Amergin -

I hope you do get a chance to visit the museum. With the knowledge that your family spent time in those hillss, it will have even more meaning for you.

Susan in California and Sinsull -

You are right, there are a lot of stories in 8080 miles. In fact, the reason that I make these trips by motorcycle is because stories are inevitable. I once drove a rental truck across the US. Nothing happened. I met no one. On a motorcycle, I feel accessible. People come up and start conversations ingas stations, museums, restaurants, everywhere I stop. Since I have a tendency to be reserved, I need that slight effort on the part of others to meet them. However, once the conversation gets underway, I do just fine.

I can pick a lot of themes out of this trip but I have pretty much covered music related things in the earlier post. I'll write here about some coincidences that happened on the trip.

One story begins more than twenty five years ago on a train running between Boston and New York. I think I have actually written this story on Mudcat a couple of years ago but soemthing happened on this motorcycle trip that fills out the "rest of the story".

Back then, I had been in the club car sitting in on of those big revolving chairs and found myself in a conversation with an old man in a battered hat in the next chair. He had noticed that I was carrying a tripod and had asked if I was a photographer. I explained that I was not but that my wife was and I was carrying the tripod to New York for her. One thing led to another and as the train traveled down the New England coast, we talked about the diffrence in light on the east and west coasts. He was from the west coast and I had spent some time there so we both had opinions on the topic. In fact, we talked a lot about light. After about a half hour of this, a very attractive, well-dressed lady appeared in front of us. I remember that she was very business like and professional as well as polite. She excused herself for having to interrupt my conversation and I assured her that I didn't mind. Hen she turned to the old man and said, and now I am quoting exactly because even after all of these years, her words remain burned into my memory. She said, "Ansel, do you want your schedule now or would you rather wait until we reach New Haven?"

The enormity of the discovery that my traveling companion was one of the greatest photographers of all time and that I had actually been discussing light with someone who understood it as well as anyone who ever lived swept over me. I went back over our converstion and was grateful that I hadn't tried to explain the "Zone Theory" to him. Once I realized who I was talking to, I did manage to take advantage of the situation and ask him about two people, Loren Eisley and Rubinson Jeffers, who I knew from their writings and biographies to have been his friends. I had remembered that he had done the book jacket photos of some of their publications and it was fascinating for me to get a glimpse into the lives of one of my favorite poets and of my favorite naturalist/essayist.

As you might expect, I have told this story a number of times over the past several decades and on this trip I told it again. It came up at my college reunion. One of my classmates, a guy I had not seen since Graduation Day. In talking about what we had done since then, I mentioned some PBS series I had produced and he said that his wife was working now on a PBS documentary with Kevin Burns about the life and work of Ansel Adams. Of course, that was all I needed to tell him about the train ride so many years ago.

"When did this happen?", he asked me when I'd finished. I told him and he looked houghtful.

"I think that woman you described with Ansel was my wife." He called her over and I told the story again. Sure enough, it hasd been her! After all of these years, I had run into the same woman again. (I was pleased to notice that she was still very attractive.)

While driving across Nebraska (did I mention that it was raining?), I remembered an acquintance from years back, an MIT professor I had gotten to know through some mutual friends and muual interests. His own interests were varied and his accomplishments were extraordinary. I had first met him when I was nine years old and went to an MIT Family Day with my uncle who was on the faculty. There, this very pleasant man had demonstrated a special light that he had invented that had the ability to slow down or stop action, even reverse it making it look as though water droplets were gsathering themselves from the bottom of the basin and rising up to the spigot. Of course, although I sisn't know it, this was stroboscopic light and this was the man who had invented it.

He was also an oceanographer with a research vessel named after him (no, his name was not Calypso). He invented sidescan sonar which is of great military importance but also has been used in underwater exploration. On the faculty list, he was Professsor Harold Edgerton but everyone called him Doc.

I met him again during the search for the Confederate submarine, the Hunley and in the search for the Loch Ness Monster. Come to think of it, the Loch Ness Monster search was one of the things that impressed me about Doc. He had looked at the evidence for the existence of an unexplained phenomonon in the loch and had felt that there were enough anomalies to make this a worthwhile subject for serious scientific investigation. While other scientists were saying, "There's no proof that there is a Loch Ness Monster" he was saying there seems to be somethng strange here and whatever is going on seems interesting. Let's go see what we can find out." That I think is the sign of a true, well-disciplined inquiring mind.

I was thinking of Doc as I crossed Nebraska because the broad horizons reminded me of his reminiscence of how he came ot invent the strobe light. Growing up in Nebraska, he had a summer job as a lineman for the power company and often had to work at night. He nopticed that when there was a lightning flash, it lit up the area and that it seemed to freeze the action. He realized that it was a result of a biological feature of sight, "persistence of vision", the same things that makes movies possible. However, in this case, what looked like freezing was due to the extreem short duration of the lightning flash. He figured that if he could come up with a light that could flash at that speed, he could create the same effect at will. Unfortunately, technology was a long way from there THe problem was that any filament that flashed did so by heating up and it took too long for it to cool and for the light to decay. However, years later he figured out how to do this and the result was not just the familiar photographs of a bullet going through an apple and a milk drop splashing, he developed aerial reconnaiscance photography that helped to overcome what had been effective German armor tactics in Italy. In that case, during the night, the Germans would mass armor at a particular point along the front and, come dawn, would puch through the Allied line. The Allies had no alternative but to stretch themselves across the Italian boot so of course they were outnumbered wherever the Germans chose to attack and the casualties were high. It was also seriously slowing the Allied advance up the boot.

The "boffins" realized that the strobe light night help with nightime aerial photography of troop movements but they needed to test out altitude, exposure, etc and in a meeting in England Doc listened to them trying to figure out where would be a good place to run the tests. Everyone agreed that the ideal place would be a large flat place with a few large vertical features. The boffins were puzzled. Doc smiled as he remembered what happened next. He had been sitting quietly listening to the discussion but now he spoke up. "I don't mean to interfere but I thnk you have a place called Stonehenge that should work out pretty welll."

After the testing, the device went to war and each night the US Air Force flew along the front lines. The films were rushed to the darkroom and there were the images of the movement of armor. US tanks were quickly moved into position facing them and in the morning the panzers were met with a surprising amount of force. After a few days of this, the bewildered German general staff changed tactics and the US tank losses fell rapidly.

I was surprised to find out what he was most proud of in his work with strobe light. I had thought hit might be something to do with his military contributions but he said that his favorite discovery was a little drop visible in his milk drop pictures. Until he pointed it out, I didn't realize the significance. Above the crown-like splash is a drop looking suspended in air. It isn't falling, it is rising! It has bounced off the surface and is going back into the air and will fall a a few milliseconds later. What Doc said though was that until he had developed and interpreted these films no one in the world had ever suspected that a liquid bounced like that in a non-chaotic manner. It just didn't spatter or act randomly. This drop could be recreated by anyone who wished to set up the simple experiment.

As I said, I was thinking about Doc as I drove across the Nebrasha highways and was very surprised to see a sign that said "Visit the Edgerton Science Center". My first thought was that there was a town n Nebraska called Edgerton - not so surprising if Doc was from the state. Perhaps his family had been old, original settlers. However, other signs later made me realize that it was a museum named after Doc. Of course I went to visit it.

I struck up a conversation with the curator who told me tha tthe museum had been gven to the town where Doc was born by the late inventor's friends and was primarily for children. It was a hands-on place designed to intrigue children and Doc's friends knew he would have liked that.

I told the curator some of my "Doc stories" that either he had told me or that I had learned from others who had studied or worked with him. Some, such as his observations about lightning and the Stonehenge story are already well known but htere were smaller anecdotes that he liked and made notes as I talked. It was a very pleasant way to remember a man I was lucky enough to have met and who was one of he most inventive minds of the century.

I guess this is enough. It certainly isn't much about music except that i might add that Doc loved to play music and invited me and me then wife to come over to join him and friends in a weekly get-together but somehow we never did. SAnd there is a lesson in that, too.

Sourdough