One annoying distraction was the heat-treating laboratory, just outside the lecture room door—and also just outside my father's office. Back in those days, in the Welding Engineering Department, we learned about metallurgy and the heat treatment of carbon steel by making a chisel out of steel bar. First, you heated the end to a glowing red, then brought it out to forge on an anvil. Visualize something out of Dante with a dozen students pounding with five-pound hammers—maybe the origin of the expression "the Hammers of Hell."
The X-ray room had thick concrete walls, except for a sheet metal roll-up door. There were signs on the outside of the door telling people of the X-ray hazard, which would suggest that they not linger there. Parking at the university was a problem. Dad used to park his car in front of that door with a sign that said "Car here for radiation protection" that solved his parking problem and seemed to be sufficient to keep the campus cops away. Once at the end of an operating session when the car was not there, the door was opened and there were a couple of neckers pretty far along in their activities. I always wondered if they had any four-armed kids as a result.
Roy McCauley, department chairman in the 1960s, was known to put on lead-lined gloves, run in and pick up the Cobalt Gamma radiation source, move it to where it was needed for an exposure, and then run behind the shields. Such was the dedication of this small group of professionals.
Robert McMaster was known as "Doc" around the Welding Engineering Department. I assume this came from his Ph.D., earned from California Institute of Technology just before WWII. He was always a student, taught the value of it by his own grandmother. His dedication to education and hard work is truly what pulled our family from the relatively menial jobs held by our grandparents into a life that was at least at the high end of the great American middle class.
He used to give pop quizzes and would count each answer as one point on his mathematical scale of numbers from 0 to n. He even did a "Sneak Midterm" test one day. Even though I lived at home, our intelligence on these activities was not very good.
His grading system solved the dilemma of how to grade his own son without appearing to favor (or not). It was so based on hard numbers that it was beyond dispute—except once, when the final quarterly grades were given. There was a group of grade totals that started in the mid-nineties and dropped down to about 87, then there was this gap with the next score being about 80. The usual A to B cut would have been made at that point, but instead it was done at 88, leaving me and one hapless fellow 87-total student without effective recourse.
For the most part, our days at Ohio State were pretty dull, but some history of import was happening right in front of us. Few people know that the origin of the "Campus Riot," something that became quite common at the height of the unpopular Vietnam War, was actually a student reaction to the Faculty Council decision to not let the Ohio State football team go to the Rose Bowl. I can still remember one of my high school classmates—well, maybe he was a year ahead—leading the chant "Give me an R, Give me an I, Give me an O. . . ." It was several more years before these things turned really ugly and culminated in the tragedy at Kent State University.
Welding cannot be long separated from nondestructive testing. Nondestructive testing, or NDT, encompasses a number of methodologies for determining that a part or component is sound without actually destroying the part by testing it to destruction. Radiography, or the use of X-rays or gamma rays to look inside a part, is one of the best-known examples. NDT mimics our own senses. But it has the ability to go beyond the abilities of our senses by extending their range.
I don't know where nondestructive testing came in as such a serious pursuit, except that it is a topic that goes hand in hand with welding. I do remember him, maybe in about 1948 or 1949, talking about nondestructive testing. Somehow, and because his favorite topics were high-pressure arcs and nondestructive testing, that led him to Welding Engineering.
All NDT involves a probing medium and a detector. You see with your eyes, hear with your ears, smell with your nose, feel with your fingers and other body parts, and taste with your tongue. Think of it as using your own five—or, for some, maybe six—senses. When you walk into a room, you "see" using visible spectrum radiation, you "hear" using a range of acoustic vibrations sound, you "smell" trace amounts of chemical present in the air, you feel heat or "touch" to determine the textures of a surface, you "taste" to determine the salinity or sweetness of things.
One of his class and lecture demonstrations was to show how carefully a coin slot in a vending machine tested your nickel before it would give up a bottle of Coke or whatever prize you sought from the machine. He would drop a nickel into the slot and in a brief second it clicked and clanked through the mechanism to fall into the collection tray. But then he went back and looked at each step in detail. First, the coin had to be the right diameter and thickness just to get it into the slot. But then it rolled down a ramp past a magnet that ether speeded or slowed the coin depending on its magnetic characteristics. Its mass determined how fast it might be going at the end of the ramp, and the coin had to make a leap at just the right velocity from the end of the ramp into a narrow space in the middle that didn't lead it back to the reject bin. And then he would say, "Do you think they trust you for your nickel yet?" and go on to explain that the nickel then hit an anvil such that if it was just the right hardness would bounce it to the acceptable bin. He always loved to go on to explore how in places where there was a lot of underutilized brainpower, like at an undergraduate engineering school, how much ingenuity and effort might be applied to slip something other than a nickel past the inspection regime. He would also point out that the nickel often received much more inspection than was applied to critical engineering structures where the results of a failure could go way beyond a nickel.
NDT also uses visible spectrum. The "Mark One Eyeball" is still one of the most powerful inspection tools in the arsenal. But NDT then goes beyond using other wavelengths of radiation: infrared and ultraviolet radiation, X-rays, and gamma rays, and beyond.
Nondestructive testing is moving from application to engineering structures into our everyday lives through application in the medical field.
One of our dad's unrealized dreams was the possibility of using several NDT methods simultaneously to probe into the unknown, and then combining those responses and comparing them to our experience. In a way, maybe that is the ultimate sixth sense that we sometimes seem to have—the unconscious use of several of our senses at one time, perhaps in very subtle ways, coupled with our experience to recognize a danger or a situation that is not so clear when we just use one or two of our senses. How else does one "sense" the presence of another person in a dark and quiet room?
The welding and nondestructive testing technology described in Falling Free is pretty accurate. Most of the devices described have a basis in real life (I'm not so sure about the Necklin rods). For example, the plasma arc, which Lois has as a formidable hand weapon is to a welding engineer a heat source for welding. Same with the electron beam. Back in the late 1950s, electron beam welding was a new and novel process. One of the OSU students, J. Whittier Slemmons, built one using junk in the early days of the process.
Lois consulted with Wally Voreck, a friend of my family who has spent a lifetime in the explosives field—some military and some industrial. Wally was also a voracious reader of science fiction and was pleased to read the book in an early form and to have a chance to offer suggestions to make the descriptions more authentic. I think it was he who suggested the explosive forming of something for Falling Free.
My own career has largely been devoted to titanium metal. I suppose that was the source for the choice of titanium for the mirror in the book. Titanium is just a metal with a fancy name, but it has of late come to signify something important enough that even credit cards scramble to usurp the name.
One maxim of our dad was the idea that whatever you would do, you should do it better than anyone else. He illustrated this a
t his Ohio State University office by displaying for many years, taped to the wire-reinforced door, a cartoon of a guy with an enormous ball of string and a caption "Whatever you do, do it to the best of your ability." Lois has gone on to fulfill that axiom in her writing.
We were taught, apparently by example, to take responsibility for our own actions and to behave in what I perceive to be a reasonably moral way. Sort of a proletarian form of noblesse oblige. Lois reflects this in Falling Free in the whole exposure of the innocent quaddies to the less innocent characteristics of man, illustrated particularly by the example of one radiograph that was presented over and over again as proof of the quality of many welds, and Leo's appalled reaction to this. I could see precisely the same reaction from our dad—and maybe it was a real case based on some work he did on the Alaska Pipeline.
Dad always claimed that his father sat him down one day in early life and asked him what he wanted to be. He responded, "An electrical engineer," thinking that he could drive the big electric locomotives that were just coming to the rails near Pittsburgh. His father's menial jobs provided little chance of affording a higher education. He won scholarships first to Carnegie, then Case, and finally Caltech based on incredibly good grades (those genes and that drive never got passed to any of us). He did study electrical engineering and the nature and effects of lightning, which I suppose was the source for his interest in arcs and welding. During the war and after at Battelle Institute, I know he worked with some early inspection of drill pipe in west Texas and torpedo drive systems in the Chesapeake Bay. We remember the stories of errant torpedoes that either toppled the observation barge, sending everyone on board in with the jellyfish, or went to the beach, causing a rapid retreat of the sunbathers in its path.
Dad was an inventor with a very wide range of interest. He held nineteen patents covering a wide range of disciplines. Some of these ideas have become very important in the lives of the modern world. He holds the basic patent on xeroradiography, the application of the Xerox (halide) patents to X-ray rather than visible light like today's copy machines. This has evolved into the medical imaging equipment used to detect breast cancer. He also holds the basic patents on the first television X-ray system, a device that he made possible by the introduction of a low-density beryllium window in place of glass that would block the weak X-ray signals, and precursor to the X-ray machines used in real-time medical imaging and luggage inspection at airports. Every time you go to a dentist using the new direct film-to-digital system, you are touched by his work.
For a time throughout the 1950s, Dad was the "TV Weatherman" to most of Central Ohio. This was truly during the infancy of television. Ours at the time was a six-inch black-and-white Hallicrafters with a row of channel-selector buttons across the bottom. Dad had taken a weather course at Caltech from Irving Krick—one of the key people in the decision to go into Normandy on June 6, 1944—so he came to the program with more real background than the weather readers of today. Like most else he did, he used the five-minute show to teach everyone in Ohio about weather. The shows always started with the same somewhat startled "Well, hi there."
People Whose Names May Have Been the Inspiration
For those who studied Welding Engineering at Ohio State University in the early 1960s, the names of at least some of the Falling Free characters are familiar.
Leo's family name may have come from Professor Karl Graf, who became chairman of the Welding Engineering Department a few years after McCauley left.
The real-life name source for "Leo" may have been the first black student in Welding Engineering, Leo Wilcox, who was a few years ahead of me. We all met him in the mid-1950s at the annual Welding Engineering Department picnics.
"Claire" may have been inspired by Clarence Jackson, a family friend as well as a professor in the Welding Engineering Department. Clarence specialized in submerged arc welding and had learned the trade the hard way. Getting him on the staff proved to be a real exercise for the silver-tongued McCauley, since the university looked down its collective nose at anyone who had not actually graduated from college, and to have such a person as a professor, even in the mostly forgotten Welding Engineering Department, was a real leap of faith for the school.
Another professor was Bill Green. I don't think he got mention by name, but maybe Silver was just a better and certainly sexier sounding substitute name.
Doctor Minchenko may have been based on Hildegard Min chenko, who was a researcher of Russian origin who worked on a sonic power project that Dad had developed and obtained funding for. For the few of us at the school at the time, this project was remembered because the frequency chosen for the 10-hp high-energy transducers was 10 kHz, right in the middle of the range of human hearing. Many a class discussion was given by yelling over the incessant screaming of the horns operating just outside the lecture room door.
Finally: Lois
Lois and I spent the first half of the summer of 1965 hitchhiking in Europe—then a relatively safe activity, and one which had a built-in filter to be sure you encountered interesting people along the way, but still a stretch for our parents to accept. I had never thought that she would find the experience any different than I. I was after small towns and rural scenery, figuring that I would see the cities later in life from a more comfortable point of view.
There were a few memorable occasions. After our first overseas flight, we arrived in London very tired. We left Heathrow heading for Stratford, because that was something we had all heard of in England. Our first night was spent in a park in a town west of London. We remember the bobby who helped us into the city park and to a park bench for a bed, and then promised to look in on us from time to time overnight.
We went to a Shakespeare play in Stratford the next day. I fell asleep, but Lois was enthralled by it all, seeing Shakespeare as it was meant to be for the first time. Staying in youth hostels was a wonderful experience. They ranged from rude sheds to ancient castles. One near Inverness had statuary in all the halls and was more like a museum.
In Ostende, we joined a group of young men for an overnight in a loft over a pub. I was impressed that Lois was able to remove her bra right in front of the crowd, but completely under her shirt. I never have figured out how that was done.
You met young people from all over the world doing the same thing. It was automatic that they were interesting, particularly the ones from Australia and New Zealand, places that seemed so far away to us. What a sad thing it is that people have become so untrustworthy as to make this remarkable diplomatic activity a danger and that it never grew the same way in the U.S. One wonders how much different the world would be if more people had had this cross-cultural exposure in their youth.
The rides were something interesting as well. The most comfortable was a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud driven by a Member of Parliament. He pointed out the straight sections of road built by the German prisoners of war in World War II and the telephone poles along both sides to discourage their use as landing fields. And then there was the back of a truckload of American onions on the ride over the "Devil's Elbow" in Scotland—we were given a few samples and added them to our stew for supper, and it probably took a week to air the hostel out afterward. We were picked up by a just-wedded couple in Belgium in a Citroen—the one with the corrugated steel sides that wobbles along the road. I think they just wanted to tell someone.
Some of the scenery probably has helped Lois in her descriptions. I'm sure the lake in Spirit Ring is modeled after Lake Como. Baocia's bony soil looks like some of Scotland, although colored by her later visits to Spain under plusher circumstances. The castles described may have been in part from this trip.
Lois joined my older brother—an accomplished sailplane pilot who occasionally finds time for work or other life activities—and me long before we had any sense of where babies came from. I think she had the usual experience of the youngest of siblings and I suppose we can blame ourselves that she was something of an introvert in her early years.
Somehow that turned out okay as it led her to the Trekkie counterculture that, combined with a large collection of science fiction novels in Dad's library, may have had a small part in sending her down the path she has taken.
Lois used to drag home the most motley-looking collection of characters—I think they were fellow Trekkies, or at minimum early incarnations of hippies, the counterculture norm of behavior for those who wanted to be different, but they all looked the same to me. Some of these folks have gone on in the science fiction field. Lillian Stewart Carl was a frequent visitor to our house, and is a successful fantasy writer and remains a close friend of Lois to this day. Her dad was also a professor at the university, in Agricultural Engineering. Ron Miller has gone on to a career of illustrating science fiction novels. In the early days he did beautiful renditions of Martian, Lunar, and other far-world landscapes that looked like the stuff Wernher von Braun and Willy Ley dreamed of.
I don't think Lois liked having babies. I think she may have been okay with the first part, but the production stage and then the years of launch activities may have taken a toll. At least that is what I assume was the source for the "uterine replicator" that plays a minor role in Falling Free but is more significant in the Vorkosigan series. However, if nothing else, the child-rearing experience allowed her to write the scene of feeding Andy with great realism.
The Vorkosigan Companion Page 15