[AT] OT NCSU

[Larry D Goss]

FWIW, Houck and Hammond are no longer with us, but Garland Hilliard is 
living in the mountains of North Carolina and spends his time carving 
absolutely magnificent objects out of wood.  He does not use the kits of 
carving objects that are available from some supply houses and craft shops, 
but rather wanders through the mountains and picks up suitable "drift wood" 
that has unusual form that may suggest a bird, animal, or other living 
thing.  He then turns these into very realistic artistic still-life's which 
bring several hundred dollars each.  Some people collect decorative 
porcelains from Europe.  I would love to be able to afford to collect some 
of Garland's carvings.

And then, there are those of us who collect tractors.  :-)

Larry

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Bruce" <davidbruce at yadtel.net>
To: "Antique tractor email discussion group" <at at lists.antique-tractor.com>
Sent: Thursday, August 30, 2007 10:23 AM
Subject: Re: [AT] OT NCSU


> I'm a bit younger than Charlie but my roommate was in engineering when
> we were at NCSU  (see we were past the cow college days - then called
> Moo U) and I remember him mentioning Houck and Hammond (probably
> Hilliard also but I'm not sure).  I was in Textile Chemistry so math was
> a constant thing.  By the time I was there calculators (mid to late
> 1970's) were everywhere (instead of engineering students walking around
> with slide rules clipped to their belts they had calculators). I was the
> same however I found a slide rule for sale at the student store for $5
> so I bought it and carried it as a backup - Post as I recall..
> David
> NW NC
> who should be out on the MF 35 mowing the jungle (crabgrass grows here
> even with no water).
>
>
> Larry D Goss wrote:
>> [WAY off topic.  Delete if not interested in a bunch of trivia.]
>>
>> Marshall plays things pretty low-key.  You have to modify the URL to 
>> bring
>> up the homepage and then go searching.  Way down in the middle, you will
>> find him listed along with the fact that he started the website.  But you
>> have to know to look for his name or you won't find it.
>>
>> Small world, Charlie.  I knew Houck, Hammond, Hilliard, and all those 
>> other
>> guys in Raleigh.  Back in the 60's, the "route to teaching" in the 
>> eastern
>> schools was for a retiring military officer (particularly graduates of 
>> West
>> Point and Annapolis) to apply for a position in the Graphics department.
>> Over the years, all the faculty in that department have been my 
>> professional
>> colleagues and personal friends.  They still are.  It's been less than 24
>> hours since I communicated with some of them by email.
>>
>> I still have my original sliderule too (a Pickett)  but I sold most of my
>> collection to Bear on his way to the Portland show with H. L. about six
>> years ago.  I have a six-foot Post Versalog hanging on the wall above the
>> computers in my office.  I used that to teach students how to use a
>> sliderule for the first fifteen years I was in a classroom, but by the 
>> late
>> 70's that technology was pretty much left in the dust.  None of those big
>> engineering tool companies you and I have mentioned are still in 
>> business.
>>
>> What's really strange about what was taught in introductory engineering
>> courses is that Gasparde Monge (the father of Descriptive Geometry) had
>> enough influence over Napoleon Bonaparte that he got that discipline
>> incorporated into the curriculum at the military school for French 
>> officers
>> at Meziere (sp) over the objections of all the other staff military 
>> officers
>> Napoleon had in 1803.  All the other military officers wanted to use
>> calculus-based instead of algebra-based science in the curriculum, but 
>> Monge
>> insisted on the latter, particularly using geometry to calculate the
>> ballistic trajectories of cannon balls so that "test volleys"
>> didn't have to be used.  The bottom line is that the Western
>> world continued to use algebra and geometry for more than 150 years 
>> beyond
>> the time that it should have been used.  MIT was the first US university 
>> to
>> make the complete conversion to calculus back in 1955, and other 
>> engineering
>> schools have slowly followed suite.  The split that developed between
>> engineering and engineering technology is fundamentally based on the
>> difference in how sciences are taught.
>>
>> Descriptive geometry was a military secret during and after the 
>> Napoleonic
>> wars.  We were so desperate to have it taught in this country that an 
>> envoy
>> traveled to France and hired Claude Crozet (student of Monge) to teach it 
>> at
>> West Point, sight
>> unseen.  When he arrived, he discovered to his dismay that West Point was
>> "in the sticks" and none of the
>> cadets spoke or understood French well enough to understand what they 
>> were
>> being taught.  He ended up writing the first text for the material in
>> English (1821).  His wife was so upset at living conditions at West Point
>> that Crozet quit a few years later and he moved his family to Virginia 
>> where
>> he
>> supported himself by surveying and investing in schemes to build a water
>> passage from the east coast to the Ohio river (up the Potomac across to 
>> the
>> Gauley, down to New River, the Kanawha, and into the Ohio at
>> Gallipolis-Point
>> Pleasant.)  There are still a few of those first edition books on
>> Descriptive geometry floating around.  I have seen one in Texas and one 
>> in
>> Tuscaloosa, Alabama.  It's a large book with fold out pages, bound in
>> leather, gold-leaf printing on the cover, etc. -- pretty nice looking for 
>> a
>> government publication by today's standards.
>>
>> In among the equipment that I sold to Bear were a couple of special
>> sliderules from the Korean war era that were used for aiming Howitzers. 
>> As
>> late as that time, our military was still making regular use of the
>> technology "forced" on us by Gasparde Monge.
>>
>> Enough already.  Let's talk tractors.
>>
>> Larry
>>
>>
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