It was a cold grey Saturday morning in the winter of 1965. I was sitting looking out of the window at the occasional flurries of snowflakes swirling around the building. I was wondering if my parents would let me go fishing with my friends tomorrow.
Suddenly I felt a sharp blow to the side of my head. Our Latin teacher, Mr Bullock, had just thrown the blackboard eraser at me. Yes, I was still in the classroom and my thoughts of fishing would have to wait until later in the day. I was made to go to the board, and write down all of the grammatical cases for “boy” in Latin. There are nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative and ablative in both the singular and plural. Twelve different cases for the word “boy”. Does anyone really want to learn this language? To make it worse, nobody today even speaks Latin apart from the Catholic clergy and a few obscure scholars.
I was nine years old at the time, but the influences I had during those early years probably shaped my life.
I had an older sister. We got on fine together, although she normally got the better of me in family disputes, probably because she was older than me. I also have a younger brother who shared many of my interests. I nicknamed him Woolley as he was born in the autumn of 1962, and the UK had the biggest freeze in living memory the following winter.
My mother did her best to care for us all. In those days there was not much money about. She worked very hard, getting up to light the coal stove an hour before she could start cooking breakfast for us all. I learned how to cook by helping her in the kitchen after school.
My father was a government scientist. He did his best to bring us up well, and to give us a good education. Apart for the fee-charging schools, the best school in the area was Bristol grammar school. Provided that you passed the entrance exam, you had access to a good free education. I enrolled in their junior prep school at the age of seven. At the time, I was rather jealous of my friends at our local school, as I had to attend school on Saturday mornings while they enjoyed a two-day weekend.
During the week, I took a bus to school, but on Saturdays my dad drove me to school and went shopping while he was waiting to collect me at lunchtime.
My lifetime interest in both pure science and engineering was sparked at this time. After my dad picked me up from school, we would trawl through army surplus stores, which were common in those days, selling off supposedly obsolete military supplies left over after World War II. We would spend hours looking through shelves filled with parts of old communications equipment, safety equipment and anything else that was no longer considered useful by the armed forces. I was planning to build my first radio receiver, and had taken a book from the local library which contained various circuit diagrams. I think that I became interested in electronics when I wondered what was inside a TV. One day I dismantled our family TV for a look, and put it back together before anyone came home. It didn’t work after that, and suffice to say I was grounded (not in the electrical sense of the word).
I needed three particular valves for my radio; two diodes and a triode. For the younger readers, valves, which the Americans call tubes, are hot cathode vacuum devices that were used for electronic switching and amplification prior to the introduction of semiconductors. How things have changed. When I was designing electronic control equipment thirty years later, I used IGBTs (Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistors). They were attached to the largest heat sinks I could find due to the amount of power that they were controlling. In 1965 I never dreamt that such a device could ever be built.
I eventually found the valves I needed, and bought the whole chassis complete with many resistors and capacitors. The following weekend I found an old variable condenser and a small loudspeaker, and I was ready to start. I cut down and riveted the chassis, wired and soldered in all the parts that were needed, and mounted it all in a small wooden box.
In the evenings after my bedtime, I would run a copper wire up to the opposite corner of my bedroom for an antenna, and listen to Radio Luxembourg. It was very comforting to listen to their DJs while looking at the soft orange light coming from the valves in my radio.
My next project was to build a solid-state radio using “modern” transistors. My dad showed me how to etch copper-backed board with ferric chloride, and using two Mullard OC71 transistors with some other parts I soon had my first portable radio.
My dad did very well from the army surplus stores. He bought an old WWII aviator’s emergency battery with an orange head cap and light for three shillings and sixpence, which is 17.5 pence in modern money. These batteries were automatically switched on by seawater and were used to help Air Sea Rescue locate airmen ditched in the sea. Airmen were much more valuable than their aircraft, and the use of silver in the batteries was more than justified. At home he cut it up, and discovered that it was full of silver compound and magnesium plates. The MOD quartermasters obviously had no idea of the true value of these batteries.
After that we purchased every battery that we could find. He then sold the silver chloride plates to Johnson Matthey for around £4,000. That was big money in those days, as our five-bedroom semidetached home cost £3,100.
In the evenings he also had us going through bags of silver coins to look for ones that were minted before 1947. The melt value of the silver in these coins was much higher than the face value. The same applies to old American half-dollar coins and others, but I think that they will all have been taken by now.
Although my father worked as a government scientist, I think that it was his entrepreneurial activities that encouraged me to start my own business after I gained enough experience in my working career.
He grew up during WWII, and even after the war you would still not be allowed to enter Oxford or Cambridge universities without having studied Latin. He studied at Imperial College London, and was one of their youngest students ever to be awarded a doctorate. I think that I am lucky to be here today. One day when he was cycling to school a V2 rocket impacted a field about a mile away. On this occasion it only killed a few cows.
Apart from my interest in how things work and general engineering, I have also been fascinated by physics. After completing the core courses required in high school, I chose to study physics, pure mathematics and applied mathematics for my advanced grades. For me, subjects such as languages, geography and others may be very interesting to some, but they are not rapidly evolving at the cutting edge of knowledge.
I, along with the rest of the world, think that the pioneering work of Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein was pure genius. One person that I consider should be up there with them is Nikola Tesla. He was also a groundbreaking genius, but I will elaborate on his achievements in later chapters.
One of my sons is now studying for a masters’ degree in physics at the University of Aberdeen. Physics is evolving so rapidly that when we speak, it is clear that many of the things that I was taught at university thirty-five years ago are now known to be incorrect. I was simply taught the best understanding that we had of physics at that time.
I hope that as the reader progresses through this book, he or she will be as captivated by modern science and engineering as I am. I would like to ask the reader to keep an open mind about the issues discussed, and draw their own conclusions from the facts presented.