My Engineer's Notebook: Amos Winter

ASME member Amos Winter is lab director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Mobility Lab and creator of the Leveraged Freedom Chair, the invention that won first prize at the 2010 ASME Innovation Showcase (IShow). As winners of the IShow, Winter and his MIT Mobility Lab team received $10,000 in seed funds to develop and manufacture the Leverage Freedom Chair, which is a lever-propelled wheelchair designed for use in developing countries. Unlike current wheelchairs on the market, the Leveraged Freedom Chair enables the user to travel on sandy roads and muddy walking paths that are frequently encountered in these parts of the world.

Winter recently completed a successful trial of the Leveraged Freedom Chair in India, and expects to be producing as many as 500 of the wheelchairs per month by March with MIT’s manufacturing partner in India. Winter, who received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from MIT in 2010, is currently a post-doctoral research associate with the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD)-MIT International Design Center. Next July, he will begin as an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.

What’s inside your engineer’s notebook?

Amos Winter.

All kinds of good stuff. I always have an engineer’s notebook with me in my backpack. I’m not kidding. Historically over the last five years or so, I’ve actually had two—one for my Ph.D. research and one for my wheelchair stuff. Now they’re combined into one research notebook. I’ve got wheelchair calculations. I’ve got sketches for a modification I made to the inside of my Land Rover to put a camping bed in it when I designed and built all of that in India. I’ve got wind turbine calculations. I’ve got anchoring calculations and power and energy consumption calculations for the undersea anchoring technology I worked on for my Ph.D. I’ve got lots of notes from meetings and action items. I’ve got some stuff on turbo chargers that I’ve been thinking about. I don’t want to give away too many details, but there’s all kinds of stuff in there.

Whose notebook would you most like to peek into? Why?

Someone who was a really prolific inventor—like Thomas Edison or Jerome Lemelson—who probably would have sketched out a lot of ideas. In the modern era, Steve Jobs. I know he sketched a lot of things, and Burt Rutan, the lead designer on SpaceShipOne. I’d also really like to see the notebook of whoever designed the Pantheon in Rome 2,000 years ago. That guy figured out some unbelievably complex stuff with absolutely no modern engineering theory. He or she—I’m assuming it was a guy because of the era—was living a good 1,600 years before any of the existing engineering theory we use today was even invented. There wasn’t calculus or any of that. I would love to see how he figured out how to take weight out of the ceiling, how he tapered the thickness of the ceiling as it goes toward the top, and how he figured out how to manage the compliance in the wooden staging that held up the ceiling as they built it so you could still maintain a correct curvature. He figured out some crazy stuff before there was any theory to do it! That blows my mind. I want to see how he did it. Same with the people who built the Pyramids or Stonehenge. They’re just amazing engineering marvels that happened way before modern history.

How and when did you know you wanted to become an engineer?

The Leveraged Freedom Chair. Image courtesy of MLAB, MIT.

I think it’s more like there’s never been a time that I questioned whether or not I wanted to become a mechanical engineer. I have always wanted to be a mechanical engineer. I ran into my elementary school principal a few months ago, and we were joking about a speech I gave at my eighth grade graduation, where I said I want to be a mechanical engineer. I was the type of kid who played with Legos and took things apart. I’ve just really always been interested in mechanical things. So I really don’t know what else I’d want to do. In hindsight, maybe I would have liked to double major in mechanical and electrical because they’re so combined these days. But there’s never been a time when I wanted to do
something else.

What's the most exciting project you've ever worked on?

I think our wheelchair, because I’ve been able to see it from inception—when I came up with the idea of the lever system—all the way to the commercialization. It was an unbelievably difficult technical problem, to provide the level of performance that that chair needed to do, but in a very simple and low-cost mechanical system. This was a crazy technical challenge. It may look like a bunch of bike parts cobbled together, but it’s not. There was some really hardcore engineering that went into that thing. And now being at the point where I was at this last trial where I was talking to these trial subjects and heard their stories about how they were trapped in their houses, depressed, and totally dependent on their families. And now they’re out, interacting with the community, traveling a few kilometers a day. To see my efforts as an engineer change a person’s life in that way, it is very moving. So it is very gratifying to see that I applied my skill set in a very beneficial way, and that’s awesome. At the same time, I never want to be a do-gooder who does tourist development work. I want there to be a reason for me to be there and be involved and make the trip to the developing country and work with these people. I want to add value to this space. That is very important to me.

What do you think you’d be doing if you hadn’t become an engineer?

A rider sits in the LFC near her family in Kampala, Uganda. Image courtesy of MLAB, MIT.

I was meant to be a mechanical engineer. There are other professions that I look at with a lot of respect because I would love to be able to do that, and I don’t have the talent. Being a writer, being somebody who could write a really compelling and engaging novel, I think that’s amazing. Being a musician. These aren’t professions that I thought of pursuing because I felt like I don’t have the chops to hack it and be successful. I realize that I’m weird in this sense, but I really never considered anything else. I’ve always felt like this is the profession for me.

What’s your favorite hobby or activity when you’re not working?

My hobbies are basically derivatives of mechanical engineering in one way or another. I’m a total fanatic about cars. I love cars, and I have a couple antique cars that I do all the work on, and tinker with. I made a lift to get under them better and pull the engine out of one. Following cars, reading about cars, watching the British car show Top Gear on TV. I’m totally a fanatic about that. I love doing all that stuff. I also really enjoy going to technology-related museums and seeing architectural and engineering marvels that I find amazing because of the technological achievement associated with them. This summer I took a few months off and went around Europe and all I did was go see places like Stonehenge, the Duxford Imperial War Museum, the Millau Viaduct in France, all the crazy stuff in Rome, the Porsche and Mercedes Museums in Stuttgart, and the Unimog Museum in the Black Forest. I love going to these places. I have a whole collection of dorky mechanical engineering-related museum t-shirts.

Was there a book or a movie that piqued your interest in science or engineering?

Amos performs an improvised stress test to test axle weld penetration. Image courtesy of MLAB, MIT.

There was a biography on Albert Einstein that I read in second or third grade that really affected me. I thought a lot about Einstein for many years after reading that. More recently, there’s a book that means a lot to me: Wilbur and Orville, a biography of the Wright Brothers. They are my heroes. They started with a problem where all the existing theory about the problem of powered flight was wrong. And in the span of four years, using only their own time and own money—just two guys who didn’t even have a college education—they solved every little problem, step by step, to lead to the powered aircraft. And they did it not by just trial and error. It was very scientific. They wanted to quantify the parameters around each problem. As far as experimental scientists, they are kings because they did it as brutally simply and as brutally quickly to get the answer. They’re so inspiring to me. I’m actually going to have all my grad students read this biography so they can put themselves in the mindset, “What would the Wright Brothers do here?” to get the answer as quickly and cheaply as possible. There’s also a fascinating book called Longitude about John Harrison, the inventor of marine chronometer—a clock that made it possible to establish the longitude of ships at sea. In the early 1700s, the British government offered this huge prize—equivalent to about 40 million British pounds today—for anyone who could judge longitude at sea within some degree of accuracy. Latitude could be determined by the position of the sun in the sky, but longitude couldn’t be figured out. The British were losing armies at sea because nobody could figure out where they were on the earth. Harrison—who wasn’t even a clockmaker, but a carpenter—started working on this problem. And in working on the clock, he came up with all sorts of precision-engineering principles and ways to keep accuracy on the ship. He made prototype after prototype, and it took him about 40 years to finally win the prize.

Who are your heroes, either within the engineering profession or in the rest of your life?

The Wright Brothers, definitely. And definitely John Harrison. There’s also a guy named Burt Monroe from New Zealand, who bought an Indian Scout motorcycle in 1921 and spent the next 40 years of his life just making it go faster and faster. In the late 60s, he ended up breaking the world speed record for under 1,000 cc motorcycles, going over 200 miles an hour on his 1921 Indian Scout. That was a guy who had no engineering training but just absolute commitment to making this thing go fast. He lost his family as a result of it. It’s kind of tragic in many ways. But he was so motivated and he did the impossible. Other heroes would be people like Newton and Edison. Henry Ford, even though he had some unsavory aspects about him. As far as for creating an industry, though, he did some pretty amazing things. I really respect Steve Jobs. He was another one who could be bristling a little bit to people because he was so focused and so committed to providing a quality product. Not just cobbling something together, but really searching for beauty and elegance. I appreciate that. Another one would be Burt Rutan. He’s got three aircraft in the National Aerospace Museum. That’s unbelievable—that one guy would design three aircraft on display. At MIT, Doc Edgarton was pretty prolific in his inventions. He basically invented high-speed photography. He did all sorts of motion capture and acoustics work, too, and started a very successful electronics device company. But he was also an unbelievable teacher and an inspiration to many, many students. I think about people like him when I think of how I want to be as a professor. I can’t think of matching his impact, but he’s the type of person I strive to be.

What’s the most meaningful or rewarding aspect of being connected to engineering?

I think about this a lot. I am very motivated by the problem, as I think many engineers are. They want to solve the problem, and the satisfaction is in the solution. When I was working on the wheelchair and doing all that design, the problem was just so outrageously difficult and was such a challenge that it really excited me. I don’t want that to diminish the satisfaction that you’re using your skills to help people. I have a specific skill set—I guess it’s unique compared to the general population—and it’s pretty powerful to know that I can use that skill set to make a positive impact on humanity. That’s pretty cool. It’s a mix of both of those aspects.

What does ASME mean to you?

ASME has been pretty awesome to me, especially in the last couple years. It’s nice to have this big organization that clearly values mechanical engineering, but also brings so many opportunities to highlight mechanical engineering work. For me specifically—because I’m now getting into so much international development-focused engineering work—ASME is the type of organization that can provide funding for this type of research, and provide professional opportunities like special editions of journals, or special sections of conferences to highlight work in this area. I hugely appreciate ASME’s commitment to grow programs related to international development. I appreciate that they recognize this opportunity and challenge, and are really putting a lot of money behind it with programs like Engineering for Change. I’m on the Engineering for Global Development committee, so we’re growing programs though that. I really like the people I work with, too, both staff and volunteers. They’re fantastic people. They’re engineers and they’re committed and motivated. I feel like ASME has taken me under its wing and I feel very much that’s helping me develop my career. As a member of the committee, I’ve also been given the chance to help ASME direct its programs related to development. It’s pretty cool to have a voice in that process because ASME is such a large, powerful organization and can do so much in that space.

I was the type of kid who played with Legos and took things apart. I’ve just really always been interested in mechanical things. Amos Winter

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