Origins of Technology

     Real research looks very much like we witness today in the struggle to defeat the threat of

the deadly Coronavirus to the health of mankind on this earth. It's highly organized. The

methods of development of an effective vaccine are well known, yet involve an enormous

amount of careful and exhausting research. It also demands a deep theoretical and practical

understanding of the subject being researched. I don't want to bore you, about a subject that

is as intensely interesting .as the origins of technology, nor do I wish to see you get lost in

the seemingly endless processes of trial after trial after trial with not even the slightest trace

discovery that characterize real research. I will, however. enlist the help of the ancient method'

of story telling, which worked, I understand to help earlier peoples to bear the everyday

near impossible challenges of simply surviving on the deserts of the Middle East, and which,

in fact, became the very structures supporting the hope and patience of most of the western

world still today.  

     It was the summer of 1960. I had just graduated High School and was on my way to the

 University of Pennsylvania in the Fall. It was a long way to work at the Bartol Research

Foundation of the Franklin Institute. A bus, and then the elevated train all the way to the end of

the line, and then another long bus ride and there it was, on the same grounds as Swarthmore

University. Dr. Metzger introduced himself. He turned out to be quite an accomplished

 

physicist  in the field of nuclear radiation. Swiss, and the reason the "Swiss never suffered in

 any war was that they were so carefully trained and prepared." Well, the boy scouts knew 

that too. A lot of grass and singing birds outside, and me and a console full of electronic 

devices designed to count and keep track of the amount of nuclear radiation falling on a 

sensor. Different electromagnetic "shields" had been configured to surround our radioactive 

sample, and this was the basis of our research. Did changing the current or shape or 

distance  from the sample alter the amount of radiation passing through the shield - or not.

     Every morning, I would take a short trip down a floor and carefully extract a sample of

Cesium 137 if I recall correctly - radioactive Cesium. It was in a lead lined box with a string

above with which you could pull out the small vial of sample and hold it at arms length, "lest

you lose the ability to reproduce" walking back upstairs and setting it carefully again, down

into our apparatus for the experiment. If I dropped the glass vial, "they would have to shut

down Bartol for 50 years", explained Dr. Metzger. Yes, of course, I was careful. But, remember

I was eighteen years old and at a new job and I had a lot of confidence in atomic scientists. In

this case as most, it was well deserved, You know, thinking about it, in about 1997 or so, we

had a conference at Broward Community College with many of the participants in the first

detonation of the atomic bomb at Alamogordo, NM, who confided that they slept up on the

platform with the bomb to prevent sabotage! Also I have experience with nuclear missiles

which I am not free to discuss. Interesting how these things occur. Yeah, Alamogordo was a

different kind of research. 

    

     The point of all this story - and it lasted all summer - every day pretty much the same until

we did a special job tor an Israeli physicist who was in charge of this enormous Van de Graf

generator and who sold me a 1955 Chevy which I used to drive to school that first year! 

     You know, this little story was supposed to cushion the effect of day after day of no

significant changes. Which, by the way, is not necessarily bad results in any way. Still, very

very boring, to the extent that I did tell Dr, Metzger that I thought "we might have something" in

an attempt to justify all those readings -see? It was then that he warned me about subjective 

bias damaging objective research. At any rate, I find now, that this was a particularly exciting 

 

period of my life and especially accelerated significant education. Go learn!...