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Apr. 4th, 2006 12:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogI was talking last night about wanting a copy of the book my great-grandfather wrote, and how I'd like to know more about him. To my surprise, after I got in to work today, I found links in my mailbox to info on a couple of things he wrote, courtesy of my raccoon-girl's nocturnal searches. Thank you my love!
They may not be of great interest to you; they're not sweeping fantasy epics or sci-fi escapades. They've not even exciting, dramatized non-fiction like biographies or historical novels. My great-grandfather was a chemist. A concrete chemist, specifically, and he wrote about what he knew.
So, here are links to a couple of his writings.
Corrosion of Embedded Material Other Than Reinforcing Steel (Portland Cement Company research bulletin 198).
And some info on Durability of Concrete Construction, a book he authored.
He was also made an honorary member of the American Concrete Institute in 1977 for "eminence in the field" (detailed here)
I'm planning to read through the bulletin tonight (in what is probably a testament to my dorkhood, the first page was really interesting to me), and I would love to find a copy of the book somewhere that I could read through. It's probably a bit obscure to find in most local libraries, though there does seem to be a copy in Milwaukee. I'd really love to have one of my own though. I'd like to read through it and learn how my great-grandfather used words. How he expressed himself. I often feel like I can connect to a person's writing much more than I can connect to their spoken words.
Even though I never knew him, my great-grandfather is the kind of person I want to be like. He was a chemist. He was a ham-radio operator and electronics experimenter (my grandfather has one of his wooden handled, cloth cord soldering irons). He ground his own telescope lenses. When he wanted to know how something worked, he learned it. At my grandfather's seventy-fifth birthday party last year, I was talking to him about the telescope that Hubert built. They used it and played with it for a while, and then sold it to a friend of my grandfather's who lived nearby; he wanted to see the stars but couldn't afford a real telescope. "How much do you have?" he asked the kid. Of course he had no more than a dollar or two, so that was the price of the telescope.
He just sounds so much like me; just smarter. Or more focused. Maybe both, I don't know. I've never met him, but I want to make him proud of me. I want to build my tesla coil, or my rail gun, or my innumerable computers, because I feel like they are tangible ways of showing that, yes, I too can do things like that. I can be smart too. I can do something worthwhile and special.
Maybe that's somehow shallow, but people like him are the ones that I've always admired. Admired and envied because I often feel like I will never be as smart and as capable as those I wish I try to emulate. But I try.
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I have more to write about this weekend and things when I can. Maybe tonight.
Until then;
-Storm
They may not be of great interest to you; they're not sweeping fantasy epics or sci-fi escapades. They've not even exciting, dramatized non-fiction like biographies or historical novels. My great-grandfather was a chemist. A concrete chemist, specifically, and he wrote about what he knew.
So, here are links to a couple of his writings.
Corrosion of Embedded Material Other Than Reinforcing Steel (Portland Cement Company research bulletin 198).
And some info on Durability of Concrete Construction, a book he authored.
He was also made an honorary member of the American Concrete Institute in 1977 for "eminence in the field" (detailed here)
I'm planning to read through the bulletin tonight (in what is probably a testament to my dorkhood, the first page was really interesting to me), and I would love to find a copy of the book somewhere that I could read through. It's probably a bit obscure to find in most local libraries, though there does seem to be a copy in Milwaukee. I'd really love to have one of my own though. I'd like to read through it and learn how my great-grandfather used words. How he expressed himself. I often feel like I can connect to a person's writing much more than I can connect to their spoken words.
Even though I never knew him, my great-grandfather is the kind of person I want to be like. He was a chemist. He was a ham-radio operator and electronics experimenter (my grandfather has one of his wooden handled, cloth cord soldering irons). He ground his own telescope lenses. When he wanted to know how something worked, he learned it. At my grandfather's seventy-fifth birthday party last year, I was talking to him about the telescope that Hubert built. They used it and played with it for a while, and then sold it to a friend of my grandfather's who lived nearby; he wanted to see the stars but couldn't afford a real telescope. "How much do you have?" he asked the kid. Of course he had no more than a dollar or two, so that was the price of the telescope.
He just sounds so much like me; just smarter. Or more focused. Maybe both, I don't know. I've never met him, but I want to make him proud of me. I want to build my tesla coil, or my rail gun, or my innumerable computers, because I feel like they are tangible ways of showing that, yes, I too can do things like that. I can be smart too. I can do something worthwhile and special.
Maybe that's somehow shallow, but people like him are the ones that I've always admired. Admired and envied because I often feel like I will never be as smart and as capable as those I wish I try to emulate. But I try.
---------------------
I have more to write about this weekend and things when I can. Maybe tonight.
Until then;
-Storm
