We bought one of the girls a train for Christmas and it brought together a lot of ideas for me.
First, it was no surprise she asked for it. If the oldest is our artist, the youngest is our engineer. She’ll turn Lego bricks, Tinkertoys, or any other pile of interconnecting parts into a tower faster than you can tell me what STEM stands for.
By the time I made my cup of coffee on Christmas morning, she’d taken apart the entire engine of The Polar Express with a screwdriver while looking for a battery compartment. Wheels and gears were everywhere and I had to think fast before the toy was so in pieces I would never get it back together.
Her maternal grandfather is an electrical engineer and later that afternoon at his house, Papa brought out his old HO-scale model trains. As he assembled track on the living room rug, he told the story of his brother who dared say he didn’t want to be a priest when he was a student at a parochial school in the 1950s.
“I want to be an engineer,” he declared instead, proudly, and he meant train conductor, though he would eventually become a software engineer. Both men are the good, unassuming figures I’ve come to associate with the occupation.
My father is a civil engineer. He worked on the Apollo Project in the 1960s, developing and testing the reentry heat shield materials for the command modules, before he started a family and took the less sexy job of City Engineer of Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Dad is also the humble gentleman who can get things done. He built some of the furniture in our house. He and his friends built our homes over the years. He talks about designing rockets like it was just building another cabinet. You could say all of the engineers in my family fit the mold to a T-square.
Watching the tracks and the little train station and the miniature people come together made me think of the HO set Dad and I once built in our basement, which also made me think of Dad’s Department 56 Village.
Department 56 is a small company in Eden Prairie, Minnesota that produces illuminated porcelain Christmas Villages. Every year they introduce and retire a number of the houses from each of their themed sets. There’s a Dicken’s Village and a New England Village.
At some point in the 1980s, Dad recalled a much simpler village that sat under his family tree when he was a child and Mom bought him a first set of three Department 56 buildings that Christmas. It’s notoriously difficult to find gifts for engineers. My parents have over twenty New England buildings now and all kinds of accessories and villagers.
When I was in high school, I was the one to assemble the village in our bay window. I mixed the porcelain structures with boulders and twigs from the backyard. I used swatches of burlap for fields and sheets of Saran Wrap for streams. The same stores that sold the Department 56 Villages often sold model trains and you could mix the embellishments. Now Mom constructs the village every year and it’s even more elaborate.
Something clicked when I started studying the history of computer software for the college lectures I teach now. I discovered the first computer hackers were members of a model railroad club at MIT. At first I thought, “what do model trains have to do with computer software?” Then I thought of Dad’s village.
There is a strange sensation that happens to me occasionally, especially in the winter, when you can see the real New England landscape through the trees. I rise above the location and see it in my head. For a moment, I can see my neighborhood from a bird’s eye view, like it’s the Christmas Village in my hands.
Appropriately, I can also remember this phenomenon happening on the Metro-North out of Grand Central when I came home from NYU for the holidays and hurtled through a southwest Connecticut filled with lights in the 1990s. I could see how every house and yard and street fit together, like I had placed each tree and garden and lamppost.
Something clicked again this Christmas afternoon when I asked myself, “Why are train conductors called engineers?” Because steam trains were the first major mechanical engines, of course. Towns were once built around tracks and depots like they were previously built around rivers and docks.
Around the first towns on train tracks, engineers added water works and then electrical grids, highway systems and then computer circuits.
How should we live? What’s the best algorithm for the most people? How can we stand above the big picture and grasp it all and remake it better? Those are still hardware and software questions for engineers. Someday my little girl might engineer virtual worlds, but they won’t be the first villages that existed in our minds.
Merry Christmas, everyone.