Aeronautics and Astronautics 21.
Having for the time at least, resolved the matter of Ninian, I acceded to Mom’s request that I come visit her for a while and take a trip along the Coast. I was still very much influenced by my experiences of the summer and what I considered certainly at least a degree of madness. I was more reserved in some ways, yet more apt to express some feelings and ideas which I’d have only shared previously in the strictest confidence. Mom was for her own part left quite vulnerable from the problems and confusions she’d dealt with over the previous months and she seemed in a mood to learn and consider new ideas. She tended to be a good deal less judgmental than she usually was.
We loaded our bedding along with some extra clothes and rudimentary cooking implements into the family station wagon. One night we slept in a motel in Hoodsport, on Hoods Canal. The other two nights we used sleeping bags in the back of the car. During the days we drove from place to place, found interesting locations for beach walking stopped in restaurants when we felt like it, sometimes cooked over an open campfire. One evening I sat on a picnic bench, reading an editorial in Galaxy Magazine, by Isaac Asimov. It was full of his latter day gloom and pessimism concerning the supposed limits of our technology. I told Mom that I no longer agreed with Isaac Asimov. This was quite a pronouncement since he’d been a foremost hero of mine since about age 14. The next morning we woke to find a chipmunk had helped himself to the majority of a box of chocolate doughnuts Mom had bought as a special treat. We’d unwisely left them closed, but on the picnic table.
I think it must still have been quite hot out and I’d just come from an upper-floor dorm room that could be quite stifling in the summer. I remember us talking about men having to wear pants or cutoffs and how hot they could be. I mentioned that the Romans had worn tunics and that sort of thing. Mom said they were essentially just sacks and wouldn’t look very stylish. We talked about overalls and other garments which were less formfitting. I mentioned at some point how uncomfortable jockey shorts were. They were the only sort of underwear boys generally wore when I was growing up. Mom had always complained about men and boys pulling at their underwear in public. I enumerated some of the reasons why that happened, too wide waistband, leg bands too thickly plied so it digs into tender places but provides little support. The crotch not wide enough to cover one sufficiently, made areas stick together when sweaty, the fly too easily opened so one can migrate out with no chance of recovery. Mom said if my underwear was that uncomfortable we’d find some thing better for me to wear. I told her then about having borrowed a pair of Chris’s panties and worn them for a couple of days, finding them much more comfortable than my own underwear. Indeed at one time when I was about 16, Mom had taken to throwing away any pair of underwear I had which appeared ragged, without inventorying how many I had left. Finding myself in possession of only two pair, and one with its seat in mere tatters, my dad being twice my size I realized I needed to wear female underwear or none at all.
Mom said she’d never thought of a man wearing women’s underwear. That was rather funny because she’d teased me quite a bit during my teen years about buying me panties like my sisters for school. She said the guys in the dorm would razz the hell out of me if they caught me wearing something like that and I’d need to wash them in the laundry room, but she’d buy me some if that’s what I really wanted.
When I went to buy clothes for the upcoming school year therefore, she bought me two pairs of white acetate panties, size 5, from the Frederick and Nelson Department Store. They were in a very nice material, tending to be cooler and more moisture absorbent than nylon. We bought other pairs over the next three years or so. Sometimes I got bikinis in blue or other colors rather than plain white briefs. On a couple of occasions Mom leant me her robes and a pair of underwear to put on after showering, if I’d shown up to her place without my own things and decided at the last minute to stay over.
When we came back from our jaunt along the coast I found myself in the midst of another creative ferment. Ideas came fast and thick; concepts for clothing, male and female, inner and outer, house designs, ideas about natural foods, exercise and work plans, in short whatever the human body and mind appeared to need—what Buckminster Fuller would call Livingry. I’ve done many of the things I envisioned then. I’ve recycled, cogenerated, done extensive experimentation with foods, built stuff, delved into the significance of the mundane, tried to understand how things worked.
I returned to the dorms to find that my Fall room in Lander Hall, near Terry, was not yet ready. I was given the temporary use of a guestroom and found myself rooming briefly with Steve Hogg, an incoming freshman, an ROTC cadet and prospective Ocean Engineering major. We had our own bathroom with shower and a fairly quiet building to live in, the quarter not having started yet. I’d brought along some food and there were several stores and drive-ins within an easy walk. I looked fairly mature so was able to buy beer for us as well.
I drew a flowchart of a simplified biodyne system intended for use under water. Steve and I went to work designing an underwater shelter based on a concept known as The Sea Tent. This was to be a flexible structure tethered to the ocean bottom by several cables and filled with air. A deck structure floating on the water at the bottom of the tent, would provide floor space. We thought a depth of about 120 feet would be good for a shelter site, but forgot for a while that this would necessitate a heli-oxygen atmosphere within the tent.
My first introduction to being a student of aeronautics and Astronautics, rather than a mere prospective customer, was Principles of Flight 300, taught by Professor Vick Ganser. He led off with a lecture about being clear whether one really wanted to be an engineer. “Engineers do problems” he said, “lots of them. So if you don’t like doing problems you’d better transfer into Art or History. Something besides Engineering.”
Secondly, one didn’t become a practical aerodynamicist or a theoretical one on the strength of a single three-term sequence like the present one. One would take several year-long courses before knowing very much about aerodynamics. Frankly, I hadn’t intended to take all that much in the way of aerodynamics, but by the end of the first period I was revising my plan. The first quarter and much of the second was dominated by something called Q, which you got by taking half of the aircraft’s velocity squared and multiplying that by the density of the air it was flying through. Q multiplied by a cross sectional area and a number called a drag coefficient, gave you drag. Q times the wing area and a lift coefficient gave you lift. There were other forces too, usually given in Pounds. Engineers didn’t use Metric quantities as much as did Physicists.
Vick Ganser was possibly the finest professor I ever had. He was very concerned over whether the major I’d chosen was right for me, but he helped me a great deal
I also had a course in Structural Analysis with Dr. Keith Holsapple, who still consulted for Boeing. This quarter we dealt largely with shear and twist and other basic materials deformation concepts. At first I nearly dropped that class, but did reasonably okay in the end. I’d already taken the first course in Mechanics, so found that the comparable class in that subject would be review, so dropped that. I rounded things out with Intro to Economics and Public Relations in the Communications Department. I’d suspected my flag project would be a great Public relations project for the Sons Of The American Revolution and my prof, Sid Copelin, agreed. I’d heard a lot of negative about PR. but enjoyed the class quite a bit and it turned out to be the only formal training I ever had in an area of employment I would visit many times in the years to come. It also was the last Communications course I would ever take to date.
Though many things in the dorm were the same as the previous spring, many had changed as well. I’d moved to Lander which neighbored Terry and was but a short walk from the common dining room between the two. I was however a bit further away from Ed in particular and some of my other noisy friends. Ed was the sort of person who tended to study mostly during Finals week and as a History major, had no math to do. My roommate Terry, a Freshman and former Eagle Scout from Tacoma was a likable, goodhearted fellow, but not much fun. He was very prone to home sickness which I could still remember quite acutely from boarding school days. He didn’t drink, use bad language or party at all. Indeed I visualized him pattering around in pajamas with feet in them. We had some good talks sometimes about ecology and appropriate technology, but we never did much together. I continued to go to parties. Like in McMahon, there were plentiful keggers in Terry/Lander and I frequently bought my own supplies.
Though I socialized after a fashion, I felt very much cut off from most people. Something within me had grown quite cold. I didn’t bother with comedies on TV and could walk out in the middle of a suspense drama. I just didn’t care about such things. I found it very easy to drop relationships if I felt stepped on or condescended to.
I’d begun the previous summer intent on strengthening the cores of both my engineering and journalistic studies. I’d learned something about electricity to be sure and had improved my news writing and honed my typing skills quite a bit. Though I typed since 3rd Grade, I’d never been very good. Now I was perhaps tolerable. I had also come to distrust a good deal of what I’d set myself to study. I chafed a good deal at the uncompromising behavioralism which reigned in the U.W. Psych Department. In this view, genetics must play no significant role in the development of brain, mind or personality, It wasn’t so much that genetics had been debunked in any sense, but hereditary-based theories were not politically comfortable. There must be no intrinsic psychological differences between the sexes and nobody was supposed to turn out to be superior in any sense to anyone else. Though psychology professors frequently sneered at religion, psychology at this time seemed to me to be more like a religion itself, with a highly complex theology, than a deductive science. I still had an interest in social science but decided I’d be better occupied studying History than Psychology.
As for Journalism I was definitely having second and third thoughts. Since the first day in Ernie Charland’s class I’d been told that news writing was objective. Personal opinion had no place here. Now in college, scrutinizing the work of others and even self-examining how I prepared a story claims that any of us really reported objectively, seemed downright delusional. Many of my colleagues were obviously pushing one political or social point of view to the exclusion of others, though they claimed the mantle of fairness. I hope I was a bit more honest. I realized that I was best described as a publicist and advocate, not a reporter. At this point I decided to drop my Journalism major. I would do much writing in and out of college, much of it in an engineering context. Since the Fall of ’74 I’ve been quite frank with myself that the way I operate is to decide what I want a story to accomplish, then gather facts to support this intent. My own opinion or belief is a factor in the genesis of each piece I write. If I can find someone else who agrees with what I am trying to advance, then perhaps I can sell the story to our mutual support. I am not a hired gun but can be a companion of the road. I am not a journalist.
By Winter Quarter Junior year I hadn’t been asked to leave, so it appeared I was still in the Aerospace game. I found another student, Doug Hackett, to study with me and that helped a lot to learn the rather messy equations and fomulae we were now using. This term we were learning to calculate degrees of twist and bending for thin-walled cross sections of various shapes and designs. We then moved into analysis of simple trusses, beams and plates as they deformed under various loads.
Winter Quarter also saw me taking Mechanics II, in which we did elementary trajectories to the moon and back and to the planets. I think one of the hardest things there is to explain to a lay person about space flight is why can’t a person just fly toward a planet, it being only 36,000,000 or so away at closest approach, and can’t we travel at 25,000 mph? Why does it take eight months or so to go to Mars. The simple answer, simple to say, but hard to explain, is that one could do something like that, but it requires a huge amount of energy. The most fuel-saving pathways between the planet start out when the planet or origin and the planet of destination are on opposite sides of the sun. One must calculate an elliptical orbit which is tangent to the earth’s own orbit at it’s nearest approach to the sun and to the orbit of the other planet at it farthest approach, (or reverse these if your destination is closer to the sun than the earth is.) That pathway will take a while to traverse, but fuel savings are a big thing in space dynamics when it costs thousands of dollars for every pound of fuel placed in orbit. There are other strategies for getting around in the solar system. We’ll deal with some of these in a later chapter.
As sometimes happened, the classes I must take conflicted with the electives I probably should have taken. In the second quarter of my Junior year I decided to pursue an interest I’d entertained since entering college, gaining some background in Military Science. Not only did Army ROTC (and presumably the other departments, Naval, aerospace, Marine,) make their Freshman through Senior courses available to non cadets, but Major Bacon, our Junior year instructor, appeared downright flattered that I would want to study with his class. Major Bacon was a business-educated managerial type, who’d been in the Chemical Corps for a number of years. I took Strategy-Tactics and Command Psychology from him. I took well to the custom of coming to attention at the beginning of class and addressing the instructors as Sir. I went on a weapons familiarization course at Fort Lewis one Saturday, learning about 30 and 50-caliber machine guns, 75-MM and 4.2-inch mortars, 90 and 106-mm recoilless rifles. I went along to a communications Center tour at Sandpoint Naval Airstation and other academic enrichment activities. At the end of the year I received an appreciation award, sponsored by Major Bacon and signed by the Commanding General of our Army Training District. I was in attendance for Ed Rennie’s ROTC graduation.
During the summer and Fall that followed my Sophomore year, I think it’s safe to say I drank as much as I could. I attended classes and kept up my studies, but Sundays tended to be very painful. Once I remember sleeping till 5:00 in the evening! My roommate moved to the Crew House for cheaper rent. I paid the extra needed to keep my room as a Single Double. At first I tried studying all night and getting by on afternoon naps like Edison, but that didn’t work out well. Soon I was back to getting up around 5:30, exercising, breakfasting, back to the dorm by 3:30 or 4:00, to bed around 11:30. I read a lot, beyond my text books and assignments, watched a little TV. I still drank beer but generally stopped before a hangover would be eminent.
While visiting Mom and Dad that Fall I’d made a list from a catalog of talking books covering the last two years, of titles from most of the subject areas available. Compiling about 200 talking book order numbers, (I didn’t record the titles,) I included selections from areas I’d always wanted to know something about and from others I’d previously have ignored. In the first category were titles on ecology, nutrition, gardening, various areas of history, pregnancy, menstruation and other health issues, books by science fiction authors with whom I was non familiar, adventures, books about the military. In the second category were westerns, detective stories, legal dramas, a book on baseball, one or two romance novels, some books on religion.
Over the next three years or so I’d call the library every few weeks, pulling six or seven tiny slips of Braille paper from an envelope and read the order numbers over the phone. I’d receive a surprise in the mail a few days later. I made believe a guiding force was helping to direct my self-education, and perhaps it was. The first mystery order included a book on ecology by Barry Commoner, one by Eule Gibbons the naturalist and a nutrition text by Adelle Davis, among other things. I never worked my way entirely through the list. I think I eventually lost my envelope, but I read much more widely during this time than I have before or since.
Another portion of my reading was devoted to a seemingly unlikely mixture, which had to do with philosophy and moral development. One reading source was the group of Heinlein books Andy Andrews had read for me the year previous; Starship Troopers, Farnham’s Freehold, Revolt in 2100, Time enough for Love. All of these had a fair amount to say about courage, honor, dedication, intelligent living. Some of them had a fair amount of rowdy sexuality in them as well, though by the rules of the participants, nothing truly immoral.
The other source was my Bible Testament, haphazardly recorded on cassette tape.
Along with the Bible, I reacquainted with C. S. Lewis and did some comparative readings on other religions besides Christianity. Mark Ingham got me a number of tapes series from the University Presbyterian Church, which allowed me to complete two Bible Study courses and follow Billy Graham around the country. I also read critiques (obviously slanted) of Mormanism, Christian Science and other groups widely considered to be Cults.
So now that I was no longer reading incidentally, what could I make of Jesus and the things he had to say? I now had The Book before me and several secondary sources to help me along. I still had trouble with the idea of someone dying to gain forgiveness for things I had done. I also had trouble with the whole notion of original sin as expounded in the Old Testament. It seemed highly sexist to me, even before I considered myself to be a feminist, and original sin was the reason we needed salvation in the first Place. In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis said that some ideas are very difficult to understand and it was appropriate for a person to use a model to help advance in his or her understanding, though one should be careful not to assume the Model was The Entire Truth. Over the summer I’d formulated a theory about love, which was based on thermodynamics, or rather, the desire to transcend these imperical laws. If the universe seems bounded by economic laws, (laws that forbid something for nothing, or generally, less even than one would expect,) what process could yield more than is put into it? Love was the only candidate I could think of. Love seemed to transcend all other processes I knew about and therefore seemed to be a high order of phenomenon/process than any other. Love was something I felt I had given and received and seemed to be a powerful argument for the existence of God, being something beyond the usual workings of the physical universe.
I’d never argued all that much about the existence of God, but what of Christ? What of Salvation? As human beings we tended to depend for our origin, our maintenance and our advancement upon economic processes and upon exchange. We generally trade a certain amount of resource for a typically smaller amount of something else that we want. In terms of work, a thing which we buy can usually be made by the seller at a cost of less work time than we ourselves would need to expend to make it ourselves. In other words, someone else’s time tends to cost more than our own. The difference between the time which would be expended by ourselves, compared to that actually expended by the seller, is reflected as profit to the seller. Hopefully we can also do something more quickly and efficiently than most other people and someone else will be willing to trade part of their time, (represented as cash or barter,) for a lesser amount of our time, represented as labor service or product. The ability we show in striking a balance between selling our own time at a profit and buying that of others at a loss, determines whether we are rich or poor.
When Economics is applied to the law, we are expected, in theory at least, to strike some balance with our fellow citizens or with the governing bodies which represent us all. Any transgression we commit needs to be paid back in terms of a fine, remuneration to the offended party, service or payment to the governing body, or we need to appear to suffer sufficiently for our transgression to make it less likely that others will follow suit.
The history of religion has been largely the same. Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, Native American Religions tend to operate on the notion that transgressions must be paid off of balancing, occur possibly stretching into the future for many lives to come. As I understand it Judaism operates similarly with sacrifices prescribed for atonement, a system of religious law and depending on one’s religious sect, possible afterlife which might be pleasant or horrible as appropriate.
In Christianity it could be said that through love, economics could be transcended. Through the love of God, a love that could fill up our spirit, one would learn to do good, just because that was the way we were or hopefully would become. I begin to see now how vain a thing it was to try to work ones way into heaven. If one did works without love, the works were essentially valueless to our souls. The works might still accomplish good, but would be unlikely to cause us to improve ourselves and works without compassion or love could help one certainly to become quite arrogant and less life-giving than works done through genuine concern and caring.
This was hard for most people to understand in 1974 and would certainly be radical indeed for people living in the First Century of the Common Era. In order to bring his case, that of transcendence through love, Jesus must certainly fly in the face of orthodoxy and would be likely in peril of his life shortly after the case was made. The Miracles Jesus was said to have worked, whether one accepts them as truth or not, were all Negantropic or non economic. Many created from few, much from little, complex from simple, (water from wine,) calming confusion, healing of disease, reversal of death, all were things which might be anticipated from someone able to transcend the disordering effects of entropy. God of course might have reached down and done all of these things, but this would be merely an application of ordering from outside of the system. Jesus worked within our own world system and showed how love operates.
While we’re at it, who is Jesus? Who is The Christ? I’ll offer an answer to this question which will be very different from that forthcoming from most people, though not necessarily exclusionary to other responses. As a science and science fiction person, I’ve always been open to the notions of other worlds than Earth, other intelligences than Humanity. If we imagine other intelligences, perhaps near infinite variety, living under other skies, under widely varying conditions, with widely differing ideas about the universe, life, and eternity, would not God wear appropriate faces to all of these races? Not contradictory, just different, as I am perceived differently as a father, a brother, a husband, a friend, an enemy, a worker, a student, a writer. Christ I feel, is not exactly the same person we mean when we say God, but is that face of God which is turned toward Humanity. No one with whom I’ve discussed this issue seems to feel that allowing for other races and allowing for religious belief in my conversant, that other races would not aspire toward their manifestation of God.
So far so good. I finally had a religious theory behind which I could get. It didn’t mean I went running to the nearest church. I refused a number of invitations to church in fact, though I did twice speak to Ed Rennie’s Sunday School class. Still I was now sitting on the side of The Christians during debates and was taken generally I think as a sincere believer.
Having made tentative peace with the Gospels, I was still uncomfortable with much of the New Testament. With many other people I had difficulty with Paul and Peter, especially things which concerned women. I have said at one time or another that the seemingly misogynist passages in The Letters may have had some justification at the time that they were written. I may also have been overgenerous. I’ve likened the writings of Paul especially, to a bright student of Albert Einstein, who, after the passing of the good Dr. might have offered insights into what his mentor meant concerning this experiment, that bit of mathematics. Insights related to the context in which the question was asked. Those who have read the history of science as well as the Bible might well object that I am suggesting that as Einstein superceded Newton, so might some other system of belief supercede the teachings of Christ, when new ideas or more rigorous mathematics might be available? To this I’d say that scientific theories aren’t so much superceded but rather added to, expanded, clarified by successive generations. Einstein didn’t so much challenge the work of Newton, but made Physics a more complete, far reaching science with clearer indications as to where Newtonian assumptions were valid. In the same way, Christianity didn’t demolish or fly in the face of Jewish beliefs, but as well, supplemented old Testament teachings. The wisdom of the Jewish teachings is and should be still available for Christians. I still read The Bible, mostly in the New Testament and most often from the Gospels, the Acts of The Apostles. To the extent I am a Christian, it is because I believe in the Word not in the Blood of Christ. And yes I suspect that Christianity will be and is being expanded, clarified by more modern thinkers. It has happened before. I will discuss some of these points further in Chapters 27, 28 and 33.
About midway through my Junior year, I read an editorial by Frederick Pohl, again in Galaxy Magazine, which gave me considerable encouragement toward following up a line of inquiry I’d been considering for several years now. The piece had to do with a proposal by a Physicist, Peter Fong, then at Emory University in Atlanta, Dr. Fong said America could decrease her gasoline needs by 10% if corn was grown on abandoned and marginal farmland, fertilized with human sewage. The idea was to give several million Welfare families 40-acre parcels of land, on which to produce 100 gallons of distilled ethanol per acre per year. Residual from each bushel of fermented grain would be a dozen or more pounds of high-protein, fat-rich biproduct which could be fed to livestock for the family’s use, or for sale. Cornstalks would furnish the fuel necessary to accomplish distillation.
The proposal was inspiring to me and I read it over many times. Since then, many objections have surfaced, the concentration of heavy metals in municipal sewage, controversial figures as to how much abandoned farmland there might actually be, difficulty coordinating several million small farmsteads as opposed to a huge agro-business operation and attendant inefficiencies of scale. From my own experience, the largest problem appears to be the inherent difficulty of moving millions of welfare families into any permanent employment, let alone trying to make farmers of people who probably have no agricultural experience and less interest! Still a government project to make use of biomass on a large scale for fuel production, is by no means an absurd notion.
I think a program for growing grass with which to make fuel pellets for winter heating, while at the same time, bankrolling companies to manufacture high-efficiency pellet stoves would be excellent on a number of levels. Carbon dioxide produced by burning the pellets would be taken up again by next year’s growing. The stove subsidies would provide many thousands of new jobs for skilled persons and trainees, making room at the entry level for new workers. Energy subsidy programs could make a greater difference in the lives of low-income families. Though I’ve departed in later years from the original Alcohol Vision, I think projects of this kind inspired many of us and set us along the roads to varied and perhaps unexpected avenues of inquiry.
Mom and I took a trip, sometime early in ’75, which brought us first to Leavenworth, to visit cousins with which she’d lived for a year after her father had died. Then we went on to Spokane to visit Aunt Winnie, who had a lot of fun seeing how naughty she could talk, now that I was grown up.
One afternoon Mom and I left Winnie’s house, setting out for Hayden Lake Idaho, on Lake Coeur D’Alene, where Grandma Seat had been living for the past three or four years. When first we entered Grandma’s room, she seemed not to recognize us. Mom tried to explain that she was Dorothy and her step-sister was Katherine and so-on through the relatives they had in common. Grandma kept saying “Oh Honey, those people are all dead.” Suddenly then, Grandma said, “Where’s my little blind boy?” and grabbed at my arm. I hugged her and she then recognized Mom as well.
We sat with Grandma for a while as she told us of a time when she was about ten. She, her mother and a lot of other ladies had been invited aboard a stern-wheeler steam boat on Lake Pend Oreille. The captain had gone ashore, perhaps to invite more guests and the boat was supposed to had been moored but had come adrift with no crewmen aboard to lend assistance. Grandma and her mother had been able to quell the panic among the other women and steer the boat back to shore, where the captain was able to get back on board and make her fast.
After a while Mom left us and went exploring the facility. When she’d been gone some time, Grandma stopped talking and said suddenly “Push my wheelchair.” I did and she steered us out of her wing, through the central portion of the nursing home and out another corridor. Turning into a room from which conversation was issuing, Grandma announced “This is my grandson and he’s a Junior at the University Of Washington! What do you think about that?” Mom had heard that Nelly, Grandma’s eldest daughter, was in the same residence and here she was. Nelly was in her late ‘70s at the time. Grandma was then 98, though she steadfastly insisted she’d been born in 1777. I would see Grandma only once again.
For the second time I participated in the Engineering open house, a Spring event for campus and general public, in which we showed what sorts of things we did in the various engineering branches. I finished the year with a course in Thermodynamics and another in bioengineering, besides my three Aero and Astro courses. I ended Junior year with a feeling that I had a fair grasp of things at this level and Dr. Bollard, the Chair of our department and my counselor, seemed happy with my work.
My second summer in McMahon Hall wasn’t nearly7 as taxing as the one previous and I accomplished pretty much everything I set for myself, taking four classes. Most notable for my major studies were Engineering Management and Advanced Calculus. Calc was taught by Gavin Brown, a mathematician from Scotland, probably a distant relative of my brother-in-law. On the elective side of things was a course in Viking History, largely for teachers, taught by Professor Babaum, from Upsala University in Sweden. Professor Babaum seemed to be quite well known to the large and quite well organized Swedish Community in Seattle.
Probably the most culturally significant course I ever took was The Living Theatre, taught mostly for engineers by Jack Leahy, professor of English and part time drama critic for the Seattle Post Intelligencer. Jack had us take in at least one play per week. I rather exceeded my quota, ranging from something called The Skidrow Show, a sack lunch and one-act affair at noon, in a slummy part of Seattle, to Dinner Theatre in the Round With Roddy Mcdowell playing in Charlie’s Aunt. I saw the Hobbit with Cathy Zobel at the Poncho Children’s theatre, The ResistOui by Bertolde Brecht, with my mother and much more. Val Paynton and I saw the Fantastics, the extremely long-running musical about young love, with songs everyone’s heard but few I think, can place. I think that all of the women I was currently dating went to at least one of these plays with me, as well as Lois and Bruce.
In one of my classes I met a woman named Pam Matern, who was a double major in Electrical engineering and Chemistry. We struck up a friendship and dated a couple of times, though she was quite serious about someone else, and corresponded after the quarter ended. Pam had done her high school science project on biochemical fuel cells that could run on sulfur-rich sludge. I did the best I could to pick her brains, having good conversation while I did it.
I had two major preoccupations this summer. One was an engine which used osmotic pressure to develop work. Osmotic pressure develops when a membrane separates two liquids, one with a high concentration of salt or other solute, the other being pure water or a less concentrated solution. Water from the less concentrated side finds it easier to get through the porous membrane than molecules travelling in the other direction, so pressure tends to build up on the more concentrated side. The idea was to use solar energy to evaporate seawater in a basin and use this concentrated brine and regular seawater to develop osmotic pressure which might be used to turn a waterwheel or low-pressure turbine, developing power. I did a few tests with miniature evaporators but eventually decided efficiencies would likely be too low.
My other major project was an improved collapsible cane. Folding canes had been around for years. Generally they weren’t as strong and rigid as good distance-travelling canes should be. After some conversations with my structures Prof. I simplified a design I’d originally discussed with my mobility instructor Len Ziska, back in high school. From a Seattle manufacturer, I purchased two sizes of aluminum tubing gauged so one would fit snuggly within the other. Lenard and I cut the tubing to length and made the parts, providing a two-inch overlap between the sections and using a spring loaded cord to hold the pieces together. I made a number of improvements in my cane over the next several months and though I never had much money for remanufacture, it worked quite well as a prototype and impressed my professors.
I spent some time with Lois at the end of the summer, pruning trees in her wooded back lot and that sort of thing. I returned her underwear, freshly laundered, and never heard the matter mentioned. Lois did talk to me about Mom however. Dad and Mom she said, got along reasonably well when Dad had Mom’s undivided attention. It was okay for me to visit there, but I shouldn’t stay very long. Since Lois was rather volatile herself, a lengthy stay at the Brown’s wasn’t all that comfortable either, so I stayed with Mom and Dad longer than Lois would have preferred, though not as long as I wanted. From what Mom told me, Dad wasn’t particularly better behaved when she was alone with him. He seemed to be more threatening than before, especially when they were alone.
First Quarter Senior year was the only under grad term I ever had which allowed me Tuesdays and Thursdays away from class, though not away from study. I had five courses, just about back to back; Gas Dynamics and Propulsion, (both AA. courses), Intro to Quantum Physics, Engineering Economics and Numerical Methods, a computer course. In many ways my Senior year was the most unsatisfactory of my entire college career. This was in part because it should have been a completion of a carefully laid, coherent plan, but wasn’t.
I’d originally intended to take a degree in Bioengineering, using A. and A. as a base emphasizing life support systems, all to be aimed at my biodyne concept. I’d discussed the entirety of my plan with only a few people but has discussed life support with many of my instructors. I’d been generally advised that if I wanted to take a Bachelor’s of Science and Engineering, (which would allow me to mix one or more types of engineering with a science at the upper division level), I should go through the Junior level with one of the existing departmental programs plus a bit more. I.E., I should take a couple or three Senior courses in the same department, then pull in sufficient technical electives to complete a coherent, 60 credits necessary for an engineering degree. I’d intended to take the Propulsion sequence in our A.A. department, to which I meant to add some courses in Biophysics as well as some research-oriented Psych classes, such as Psych statistics, perception and experimental design. I had identified 18 hours in physiology and Biophysics at the Senior Level, including Respiration and regulation of body temperature and other autonomic functions, as well as a course in computer modeling of biological systems.
I’d joined the Aero and Astro Department because it hopefully would allow me to deal with issues relating to Space, but also because it was a small department. I thought I’d know my professors better and the program was also quite flexible, lots of room for individual tastes. Early in my Junior year I decided to complete the standard degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics, but retain the bio-overlay, which, it seemed to me, would be the best of both worlds.
Now in my Senior year the downside of being in a small department became apparent. No class was offered more than once in the schedule and every elective I needed seemed to be at 8:00 in the morning, all year long! In order to complete a standard degree in the department I must take two sequences from our own course listings. I’d already chosen propulsion and had been advised to take Gas Dynamics since it closely related to rocket problems. I did this. Neither course was significantly more difficult than others that I’d completed the previous year, but I wasn’t able to find a study partner to help decipher blackboard notes and aid in writing up problem sets. I did what I was able, but that wasn’t very good. Had I known then what I know now, I’d have taken Space dynamics, an advanced orbital mechanics course, along with propulsion and left the 8:00 A.M. slot open for the Biophysics courses I needed. The things we did in Gas Dynamics, duct flow, elementary nozzle design, effect of solar wind on a spherical body, heat transfer through a shock wave, are now computer problems. I’ve never had much need to do any of those things to date but mechanics tend to apply to many processes in and out of engineering design.
It occurs to me generally that the courses/study areas which are most useful to persons with broad perspective or those wishing to undertake entrepreneurial ventures, tend to be; physiological, mechanical/automotive, electrical, monetary, legal. These are the things that truly touch our lives at home and in the marketplace. How do we stay healthy or discern among varied medical advice, How do we design and organize our homes, distribute power, transport ourselves, make investments, borrow money, which codes of conduct apply where? All of these things are based in one way or another on applied mechanics, or can be understand by someone who has a reasonably good grasp of mechanical science. One need not build a house to deal competently with a contractor, nor be a doctor to make informed medical decisions. On the other hand a reasonably successful person doesn’t need to know a great deal about modern electronics or computer architecture, unless that is the basis of success. Most electronics, unlike the old ham radio and reel-to-reel tape recorder days, aren’t particularly fixable outside of a factory and most can be replaced at fairly low cost. Such things aren’t really designed to be fixed anymore. I wish I’d taken more life-support oriented biology, biomonitoring, sensory physiology in college the first time around. But I did learn enough to have some basic understanding of all of the systems on which my modern life depended. By the time my Senior Year ended I knew in general how Fuel cells and solar cells worked, something of gas turbines and other heat engines, something of logical systems, cash flow. I knew how to design vehicles and devices to accommodate a wide variety of body sizes, how to calculate momentum and time dilation factors for bodies moving near the speed of light and I knew a good deal about making fuel from green plants.
In Quantum Physics I studied with a guy named Dave Wilson. Dave and his girlfriend Barb Hershey were a good deal more liberal than me, but we shared an interest in whole foods and ecological living.
Dave and I talked a good deal about building a fairly low-tech algae machine which would operate in concert with an anaerobic digester. The idea was to grow algae hydroponically, under glass. The algae would be fed into a biogas fermenter to yield methane and carbon dioxide, plus a mineral-rich effluent. The effluent would go back into the algae-grower, along with the carbon dioxide extracted from the biogas, to produce more algae and so forth. The methane from the digester could be burned or operate a fuel cell to provide electricity. Once put in place in a remote location, a family or small group could provide themselves with cooking gas, moderate electricity sewage disposal and perhaps even a food source. We never built the system but I may do so yet.
We read together from Mother Earth News and Five Acres and Independence;talked about cardboard domes, alcohol fuels, scientific farming on marginal land and interstelar ramjets. Though Dave had his soft-tech side, he was then an Astronomy major. We took walks around the lower-campus area, examining cattails and other fauna and Dave went shopping with me when I bought my first gun. It was a .32-caliber Snub-nosed Smith and Wesson revolver. It would be a few months before I’d get to shoot it but I was now 21 and an armed citizen. I was saddened to lose track of Dave a few years later due to a move away from Seattle and the lack of a phone for half a decade, but perhaps I will find him again some day.
In Winter quarter I took another Physics course, this time in Statistical Thermodynamics and I had an advanced engineering Thermodynamics course in the Spring, along with experimental statistics. Thermodynamics is one of those areas of study which is perhaps not all that important to the non designer, but pretty vital to anyone dealing with energy systems. One deals with things like temperature and pressure, heat, work and power as well as order and disorder. The laws of Thermodynamics (plus love) cover pretty much everything that goes on in this universe.
Two other courses stand out in my Senior year as being particularly interesting and useful. They were Human Factors Engineering and Environmental aspects of Heat Engines. Human Factors was co-taught by an Industrial Engineer and an Engineering Psychologist from Boeing. I hadn’t even known until now that there was such a thing as an Engineering Psychologist and I wished I’d met Dr. Con Kraft a year or so before when I was still designing my curriculum. He’d started out as a garden-variety psychologist but had gone to work in the Aerospace Industry analyzing sensory acuity, reaction time, perceptual issues and cognition. He had a great deal to do with flight simulators and instrument/control displays in aircraft.
Our class began with what we called Anthropometrics or human measurement. We measured one another’s arm and leg lengths, foot to knee dimension, standing and seated height, shoulder span and other factors, then calculated mean and standard deviation values for the class. Next we did a batch of measurements on several cars which were available to us and each of us wrote a report on the issue of drivability of each car for everyone in the class. Though the only blind person in the group I was the only student who considered the visual angle from seated eye-level to a spot on the road sufficient far ahead to assure adequate braking time.
We made a couple of field trips to Boeing where we examined a variety of flight simulators, and talked to flight control officers and other specialists. We also looked at traffic patterns in congested parts of the city and considered various sorts of signs and traffic signals.
Our term project was to design an automotive driving simulator in which to train student drivers without using fuel. I told my instructors that were I to design a driving simulator I’d design one I could use, but I thought it would be more useful for me to design a Walking simulator with which to train blind mobility students learning to cross at intersections.
This design was carried out a couple years before the advent of the micro processor, so the project seems a bit dinosaurian by today’s standards. The idea was to push a sound cart through a noise pattern, such as an intersection or other problematic travel area. The cart would have four to six microphones, arranged radially and each feeding into a separate magnetic tape track. Each microphone would be capped with a cone, through whose small end sound would enter, providing a sense of directionality for specific sound sources recorded. The mobility student, practicing in a gymnasium, parking lot, playground or some other safe, flat area, would wear a sort of crown with small speakers surrounding the head at a distance. Each speaker would play back one of the recorded tracks from the sound cart, thus replicating the entire sound field. A gyroscope would sense any change in the traveler’s direction and would shunt sound form one speaker to another in order to make the sound field turn as the student moved about. The mobility instructor would direct the student to travel a similar route as was originally followed by the sound cart and could even lay out the practice area with tapes or boards, simulating curbs or sidewalks. There were a couple of ways in which the sounds reaching the student could be varied to simulate faster or slower travel through the sound field. Tape could be sped up or slowed down to simulate doppler shift due to increased or decreased walking speed. Bits of sound track could be skipped or brief bits of neutral sound put in to simulate less or more time taken in transit than had been experienced in the sound cart recording. It was a fun project and I got a good grade. My friend John Hall, a Mechanical Engineering Student an oft time lunch companion, helped me draw up a snazzy visual rendering which showed a student (labeled Blind Kid) being marched into a hole with pungi sticks, (labeled pungi sticks) by a rather ominous instructor!
I spent some time this quarter talking to Dr. Kraft about a non course-related yet a human factor issue. For a couple of years I’d been interested in designing an improved bra for full-figured women. My mother and several of my girlfriends had suffered from the old squeeze and hold approach. Mom had deep ruts worn in her shoulders from where the straps had dug into her over the years. The idea was to use non elastic straps crossing in back and coming forward over the shoulders to connect with individual harnesses. Each harness would consist of two cotton straps, crossing under the breast cup and attaching to the shoulder strap. The design was meant to gently support the weight of the breast in a fairly dynamic way, stopping extreme jiggle but not imprisoning. My project was to involve an attempt at modeling the weight and mass distribution of various breast types and measurement of skin pressure sensitivity on the back and shoulders. This would allow me to calculate over the shoulder loading and design appropriate strap widths to afford comfort to the wearer. The project was a topic of conversation in my group of close friends for a while, but though I took care to design the research to avoid inappropriate questions of touching, I think it seemed a bit risqué for most of my prospective subjects.
Environmental Aspects Of Heat Engines was offered this year as the third quarter of the Propulsion Sequence in my department, replacing the course in rocketry which had been the primary reason I’d decided to spend my Senior year in A. and A. I was obviously disappointed and upset at the deletion for this year of the only course in chemical rocketry that seemed to exist of campus!
Dr. Descher who taught the sequence this year, didn’t do rockets, but was quite knowagable about what is called Energy Conversion. He began the Spring Class by giving us some figures on the relative energy content of various energy sources per pound, gasoline, methyl alcohol, coal, wood, even compressed rubber. He hammered home the relative efficiencies of burning fuel to create electricity or using the fuel as a heating source. He also explained to us that nitrogen-oxygen compounds generated in the combustion of gasoline in air, took longer to break down, the higher the temperature at which they were created in the engine. Even though lower-temperature engines characteristically produced more carbon monoxide than the more efficient higher-temperature engines, they were, according to Descher, less polluting in the long run.
Much of the class was focussed on burning fuels at the highest practical efficiencies and on what things cost. Electricity in Seattle, in ’76, cost about two cents per kilowatt-hour and the price had climbed quite a bit since the beginning of the oil crisis about two and a half years earlier. Though prices were five times as high in New York, replacing conventional systems with more imaginative ones wasn’t as easy as it might appear at first sight.
Descher pretended for the sake of argument that one could build a photo voltaic solar collector out of low-grade plywood. He went ahead to show how even at this cost-level, producing megawatts of solar power would still be quite expensive. It was clear that very creative ways must be employed in putting solar energy on line in any quantity. Where two systems were being compared, the one with the cheaper collector would be likely to achieve economic superiority.
So far as I could see, green plants were the cheapest way to cover a surface, especially if one could employ perennials which would be harvested over successive years. I wrote my term paper on biomass energy, starting with the basics of photosynthesis and carbon fixation, I progressed to biomass energy content, strategies for processing and harvesting. I ended with economic, political and social issues.
Dr. Descher, a firmly-committed nuclear advocate, didn’t like my paper, though my in class presentation was well-received. On paper, I’d used inflamatory language, daring to suggest that Nuclear energy held a number in inherent hazards for society and the environment. I even suggested the possibility of terrorism, which Descher poo-pooed. This was before Three-Mile Island and certainly before Chernobal and I stand by what I said, essentially, if a system is unsafe, it’s dangerous. If a system is too safe, vigilance tends to wane and glitches are unnoted and opportunities are there for sabotage, again the system is unsafe. Dare we play these games with devices that can pollute an entire state or region? I got a B in the course.
Much else was going on during Senior Year of course. Under the tutelage of Andy Andrews who continued to read for me, both texts and leisure books, I was learning to make beer. I worked at first with malt syrup and dextrose, but soon was using malted grains and dried hops. Since I preferred a strong, dark British-style ale, my output was much prized by some of my more sophisticated profs, including Dr. Bollard, From New Zealand, who didn’t even expel me when one of my bottles blew up in his filing cabinet!
Early in the year I’d begun keeping company somewhat with a Freshman engineering student, Christina Haynes, from Texas. Christina would eventually join my department. I drew on past acquaintances in the Society of Women Engineers to get her introduced, taking her to a meeting. I thereby became myself reinvolved with the group. I also met a woman, perhaps two years my senior, who was from Alabama. Her voice reminded me a great deal of Ninian’s. I nearly gasped when first I heard her speaking. Elaine was a delightful person in her own right and I asked her out. She said she’d go out with me, but would never commit to a particular date. Finally a mutual acquaintance, a Haitian woman named Missie, who I had dated, told me that I needed to be aware that Elaine was black and that’s why she kept putting me off. This hurt a bit at first but later it was more amusing than anything else. I’d suspected that Elaine was black, since a lot of her friends appeared to be. I was damned if I was going to ask though and frankly I didn’t care. Recalling the time on the bus back in Senior year high school when I’d nearly recoiled discovering I was seated next to a young black woman, I was happy not to be quite so discriminating anymore. Elaine and I continued to be friends, talked a lot on the phone, often at meals, sometimes about rather intimate things. Knowing that she felt uncomfortable going out with me though, I never asked her again.
I’d been appointed to the Engineering Student Council, our student governing body, a couple of years before, but we hadn’t done much until recently. Now we were quite involved with the up-coming Engineering Open House. Though I’d been unsuccessful in placing any of my articles with the U.W. Daily, I was now writing for The Innovator, a four-page student paper, I was also chosen to write copy for a series of brochures which would be distributed to schools, industry and the Legislature. Since these needed to be planted to particular audiences, my PR as well as my journalistic training was paying off.
I was myself written up by Tom Williams, the new director of Technical Communications and editor of The Trend In Engineering, our College’s official journal. In a Conversation With Dave Plassman, Tom discussed my studies, my various projects and my attitudes on a lot of things. “You can go a lot on Ornery,” I said. I guess I’d still stand by that, though I’m gentler now.
There was no official status for my biodyne project, but it continued to evolve as my knowledge of thermodynamics, chemistry and propulsion grew. By the end of Senior Year I had realized that I was introducing unnecessary complexity into the system by using exothermic reactions such as the breakdown of hydrogen peroxide to provide oxygen to my prospective crew.
It would be most energetically appropriate to carry liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to furnish both air and water. Some nitrogen could be brought along and reused in the cabin atmosphere. Water and carbon dioxide could be removed either by the metal, air, water, carbonate reactions described in the last chapter, or cyclic cooling and re warming could be utilized with cryogenic gasses serving to freeze out atmospheric wastes, as they themselves are warmed to cabin temperature. Perhaps aluminum or magnesium from spent fuel tanks might substitute for lithium as an air scrubber.
I still had not a very good measure of the efficiency of my proposed system. For propulsion I assumed I’d be using some sort of electric rocket, powered by a combination of fuel cell and solar energy, using waste water and gases as reaction mass. Electric rockets were usually discussed in connection with nuclear power systems and were intended to have an exhaust velocity several times that of chemical rockets. My friends and instructors couldn’t see why anyone would be interested in an electric system with exhaust velocity just slightly over that of chemical engines. Nobody wanted to talk to me about the efficiency of ion or MHD rockets, (in this case the energy in the rocket steam compared to the input energy needed to operate the rocket.) It would be ten years before I’d have my own computer and could investigate some of these issues for myself.
Spring Quarter I decided to add something different, not unique but uncommon to my academic diet. In spite of my lifelong fascination with history, I’d so far, taken only three courses in the subject throughout my undergrad studies, so I decided to enroll in a course called Medieval English Culture. It was a night class. Our professor was a rather new P.D from Cornell, named Sheila Dietrich. The course made me reconsider what Medieval actually meant. We started with the end of the Roman invasion in the Fourth Century A.D., to the end of the 15th Century. I met several notable authors, including Geoffrey of Monmouth, Geoffrey Chaucer, The Venerable Beade, Abalard and Heloise, as well as more modern writers.
The class ran from 6:30 to 9:00 P.M. and gave me ample opportunity to walk home in the balmy spring evening air, which I’ve always loved. A little party/convenience store, The Easy Shop, was about a block off my route to the dorms and I stoped there frequently after class for refreshment, solid and potable. I have delightful memories of rereading Beowolf over beer and tortilla chips, perhaps with a slab of cheese, a loaf of sour dough and a few sticks of licorice to round things out. I was amazed at how well I remembered the Beowolf tale from age Ten, when I was supposed to be reading a children’s version.
It seems fantastic that for all my venturings outside the predominantly male Engineering College, Sheila was the first female prof I’d ever had. I developed quite a crush on Sheila, though I always behaved toward her most appropriately. I helped instigate an end-of-term party at the home of Sheila and her husband, Mihol, an English professor, also at U.W. A group of musicians provided Saxon music for our party while I provided my best attempt at Saxon beer.
Our Class Of ’76 graduation was exercise was nice, fun, free of the self-absorbed gravity of my high school commencement. I went through the procession line with a Middle Eastern fellow, whom I hadn’t previously met. We collected our BSs together, his in Mechanical, mine in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering. Another chapter in my life was closed, though but for the moment. With in three weeks now, I’d be flying East to fulfill a dream I’d entertained since age eleven.