My kind of work...15 2 5 (15) 25 1 23

An excerpt from my autobiography...15 2 5

Normally it has been the other way round but today I wish to incorporate an excerpt from my autobiography as blog: 

Looking back at the kind of work I did over the years and contrasting it to those about me, when the teachers in my wife, eldest son and brother spring to mind, I see my various jobs as being more hands-on as opposed to sitting at a desk to draw up a lesson-preparation which is altogether a more cerebral activity…

Let me give a few examples…like when I started my work 3 days after finishing school aged 15, the lowest of the low, I began the very first day by doing something with my hands: one of the older guys, Ian, took me to the Boiler House to show me where to collect the various samples of water then we returned to the Laboratory and he showed me the various types of titration which had to be performed in order that acid and alkali levels could be determined, water hardness levels temporary and/or so-called permanent. Thereafter we returned to the Boiler-house to its Chemical Store on this second visit and he showed me which chemicals needed to be added to the various water collection points, the in-coming river water, from the River Roach originating to the north of our next town Rochdale in limestone country, thereby containing minerals which rendered it temporary hard. Since the main job of the Boiler-house was to raise steam to drive the steam-turbine for generating electricity and also to supply heat to the paper machine drying cylinders, the water required for such operations of necessity had to be pure. My first job, central to the whole operation then, was to remove all chemicals such as calcium carbonate to prevent their otherwise depositing in the pipe-work which carried the water and/or steam to its destination.

Occasionally I would have what you might like to call an off-day when nothing seemed to go quite right, like if I broke a pipette or a burette after returning to the lab with my water samples, and if this happened it was no big deal unless after first one such breakage there followed a second one, with each successive breakage I guess one’s confidence began to slip away just a wee bit more… On other days it might be one of the glass measuring cylinders which stood upright maybe 30 cm about 14 inches off the bench, that crashed to the floor, or one of the graduated flasks generally of 1 litre capacity: great bulbous things with flat bottoms so they could sit squarely on the surface of the bench but then drawn out to contain narrow necks of maybe ½ inch in diameter, about 2 cm say, so that one could with precision fill the flasks to their graduation levels of 1000 cm3 or 1000 millilitres, locating the bottom of the water’s meniscus to sit just on the graduation mark, and I don’t know with what accuracy say 1000 plus minus 0,01 ml or even 0,001 ml..? In any event breaking these was a bigger deal, and then one collected not a few long looks and one began to wonder whether one’s career as a budding chemist was going to be short-lived.

So one job followed another and no sooner had one learned to do one set of jobs there was another set to take its place. In the fullness of time the job of testing the boiler waters and treating them with chemicals was relinquished altogether with the hiring of a new junior in one Keith Brierley.

Later I would learn how to make paper hand-sheets during pulp evaluation exercises: disintegrating the samples of wood pulp in a cylindrical vessel made of brass which stood maybe 25 cm about 12 inches off the bench and fitted with a propeller blade stirrer which created such a deep vortex in the water it contained, once the power switch was hit, that the dry or soaked pulp sheets disintegrated in no time at all, giving rise to an aqueous slurry of the individual fibres: birch from birch pulps, pine from pulps like Husum, a town in northern Sweden, or spruce fibres from Kuusankoski “Bond Special” Sulphite Pulp in the south of Finland for example. Alternatively we had the whole range of fibres to choose from North American and Canadian forests, in redwoods and sequoia for example, or eucalyptus from South America, Georgia Pacific just one of N. American companies we took pulp from.

Have a good day everyone as I hope you enjoy my break from tradition..?