![\"Miles-Sullivan-1456839578\"](\"http:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2016\/07\/miles-sullivan-1456839578-150x150.png\")
Miles Vincent Sullivan\u00a0\u201941\u00a0died February 27 in Dallas, TX. He was 99 years old.<\/p>\nMiles Vincent Sullivan\u00a0\u201941\u00a0died February 27 in Dallas, TX. He was 99 years old.<\/p>\n
Sullivan is\u00a0perhaps best known for the drinking bird that sits on the edge of a glass, perpetually bobbing in water without any internal or external energy source. United States President Herbert Hoover had one on his desk in the Oval Office. Albert Einstein stayed up all night at one point, puzzled about how it worked. When asked in the morning whether he had figured it out, he shook his head, but then proceeded to disassemble the bird for his answer.<\/p>\n
A remembrance Patience came easily to my father, and he never seemed to tire of his three children\u2019s unscientific minds.<\/p>\n \u201cBut how does this work, Dad?\u201d was our perpetual theme. His answers were thematic too.<\/p>\n The sensor filament inside the toaster says to the release mechanism: \u201cOur toast looks just crusty enough to eject now.\u201d<\/p>\n The battery\u2019s positive charge says to the negative: \u201cPotentially, we could make a complete circuit.\u201d<\/p>\n It could be laser beams, computer chips, the little bobbing bird that made my father internationally famous, or just the dial on a washing machine\u2014in the end, they all assumed human personalities.<\/p>\n Hardship can inspire humor and creativity\u2014my father was proof of that. After his father died, a small one-room Winona storefront doubled as living quarters for my father, his brother, and their mother. A small curtain near the back of the store did its best to partition off the boys\u2019 bed from the rest of the cramped store.<\/p>\n By the end of high school, it was apparent that his mind was capable of great things, but a lack of money stubbornly blocked my father\u2019s college aspirations. Months after graduation, an accidental meeting with a former math teacher settled the issue.<\/p>\n \u201cYou need to be\u2014you must be\u2014in college, Miles. I will get you there,\u201d the teacher said, single-handedly arranging a full scholarship to Wabash covering tuition, room and board, and even a steady job.<\/p>\n With the ink on his undergraduate diploma barely dry, my father was drafted into World War II service\u2014his main residence, the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n After the war, Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, quickly hired my father as a member of their semiconductor technology team. He soon acquired a series of patents, including photo-mask lithography systems used in computer chip circuitry. He also developed new contacts that allowed energy to flow away from solar panels and into energy-consuming machines. These contacts are still widely used in communications systems as well as in experimental projects like the Mars rovers.<\/p>\n Facts tumbled out of my father\u2019s brain like salt from a loosely capped shaker. He must have been born with an extra curiosity gene, because his fascination with life permeated everything he touched.<\/p>\n Pursued by lawyers and marketers attempting to partner with him in business, my father stubbornly refused to stray too far from his love of pure science.<\/p>\n But he also liked having fun. In 1946 he patented the little toy bird that seems to bob endlessly for water without an apparent energy source. He called the little toy \u201cthe drinking bird,\u201d and probably didn\u2019t dream that it would eventually be considered for advancing water irrigation systems in the Middle East, using the sun as its only energy source.<\/p>\n Albert Einstein\u2019s encounter with the bird was reported in a 1964 TIME magazine story. After several days of theorizing about what propelled the little bird, the great physicist\u2019s attempts at unraveling the bird\u2019s secret proved futile.<\/p>\n In 1949 a Washington Post reporter said that the drinking bird was the top entertainment feature in the House and Senate. Miles Sullivan hadn\u2019t yet set foot on Capitol Hill, but the little bird\u2019s feet had.<\/p>\n With the inside scoop on the bird\u2019s mechanics ingrained in our brains, my brother, sister, and I used to explain to our science teachers the details Einstein had missed. It was our brief moment of glory in the science spotlight, except for our run- ins with some of the lab-coated, bifocaled physicists at the laboratories. These colorful characters always struck us as an equal mix of kind, scary, and quirky.<\/p>\n It was easy to see why my father fit in so well at the labs. It was a place where the building\u2019s passkey appeared to be this: \u201cAbove all else, let\u2019s never be routine\u2014if it\u2019s new and different, let\u2019s develop it, and let\u2019s revel in it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014from \u201cThe Father of Inventions\u201d by Anne Sullivan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Miles Vincent Sullivan\u00a0\u201941\u00a0died February 27 in Dallas, TX. He was 99 years old. Sullivan is\u00a0perhaps best known for the drinking bird that sits on the edge of a glass, perpetually bobbing in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":2514,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-class-notes"],"w_featured_image_url":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2016\/06\/drinking-bird2-1024x683.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2585"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2588,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2585\/revisions\/2588"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/strong><\/em>Just one of the many PhD inventor-scientists at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, my father\u2019s credentials were fairly ordinary in that setting. But he was far from an ordinary man and far from an ordinary father. As much as he loved pure science, he loved his family more.<\/p>\n