Oh where has time gone?
I know where we have gone - South Africa in April and it was wonderful. In the old citadel in the centre of Capetown there is an IEEE plaque celebrating the first use of wireless for military operations during the Anglo-Boer war. The interesting thing is of course that the army had a very bad experience while the Navy did not. Early radios needed a good earth connection which the land in South Africa did not always provide, but the sea did. We stayed at Fish Hoek which is two bays away from the Simonstown naval base. The museum there had several examples of six inch guns of the type that my father was involved with installing at Fort Shannon in 1942. Simonstown also boasts a converted cableship, Cable Restorer see
http://atlantic-cable.com/Cableships/CableRestorer/index.htm. It is now part of the Simonstown Museum and is used as the Roaring Forties restaurant.
Since last writing the first draft of a book has been completed, cumbersomely titled:
"Forecasting History: (a curious engineer's view of the history of predictive meteorology)"
Not really sure who it is for or who might publish it or whether it should just appear on this website. The chapters headings are
1 The first steps in a quest to satisfy curiosity why write the book
2 Weather Lore just as it says
3 Standard Time time delivered by telegraph
4 The beginnings of a UK meteorological service weather collected by telegraph
5 The science underlying meteorology exactly what it says
6 Meteorology and flight exactly what it says
7 Forecasting and World War II The weather war is fascinating
8 Bits and Pieces on the road to modern forecasting Weather balloons and tephigrams
9 Weather models old and 'new' A self-indulgence that could be omitted
Today we are planning to mount the material that comprised my contribution to the October 2008 meeting on the1858 trans-Atlantic cable. There was to be two contributions, but when it was discovered that the first of my two presentations was to be made in a very short time it was impossible to fit in all the material. For that reason the content was distributed between the oral presentation and the published paper, which can effectively be read as one contribution. The second oral presentation and the second paper were identical in content, so that only one has been placed on the website.
It is so gratifying to see that the website is being so useful. There have been several email contacts on technical matters, but there is also a family social networking aspect. Only today we had two emails from relatives of Anne's who saw their grandmother in a picture in one of the papers on the site. I wonder do they know about their relative, William S. Pilfold, manager of the Mexican Cable Co offices in Galveston who was drowned along with his children during the flooding that followed the hurricane that made landfall there on 8 September 1900 see www.gthcenter.org/exhibits/storms/1900/. I have never been able to understand that there was no reference to his wife amongst the casualties. Did she escape or was she not there at the time?
All of this make me think that there is room for a 'bits and pieces' section on the website, a place for relevant family histories. Then maybe I will get back to my project of completing a contextual record of the craft/artwork and military career of my father, Maurice F. (de) Cogan. The only corpus of his work that is not yet available on-line is his extensive medical illustrations. What is at http://www2.cmp.uea.ac.uk/~ddc/Maurice%20Project/ needs editing and reduction in the size of the individual jpeg files.
