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Parental museum pieces
Jul. 14th, 2019 08:49 amA couple of years ago I mentioned selling a seventy-year-old radio. My father had set it up for me in my first bedroom; its antenna was a long wire that he rigged to hang along the back yard like a washing line. I remember his surprise when in a technology museum he saw display cases with vacuum tubes; he recognized some of them as being normal components that he knew how to use. I similarly inherited his slide rules, etc.
A common pastime with museum displays for me is spotting items, typically technology or office equipment, that I recall from my childhood. I forgot to mention that belowdecks on the RRS Discovery on Friday I had a couple more instances of such. They weren't exact matches but finds that felt very familiar to me included a wooden box with a sliding lid that one can use as a pencil case or suchlike and an electric desk fan made by the General Electric Company (the English one, not the American General Electric of the Fortune 100) with a horizontal control knob that one slides from one position to another.
It makes sense that my parents' household included some old items. Their early lives were rather austere so their habits were correspondingly frugal and, being most comfortable in analog electronics and light engineering, my father was good at repairing things, even darning his own socks. I would not be surprised if he had acquired the electric fan second-hand and rewired it at some point to extend its life.
Update: Another game I play is to spot my late parents' possessions in period movies. For instance, my father's electro-mechanical calculator crops up in a few. The larger surprise so far was my mother's vacuum cleaner turning up in
A common pastime with museum displays for me is spotting items, typically technology or office equipment, that I recall from my childhood. I forgot to mention that belowdecks on the RRS Discovery on Friday I had a couple more instances of such. They weren't exact matches but finds that felt very familiar to me included a wooden box with a sliding lid that one can use as a pencil case or suchlike and an electric desk fan made by the General Electric Company (the English one, not the American General Electric of the Fortune 100) with a horizontal control knob that one slides from one position to another.
It makes sense that my parents' household included some old items. Their early lives were rather austere so their habits were correspondingly frugal and, being most comfortable in analog electronics and light engineering, my father was good at repairing things, even darning his own socks. I would not be surprised if he had acquired the electric fan second-hand and rewired it at some point to extend its life.
Update: Another game I play is to spot my late parents' possessions in period movies. For instance, my father's electro-mechanical calculator crops up in a few. The larger surprise so far was my mother's vacuum cleaner turning up in
Under the Shadow(2016).
