{"id":800,"date":"2013-01-15T09:25:09","date_gmt":"2013-01-15T14:25:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/?p=800"},"modified":"2017-07-28T10:08:31","modified_gmt":"2017-07-28T14:08:31","slug":"archives-back-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2013\/01\/archives-back-future\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Archives: Back to the Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Science-Review\"<\/a>A grainy clock counts down black-and-white seconds, and two wineglasses appear as suspense-inducing music scratches in the background. \u201cHere are two snifters, one with wine, one with water,\u201d a voiceover intones. \u201cIf you put a tablespoonful of wine into the water, and a tablespoonful of this mixture into the wine, is there more wine in the water than water in the wine? The answer in a moment.\u201d The wineglasses fade to a shot of Gilman Hall.<\/p>\n

Between 1948 and 1960, Johns Hopkins produced several educational television series. Johns Hopkins Science Review opened in March 1948, on WMAR-TV\u2014 a weekly program featuring world-renowned scientists and scientific \u201cfirsts\u201d that was telecast to Baltimore from Remsen Hall. The series specialized in demonstrations, discussions, and dramatizations by Hopkins faculty and guests, with topics ranging from the first televised live birth to segments with \u201cBig Bang\u201d theorist George Gamow and pioneering rocket engineer Wernher von Braun. At least seven episodes in the four series featured engineering themes, including this Nov. 2, 1958, segment titled \u201cThink and Answer.\u201d<\/p>\n

The snifters crackle back onto the screen along with the show\u2019s host, creator, and producer Lynn Poole, who is introducing the episode as a quiz show testing rigorous thinking. Eliezer Naddor, a Hopkins professor of industrial engineering, solves the puzzle. \u201cThe answer is rather simple, Mr. Poole,\u201d Naddor says. \u201cThere is just as much water in the wine as there is wine in the water.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was problem solving; looking at a new set of facts and trying to figure out a doable solution.\u201d Robert Aberneth<\/cite><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As the episode unfolds, freshmen Karvel Rose and Robert Abernethy take on two Arts and Sciences classmates in a contest to tackle eight mind-teasers posed by Naddor. At the conclusion, the engineers prevail with a score of 4 to 3.<\/p>\n

Fifty-four years later, Abernethy\u2014 president and chairman of American Standard Development Co. in Los Angeles\u2014recalls being glad he participated in the episode. \u201cMy memories of it are fond,\u201d says Abernethy, who spent three years on the electrical engineering track before switching to mathematics in his senior year. In addition to his real estate business, Abernethy is deeply involved with numerous charities and boards, including the Hopkins board of trustees. And at least one skill he relied on during the 1958 episode has continued to serve him in all those endeavors. \u201cIt was problem solving; looking at a new set of facts and trying to figure out a doable solution,\u201d he says. \u201cIn a way, that was a little start to what has been a lifelong pursuit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Soon after the program\u2019s Baltimore debut, CBS agreed to broadcast the Science Review from Boston to Richmond, making Johns Hopkins the first university to produce a weekly program on network television. In fall 1950, the series switched to the DuMont network and its local Baltimore affiliate, WAAM-TV, which later became WJZ. Johns Hopkins Science Review became the first American program to be seen in Europe in 1951, and by 1952, the show was being broadcast in 21 cities across the United States and in Canada.
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