Encounter With the Washing Machine Wringer

Even after all these years of association with the space program I am still amazed at the progress of technology during my life time, especially the progression from tube type electronics to micro-circuitry that has made such great changes in our ability to communicate and handle data.  I have observed that every new technology development comes with fears that it may be misused or present some sort of hazard to the populous.  

My first encounter with new technology and it danger came when our family acquired a wringer washing machine about the time I was just starting to walk.  The washing machine precipitated an incident that physically scared me for life.  That incident is in my memory only because of its repeated telling by my mother and grandmother.  Apparently, the trauma of the event completely erased it from my conscious memory. 

   

Every Monday Mama Weaver would come over to our house to help Mother with the wash.  In our washroom was a wringer washing machine and two #3 galvanized wash tubs sitting on a bench beside it.  When the clothes had been sufficiently sloshed about and agitated in the machine, they would be taken out  of the washer and put thru the wringer and dropped into a tub of clean water for  the first rinse; then the wringer head would be swung around to the other tub and the clothes would be put thru the wringer into the  other tub for the second rinse.  Lastly, the clothes would be put thru the wringer one last time and into a basket for carrying outside where they would be hung on the clothes lines to dry.  

Occasionally, as the garments were fed into the wringer, one of them would fail to drop into the tub and continue around one of the wringer rollers.  It only took a couple of extra turns for the thickness to build up and cause the safety mechanism to pop the two rollers apart and stop the wringing action.  After some tugging and prying the tangled garment would be removed, the mechanism reengaged and the wringing of clothes resumed.

One wash day I played and watched as the ladies did the wash.  My sister, Nancy, was helping by guiding the clothes into the rinse tubs.  However, no one was watching the little boy when he reached up to examine the pretty pink rubber rollers.  My screams and the “clunk” of the rollers popping apart quickly got their attention.  My left arm was stuck between the rollers up to the elbow as I hung suspended five inches off the floor.  For a moment everyone else joined me in screaming.  As Mother held me, somehow Mama Weaver  managed to extract my now red and swollen arm from the wringer.

Wash day came to a halt as the priority became to get me to the doctor for they were sure that my arm was crushed.  They wrapped my arm in one of the freshly washed towels from the basket and since Mama Weaver did not drive she held me in her arms as we sped the nine miles to the doctor’s office in Tuscaloosa.  My cries soon subsided to an occasional sob or whimper but Nancy cried most of the way about her little brother’s broken arm.

After an examination, the doctor assured them that my arm was not crushed but it was badly bruised and I had a deep wound on the underside  of my forearm where all the the layers of skin had been scraped away by the turning action of the rubber roller.  The healing process took a long time and many bandage changes and left me with a permanent scar about half the width of my arm.

Copyright 2012© Willie E. Weaver 

All rights reserved.  Its is unlawful to reproduce 

this in any form without the express permission

of the author.

JOHN and RUTH

My former pastor, John, was a passionate man.  He was passionate about preaching the gospel of Christ.  He was passionate about playing the piano.  And, oh yes, he was passionately in love with Ruth.  

As a young man, John preached the gospel in tent-meetings across the South with the Rev. Glenn V. Tingley.  One of the churches which had its roots in those tent meetings was the Alliance Church in Gadsden, Alabama.  John went to Toccoa Falls Bible College in the mountains of north Georgia to study to be a christian minister.

Ruth was an instructor in Bible History and Greek.  By her own admission, she was an old maid school teacher and intended to serve the Lord in the capacity of training preachers and missionaries for the rest of her life.  John took some of Ruth’s classes and was quite taken with her.  On the close-knit campus, their paths crossed almost daily.  Perhaps, John even began to plan chance meetings.  Ruth was several years his senior so he knew that it was unlikely that a real romance could develop between them.  The rules of the college forbid fraternization between staff and student, so their relationship remained that of student and teacher and of good friends.  Still, for John, there was an attraction that he could not lay aside all through college.  

After the graduation ceremony, John found Ruth in the crowd to have one last conversation with his friend.  When he told her that he was headed to pastor a new church plant in Gadsden, Alabama, she asked him to promise to come back to the campus in a year and tell her about his first year of ministry and how the work in Gadsden was doing.

John plunged into his task for a year and the Gadsden church grew as souls were added to the family of God.  John was consumed in his ministry but as the days went by, he became more and more convinced that Ruth was the woman that God had chosen for him.  He determined that he would pursue a more serious relationship with her.  As a successful pastor, he could offer her a house and home and an opportunity to serve the Lord in a growing work.  

He was convinced that this was the right thing to do, but still, there was a lingering doubt.  What if she rejected him.  With much prayer, he set out for Toccoa.  If his plea fell on deaf ears, he was ready to take that as a sign from God and to go on without her to the work that God had laid before him. 

He arrived on campus on the last day of regular classes.  He went directly to Ruth’s class which was about to begin.  He entered the room with the students and quietly slipped into a seat at the back of the room.  A few students noticed this intrusion but Ruth seemed not to notice her extra student.  She proceeded with a final lesson and then a concise review of the semester's work.  John sat there content to be back in her presence but soon found himself listening intently as if he had to take the exam.  She concluded the review, reminded the class of the scheduled time for the exam and dismissed them with a prayer.  

Over the next week, as Ruth administered and graded exams, they managed to renew their friendship.  By the end of the week, a proposal had been made and accepted and a wedding date set.

John and Ruth went north to be married in her home church in Pennsylvania.  They were driven there by an older minister and his wife in their Ford A-Model Roadster.  If you remember, the Roadster had only a front seat in the cab and an open-air Rumble Seat which was where the trunk is on modern autos.   When the weather was clear, Ruth and John sat in the Rumble Seat.  When it rained, all four of them crowded into the cab on the front seat.  Now, that seat is not wide enough for four so when it rained, Ruth sat on John’s lap.  In later years, John would reminisce, with a chuckle, of that time of closeness as symbolic of their closeness through their years.

He and Ruth raised four children and he preached the gospel as the pastor of several other churches.  He preached the gospel on a missionary trip to India.  He preached the gospel as pastor of an International Church in Cambodia.  He preached the gospel as a traveling evangelist.

From the evangelist road, he and Ruth came with their travel trailer to pastor our church and stayed on to shepherd us for several years until failing health led him to resign.  After a time of recover, he began to accept an occasional evangelistic engagement.  He went back to his first pastorate, the Gadsden church, for a series of meeting and while there he fell sick and went to be with the Lord.  

A SOLID STATE DEMULTIPLEXER for the SATURN

This is an account of just one of the many times where NASA helped  push our electronic world out of the old technology and into the transistor/solid-state electronic era.  I have wanted to tell this story for some time, but have just recently taken the time to write it down.

The development of the SATURN system of launch vehicles proceeded from the Saturn 1 - Block 1 to the Saturn 1 - Block 2, and then to Saturn 1B -Block 1, and Saturn 1B - Block 2, and then on to the Saturn 5.  We began to expand and upgrade our ground test equipment as new technology and schedule considerations presented the opportunities. In our telemetry ground stations, we discarded the oscillograph recorders, whose long scrolls of data had to go through a photographic development and drying process, and installed recorders that used thermal sensitive paper that came out of the machines fully developed.   

We had performed the Redstone and Jupiter telemetry testing with ground stations whose electronics were almost entirely based on vacuum tube technology.  During Mercury/Redstone testing we acquired some equipment that used the new transistor technology in special circuits.  The flight equipment of the Saturn rocket would make more use of transistor circuits.  

Our first real leap into the world of transistors was when we added a new set of signal discriminators in preparation for Saturn tests.  Many of our engineers and technicians had little knowledge or experience with transistor circuits.  Luckily, we had Tom Flanders on our contractor support staff.  Tom had taught transistor circuits at Georgia Tech while getting his masters degree in electronics.  He left the academic world and hired on with our NASA contractor, Chrysler Corporation.  We got approval, through the MSFC training department, for him to teach Transistor Circuits to all those in the laboratory who desired such training.  That worked out well for NASA and for those who took the training.

The Saturn 1st stage data system had flight multiplexes that placed the output of 300 sensors into a data stream and sent it to a ground station where a demultiplexer would separate the 300 signals.  Our existing demultiplexer could process the 300 signal data stream, but it suffered from over heating and vacuum tube failures.  Also, during operation it required constant adjustments.  We were in dire need of a replacement before we began the Saturn 1B and Saturn V tests.  We had talked with several vendors in the telemetry market about the possibility of a demultiplexer based on transistor technology but none of them offered such an unit . One vendor did offer to supply a transistor based demultiplexer on a cost-plus development contract.  

Tom Flanders had been working with the technician who was responsible for the demultiplexer in an effort to solve some of its problems.   He told me that rather than waste his time on the old machine I should let him just build a new machine.  He assured me that he could do that with transistor logic boards and other components currently available on the market.  I asked him and my lead telemetry technician, Prince Jones, to explore his idea further and if it still seemed feasible, to bring me a proposal which we could take to our Advanced Projects office for possible funding.  

When they had the proposal ready, we presented it to Paul Davis, the Laboratory lead for Advanced Projects.  This was the same Paul Davis that I had worked for in the Measurement Test Section during my first Coop session.  He gave us approval to proceed and made funds available for the equipment and parts we needed.

I assigned another contractor engineer, Earl Benson, to work with them.  The designation for the effort and eventually the final Design became “BFJ” after the thee men working on the project.  Along the way some doubters begin to say BFJ stood for “Big Fat Joke”. However, in a few weeks, they produced a breadboard version that met the basic requirements.  Along the way, Earl Benson left the project and Charles Mandy took his place, but the BFJ name stuck.

Several more weeks to work out the component layout and design the control panel and, we had a working unit that fit neatly in three drawers of a standard equipment rack and needed only moderate cooling.   Whereas, the old model occupied 3 standard racks and required massive cooling.  We worked with the designers of the flight multiplexer in a series of verification tests to prove we had a design that could reliably process the output of the flight multiplexer.

We then contracted with Brown Engineering to build units for our Systems Test telemetry ground station.  We also made copies of the design documentation available to other NASA groups and to any vendor that may want to supply similar units for the program.  

Thomas E. Flanders, Charles A. Mandy and  Prince T. Jones

co-authored a technical paper describing their work.

“A SOLID STATE DEMULTIPLEXER” 

(NASA MSFC publication SR-QUAL-65-53), 

  

Mr. Flanders presented the paper at the 

1965 International Telemetry Conference 

at the von Braun Civic Center 

in Huntsville Alabama.