He also received the 1991 Portrait Division Award from the American Women in Radio and Television and the 1998 American Society of Mechanical Engineers Engineer-Historian Award. He was also named one of the five finalists from among 1,300 entrants in the 1993 New York Festival International Radio Competition.

Lienhard has written upward of 2,500 radio scripts for the series, each one more intriguing than the next, telling the story of engineering and creativity and how they form our culture. Every audio and transcript — plus lots of supporting documentation and data — lives at the UH Library Special Collections.

As for the program’s radio future, Pendergraft reflects on its long-standing success, reinforcing public radio’s role as an essential platform for lifelong learning.

“There’s not one single thing that is more appropriate for its core mission of public education than ‘Engines of Our Ingenuity.’ It is a four-minute godsend to the core mission of public broadcasting,” Pendergraft says.

GENTLEMEN, START YOUR ENGINES

Rarely does anyone reach the pinnacle of both engineering and storytelling, but Lienhard has stood at the very top for decades. Both his undeniable engineering brilliance and his storytelling talent were shaped and refined from an early age.

“I got into engineering because I was seriously dyslexic,” Lienhard says, recalling his early days in Minnesota when his parents would read to him, opening up a new world for the child.

“It was good stuff. They were reading Dickens and Melville and Chesterton,” Lienhard says. “I was raised with the maxims of writing ringing in my ears. I could barely read and write, but I could make pictures in my mind. So that was the way I managed to learn anything I learned — it was sight and sound.”

Through the hours he spent listening to his parents read, he became a symphony of ancestral talents, an amalgam of the Lienhards who came before him. His mother, a singer in early radio, and his father, a newspaper reporter and photographer (once a science editor), revealed their talents to him, and he lapped them up. As the years laid out in front of him, Lienhard would travel through the arts, with stints as both a singer and stage actor.

But he could not know that listening to his parents’ storytelling would lead him to become a world-class engineer or one of the nation’s great radio writers and storytellers.

Though his radio success might seem to eclipse other of Lienhard’s accomplishments, it most assuredly does not.

In 1964, he was the first to use thermodynamics, the study of heat and energy, to predict how much rainwater flows out of a watershed and into rivers and streams. He soon realized that similar mathematical and physical models could describe how things like money, jobs and resources move through society.

“We developed that whole thing a lot further and predicted things like wage distribution,” Lienhard says. “We showed that with all of the standard distributions, you can actually form physical models behind them.”

This work has been called groundbreaking because it showed that the same mathematical principles that govern nature could help explain economic and social inequalities, helping shape modern methods for predicting income gaps, poverty trends and resource distribution.

In 1981, he quite literally wrote the book on heat transfer, “The Heat Transfer Textbook,” in which he discusses managing heat in power plants, where engineers must efficiently transfer heat away from engines or turbines to prevent overheating and improve energy efficiency. Though in true Lienhard everyman style, he also explains all the thermal action behind a glass of iced tea.

Since its initial publication, it has been used in engineering courses worldwide and is currently in its sixth edition, solidifying its place — and his — in scholastic history.

As points of family pride, Lienhard’s son John, an MIT professor of engineering, made contributions to all editions, signing on as coauthor to manage the first free typeset version, the third edition. His son Andrew, a software developer, composed the music in the background of every episode of “Engines of Our Ingenuity,” communicating his thoughts lyrically. And his loving wife of 65 years, Carol, who died in 2024, “critically read almost every episode with a fine ear for what will work and what will not.”

DEVELOPING A LOVE OF PHOTOGRAPHY

In his early days, Lienhard had to find creative ways to learn. “Everything I did had to be a visual workaround. I didn’t do decently in any K–12 course until my senior year in high school,” he says. “Then I took drafting and was hypnotized by it — finished all three years of the course in one. That led me into engineering, which was, for me, always a visual sport.”

A visual sport not unlike photography — another Lienhard talent that should come as no surprise. He has been tinkering with cameras since elementary school, when he attempted making pinhole cameras following a diagram published in 1925.

It was a natural fit for someone who painted pictures in his mind as his parents read to him years earlier.

Nowadays, you can find Lienhard’s photography online, where you’ll get a peek inside what revs Lienhard’s own engine: sports, travel, nature, music and UH football.

THE IMPACT OF 'ENGINES'

As the show’s popularity grew, Lienhard understood the importance of his audience.

“He knew there were going to be scientists and astronauts and heart surgeons and real academics hearing every word he said, so not only did he have to be interesting but he also had to be dead solid right,” Pendergraft says.

He was so right that one astronaut, Dr. Michael Barratt, was inspired to partner with Lienhard and write 20 episodes — one while on board a space shuttle. Barratt’s episode, No. 2693, begins, “Greetings from the flight deck of the Space Shuttle Discovery, where today we celebrate our ships.” Barratt ends the episode with the same awe-inspiring feelings provoked by Lienhard’s prose: “So here’s to our ships, and to the men and women who build them, from those of us with the tremendous good fortune to sail and fly them.”

Barratt is one of 50 guest hosts that have filled Lienhard’s slot as writer and narrator, marking a change and new identity for the program. The evolving landscape brings the show into a new era full of possibilities, perhaps like the one Lienhard chronicles in episode 1557: the story of his Swiss great-grandfather, Heinrich Lienhard, who immigrated to the United States on the eve of American industrialization.

That segment begins with, “Today, we watch a new world being formed.”

Indeed, this great-grandson now witnesses the emergence of yet another new world, reflecting on the program’s enduring legacy. Modest to a fault, he says, “The program is going into better hands than mine.”

But then again, change is nothing new to Lienhard. In his book “Inventing Modern: Growing Up With X-Rays, Skyscrapers and Tailfins,” he acknowledges: “Change, even rapid and radical change, is oddly invisible; it really does come to us on little cat feet.”

One thing that won’t change is the way he and his guest contributors sign off on the program, just after they say their name. His tagline — much like the professor himself — is low-key and brilliant: “I’m John Lienhard at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.”

Mostly his.