The nation’s efforts to advance technologically need to be supplemented with a positive attitude toward hands-on experimentation and the spirit of craftsmanship, Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology president Gao Chung-hsing (杲中興) said.
As an engineer, Gao worked in the institute’s missile and rocket systems division, which has designed some of the military’s most important weapons: the Tien Kung III, Hsiung Feng III and Hsiung Feng IIE missile systems. In May last year, Gao took the helm of the institute.
Aptitude for engineering and tinkering should be nurtured at home and in schools, as it would foster problem-solving skills and attention to detail, he said.
Photo: Lu Yi-hsuan, Taipei Times
Born into a family of government functionaries in Nantou County’s Jhongsing New Village (中興新村), Gao said his interest in rocketry and tinkering started at an early age.
His public servant parents both paint, but his mother also enjoyed carpentry and made all her son’s toys and furniture for the family home, he said.
However, Gao said he was fascinated by aerial vehicles, especially rockets, a love partly inspired by aerial firework displays.
By age eight, he was making his own rockets, everything from the propulsion vehicle to the gunpowder, he said, adding that he started manufacturing gunpowder after discovering that commercially available fireworks contained too little gunpowder for his purposes.
Undeterred, he procured potassium perchlorate from a chemist in Taichung, mixing the salt with ground charcoal to make gunpowder and experimenting with various ratios to perfect his formula.
Graduating to homemade bombs, he filled an empty powdered milk container and fit it with a bamboo stick fuse, before rolling it down the hill, Gao said.
“I rolled it down the hill,” he said. “I then picked it up before it exploded.”
It is far from safe to have a teenager cooking up explosives at home, he said. “During my stint as an amateur chemist, I set fire to our home a few times.”
The last of the accidents was an explosion sparked while using ethanol to create liquid rocket fuel. It caused a fire at home and injured himself, his little brother and a cousin. He was middle-school age at the time.
“Mom threw everything away and banned me from lighting anything up at home,” he said. “I had to close shop.”
As an adult, Gao said that he chose safer hobbies: car mechanic, carpenter, bicycle engineer, sailor, airplane pilot, as well as motorcycle rider and guitar player.
Professionally, he studied aeronautical engineering at the University of California, Davis, where he learned much in the classroom, but also from the US culture of tinkering, he said.
“In that country, engineering is an integral part of local living, leisure activities and learning,” he said. “US high-school students who are into model airplanes do not buy kits. They create fiberglass and plaster molds to make personal airplane models.”
“Many of the professors, alongside their professional discipline, dabble in architecture and the brewing of alcohol,” he said. “This is an important dimension to the US engineering advantage.”
Japanese culture has also impressed him with its emphasis on craftsmanship, Gao said.
Nine years ago, when he started to work in the institute’s missile division, the carpentry section chief took the entrance exam to an apprenticeship program of a master carpenter who had learned his craft from a Japanese artisan. The section chief failed the test and was sent home.
Gao quoted the master as telling the section chief: “Before coming back here, take four or five months off and learn how to sharpen your tools properly.”
“It turned out that a carpentry foundation is not the same as woodworking, which includes sophisticated tool-sharpening skills and a different set of techniques for butt chisels, carving chisels, hand planes and such,” he said.
Perfectly sharpened tools are a necessity for carving models that have a flush and seamless fit, Gao said, adding that the master carpenter’s gnarly fingers bore the marks of his dedication to perfection.
“Craftsmanship is the rebar that strengthens the cement of knowledge and it needs to be nurtured at home and at school,” he said. “Taiwan needs to rediscover craftsmanship. Craftsmanship does not have magic shortcuts, yet high-tech industries must be based on craftsmanship.”
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