Career “trophies”, coffee mugs, one of which was created by dye printing technology (depicting our development team), the other a memento commemorating the issue of an arcane patent.
There is a more general problem related to the “what to do with old lab notebooks” that some of us face. It is what to do with our shoeboxes of photos (virtual digital shoeboxes and real ones). And written correspondence. Love letters. Birthday cards and holiday cards that caught our attention enough that we saved them. The trophies, actual physical trophies, or the certificates of commendation for a job well done. Birth and death announcements. Souvenirs of our travels, the mementos of the high points of our lives.
All of them carry great meaning to us, invoking a romantic haze of fond memories from those times and places, for those people and events. Yet those memories are internal to us; they are not shared, even with the persons we may have shared the moment with—at least not exactly. Each of them has his or her own version of those scenes. And they are not shared in the same way with our children, and certainly not their children. Our lives are an abstraction to them. They weren’t even around when the main story was unfolding.
I have come to realize this in the last few years as I have processed the items left behind by my parents after their deaths. I have a high regard for my father’s technical acumen and his many projects. Some of them were to gather and archive family history, others documented his personal interests. He was always an early adopter of technology and embraced digital photography well before I did. He acquired a large collection of both film and digital pictures, organized in shoeboxes and digital folders. He worked to digitally scan historic family photos that dated back to the 19th century.
There is a treasure trove of history here, some even recent enough to overlap with my own, yet I do not find myself compelled to explore it. And therein lies the problem. If I am not inspired to carry forward the artifacts of prior generations, why would I expect subsequent generations to propagate mine?
The title page of my grandfather’s PhD thesis, a thick volume of scientific discovery, each page typewritten in carbon-paper triplicate by my grandmother during their time at Harvard. Interestingly, it was submitted on his (54th) birthday.
“Long before the term ecology became a part of the vocabulary of the scientist, primitive man, looking out over the expanse of blue-green water which characterized his favorite fishing haunt, was probably aware of the fact that notable alterations in the color and clarity of this body of water would occur as the seasons changed.”
The introductory sentence of Theodore Olson’s PhD thesis on algae blooms.
I was witness to my grandparents’ transition to an assisted living apartment from the home they had kept for more than half a century. Though modest, it was the center of a busy family’s activities, and had accumulated the corresponding mementos through the decades. It had also collected the technical artifacts of my grandfather’s scientific career, specimens of insects and fish and algae from his ecological and entomologist specialties. He kept copies of his and his peers’ published works, along with those of his doctoral students, who carried on these disciplines, with the scientific rigor and methods that he taught them over their years in his tutelage.
I was there on the day when he had to empty the ‘wall of books‘ in his home library, which included the dissertations of his students. There was no space for everything at the new apartment. A few important reference volumes could be retained, but the others? What to do with them? Here were the compiled and distilled understandings of pioneers in biology, acquired through years of painstaking research, building upon the pyramid of human knowledge. These breakthroughs of their time have now been incorporated into our general understanding of modern biology.
What should happen to the first-ever photomicrographs of blue-green algae blooming to produce cyanobacterial toxins? What should become of the tabulated counts of seasonal species of mosquitos that were the vectors of mosquito-borne diseases? What should be the fate of that first chart correlating taconite processing and asbestos-like fibers in Lake Superior? All of these new discoveries had been first reported in his research and in the dissertations of his PhD students.
A scanned portrait of an unidentified woman in the family photo collection.
My father, an early adopter of nearly everything, took on a project to digitize a collection of historical family photos that had accumulated over many generations and that were now in his possession. It was the early years of digital photography when scanning technology was barely up to the task, and computer image file formats were crude by today’s standards.
Nevertheless, he forged ahead and built a repository of over 700 scanned photographs dating back to the 1800s. He recognized a weakness in the collection—there was no context, no annotations, no identifications of the people portrayed. Old photographs lose their value when this information, originally held in the memories of those who were around at the time, is not recorded.
My father knew this and wanted to somehow attach the information about the photo, in the scan of the photo. I know this, because he asked me (an imaging scientist) about how to do it. Unfortunately, at the time, there was no standardized way to embed such “metadata” within existing image file formats. He was a man ahead of his time.
John checks for mail at Rural Route 2, Box 619, later to become 292 Heather Lane.
In 1965 we moved into a newly-built house on the outskirts of the town of Long Lake Minnesota. Today considered an “exurb” of Minneapolis, at that time it was a rural community at the very edge of urban influence. I turned twelve on the day we moved in and was starting to explore the possibilities presented to a teenager in those years.
The Vibroplex Deluxe Original telegraph key, first manufactured in 1939.
I was moved recently by an unexpected item encountered while clearing out my parents’ home. They both passed away in recent years leaving, as we all will, a lifetime of accumulated possessions. Perhaps it is a rite of passage that we all mark our parents’ passing with tributes and shared memories, and then respectfully distribute their earthly possessions.
Those possessions usually include home furnishings of a previous era, and clothing that might fit but doesn’t match anyone’s current style or fashion. Many kitchen utensils will find their way to donation centers. Easy items to dispatch are those for which there are few memories. The more difficult are those with sentimental attachments.
My dad was an amateur radio operator, a “ham”, which is a term for the enthusiasts across the world that participate in this form of communication, ever since Marconi sent his first wireless message. There is a broad and varied number of these practitioners of a discipline that requires technical expertise and skill, and a desire to share their experiences “over the air”.
I grew up in this culture, listening to the chirps and squawks of my dad’s radio receiver late into the nights. One of the essential ham skills was to tap out Morse code messages with a telegraph key — the first level of an amateur radio license (“Novice Class”) required proficiency at five words a minute. My dad was extremely skilled at this and could signal at much higher rates. As one improved in this skill, the limitations moved from brain-hand coordination to the mechanical key itself.
This limitation was recognized early on, and various ingenious adaptations of the simple momentary contact key were invented. Some worked better than others. Over the course of my dad’s ham career he acquired various makes and models of telegraph keys with which he competed in amateur radio contests, to see who could make contact with the most other hams in a weekend.
His amateur radio station equipment will find homes with other ham operators, but his set of telegraph keys were distributed to his children, all of whom have those memories of dot-dash Morse code beeps in the night. This is the item I received: on a beautiful chrome-plated base, the key itself is a delicate collection of mechanical components, carefully balanced and customized to the hand of the operator. I am told that operators have a distinct “signature” that can be recognized when listening to the delivery of Morse code, each hand having its own rhythm and style.
This identifies the manufacturer, Vibroplex, and proudly displays its serial number and patented status. The logo is a lightning bug, carefully anodized or painted red on the brass plate, a feature maintained even on current models. This may be a collector’s item as there are many similar to be found at http://www.vibroplexcollector.net.
The ham community has an endearing term of respect for their fellow amateurs who have since passed away: Silent Key. It is a reference to the early days of telegraphy where the letters SK were sent to designate the end of a transmission, and then the station would become silent.
There is a national silent key registry, the cumulative obituaries of the ham community, where you can look up life accounts of past amateurs, including my dad, K0TO.
His station is silent now, but my memories of it will remain until I too become silent.
Showing a few bruises from years of heavy use in my home, at school, during protest marches and on backpacking trips, this is my first single lens reflex camera, the Nikomat brought back from Japan by my dad’s business contact.
A half-century ago I was a teenager in high school, fascinated with cameras and photography. I had progressed from my first Kodak Instamatic to a (used) Kodak Retina-II 35mm; both are considered “rangefinder” cameras: you looked through a viewfinder that simulates what the lens sees.
But what I really wanted was a single lens reflex camera, a Nikomat, a camera one step down from the famous flagship product of the Japanese camera maker, Nikon. A “single lens reflex” (SLR) is a high-performance camera, where the view through the eyepiece comes through a complex arrangement of mirrors and prisms from the very lens that will be recording the picture. The key to this magic is a mirror on a spring-loaded hinge that provides the periscope-like view through the lens while aiming and composing the shot. When the shutter release button is pressed, the mirror swings out of the way just in time for the shutter to open and expose the film.
I acquired my first SLR by saving the earnings from my summer job flipping hamburgers at the local drive-in. Except it wasn’t enough. My dad helped out, not by a contribution, but by asking an associate who occasionally made business trips to Japan to make a camera purchase on my behalf, since the local cost was significantly lower than the imported retail price in the U.S. and, crucially, within my savings. At that time such long-distance business trips were rare, and I had to wait several more months for my camera to arrive.
When we consider the impact of computer graphics we usually think
of Hollywood motion picture special-effects, or beautifully crafted images and
commercials from high-end marketing firms, which both seem like products of the
east and west coasts. We don’t think of midwestern
artists or public university departments as being part of that world. Yet this is exactly where much of the
pioneering work in computer graphics was done and its commercialization was
born.
The coils that provide the magnetic force to move the electron beam
Cathode ray tubes are a remarkable technology that incorporate many seemingly magic principles of physics. Thermionic emission causes electrons to “boil” off a cathode, high voltage electric fields accelerate and focus them, and magnetic fields steer them to the anode screen where they energize phosphor molecules, which then re-release that energy as visible light!
While developing the electronics to control the CRT and make
all this magic happen, we often had to “bring up the spot”, showing the
electron beam in one static location, where it could be examined visually and
measured with various instruments.
This was always a tricky maneuver, because if the electron
beam were allowed to become too intense, the energy transfer to the screen
would cause it to heat up to the point where the phosphor would suddenly
vaporize, leaving a dark spot that could never be lit up again. Usually, this burn-hole was in the middle of
the imaging area, and so the CRT, the single most expensive component in the
system, would become instantly unusable.
To avoid this event, there was a standard procedure for bringing up the spot: apply voltage to the CRT and gradually increase it, sneaking up on the level where the spot would become visible, and then avoid going too far. The safe operating zone was rather small.
But even the best procedures cannot anticipate every possible
experiment and test that might be needed while inventing new technology. Consequently, there were situations where the
beam accidentally and unexpectedly reached the critical phosphor burn level,
and whoever was conducting that particular test suddenly realized that they had
crossed the threshold and now the CRT had a permanent blemish. They had become a member of “the burn-hole
club”.
The burn-hole club comprised everyone who had suffered this
unexpected event. It was both an
embarrassment, and a badge of honor. It
was awful to realize that an expensive component was now worthless, but on the
other hand, the tests and experiments that we were conducting were on the
cutting edge of our knowledge, the term “cutting edge” implying that injuries
were part of the process. Only brave
researchers dared to push this edge forward.
I am not a member of this exclusive club, but that is
because I had skilled technicians who knew far better than I how to conduct the
tests I requested. They were on the
front lines of the technology. And as a
result, they were the ones first inducted into the burn-hole club.
There is one incident that deserves special mention. It occurred during the development of the
brightness calibration method, a critical part of making accurate exposures
onto film. We used a photocell at the
far edge of the screen. It needed to
“see” the spot, and measure how bright it was.
The task of figuring out how to do this was assigned to Rick Keeney, who
became a master of writing code to control the complexities of driving a
cathode ray tube.
To solve this particular problem, Rick came up with a clever
algorithm to position the beam directly under the photocell. The exact horizontal and vertical position of
the photocell is not known, at least not at first. It needs to be located. So Rick made a first best guess, and then
refined it. By moving the beam slightly
horizontally and vertically and seeing if the light seen by the photocell
increased or decreased while doing so, the beam position could be
estimated. Move the beam to where the
light measurement was strongest, and that would be the location directly under
the photocell.
But if the photocell light level was low, it was hard to
know which way to move, so increase the intensity of the electron beam and try
again. And if that didn’t help, then it
was likely that the beam was not quite where it was expected. So move it over a little bit and try again. This was the strategy for locating the beam
and calibrating its brightness. It worked
fairly well… until it didn’t.
On one occasion, the beam could not be detected at all. The algorithm increased the intensity trying to measure the light, but as it did so, burned the phosphor in its path. When it failed to detect the beam, it moved over a little bit and burned the phosphor there too. Since the beam was still not detected, it was moved a little more and tried again. The algorithm didn’t have a limit check on position, so it marched all the way across the full width of the screen, leaving behind a tire-track of vaporized phosphor.
This was a spectacular example of damage by electron bombardment, and Rick Keeney, in addition to being an Academy Award winner, also holds the prime honor in the burn-hole club. And I have the privilege of curating the resulting damaged tube.
The trail of damaged phosphor, leading right off the edge of the screen.
Rick with a more public acknowledgement of his skills in pushing the cutting edge of science and technology.
Those who know me would be stunned to learn that I have a
gun collection. I acquired them in the course
of my work trying to make computer images on film in the 1990s. They are electron guns, the mysterious
workings at the business end of a cathode ray tube.
This is the first of three posts describing a now-(nearly)-obsolete technology.
Thomas Edison nearly discovered them. In his experiments with heated filaments in evacuated glass bulbs trying to find a suitable incandescent lamp, there were hints. He noticed depositions of material on the walls of the glass tubes. Many scientific discoveries are preceded not by the expression “Eureka”, but instead by the comment: “Hmm, that’s funny”. If he had followed up on this odd result, he might have also invented the vacuum tube amplifier.
