Learning

Brian Herbert wrote about learning: The capacity to learn is a gift; the ability to learn is a skill; the willingness to learn is a choice. Today we are seeing a deluge of information and data for our attention. In this tsunami, we should fix priority for learning- first, what is necessary; second, what is useful; and third, what is simply ornamental.

Let us remember what Lord Kelvin (earlier name, Sir William Thomson 1824-1907 -probably one of the earliest electrical engineers from UK, apart from being a great global mathematician and physicist) wrote at the end of 19th century, after an illustrious career which brought him peerage, “I have lived long, and have learned enough to realize that I know nothing”!

 Lord Kelvin was Professor of Physics at Glasgow University from 1846 to end of his life.  Elihu Thomson – great electrical and transformer engineer of US of the time, whose company merged with that of Edison to form the General Electric Company - referred Lord Kelvin as the father of modern electrical engineering. Lord Kelvin was a consultant to Niagara AC Electric Power Plant (being the first in the world, no models to copy but everything to be created!). Apart from his contributions in submarine telegraphy, there were Ferranti-Thomson AC dynamo, electrometer, electrostatic voltmeters and of course, Kelvin’s bridge!

Elihu Thomson was delivering the obituary speech for late Kelvin, during the memorial meeting, held in New York on January 12th,1908. To illustrate Kelvin’s thirst for knowledge and yearning for learning, Elihu Thomson quoted an incident. In 1897, at the age of 73, Kelvin visited US with his wife (after a long tortuous journey by sea) to learn the latest developments in electrical engineering in that country. He visited factory shops of General Electric Company at Schenectady. During the visit, he was profusely noting down in a note book what all he saw and heard about the new electrical products being made there. After a few years later, a US engineer from GE, E W Rice visited him at Glasgow. Lord Kelvin immediately took out his old note book and questioned Rice regarding the later developments on each of the items that he had noted during his earlier visit in 1897.Lord Kelvin, at late age, was in a hurry to make himself up to date in Electrical Engineering!

 Let me share my own learning journey. Out of more than half a century that I was involved with transformers and other power products, I worked in a Japanese subsidiary (TELK, Kerala, India) for the first three decades and the balance two decades with the global transformer market leader from Europe (ABB Vadodara, Gujarat. India)

Just three days on my crossing the age of 22, on December 3, 1966, I walked across the gates of the newly set up Transformer factory (TELK) in Kerala for an innings of 33 years. TELK was  a joint venture between Hitachi, Japan and Government of Kerala, India. On the very first day, I had a meeting with the Hitachi resident Directors of the company in the company conference room. They were - T Ogawa, senior director, tall by Japanese Standards and always serious and the other, E Kaku, short, diplomatic and genial. Mr Ogawa was earlier General Manager of Hitachi Transformer factory (Kokubu works) in Japan and a veteran transformer engineer with engineering and design experience. After general introductions, Mr Kaku drew a mountain on the black board and said “This is Fuji san, (Mount Fuji) the revered mountain peak of Japan. Ogawa-san is at the top of this mountain and you are at the bottom. You have to climb the mountain slowly but steadily with mountain top as the destination” (‘san’ is the honorific salutation for addressing persons and objects in Japan, like sir) I never forgot this simile and always took it as an aspiration. I have not yet reached the top of Fujisan and struggling somewhere at the middle of the path. Quite often, I come across technical problems that I have never experienced earlier and I spend several hours to understand and resolve them. My wife finds this quite strange, as she is seeing this for the past 44 years. According to her, any person of average intelligence should have mastered the craft long back.

Frankly, even after so many years, each month, I see and learn something new in transformer engineering that I have never come across before. But when I joined the engineering department of the transformer factory at the young age, I felt, I know everything on transformers as I had studied “Electrical Machines” by M G say (famous London University Professor during the first half of last century) during my college course.!!