elliottd wrote:
> Did you know that Nevil Shute who wrote the racing story "On the Beach"
> which they made into a movie in 1959 was also a Mathematician. For two
> summers as a student (summer jobs) he calculated the polynomial equations
> for the British dirigibles named the R-100 and the R-101. They used
> sliderules that were very long - like 10 feet long if I remember correctly.
> This is all in a book he wrote appropriately entitled "Slide Rule". He was
> quite an author and engineer. Click for more :-
Shute had a pretty broad understanding of things mechanical. One of his less
well-known books is called, _Trustee from
the Toolroom_, in which a childless middle-aged British machinist is suddenly
charged with looking after his niece after
her parents are killed in Australia. There's one particularly affecting scene
where he's at a loss to cheer up his
niece, so he does what he knows--he goes down to his Myford lathe in the
basement and begins making her a little bird's
nest with metal eggs (for Easter, as I recall, imperfectly), and turnings for
the nest, then tempers the eggs to
different colors. Shute's descriptions of the processes and the tooling
required are quite accurate.
Cheers.
--
Michael D. Porter
Roswell, NM
[mailto:mporter@zianet.com]
Never let anyone drive you crazy when you know it's within walking distance.
|