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Engines of Our Ingenuity

Written and hosted by John Lienhard and KUHF-FM, Houston, The Engines of Our Ingenuity tells the story of how our culture is formed by human creativity. The program uses the record of history to reveal the way art, technology, and ideas have shaped us. Episode topics range from cable cars to Civil War submarines, from the connection between Romantic poets and Victorian science to the invention of the bar code.

John Lienhard is M.D. Anderson Professor of Mechanical Engineering and History at the University of Houston. He has worked as an engineer and educator since 1951, and is known for his work in the thermal sciences.

Engines episodes were selected because of their relevance to American History and are indexed and briefly annotated on this site. You can navigate the selected episodes in three ways:

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  Discovering America Spectacles The Chimney The Parachute What Did They Say in 1490? Amerigo Vespucci I Amerigo Vespucci II The First Atlas Mercator's Maps Medicine in New Spain Tobacco Medicine in New France First U.S. Press Iron in America Women in Astronomy Williamsburg Music Daniel Fahrenheit Colonial Women Inventors Slaves and Smallpox Dorothea Erxleben Axe, Riverboat, and Locomotive Robinson Crusoe Franklin's Heat Experiment The Iroquois and the U.S. Government Inventing the Telegraph Franklin's Electricity The First American Steam Engine II The First American Steam Engine I The Liberty Bell A Man-Midwife Black and White A Navy Born of Rum Phillis Wheatley Printing in Williamsburg Declaration of Independence 1776 Submarine I Bushnell's Submarine Martha Ballard, Midwife Fanny Burney Benjamin Banneker Joseph Priestley An American Revolution Parachutes Franklin and Mesmer Two Monticellos Engrossed in the Constitution Poets View the Industrial Revolution John Fitch II Interchangeable Parts John Fitch I Guillotin/Guillotine Samuel Slater Interchangeability The First American Navy Jedidiah Morse Moses Austin's Lead Jefferson and Technology The Library Of Congress Wooden Clocks Fulton's Submarine Oliver Evans III Roads, Canals, and Railways Oliver Evans I Oliver Evans II Measuring America The Rush to Build Steamboats Shotgun Homes and Porches Inventing the Riverboat Benjamin Rush Fulton's Battery-Catamaran Pittsburgh in 1816 The Erie Canal George Catlin Peter Cooper John James Audubon Early Photography Iron Buildings Sing Sing Prison Lawn Mowers Maria Martin Darwin Boards the Beagle Balloon-Frame Houses Black Inventors Thoreau's Pencils Lowell, Massachusetts Early Texas Track Widths Food in Early Texas The Telegraph Steam Across the Atlantic The Prison Treadmill Owen's Ichthyosaurus Poe's Conchology Coffin Wharf American Industrial Revolution Icons Of Women in Science The Mismeasure of Man Anesthetics Sojourner Truth Ice Cream Oliver Wendell Holmes Northwest Passage Looking for Franklin Clipper Ships Sarah Bagley 1846 Roebling's Other Bridge A Steamboat in San Francisco Bay Maria Mitchell African Steel Making Germs I An American Dirigible Agassiz Invention of the Hospital Harriet Beecher Stowe Science and Technology in 1852 New York Harbor, 1852 Airships Germs II A Transatlantic Cable I The Panama Railroad Who Invented the Telephone? Kelly's Converter Walt Whitman Am a Camera Dromedaries in Texas Hugh Miller Slave Inventors Darwin and Racism Titanic and Great Eastern Air Mail, 1859 The New Consumerism The Sunken Monitor Mrs. Greenhow, Confederate Spy The Monitor's Flush Toilet Civil War Ironclads Black Soldiers in the Civil War Civil War Submarine The Last Masts Of Forts and Trenches George Perkins Marsh A Transatlantic Cable II Qwerty Midwestern Windmills Typewriter Beach's Subway Barbed Wire The Prehistory of Motorcycles The Golden Spike San Francisco Dirigible Aeronautics: 1869 Submarine II Chewing Gum Chicago Fire Thomas Nast Skyscrapers The Great Peshtigo Fire Agassiz in the Galápagos The Paige Compositor Herbert Hoover Victorian Working Women Marey and Muybridge 1876 Technology Thomas Watson The Centennial Exhibition The Fresno Scraper Robert's Rules of Order Emile Berliner Houses by Mail-Order Lewis Latimer The Coming of the Camera Railroad Cars Telephone Use Edison's Golden Years Belva Ann Lockwood Veblen and the Information Age Electric Lights Before Edison Ellen Swallow Richards Greely and the Signal Corps John Roebling The Paige Compositor Standard Time Alexander Graham Bell Aluminum Edison's Big Failure Power in Colorado Women and Photography The Johnstown Flood Nineteenth-Century Transportation Tall Buildings IBM and the 1890 Census Ferris' Wheel One Generation's Change 1893 Exhibition Three Women Architects Inventing the Dishwasher We Discover X-Rays America at the First Modern Olympics Wright and Lilienthal The California Eagle Great Lakes Wrecks Bertha E. Jaques Aeronautics: 1897-1910 Frederic Remington The First Red Cross Ambulance Fire-Control Zeppelin in Minnesota The Airplane as a Bird Steinmetz Adams Education Florence Merriam Bailey Elizabeth Fleischmann The Paper Clip Carnegie and Rockefeller Wright and Langley I King Camp Gillette Wright and Langley II Alfred Stieglitz Julia Morgan Millikan Gas Stations The Longest Race General Electric Technology 1909 Sears-Roebuck Catalog Flight in 1909 Women in the Academy Mulholland Waters Los Angeles Tom Swiftly Using the Telephone Willis Carrier Titanic Katherine Stinson A Lady in A Parachute Early Women Fliers Zippers and Design The Armory Art Show Henry Chapman Mercer Morgan's Gas Mask Trench Warfare Digging Through Panama The Influence of War Maria Montessori Gertrude Stein and Gears Garrett Morgan Polio and Clean Water The Economics of a Revolution Ford's Eagle Boat Housework Norden's Bombsight Insulin Bessie Coleman Scopes Trial City of the Future Einstein: Inventor Flying Across the Atlantic Holland Tunnel In Which Ford Forgets Amelia Earhart The Day the Dam Broke Helen Keller Edwin Hubble Eliphalet Nott Two Visions of Aviation P.W.A. Edwin Armstrong and FM Radio Black Aviator Duesenberg Hoover Dam The Redoubtable Dc-3 Shopping Carts Hindenburg in Flames Xerox The Golden Gate Bridge O-Ring Lindbergh's Heart Pump Wrong-Way Corrigan C Rations Lisa Meitner Helicopter Terman and Silicon Valley Hedy Lamarr, Inventor Charles Richard Drew Florey and Penicillin Carbon-14 Quonset Hut Hanna Reitsch WWII Soviet Women Pilots Radar Vannevar Bush's Differential Analyzer Liberty Ships Tuskegee Airmen Balsa Wood Mustard Gas Glide Bombs The GI Bill Igor Sikorsky Balloon Bombs Bush's Analog Prediction Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin Germany and the Atom Bomb The Texas City Disaster Gallup Poll John Forbes Nash, Jr. Mencken and Technological Change Polaroid and Land Charles and Ray Eames Bar Code Who Was Charles Lindbergh? Ray Dolby Rocket Belt Bettelheim, Bly, and Revels Post-Its Hyatt Skywalk Maya Lin's Memorial Bucky Balls Flight of the Voyager Superconductors
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