***Editor’s Note: The “I Became An Engineer” blog runs every Friday. To share your story email jennifer.delaosa@advantagemedia.com***
This week’s story comes to us from ECN reader John Randall.
I grew up in Kenya and we had to do everything ourselves. We had no power, water, phone, and all the things we take for granted and use so easily today.
I soon learned I must find out how all these things work. My first thought was to make and manage a power supply. We had a 110 Volt 3 KW generator and some huge lead acid batteries 3000 AH each, 50 of them in total. This posed a huge risk of fire as DC is not very forgiving.
We also designed water pumps that would work from the water pressure in the river by gravity. A small fall about 15 feet gave us enough power to hydraulically pump our water up 75 feet to a storage tank.
Then we turn to a phone system between farms. I wired a single line telephone to three farms using surplus wire from the military. I hated the smell of the wire, which was always hard to get rid of after working with it all day. I found out five years later that the smell on the wire was arsenic used to kill white ants (termites). I guess I was lucky (I was 15 years old at this juncture)!
Then there was the day I thought I could fix a car. It had been running on only two cylinders for a few days out of four. When my dad was away for the day I removed the cylinder head and found the problem was a blown head gasket. My dad was furious when he saw all the engine bits all over the place, until he realized that I had diagnosed the problem. He said, “How did you figure that out?”
What else could I do but be an engineer to figure out how all this stuff works?
Those were great learning years.
Read other stories, here:
- A Note From The Editor: An Engineer’s Story
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of A Small FM Radio
- I Became An Engineer: Because I Loved LEGOs And Tinkertoys
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of The Cool Jackets
- I Became An Engineer: Because My Dad Said Not To
- I Became An Engineer: Because I Couldn’t Stop Tinkering
- I Became An Engineer: Despite Being Bad At Math
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of Christmas Lights
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of Uncle Chet
- I Became An Engineer: Because I Can’t Stop Asking ‘Why?’
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of Star Trek (Specifically Montgomery Scott)
- I Became An Engineer: Because I Was A Really Lucky Nerd
- I Became An Engineer: But ‘Nobody Knows’ Why
- I Became An Engineer: Because I Couldn’t Be An Astronaut
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of Nuclear Submarines
- I Became An Engineer: Because No One Was Hiring Shoe Salesmen
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of Mr. Kenny, The TV/Radio Repair Man
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of A Book (And My Mom)
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of A Cattle Ranch
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of A Wise Father And The Possibility Of Death
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of An Evil Mastermind
- I Became An Engineer: To Get Off The Tractor
- I Became An Engineer: Because Of My Rodeo Coach