He starts by paying homage to the great boiler men of the past: Evans, Stephenson and Robert Fulton. Stephenson is especially interesting because he was illiterate til he was 18 and some of his inventions were presumed to be stolen because he had such a gruff exterior.
Hawkins begins his book by explaining what goes through his mind when he arrives at the shop, smells the air, and looks around:
That's beautiful, isn' it? Few things are more interesting in print than a man explaining his passion for his work. Imagine what Shakespeare or Eugene O'Neil could have done with raw material like this!
If you've never heard of this it may be because Von Braun believed an Earth-orbiting space station had to be built first, and he was talked out of that by a young American engineer from the Grumman company.
“Imagine what Shakespeare or Eugene O'Neil could have done with raw material like this!”
ReplyDeleteIt reminds me of a passage from a 1934 novel “Call It Sleep”, by Henry Roth.
Wiki says: “A young boy (David) growing up in the Jewish immigrant ghetto of New York's Lower East Side in the early twentieth century...David becomes fascinated with the story of Isaiah 6...specifically, the image of an angel holding a hot coal to Isaiah's lips and cleansing his sin….some older truant children force him to accompany them and drop a piece of zinc onto a live trolley-car rail. The electrical power released from this becomes associated in David's mind with the power of God and Isaiah's coal."
In the book's climax, a brutal family quarrel erupts:
(From Wiki)"Albert (his father) makes as if to kill his son with the whip. As the others restrain Albert, David flees the apartment and returns to the electrified rail. This time, he touches the third rail with a long [steel] milk dipper in an attempt to create light and receives an enormous electric shock.”
Here’s the passage:
“Power! Incredible, barbaric power! A blast, a siren of light within him, rending, quaking, fusing his brain and blood to a fountain of flame, vast rockets in a searing spray! Power! The hawk of radiance raking him with talons of fire, battering his skull with a beak of fire, braying his body with pinions of intolerable light. And he writhed without motion in the clutch of a fatal glory, and his brain swelled and dilated till it dwarfed the galaxies in a bubble of refulgence -- Recoiled, the last screaming nerve clawing for survival.”
Wooooowwwww! Many thanks for the interesting comment. "Call It Sleep" is now on my list of books to read. I love the sentense that starts with "The hawk of radiance."
ReplyDeleteI'm a liberal artsy guy myself but descriptions of the real world seem oddly unsatisfying when they leave out the technology...the things...that shape our lives.