We are the Brothers Whitney. Separated by a continent, still riding the same brainwave, we are the philosophical heirs of the Victorian gentleman inventors. Creators with class. Makers with moxy. Purveyors of Occidental originality.
Imitation might flatter, but there’s too much duplication around the Internet already. All the content on this, our storefront of ingenuity, will be fresh.
Unless it is absolutely too wonderful, of course.
Dick:
I’m an engineer, inventor, and a designer. A maker. Creation has been my passion for as long as I can remember, and I remain enamored.
With nearly a decade on my young padawan, I’ve had the extra time to get a little farther in the game. I left my native Florida for a B.S. in biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and fled that urban disaster for the cool embrace of Boston. There I joined the MIT Media Lab I picked up friends and skills, built a few nifty interfaces in Hiroshi Ishii’s Tangible Media Group, and became permanently cold. Fearing that following the northward trend would land me in Greenland, I broke the pattern and moved to warm, wonderful Los Angeles.
In my spare time I’m a shade-tree mechanic of the unimagined future and I explore the incredibly diverse wilderness surrounding LA. I even take a few photos.
Professionally I invent the future at Idealab, a thinktank and startup generator. You can reach me at ingeniousdickATgmail or dickATgraDOTin. Yep, the second is an Indian domain.
Will:
I’m a high school senior straining at the ropes to get into the real world. Up until just a couple of years ago I was a boring kid who didn’t really do a whole lot outside of school, but I’ve been able to fix that. Now I spend my days in school thinking about what to do and make and build when I get out. Even so I tend to do well in my classes.
I live about as far away from Dick as possible and still stay in the US, both geographically and socially. It’s too backwards for me here in Alabama, with not much in the way of maker/net community. I’m trying to change that, at least until I leave for college next year. I’m applying to tons of universities in engineering, since I figure that I’m going to be doing hacking and making whether or not I get a degree and a salary for it. I can’t wait to get somewhere with more like-minded people to enlist in my projects.
My interests include fire; going fast (not on strap-on Heelies, as I still have scars; story later); things that fly, particularly with LEDs and/or cameras; sharp things; scifi (the good kind, not the stuff that comes on the channel); energy, including storage and movement, kinetic and thermal; a little bit of sociology, especially how to engineer it; hacking the planet; and fire.
What? It deserved to be said twice.