Other Awards Shows That Deserve to Get Red-Carpet Treatment
By LEE GOMES
Did you catch the big awards show? What a spectacle it was, with all the celebrities and bright lights and long acceptance speeches.
This being a tech column, we're not talking about the Oscars, but rather, the Charles Stark Draper Prize, which was given out last week at a gala black-tie dinner in Washington, D.C.
The Draper Prize is one of a number of distinguished but not widely known technical awards that might be regarded as the Nobel Prizes that Alfred forgot to create.
The Swedish industrialist, who died in 1896, mentioned only five prizes in his will: physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace. Since then, the Stockholm foundation that administers the Nobels has taken a distinctly small-tent approach to expanding the list. The only new prize came in 1968, for economics, and it technically isn't even a Nobel Prize, but the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences.
So, engineers, mathematicians, architects, inventors and others slighted by the foundation have, in recent decades, created their own awards, to give themselves a spotlight to stand in.
Getting people to notice or care about these awards, though, is often an effort that deserves its own medal. The general public, while having an apparently unlimited appetite for entertainment prizes, can't seem to abide anything more than a single annual look into such matters as science or engineering.
The Draper Prize, for example, is meant to "increase public understanding of the contributions of engineering and technology." It was established 15 years ago, and is named for the MIT researcher whose lab helped pioneer inertial navigation. Winners receive $500,000 from an endowment from Draper Laboratory, a nonprofit research center in Cambridge, Mass. The prize is administered by the National Academy of Engineering, and is that discipline's highest award.
This year, the prize was given to Alan C. Kay, Butler W. Lampson, Robert W. Taylor and Charles P. Thacker, all of whom worked at Xerox's famous Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, in California in the early 1970s.
The men are credited with creating the Xerox Alto, usually cited as the first practical networked personal computer. Messrs. Kay, Lampson and Thacker did much of the actual engineering work. Mr. Taylor ran their famed computer-science lab, which also invented, among other things, the Ethernet networking system and the window-oriented user interface. The Alto also is the great-grandfather of the Apple Macintosh, with the genealogy running from the Alto to the Xerox Star to the Apple Lisa and finally to the Apple Mac.
Including the Nobels, there are roughly 160 big-ticket prizes handed out each year, collectively worth nearly $40 million, according to the International Congress of Distinguished Awards, a Philadelphia outfit that tracks these things. There are twice as many awards for humanitarian endeavors, such as peace, literature, the environment and the arts, than there are for science and technology. But the average prize for technical accomplishment is worth more: $255,000, or 13% more than the average prize for merely doing good.
Some of these awards have obvious commercial tie-ins, like the Ronald McDonald House Charities Awards of Excellence. Others appear to be attempts at some sort of redemption. The Lemelson-MIT Prize for inventors is given in the name of Jerome H. Lemelson, an American inventor whose main innovation, many intellectual property attorneys will tell you, was using the U.S. legal system to extort royalty payments out of companies via questionable patent claims. Albert Einstein maintained that Alfred Nobel himself started his Peace Prize to atone for a guilty conscience over a long career spent inventing dynamite and making all sorts of armaments.
The professional societies that hand out these awards say they have a dual purpose: to honor the achievement of a person or group and to call attention to the social usefulness of their profession. So, it's necessary to be mindful of how the award will play to the public.
Many Draper awards are for reasonably well-known accomplishments: the Internet, fiber optics, the GPS satellite system. But one recent award stands out for being technically recondite: the 1997 prize to Vladimir Haensel, then an emeritus professor of chemical engineering at Amherst.
Prof. Haensel, who has since passed away, was cited for work he did in the 1940s, when he developed "platforming," short for "platinum reforming." It's a chemical process that revolutionized the way petroleum was refined, not only making lead-free gasoline possible, but for turning refining into an efficient operation with a multitude of economically useful byproducts.
While platforming is central to the modern global economy, its obscureness gave the Draper folk some pause, recalls Wm. A. Wulf, president of the National Academy. In the end, the group figured out a sound bite for Prof. Haensel's contribution that was both accurate and accessible. Said Mr. Wulf, "We told people that without it, all of our IQs would have been 10 points lower, on account of all the lead in the air."