The make-up artist

An MIT professor values inspiration over perspiration

by Chris Wright

Like all inventors, Ernesto Blanco is an optimist. "I can create practically anything," he says, "that can be physically done."

And if that sounds cocky -- well, you've got to have a fair amount of swagger to go about solving problems that have so far confounded humanity. "People will say something cannot be done," Blanco says. "But the inventor doesn't stop there. He wants to prove that everybody else is wrong."

For the past four decades (on and off), Blanco, 77, has taught the art of invention -- or mechanical design -- at MIT. Which is actually a lot tougher than it sounds. Though MIT encourages its students to push the proverbial envelope, that's not nearly enough for Blanco. "Most often," he says, "the inventor finds that the knowledge he has is not enough. He must go further." Blanco wants his students to rip the envelope up and start again. Invent e-mail.

Speaking from his office -- a scrabble of rumpled blueprints, oily components, and half-assembled gadgets -- Blanco admits that it hasn't always been easy to shepherd fact-loving engineering students into the "unknown territory" that marks "the point where the engineer becomes the creator." After all, the MIT engineering department is probably not the ideal place to embrace the ineffable.

"The way we [at MIT] teach is discipline, analysis, math, physics," he says. "But we don't tell the student what to do with it. I try to have my students do something useful. I don't care whether they do it by transcendental meditation. Just solve the problem."

Graying and bespectacled, Blanco doesn't look like a rebel, but he often talks like one: "Invention is the mother of progress, not science," he says. "This is a sacrilegious remark at MIT, but I don't give a damn." Blanco can spend hours rattling off instances where innovation has been brought about by doers rather than thinkers. But his own life story is perhaps the most compelling argument for native wit over erudition. For Blanco, invention has always been, quite literally, child's play.

"My family was very poor," Blanco says of his childhood in 1930s Havana. "All I wanted was toys. So I would get a piece of cardboard and some glue, and I would make something. Then I would package it and put it away. Every now and then I would go and open a package and enjoy my new toy. I discovered that I enjoyed making the toys more than I enjoyed playing with them."

By the time he was 16, Blanco had chalked up his first real invention: an electric egg cooker. At 19, at the height of World War II, he approached the US Navy with a device that would eliminate the wake left by submarine periscopes. Today, Blanco has 14 patents and three applications to his credit, plus hundreds of sundry inventions ranging from a surgical stapler to a pancake flipper. And he shows little sign of easing up. In his cluttered office, Blanco proudly shows off the prototype of his latest patent: an automatic page turner.

"You have to realize," he says, "the ability to create is inexhaustible. It never ends." The ability to create, however, is not always enough. Unfortunately for Blanco, the inventor must also be part businessman. "I'm not much of an entrepreneur," he says. "Many times I've said that I'd like to have somebody knock on my door and say, `I have the ability to put anything on the market and make it succeed.' "

A few years back, this happened, and Blanco found out what a slippery bunch entrepreneurs can be. "He took my patent application, my drawings, everything," Blanco says. But Blanco, being one of those rare types who see opportunity in every setback, refused to take it lying down -- even after litigation proved fruitless.

"Stealing inventions is silly," he says. "You might think, `I grabbed it! Now I have it!' But what you have is empty: you're not going to defend it, you're not going to fight for it, because you know perfectly well it doesn't belong to you." Sure enough, Blanco eventually came up with an improved design, and the "crooked" partner failed in his bid to get rich from his treachery. "In the end," Blanco says, "the creative person always has the edge."

Edge or no, Blanco's not exactly rolling in it himself. "I haven't seen any money coming in from any of my inventions," he admits. "People come to me and say, `If you could do this, this, this, and that, you could be rich.' So I am a fool and I do exactly what I am asked. Then, people look at my inventions and say, `So what?' "

Does this make Blanco feel like a failure?

"Failure," he says, "must never be considered final." As Blanco says this, he fiddles with his page turner, which is stubbornly refusing to turn pages. "My whole life," he says, still fiddling, "has been a succession of failures . . . "

Then, as if on cue, a page flips, and a childlike grin spreads across the old man's face. "Always culminating in success."