Old-School Hackers
My mom's uncle Bob passed away last night. That's too bad, I never really spent a lot of time with him, and I didn't even know he existed until about a year ago, when I was traveling through southern Utah with my family and we decided to pop in and visit. He was awesome.
While I'm not really active in the DIY community, I always had that mentality- when I was a kid, I'd spend days playing with my Erector set or taking apart toasters and hard drives, eventually graduating to cars and motorcycles, and finally getting into the software side of computers. I consider breaking, fixing and building things an essential part of life, but anything I can do pales in comparison to Uncle Bob. He lived through the Great Depression, and spent most of his life in a farming community that never really made it out of the depression. He never threw anything away, and his back yard was a massive junk yard- the kind of place that car people fantasize about. Old tractors, vintage Fords, Chevys, Cadillacs, and a weather-beaten-but-mostly-intact International Harvester (remember Mater from the film Cars?). Most of them aren't salvageable, but there are some gems. He flew a Cessna until its hangar collapsed in a windstorm, at which point he bought a Corvette "so he could still fly." Like many of us, he was a serial career changer, doing what he thought was interesting, moving on when he found something else.
Uncle Bob had a perpetual motion machine (Except he didn't like people calling it that, because that's impossible. It was a "generator") that would lift a weight up an inclined plane, let it slide down, powering a generator that charged a battery that in turn would lift the weight up... I have no idea how it was supposed to work, because he never did figure out the friction issue. Maybe somebody here has ideas. It was a pretty cool bit of fabrication, at any rate.
No point to this post really, I've just been meaning to write about him since I met him. We could all learn a lot from the hot rodders, builders, mechanics, and DIY-enthusiasts-by-necessity of past generations.
If not, they still have great stories.
While I'm not really active in the DIY community, I always had that mentality- when I was a kid, I'd spend days playing with my Erector set or taking apart toasters and hard drives, eventually graduating to cars and motorcycles, and finally getting into the software side of computers. I consider breaking, fixing and building things an essential part of life, but anything I can do pales in comparison to Uncle Bob. He lived through the Great Depression, and spent most of his life in a farming community that never really made it out of the depression. He never threw anything away, and his back yard was a massive junk yard- the kind of place that car people fantasize about. Old tractors, vintage Fords, Chevys, Cadillacs, and a weather-beaten-but-mostly-intact International Harvester (remember Mater from the film Cars?). Most of them aren't salvageable, but there are some gems. He flew a Cessna until its hangar collapsed in a windstorm, at which point he bought a Corvette "so he could still fly." Like many of us, he was a serial career changer, doing what he thought was interesting, moving on when he found something else.
Uncle Bob had a perpetual motion machine (Except he didn't like people calling it that, because that's impossible. It was a "generator") that would lift a weight up an inclined plane, let it slide down, powering a generator that charged a battery that in turn would lift the weight up... I have no idea how it was supposed to work, because he never did figure out the friction issue. Maybe somebody here has ideas. It was a pretty cool bit of fabrication, at any rate.
No point to this post really, I've just been meaning to write about him since I met him. We could all learn a lot from the hot rodders, builders, mechanics, and DIY-enthusiasts-by-necessity of past generations.
If not, they still have great stories.
posted by mckt at
12:41 PM
2 Comments:
MATER=FRANK
By
Anonymous, At
March 10, 2010 1:15 PM
My Father was a mechanic and avid hot rod builder. He rarely wore out a set of tires before moving on to another car. I learned a great deal from him and his "Fix and build anything" attitude. What you said makes a lot of sense and I think if these guys would've grown up in our generation.. they'd be hackers like us (Breaking to fix and fixing to break heh). Cheers to the old school hackers and hopefully we'll have some interesting stories ourselves when it's all said and done.
By
aaron, At
March 10, 2010 3:50 PM
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