0.15 Reincarnation  (Page 8/12)

I spent a lot of time mystified by Furness’ charisma. He was spellbinding—both as a public speaker and in private conversation. A great deal of his success was due to his personal charm, and a great deal of that could be attributed to his rural North Carolina roots. Disarmingly down-home, he seemed by turns to have stepped right out of either The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or one of Faulkner's Snopes family sagas. (I asked his mother once what she remembered of his early childhood, and she said, “Whut was it he made that first rocket out of? Snuff cans, I think it wuz.”) He had a rich, rolling accent and an arresting manner that was at once courtly and folksy. Along with his spectacles and graying hair and beard, his accent gave him the avuncular air of a Colonel Sanders. He was formal in a way not commonly seen in modern America, opening doors for women, shaking hands every time he greeted a friend, and pulling chairs out from tables for his guests. His speech, marked by a musical drawl, was determinedly homey, packed with odd, strangled sounds as if consonants kept getting swallowed in mid-expression by his sinus cavity. “Isn’t” he rendered as “idn’t,” “ninety” was “niney,” “want” was “won’t,” “presented” was “bresented,” “student” was “stunent,” “my” was “muh,” and so on.

Furness also had an approach to his work—or, at any rate, to promotion of his work—that was epically Romantic, in the Sir-Walter-Scott-by-way-of-the-American-South sense. This could cause a tremendous amount of head-scratching among the no-nonsense engineers in the HIT Lab. They were particularly bewildered when Furness wrote a call to arms in one of his lab-anniversary messages. “I have long held the belief that humans have unlimited potential,” it began, and went on to declare Furness’s intent to attack

hunger in the world, and wars and crime and places where our children are not safe…. I believe that we can solve these problems. That we can go where no man or woman has gone before. That we can soar by spreading wings we don’t know we have. And that we can do this by creating new tools which tap that incredible resource of our minds, allowing us to amplify our intelligence, much as the pulley or level amplifies torque, giving us a new strength and empowerment to address contemporary issues and the frontiers of our existence…. In the end, perhaps we are not too different from our early ancestors, when the invention of the wheel provided a new kind of mobility. We, too, are dedicated to a new kind of mobility—mind moving—but with the end goal of making our lives, and those of future generations, more complete and fulfilling. For as we move here, a candle flickers in Tibet....

“Good God,” said Rich Johnston, one of the lab’s electrical engineers, by way of a typical reaction among the lab’s scientists. “My job is not to solve world hunger. My job is to solve specific engineering problems!”

Furness’s students differed from him considerably in other ways as well. Many of them viewed the lab as a steppingstone to wealth—particularly those intent on leveraging their HIT lab research into a discovery that could attract funding for a startup. The Diaspora of HIT lab alums that Furness envisioned going off to universities and established corporate laboratories to further his visions were instead going off to startups hoping to strike it rich. Lab discoveries that Furness envisioned being licensed to corporations with the finances and infrastructure to invest for years in commercializing new research were instead being licensed to startups more interested in winning an immediate gamble on the stock market than in putting in the years and millions it would take to turn research into world-changing industrial products. Furness’ most important scientific achievement—an invention he called the “virtual retinal display,” which scanned images directly onto the retina rather than the back of a screen and that showed long-term promise in fields ranging from relief of certain forms of blindness to development of featherweight, screenless head-mounted displays, had been licensed to businessmen from a company called Microvision who felt none of Furness’ love for the invention or its potential. Furness came to believe that they saw it simply as a financial opportunity. They seemed to him to be intent on capitalizing on the high-tech hype that was sending more and more money after less and less plausible ideas; they were hoping to hype his invention’s potential, cash in on the stock market, and abandon his work instead of carefully building a viable business around it and remaining committed to its success over the long haul. As evidence, Furness cited numerous instances in which the company either tried to evade its quarterly license fees to the lab or complained without justification that Furness was channeling that fee money—which was supposed to be devoted to VRD research—into other, unfunded lab projects. In the years since Furness licensed his invention to Microvision, he had grown increasingly disenchanted, referring to company management more and more often as “clowns,” “clueless,” and “freeloaders.”