Dear Kate and Joanna,
Max and I often discussed new and sometimes bizarre ideas. I sometimes recall them very clearly.
For example, two days ago I found that my kitchen fluorescent light was defective. It was emitting random, flickering lights. I decided to continue making tea, a customary task. Suddenly, I found that my perception of colour and distance was distorted and I couldn't pour tea properly.
The experience took me back to the time when your family lived in a semi-detached house on the edge of Sheffield, so it was long ago! There, Max introduced me to the idea of stroboscopic effects.
He told me that in France the investigation of mystery car crashes led to the conclusion that they were caused by the effect of rapid flashes of light. These came about at critical speeds by sunlight passing through poplar trees lining the roads of Northern France. They interfered with the alpha rhythms in the brain.
Max invited me to experience the change in orientation. He got out some equipment and asked me to stare fixedly at a light source, switching on a small motor. After a few seconds my vision was invaded by a host of brightly luminous balls, all coloured purple or orange! When he switched the apparatus off, I was still blinded by this apparition. After a little while I was restored to normal sight. However, after nearly fifty years, I can still recall the lights I saw through the stroboscope.
Later, I rang Max and suggested that we market them as party novelties. He rejected the idea saying it could be dangerous!
We were often fooling around with ideas. I remember that before the invention of photocopiers, the only way of taking copies of documents was by "wet process". This was slow, expensive and involved delays while the copies dried. The only dry process was the dyeline process – the one by which copies were made of tracings. The tracings had to be on translucent paper.
I had the idea of turning the paper translucent. Our company Chemistry Department produced a liquid that made paper translucent. I used a spirit duplicator for the transfer of the liquid to the paper to be copied. (I had several hundred thousands of planning sheets to be copied.) I tried it and it worked! I could make copy documents transparent and take cheap copies!
I arranged for a demonstration for senior management, using a young lady to operate the machine. We were in the middle of a discussion of further applications when we noticed that the young lady's head was resting on the machine. She was unconscious! The Chemistry Lab, without telling me, had used chloroform as an oil dispersant. She was carried out while the observers turned on me, ignoring my offer to knock a hole in the wall and install a fan. The Chief opined: "Clearly, he hasn't enough to do. Give him more work."
Once, Max and I were nearly kicked out of the Science Museum because of our noisy criticism of Stephenson's Rocket locomotive. I'll write another time about the Rocket.
Love,
Conrad
