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ME Chair Pisano serves up serious fun with his passion for gadgets
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In his Homecoming talk, ME chair and professor Al Pisano described the tiny microsensors that will define our future technologies. Pisano, who is also director of the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center and FANUC Professor of Mechanical Systems, holds 10 patents of his own.
AARON WALBURG PHOTO
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You may already know that Rube Goldberg (B.S.1904 Metallurgy)—the engineer, cartoonist and 1948 Pulitzer Prize winner who drew elaborate machines designed to sharpen pencils or perform other simple tasks—was a graduate of the College of Engineering. But did you know that the inventor of the computer mouse was also a Berkeley alum? In 1968 Douglas Engelbart (M.S.’53, Ph.D.’55 EE) developed the prototype for the indispensable device handled every day by hundreds of millions of computer users worldwide.
ME professor and chair Al Pisano revealed these and other entertaining tidbits from Berkeley Engineering lore in his Homecoming talk, “The Future of Gadgets,” about the history of apparatuses from vacuum cleaners to Swiss army knives to micro-electromechanical systems, or MEMS. He enumerated some of the College’s most famous inventions, including prestressed concrete, Berkeley UNIX, electronic design automation and the cutting-edge wireless sensors known as “smart dust” that detect motion and other ambient conditions.
Proceeding through his presentation, Pisano flashed an image of the first integrated microfabricated crash sensor, a tiny chip now manufactured in the billions and used to power motor vehicle airbag systems worldwide. These chips are exemplary of the diminutive gadgets of the future, he said, pointing to the screen.
“That chip right there has a job. Its job is to determine, from the way your car shakes and decelerates, whether you have hit a pothole or had an accident, and to launch an airbag to save your life.”
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Pisano joked about the insects that are often photographed with these tiny devices to show their size.
PHOTO COURTESY ALBERT PISANO
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Since Isaac Singer’s first portable sewing machine was patented in 1853, gadgets have gotten smaller and more sophisticated. The fun micromachines and nanoscale devices of the future will measure about 50 micrometers, Pisano said, close to the width of a single hair on his Southern Italian head. So small that ants could smile down at them (and he had a slide to prove it).
But these little machines have big responsibilities, Pisano added.
“The future is going to be determined by looking at the world from the very small and stretching all the way up to the societal scale,” he explained, “depending on whether we’re talking about those little microsensors, putting those sensors together in networks or assembling all that data together to see global trends. That, I think, is a big technological success.”
Go to www.coe.berkeley.edu/multimedia/index.html to see a video of Pisano’s talk.
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