Father Knew Best

THE SPRING 2005 ARTI cle on the history of the microwave oven (“‘The Greatest Discovery Since Fire,’” by William Hammack) reminds me of how my father saved the day for Raytheon. In 1958 a newfangled gadget called a Radarange was brought to Minnesota Power and Light in Duluth for a demonstration. Appliances were a big thing for power companies in those days, and this was one big appliance. The day before the demonstration, the unit was set up and tested, and it failed to operate. Nobody knew how to fix it. People from the entire state were coming to see this new way of cooking, and there it sat.

My grandfather, a comptroller at MP&L, called his son, outlined the dilemma, and asked if he could try to fix the oven. My father was an engineer at the local television station, and he repaired TV sets. He had a good knowledge of electronics. But a microwave oven? When he got there, the factory rep explained the functions of the new oven. My dad, with his meters, determination, and a little luck, found the problem. It turned out to be a defective large capacitor.

Since no parts were available and it would take way too long to get one from the factory, Dad drove to Northwest Radio, the local TV and radio parts store. There he managed to find several capacitors that added up to the approximate value of the defective one. He installed them into the unit, and Io and behold, it worked. The demo went off perfectly the next day.

A TV home-service call was $4 back in 1958, but Dad didn’t ask for any compensation. A few days later a check for $200 came in the mail from the power company. My father said it was the biggest check he had ever received. We ate well that week.

MarkParthé-Hills
PRESCOTT, ARIZ.

Father Knew Best

ONE OF MY MOST TREAS ured possessions from my military service is a Raytheon 2J50 3-cm magnetron. At the end of World War II, I was an enlisted man in charge of radar maintenance on the battleship Massachusetts . The equipment I was responsible for included four small radars, Western Electric Mark 22s. They were auxiliary to the Mark 4 antiaircraft radar for identifying low-flying planes from echoes from waves.

Our ship and the Essex were the first ones back from the Pacific Theater to the States at the end of the war. We left the day the surrender was signed and arrived at Bremerton, Washington, on September 13. Sixty days later I was out. A few weeks after that I received a package mailed from Bremerton that contained some personal effects I had left in an ammunition box in one of the radar spaces, a copy of Fundamentals of Radio , and the magnetron. I don’t know why they sent it. It was a classified item, and they shouldn’t have. I guess the fellows in my crew thought I might like a tangible memento of my service.

Jack E. Day
NEWBERG, ORE.

Way Ahead Of His Time

I ENJOYED YOUR ARTICLES on air conditioning and submarines in the Spring 2005 issue (“The Hunley ,” by Tom Huntington, and “Cold Comfort,” by T. A. Heppenheimer). One curious person went unmentioned in both—not surprisingly, since he is virtually unknown except to historians of science. He is the Dutch inventor Cornelis Drebbel, who did pioneering work in both fields in the seventeenth century.

In 1620 he astonished King James I of England with a demonstration of airconditioned coolness in the Great Hall of Westminster Abbey in the heat of summer. Apparently more showman than scientist at heart, he didn’t leave details of how he did it, but it appears that he placed along the walls metal vats filled with snow that had been saved since the winter in an underground pit (a common practice among the wealthy). He mixed the snow with water, saltpeter, and salt, yielding a slush whose temperature was below freezing. This arrangement cooled the surrounding air. Drebbel had written in 1608 that warm air rises because cooler air is denser, a remarkably advanced observation.

Just as mysteriously he designed a submersible vessel that traveled some distance under the Thames and stayed down for three hours. This too was witnessed by the king, along with thousands of onlookers. No one knows how enough oxygen was made available to the crew, but later that year Drebbel wrote that “salt-petre, broken up by the power of fire, was thus changed into something of the nature of the air.” (Potassium nitrate, or saltpeter, decomposes when heated to yield potassium nitrite and oxygen. Drebbel presumably used this method to provide his submarine crew with a bottle of oxygen to sustain them.) Many years later the natural philosopher Robert Boyle deduced that Drebbel had understood that air is a mixture of gases, only one part of it necessary for life. This was more than 150 years before Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen.

Carlos Diaz
PENSACOLA, FLA.

When It Rains It Drains

I READ WITH GREAT INTER est “Artificial Turf and How It Grew” (by Barbara Moran, Spring 2005). I was the project manager for the first drain-through football field in the United States. I was working for the architectural firm CUH2A, in Princeton, New Jersey, and the project was a new football field for Trenton State College (since renamed the College of New Jersey). Several drain-through fields had been built in Europe, but this was new for the United States. We designed the field with a six-inch rise in the center, but only because we were afraid it would look concave from the stands if it didn’t have any elevation. The client asked for AstroTurf; we found a competitor, SuperTurf, to be cheaper, more resilient, and less slippery, especially when wet, so we bid on the project with two specifications, using either AstroTurf or SuperTurf. The latter was $175,000 cheaper, but the college insisted on the former. Before the first game, in 1984, it rained all morning and stopped about 30 minutes before kickoff. There were no puddles or standing water, though there were complaints that the field was slippery.

Burroughs Perkins
PENNINGTON, N.J.

Underwater In Space

NORMAN BERLINGER, WHO wrote “The War Against Gravity” (Spring 2005), may not be aware that a full century ago the Russian space-flight pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky worked with suspension in liquid as protection during high acceleration. In 1911 Tsiolkovsky described experiments he had done with animals in a centrifuge, and he proposed a liquidfilled hard-shelled suit for the space traveler. He wrote: “It is best if during the experiment the person lies horizontally in a casing of approximately the same shape and size as the subject under test; then only small quantities of liquid will be needed to fill the empty spaces…. The mouth, nose, and ears should be closed tightly with a casing and pipe for free breathing.” He clearly understood the practical limitations of the idea- hence the horizontal position—and he anticipated Earl Wood’s discovery of the displacement of organs. But he also thought liquid suspension would work to at least 10g.

Robert Karnes
HANOVER, MASS.

Underwater In Space

FIGHTING SQUADRON Twenty, aboard the USS Enterprise with the 3rd Fleet in the Pacific, received our g-suits in the fall of 1944. They were uncomfortable, but we generally accepted them as an extra edge for survival. However, some of our F6F Hellcats didn’t have g-suit pumps installed, so there was no place to plug in the tail of the suit. But if you did have the pump, your wingman usually did too, so he could stay with you during high-g situations. Before I received my g-suit, I discovered that bending over and tightening my abdominal muscles during high-g pullouts seemed to mitigate the effects, just as did others mentioned in Dr. Berlinger’s article.

Comdr. Roy W. Fletcher,
USNR (Ret.)
RANCHO BERNARDO, CALIF.

Changing Trains

PERHAPS THE CAPTION FOR the picture on page 33 in the article on air conditioning should have read, “An Arctic resident dreams of the 5:15 to Wilkes-Barre.” Wilkes-Barre was the closest that the Pennsylvania Railroad came to Scranton.

Jack Haap
WESTCHESTER, OHIO