his ultimate success, even when his prey had disappeared over the next rise. "Other things being equal, those hunters who had the most love of nature would be the ones who sought all of its allures," Heinrich maintains. "They were the ones who persisted the longest on the trail. They derived pleasure from being out, exploring, and traveling afar. When they felt fatigue and pain, they did not stop, because their dream carried them still forward. They were our ancestors."

As a superpredator man was unsurpassed. When it comes to calories expended per pound of body weight per mile, a man on foot was 50 times more efficient than a mouse, 5 times more efficient than a rabbit, twice as efficient as a dog, almost as efficient as a horse and half as efficient as a salmon. When the Navajos wanted an unblemished deer hide for religious ceremonies, Heinrich wrote, they chased the deer until it was too tired to run any farther, at which point they throttled it with their hands.

Because the genes of the most efficient superpredators were passed down to their descendants, their yearnings, passions and desire for efficiency still flow through the veins of humans today, which may be why so many people today prefer canoes to hydroplanes, bikes to automobiles and skis instead of snowmobiles. It may also be why most people instinctively understand the long range advantages of living off the amount of energy the sun gives each of us each day rather than, as MacCready says, "draw down the principal"¾use up the "energy of fossil fuel, the stored energy of sunlight captured millions of years ago."

Engineers, for all their supposed indifference to aesthetics concerns, can’t always tolerate violations of engineering efficiency. The young Albert Einstein was so offended at the inability of electro-magnetic field theory to fully explain the dynamo, for instance, that he ended up years later totally altering our conception of space and time. Einstein wrote his initial paper on relativity ("On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies") in part to remedy an aesthetic aberration, explains science writer Tim Ferris in Coming of Age in the Milky Way. At the beginning of the 20th century, noted Ferris, quoting the American historian Henry Adams, dynamos (electrical generators) weren't so much just another technology as they were a "moral force" and a "symbol of infinity." Although dynamos were changing the world right in front of Einstein’s eyes (his father and uncle had built dynamos in their back yard) no one, including the young Einstein, fully understood how they worked. "Under existing theory," writes Ferris, "the moving field was to be explained according to one set of rules if viewed from the perspective of a dynamo's rotating magnet, and another if viewed from the stationary electrical coil. . . . It bothered Einstein as unaesthetic. 'The thought that one is dealing here with two fundamentally different cases was for me unbearable,' he recalled. 'The difference between these two cases could not be a real difference but rather, in my conviction, only a difference in the choice of the reference point.'"

Stephen Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple computer, once stayed up to 2 am laying out black Mylar traces for a circuit board for the original Apple II. Unlike Einstein, Wozniak did not solve some great mystery of the universe, feed-throughs being simply places in the circuit board where the printed electrical traces passed under adjoining ones so they wouldn’t touch. But to Wozniak having more feed-throughs than absolutely necessary just didn’t seem elegant. By rigorously re-arranging his design Wozniak reduced the number of feed-throughs from 50 down to 3. "I just wanted to minimize feed-throughs," Wozniak said. "It's totally aesthetic. Nobody even knows I did it. But I know, and it's just aesthetically perfect to me."

Thomas Hoving, the down-to-earth former head of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, once showed a metal object to a group of art students and then asked them whether it was a tool or a work. The device was polished metal, lean and flowing and full of subtle curves. As it turned out, the device was an obstetrical tool. Similarly the hull of a racing yacht is designed for only one thing¾to win races. Yet even people who know nothing about sailing can still appreciate its symmetrical beauty and flowing lines. Airfoils often display beautiful compound curves even though the engineers who designed them were only trying to maximize lift and minimize drag.

At a certain level, engineering is aesthetically beautiful in the satisfactions it offers to the soul. In a world without constraints efficiency vanishes and so does beauty. Back in the days of the CP/M operating system many computer programs were written by inspired artists. No one but an artist could write a program that was both very useful and still small enough to work in the tiny amount of internal memory available at the time. But, as better operating systems became available and the cost of memory and storage devices plummeted, personal computer programs increasingly went from lean light gazelles to massive plodding Clydesdales, lacking both elegance and efficiency. In the process, something important was lost and the result was that few people (including the programmers themselves) thought of programmers as artists anymore.

Although it's hard to feel much sympathy with the modern day Luddite left when it talks about the terrible social impact of pollution-free fusion power, I’ve often wondered wonder if cheap, limitless energy will really be the unambiguous good many power advocates think it will. Just as artists tend to be more creative when they have to work under constraints, engineers do too. Any aeronautical engineer can design a plane that will fly with a 1,000 hp engine. But if you tell him he has to design a plane that has to fly on the amount of power a single human can continuously produce (1/3rd horsepower) or on the output of a 47-foot wing panel of solar cells (1500 watts, the same the same as a hair dryer), that is where artistry and creativity flourish. Only a few people can do that. Many live in Southern California. The best known is Paul MacCready.


WHEN I FIRST STARTED TALKING to Paul MacCready about low-power people and their inventions, I found it hard to reconcile his appearance and demeanor with what I already knew of his accomplishments. Although it's not always apparent in casual conversation (he can be low-key to the point of vanishing into the wallpaper), MacCready is known world-wide for his efficient, man-powered machines. He’s been called the "Dr. Edward Teller" of solar power, a "cold dreamer," and the "poet laureate of flight." He’s a friend and confidant of Nobel prize winners, generals, cutting-edge academicians, entrepreneurs and CEOs. He's a ubiquitous lecturer on creativity, thinking skills and efficiency ("doing more with much less" he calls it) and represented by the same speakers bureau (at $8000 to $10,500 per appearance) that represents Jimmy Carter, Jerry Seinfeld, Dan Rather, Tommy Lasorda, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. His accomplishments have been recognized by dozens of prestigious organizations, including The Lindbergh Foundation, the National Aeronautics Association and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers which in 1980 named him "Engineer of the Century." Time called him one of the 20th century’s 100 most creative minds.

Still for someone hailed by Esquire as the most "delightful and creative" engineer of the last 100 years, he’s the opposite of hale-fellow-well-met. Perhaps as a result of his childhood dyslexia, he has a hard time with names and faces. Although I had two long exploratory breakfast meetings with him at Caltech when I first began talking to him about writing this book, when I subsequently ran into him on the stairs of Caltech’s Thomas Hall a few months later we chatted pleasantly for a couple of minutes before I realized that he didn’t know who I was.

Far more than most public figures, MacCready seems to have no interest in asserting dominance or authority. He generally speaks without passion or emphasis, sometimes in a voice so soft and inflection-free a tape recorder can't pick him up from three feet away. He’s not a stand-offish unfriendly guy or a prima donna to whom deference must be paid. Back in the late eighties, when he was less jealous of his free time, I read something he’d said in the newspaper, gave him a call out of the blue and we chatted for half an hour. Later he mailed me a book on the matter. He’s not impressed by public relations or flashy appearances. He doesn't dress for success, often appearing in casually mismatched outfits, battered sneakers and an plastic digital watch. He doesn’t like confrontations. Sometimes in conversation he toys with his jacket buttons in the manner of a bashful five year old. Despite being in his seventies, he still retains enough of his boyish enthusiasms to mount a video camera on remote control vehicle to try and chase a skunk out from under his house.

"In person, Paul MacCready is a less-than-awe-inspiring figure," wrote Josh Hammer in a 1987 Los Angeles Times story. "He’s a slight man, with a pale, birdlike visage and oversized horn-rimmed spectacles perched on a sunburned nose-a classic Walter Mitty character. His voice comes out in a reedy monotone, devoid of the tiniest change in pitch or emotion. He moves awkwardly, carrying traces of the ungainly adolescent who was always picked dead last in schoolyard choose-‘em-ups."

But it’s a mistake to conclude from his image that he’s a negligible personality. "He’s always been very competitive by nature, just like Bill Gates," says old friend and former Caltech classmate Henry Jex. "These are people who go to extremes to get something done and they accomplish miracles." He’s self-assured, congenitally (even annoyingly) optimistic, loyal to his friends, physically courageous and persistent to the verge of near irrationality. He was the U.S. soaring champion three times while still in his twenties and the international champion at age 31. He has climbed Kilimanjaro, scuba dived with the whale sharks of western Australia and rafted down the Yangtze through the mountains of Tibet. "He’s got a new idea ever ten seconds," says Chet Kyle, mechanical engineer, efficiency expert and co-founder of the Human Powered Vehicle Association. "Some are great. Some are lousy." The difference between MacCready and other folks with good ideas is that he makes things happen. "He knows how to do things. He can solve problems in the physical world that have baffled other people for decades."

I knew most of this when I attended a dinner where he was the guest speaker a few years ago. I just found it hard to reconcile his legendary determination, which I had never seen, with his retiring manner, which was always on display. On this occasion, MacCready was speaking to the Twilight Club, a private organization of doctors, lawyers and businessmen which met monthly in the clubhouse dining room of a private Los Angeles golf course. When we took our seats, I found that the elderly gentleman on my right had once been a good friend of Charles Lindbergh. On my left was the host, a large, friendly man but not overly subtle. When he discovered I was a writer he asked what I did for my "day job." He also asked what plans I had for my next book.

Like most writers, I have spent most of my life asking other people what they think. When someone asks me for my views, it is such a rare experience I tend to go overboard. As I explained to my host, my next book was tentatively entitled "Songs of the Beta Male." As he had never heard of alpha or beta males, I quickly explained that those were phrases taken from the study of wolf pack behavior. The leader of the pack (society) was the alpha male. He ran the show and had his choice of females. The less prestigious wolves (or men) were beta males. With no responsibility to act a part (confident and fully in charge), they were free to be creative.

Basically, my theory went, human alpha males were men who were good at high status activities, such as asserting their will, running other people’s lives and attracting mates, but they couldn't invent things like steam engines, write novels, make mathematical breakthroughs or even draw a really good comic strip. They were far too worried about their social status have the kind of commitment to truth and real insight that true creativity demanded. They were more concerned with wearing power suits, dining at high-status restaurants or arranging their office furniture to support their sometimes shaky self-image and control. This was in fact one reason I admired MacCready. He didn't care about any of that stuff.

I had just begun to explain all this to my host when he interrupted to announce that "Everyone in this room is an alpha male."

I don’t remember what I said exactly but it was something non-committal, which seemed to provoke him even more.

"What about Paul MacCready?" he boomed. "Is he an alpha male?"

I should have derailed the question with flattery—"Oh those categories don’t apply to someone like MacCready. People at his level are in a class by themselves."--but I'd had two glasses of wine before dinner and, is sometimes the case, I was full of myself.

"Well," I said, thinking as I spoke. "He's a very complex person who appears to be a beta male . . ."

I got no further when MacCready, whom I hadn't even known was listening, suddenly spoke up from across the table. "You don't know me well enough to answer that!"

Suddenly the entire table was looking at me.

"You're right," I said. "I don't."

They say you learn more from your mistakes than your successes. Well, I learned a lot that night, including the fact my Beta male theory needed more work and that that whatever else one might want to say about MacCready, when it came to defending his self-image, he certainly wasn’t humble and neither was he shy.