What have I done?

The satellite is coming over the horizon! I remember the excitement when the first communication satellite (Telstar) was launched in 1962. Where was I? Standing 70 feet high behind the big 85 foot dish at Goonhilly that was to receive the signals from the satellite. We had just finished checking the very special receiver we had built for the purpose and we had filled it with enough liquid helium (it ran at -272°C) to last out the two twenty-minute windows when we would have an opportunity to see whether everything was going according to plan. Now everyone has a dish on their outside wall – albeit a little smaller.

I had originally intended to be a cosmologist, using Einstein’s general theory to study the way the universe is made up after studying mathematics at Cambridge. However, I realised that I liked to get my hands dirty, especially after a couple of years in the RAF maintaining radars, so I changed course to become an electrical engineer – although it was a few years before I realised that that’s what I had done until I registered as an engineer in California!

Then off to America, which was where all the money was to do the exciting things in the developing electronics industry. I changed from the tiny signals from a distant satellite to quite the opposite - using high power radio waves in industrial processes – special microwave ovens for drying paper, glass fibre, bread wrappers – all sorts of interesting possibilities.

Then it was the “emperor’s new clothes” (software is like that – you can’t see it or touch it or smell it). The rapid transit being built in San Francisco was to be controlled by one of the new-fangled computers with invisible software, but all they knew was that it didn’t work! So it became my job to see whether the emperor really had any clothes. The answer was “not much”!

So, after a few on-the-job lessons in train control, it became clear that the programmers knew even less than I did – they thought they were building a warehouse programme because that’s what they’d always done before!

Eventually after a couple of years of hard work the rapid transit opened and the computer proved it’s worth. At the conference in San Francisco, we had train engineers from around the world – Paris Metro, French Railways, British Rail, London Transport, German Railways, etc. all admiring our work. Finally the emperor had his splendid new clothes.

Then, as a consultant to NASA, I worked on the predecessor to the DVD. Instead of small discs we had long loops of plastic and the recorder was a box about six feet high! Never did work properly, but we found out about how to build one that did.

After that it was computer programs for a whole variety of enterprises. Booking walking tours in the Sierras, selling baseball season tickets, managing a garlic factory and processing credit cards for low-cost airlines.

And all the time, finding the time to fix the electrical circuits at home - I was attracted to beautiful old San Francisco houses that always needed re-wiring! As an electrical engineer, it wasn’t too difficult, but I did have problems with the plumbing!

Now with a house in Port Solent, there are other things like that to do – plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

John Day

023 9220 0338