Manfred Clynes - Biography and Career - Education and Influences - Early Invention of Inertial Guidance at Age 15

Early Invention of Inertial Guidance At Age 15

Manfred Clynes was born on August 14, 1925, in Vienna Austria. His family emigrated to Melbourne, Australia, in September 1938 to escape the Nazis. In Australia, at fifteen, in his last year at high school, having newly learned calculus, he invented the inertial guidance method for aircraft using piezoelectric crystals and repeated electronic integration, but Australian authorities denied that it would work. In fact, the same system Clynes had invented was later used with great success, during the last part of the Second World War. The detailed descriptions of this invention as written by the fifteen-year-old Clynes are rigorous; it was the first of his many inventions to come that worked. (Clynes' earlier attempt, at the age of thirteen, to create a perpetual motion device was naturally a failure). In 1946 Clynes graduated from the University of Melbourne having studied both engineering science and music. His musical talent was recognized by a series of awards, concerto performances and prizes, one of which provided a three-year graduate fellowship to the Juilliard School of Music. At Juilliard, he was a piano student of Olga Samaroff and Sascha Gorodnitzki.

He received his MS degree from Juilliard in 1949, after having performed Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1 at the Tanglewood Music Festival (in 1948) then under the direction of Serge Koussevitzky in a performance of which the pianist Gerson Yessin, who was present, recently recalled as "monumental." After graduating from Juilliard (It gave no doctorates then), Clynes retreated to a small log cabin at six thousand feet altitude in the solitude of Wrightwood, California. There he learned Bach's Goldberg Variations and other works. He performed them for the first time in October 1949, in Ojai, at J. Krishnamurti's school, and, in 1950, along with other works, in all the capital cities of Australia, to great acclaim. He soon became regarded as one of Australia's outstanding pianists.

In 1952 he was invited to Princeton University as a graduate student in the Music Department, and issued a green card, to pursue his studies in the Psychology of Music, with a Fulbright and Smith-Mundt Award. There he became aware of the work of G. Becking, who in 1928 had published a sensitive, if nonscientific, study of distinctive motor patterns associated in following the music of individual composers. It was this work that led, in the late 1960s, to Clynes' scientific sentographic studies of what he termed composers' pulses, as their motor manifestation, in which Pablo Casals and Rudolf Serkin were to be his first subjects.

Young Clynes had a personal letter of introduction to Albert Einstein from an elderly lady in Australia, with whom, in her youth, Einstein had exchanged poems. Soon Einstein invited him repeatedly to dinner at his home, and a friendship sprang up between the two men. (See details Michelmore’s Life of Einstein.) Clynes played for Einstein on his fine Bechstein piano, especially Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert. He loved Clynes’ Mozart and Schubert, calling Clynes “a blessed artist” (Ein begnadeter Künstler) In May 1953 Einstein wrote Clynes a personal letter by hand to help him in his forthcoming European tour.

(Translation of Einstein's letter, dated Princeton, 18 May 1953: "Dear Mr. Clynes, I am truly grateful to you for the great enjoyment that your piano playing has given me. Your performance combines a clear insight into the inner structure of the work of art with a rare spontaneity and freshness of conception. With all the secure mastery of your instrument, your technique never supplants the artistic content, as unfortunately so often is the case in our time. I am convinced that you will find the appreciation to which your achievement entitles you. With friendly greetings yours, A. Einstein.")