The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [65]
The Welding Engineering Department was always underfunded. One of the classes that was taught by my father and in which I participated dealt with resistance welding, a high-current welding process where power supply was of great importance. Everyone has seen the automobile advertisements with the robotic welding machines where a hundred copper electrodes all converge on a car body at once and set off a shower of sparks. Dad pointed out that metal expulsion as evidenced by the sparks usually resulted in a sub-standard weld, something apparently lost on the advertising types who probably thought the drama was a good thing.
I suspect that some of the disdain for "Administrators" came from Dad's sometime disdain for their activities. He would work hard to get research money only to see most of it siphoned off as "overhead," or maybe get some expensive piece of welding or inspection equipment donated, only to have the administration withhold the funds needed to connect it for service.
One of the first assignments was for each of us to choose one of the clunky old resistance welding machines—my choice was a World War II surplus "Capacitor Discharge Welder." Anyway, we were supposed to trace the power for our particular equipment back to its source, an exercise that sent many enterprising students into the many tunnels that carried steam and utility piping and electrical distribution buses throughout the university. In my case, my machine needed some special thyrotron tubes—this was a high-amperage switching device that does the same thing as a transistor, except it was a vacuum tube with a pool of mercury in the bottom. The signal current caused the mercury to evaporate, and that in turn was the conductor for a rush of several thousand amperes to the machine. There were no spares, and they cost a couple of hundred dollars each. We found a couple in the Electrical Engineering Department and boosted them after an evening class. They had more dust on their boxes than a forgotten bottle of wine in an underused cellar. I don't know if they were ever missed, but they gave the machine about an hour of life before the next component failure proved fatal.
One annoying distraction was the heat-treating laboratory, just outside the lecture room door—and also just outside my father's office. Back in those days, in the Welding Engineering Department, we learned about metallurgy and the heat treatment of carbon steel by making a chisel out of steel bar. First, you heated the end to a glowing red, then brought it out to forge on an anvil. Visualize something out of Dante with a dozen students pounding with five-pound hammers—maybe the origin of the expression "the Hammers of Hell."
The X-ray room had thick concrete walls, except for a sheet metal roll-up door. There were signs on the outside of the door telling people of the X-ray hazard, which would suggest that they not linger there. Parking at the university was a problem. Dad used to park his car in front of that door with a sign that said "Car here for radiation protection" that solved his parking problem and seemed to be sufficient to keep the campus cops away. Once at the end of an operating session when the car was not there, the door was opened and there were a couple of neckers pretty far along in their activities. I always wondered if they had any four-armed kids as a result.
Roy McCauley, department chairman in the 1960s, was known to put on lead-lined gloves, run in and pick up the Cobalt Gamma radiation source, move it to where it was needed for an exposure, and then run behind the shields. Such was the dedication of this small group of professionals.
Robert McMaster was known as "Doc" around the Welding Engineering Department. I assume this came from his Ph.D., earned from California Institute of Technology just before