LocostUSA.com

TRX made reference to Neville Shute's 'Trustee from the Toolroom'

http://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/shuten-t ... -00-h.html

in Limykid's build log. It had been 25 or 30 years since I'd read that book so I settled right down to it again last night, until my wife threw me off the computer. I went to my laptop and turned it into a one-night read. Yes, it is an 'old-fashioned' read, but a good one.

Shute was of the same era as other noted UK authors such as Alistair MacLean (Ice Station Zebra or Guns of Navarone) or Hammond Innes (Wreck of the Mary Deare). Shute had his own success having novels adapted to film (On the Beach) but my favourite read is his autobiography, 'Slide Rule.' Shute (actually Neville Shute Norway) was an aeronautical engineer in the UK, first with deHaviland, then Vickers, and finally as a partner in Airspeed, which produced the Airspeed Anson, the most widely used multiengine trainer in the Commonwealth Air Training Program of WWII. He became a full time author after WWII.

With Vickers, Shute (as Norway) was the structural engineer for the R100 dirigible, one of two (the R101 was produced by a competing government effort) built in the UK in the thirties. Those of you who regard FEA as the norm would be fascinated by the R100's structural design philosophy, which was based on a desire for a simplified but reliable design analysis. The R100 employed fewer ring frames than any other dirigible, largely to reduce the structural loads calculation to a 64 by 64 matrix (as I recall). This was solved by a team of calculators (young ladies with Facit calculators) who worked the solution in parallel until they all got the same answer. Then the scantlings would be revised based on the calculated stresses and they'd do it all over again. A different age ...

_________________
Warren
Isuzu Pickup/SR20DE, +401 COLD frame
Build Log: viewtopic.php?f=35&t=11601

Truly a different age!

On reflection, I suppose I should have included a photo giving some idea of what a Facit calculator looks like ...... determining how it is used is left as a proof for the reader. I think I could still use one: I remember using one 40 years ago to calculate ship hydrostatic particulars.

_________________
Warren
Isuzu Pickup/SR20DE, +401 COLD frame
Build Log: viewtopic.php?f=35&t=11601

I did a brief review of the book on one of the machinist forums a few years ago:

[snip]

Keith Stewart was one of those pudgy little men nobody thought about much. He had his little workshop in his basement, wrote articles for "Miniature Mechanic", and his wife worked in a shop to make ends meet. He's just barely getting by, but he's doing what he wants to do.

His sister and wealthy brother-in-law plan to sail from England, through the Panama Canal, off to Tahiti, and eventually back and north to Vancouver, where they intend to relocate. At his brother-in-law's request, Keith solders up a sealed box for his sister's jewelry and embeds it into some of the concrete ballast of the boat. Keith agrees to keep his 10-year-old niece until her parents make it to Vancouver.

Months later, word comes that the ship has run into a reef near Tahiti. Two bodies were found, and all that was left of the sailboat are the keel and some concrete bits. Their will makes Keith trustee of his niece's inheritance... all 56 pounds of it. Her parents had apparently sold off everything they had and converted it into diamonds before they left.

That jewelry box belongs to his niece, and it's his duty to retrieve it for her if he can... but Keith is a man who seldom leaves his house. He has no passport, no car, no relatives he can impose on, and almost no money. He doesn't even have any friends; just some casual acquaintances among the local model engineering hobbyists. So he starts calling up the only people he knows...

Today we'd call it "networking". And that's really what the book is about; how a reputation can precede you, and a dash of "six degrees of separation."

This book was written by Nevil Shute in the late 1950s. It's written in the style of British fiction of my grandfather's time, which means it's not going to grab anyone by the throat and yank them into the action. But it was worth reading, and I'm keeping my copy...

[/snip]

Richard Feynman talked about the rooms full of women at Los Alamos, running columns of numbers after the equations were broken into calculator-sized bits by the mathematicians. Off in another room they had the guys running the new electronic computer, but they weren't as efficient as the massed calculator attack; apparently they kept getting side-tracked playing with the computer instead of solving problems with it.

Eventually they ran into one problem they couldn't figure out how to solve mathematically. They knew *how*, but there simply wasn't enough computation power available to them. So to figure out how the segmentation of the explosive shell would affect the shock wave, they abandoned mathematics and used empirical methods - they got a sergeant to build a bunch of models, go out into the desert, and blow up some instrument packages. He did that for months...

The explosive was RDX, which poured like thick honey and set up into a solid block. The problem was, air bubbles kept getting trapped in the pour, and they did strange and unpredictable things to the shock wave. So the sergeant had to use a dental drill to cut down to each bubble, then use a syringe to backfill the channel with liquid RDX. We're talking about blocks of explosive the size of an old-time console TV.

That guy got to set off tons of explosive. I never quite decided if he had the best job in the world, or it was a complete Looney Toons scenario...

As an aside, in the movie "On the Beach", based on Shute's book, there's a car race supposedly in Australia, but was clearly Riverside Raceway near Los Angeles. I had the pleasure of driving there half a dozen times.

_________________
Midlana book: Build this mid-engine Locost!, http://midlana.com/stuff/book/
Kimini book: Designing mid-engine cars using FWD drivetrains
Both available from https://www.lulu.com/

Thanks for posting the link to "'Trustee from the Toolroom". I downloaded it the other day and had a good time reading it. I enjoyed it as much as any of the Burt S. Levy series of books from "The Last Open Road" on thru all of the sequels.

_________________
Chuck.

“Any suspension will work if you don’t let it.” - Colin Chapman

Visit my ongoing MGB Rustoration log: over HERE

Or my Wankel powered Locost log : over HERE

And don't forget my Cushman Truckster resto Locostusa.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=17766

+1 on what RX7 said. I put it on my iPhone and have been reading it whenever I have a minute. Really enjoying it.

_________________
Bill H
Winnipeg, MB, Canada

that looks like a real streamlined calculator compared to the one i used in the sixties and seventies when in a drawing office.

talking of big computers, when i worked as a maintainance man at wembley stadium in the eighties, they had an open framed mechanical computer for calculating the bets for the tote, it filled a room about 30' by 30'. the guy who maintained it was the guy who installed it in 1947, i remember his eye sight was failing from hand making small parts to repair it, lots of chains connecting different little tables of calculators but all mechanical, just electric drive motors.

_________________
this story shall the good man teach his son,
and chrispin chrispian shall ne'er go by,
from this day to the end of the world.
but we in it shall be remembered.