MIT

"I dug out the heat transfer textbook I had studied at MIT and did some rough calculations, and found that my concern was correct. So over the next few days, I tried an indirect heating method: not letting the soldering tool directly contact the electrode, but only letting it contact the copper wire, using copper’s high thermal conductivity to melt part of the electrode and complete the soldering. My method was slower than the original, but the likelihood of disrupting the transistor’s internal chemistry should be lower than with the original method, so the final yield should be higher. After I myself became proficient in operating my soldering method, I began training the two most experienced operators. After one or two days, their soldering speed using the new method had reached 80–90% of the original method. We accumulated several hundred transistors soldered using the new method and compared the yield with another group of transistors soldered using the original method. Sure enough, the yield of the new method was noticeably higher than that of the original method. My supervisor came over to take a look, and the production manager also came to see it, and even sat down and asked me to teach him the new soldering method. A few days later, the entire production line switched to my method."

"At that time, among the professors in MIT’s mechanical engineering department there were many master-level figures. In applied mechanics there was Den Hartog; in fluid mechanics there was Shapiro; in thermodynamics there were Keenan and Kaye; in materials science there were Orowan and Chao. A few months ago, a vice chancellor from the University of California, Berkeley came to visit me. He was a few years younger than I and also came from mechanical engineering, though not from MIT. When he discovered that I studied mechanical engineering at MIT from 1950 to 1955, we could not help recalling the past. He said that at that time he greatly envied MIT’s faculty and academic standards, and he also agreed that the 1950s truly deserved to be called the golden era of MIT’s mechanical engineering department."

"Just as the literary giant Hemingway described Paris as “a moveable feast,” I describe my year at Harvard the same way. After that, I went through various stages—MIT, employment, entering Stanford for a Ph.D., and working at Texas Instruments—but no matter where I went or what I did, I carried this “feast” with me and continually enjoyed the knowledge, interests, and insights that this “feast” gave me. Even decades later, when I returned to Taiwan, although changes in time and place made it feel as if I were in another world, this “feast” still did not lose its freshness. It was as though I were still immersed in a rich, ever-changing, refined, and captivating atmosphere."

"Thinking of Apple’s investment like a government program is instructive. Year in, year out, China didn’t have the talent or expertise to build the products that Jony Ive’s studio conceived, but the engineers Apple hired out of MIT, Caltech, and Stanford, or poached from Tesla, Dell, and Motorola, routinely got them up to speed. Apple could send a caliber of talent to China—what one Apple veteran calls “an influx of the smartest of the smart people”—that no government program ever could. And the culture was such that the Apple engineers would work up to eighteen hours a day. Moreover, whereas a government program could at best train a workforce to engineer products, it wouldn’t have the ability to actually purchase the goods. But Apple could and did."

"Thinking of Apple’s investment like a government program is instructive. Year in, year out, China didn’t have the talent or expertise to build the products that Jony Ive’s studio conceived, but the engineers Apple hired out of MIT, Caltech, and Stanford, or poached from Tesla, Dell, and Motorola, routinely got them up to speed. Apple could send a caliber of talent to China—what one Apple veteran calls “an influx of the smartest of the smart people”—that no government program ever could. And the culture was such that the Apple engineers would work up to eighteen hours a day. Moreover, whereas a government program could at best train a workforce to engineer products, it wouldn’t have the ability to actually purchase the goods. But Apple could and did."

"Thinking of Apple’s investment like a government program is instructive. Year in, year out, China didn’t have the talent or expertise to build the products that Jony Ive’s studio conceived, but the engineers Apple hired out of MIT, Caltech, and Stanford, or poached from Tesla, Dell, and Motorola, routinely got them up to speed. Apple could send a caliber of talent to China—what one Apple veteran calls “an influx of the smartest of the smart people”—that no government program ever could. And the culture was such that the Apple engineers would work up to eighteen hours a day. Moreover, whereas a government program could at best train a workforce to engineer products, it wouldn’t have the ability to actually purchase the goods. But Apple could and did."

"this mantra time and time again whenever the question was broached. As for expertise, Harrison and Wallace once again got lucky when they learned that a pioneer in the business was living just down the road from them, working for H.C. Baxter in Houlton, Maine. Olof Pierson would earn the label “the father of the frozen French fried potato.”16 Pierson was an eccentric, MIT-trained, chain-smoking, hard- drinking, absent-minded inventor. He earned a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering from MIT in 1932, and while serving in the American army during the Second World War he was given the task of working out how to dehydrate potatoes for the armed services. His success led to his joining H.C. Baxter, where he continued his work on processing potatoes, first in canned goods and later in freezing them as french fries. He invented and drove the process and indeed was dir- ectly responsible for the first package of frozen french fries sold in 1947 by the Birds Eye Company.17 He later became an independent consult- ant in the frozen food business. McCain Foods was an early client, and later he advised the United Nations Food Organization. Pierson had the run of the place on the technical side with McCain"