Chapter 4

The bus trip to Toronto was boring but I managed to get a seat that had some light and I buried my nose in a Chemistry book from the library. When things quieted down, I was able to lean on a metal partition and get some sleep. Surprisingly nobody recognised me. At fifteen minutes after seven in the morning we got into the bus station. I had got my bag from overhead and felt bad because I had to have help to both put it in place and retrieve it.

A familiar suit and face was waiting in the station for before me. I was glad to see that both of us had smiles.

"This way Sir. Mr Holtzman is waiting for you."

"I am sorry for getting you up so early. I could have taken a city bus over."

"Think nothing of it. It is the changes in routine that I like about my job and this is one of them."

"I like change too but not like the old Chinese curse. I do wish I had your ability to fight or shoot when I needed it just a short time ago."

"I wish you did too but then I would get less to do."

Mr Holtzman was waiting at the door and trying to get out was a little girl intent on seeing me. She pushed her way out and ran a dozen feet yelling, "Daddy, daddy, you came back."

I picked the girl up and swung her around before putting her back on her feet. "I missed you a lot and so do the other girls. They can't wait for your next visit. Now let's get inside before a bug bites your bum." I pretended to try to pinch her and she screamed like the little girl she was and ran into the house.

John Holtzman put out his hand and we shook. With his other hand on my shoulder he guided me into his very large and quite expensive home.

"It's good to see you Jeff. Won't you have a seat with us? We were holding off breakfast until you arrived."

"I certainly will but I am amazed that you were able to restrain that eating machine standing before us."

From closer to the floor we heard, "I don't eat that much — do I Grampy?"

"Of course you don't. You're a growing girl and need your food. Now why don't you take Jeff's hand and show him to the washroom to freshen up then bring him to the kitchen?"

"Com'on, I'll show you."

When we returned I saw that the kitchen was very large and fitted out with all the latest appliances. The room was capable of serving a large party that might number into the hundreds and I wondered how many servants this man had.

We discussed mundane topics and my school. I went through the subjects I wanted to be tested in and how far I went or wanted to go in each.

John said, "Tell me more about your decision to take Home Economics."

"As you know I'm still a boy and will remain that way for a while yet. I have learned a lot about human nature when I decided to not be shy anymore, I needed to learn more. Girls, I find are such interesting creatures. They give their heart unstintingly one minute and want to rip yours out the next. I may take the rest of my life to study them but it should be fun."

"I just can't see me doing that at your age. Then again I was not as shy at the first and only slowly grew out of it. You on the other hand have become quite a lady's man all of a sudden."

"Many young boys have girlfriends but their goals and methods do not necessarily change until later in life. I just sharpened my view of what I want in life and I am actively pursuing it. Home Ec is not quite one of the bases that need be touched, still, it shows that I'm not afraid to step out on a branch. One day, I think all children should take the course. There will be no stigma then, and perhaps we will have happier families with the male taking a fair share of the load."

"So you are into social planning now. What else?"

"Well, I have been thinking of making money. On the trip from the bus station here I thought of one more project."

"What is that Jeff?"

"Your driver seems to be very competent. Some people like that choose to wear sunglasses of the aviator type used by the American pilots during the last war. You can make more of this type but with plastic polarised lenses. A single light metal bar supports the frame across the top of the lenses and a support comes down to straddle the nose. Simple rivets are used to mount the lenses."

"What is so great about sunglasses, Jeff?"

"I see them gaining popularity. I would have one factory make expensive units like Foster Grants and two other ones making cheap knock-offs. The trick is getting good designers to make chic units then getting movie stars and other notables to wear your products in public."

"So that will make a lot of money?"

"It should but it reminded me of contact lenses. Glass lenses are common and there are now plastic ones. I want to look for a plastic lens that will be soft and permeable to oxygen that let's the eye breathe and allow longer contact with the eye surface. These can be coloured to change a person's appearance and also be polarised."

"Is this going to make money?"

"This should make a lot of money as people shift from lenses on frames to invisible ones on the eyeball itself. This project is well beyond my limited abilities and I just considered it a good place to start. The lenses used in sunglasses can be improved though in some of the coatings. I just have to find them."

"Is this the organic material you were going find?"

"It wasn't, but it is one of them now." I had worn contact lenses and in my later years and I even remember the type of plastics used. "What I came here for was to find the right plastics to replace glass in containers. Plastic will rot eventually but glass stays the way it was formed or in broken fragments forever. When I get the right plastic then we need to find a glass bottling machine and an engineer to change it to work with plastic. Getting a soft drink manufacturer to bottle with my product will make many millions."

"Why would they shift from glass to plastic? They have a lot of capital tied up in glass."

"Plastic is lighter to carry, the bottle will not break in the bottling plant, on the truck delivering it, the grocery shelf or in front of the final customer. The glass bottles sometimes are contaminated from previous use. The plastic bottle is brand new all the time. The uses for plastic bottles would extend from milk, soda and other beverages to shampoo, bleach and almost all cleansers. Then there are the home petroleum products markets like motor oil in containers that can be resealed, unlike a metal can. I do not think the plastic bottle should be reused but it can be converted to other products. A suitable deposit on all bottles should see that they get returned for reuse, recycling is a better term for that."

"So you are looking for two if not three types of plastic. Is that what will gain you another Nobel Prize?"

"Oh no, that is another type of compound I have to search for. Last week we had a fire in a neighbour's home. The owner of the house was burnt but luckily didn't need hospitalisation. Their home was at least partially insured. Other than the man being under the influence of alcohol and a nicotine addict, I believe he fell asleep with a lit cigarette. This could all have been prevented with a device to detect smoke. While looking at the man's condition I thought of two possible ways of making the devices. One could be produced cheaply and sold. One needs some advances in semiconductor technology but the other I can do now."

"That sounds interesting too and could be quite profitable if you hold all the patents."

"It is a safety device and can be legislated into compulsory use in public places like government buildings, hotels and apartment buildings. Saving one child's life would make their value more than any dollar amount."

"Will you make one for me?"

"Sure but I need an alpha emitter. This is a very low level radioactive substance. The alpha particles can be stopped dead by a simple sheet of paper. There are gamma rays too but they are very low level and less dangerous than living in your basement and breathing in some of the radon escaping from the earth's crust."

"So this is gaining your prize?"

"No, I need to work on some chemicals that can be manipulated with magnetic fields, electric current and temperature. The devices used with this idea should gain me the prize I mentioned.

"Another thing that can make many millions, I thought of last week. I was watching my friends dancing to the music on the radio. One portion of this invention will be a cartridge about four inches long, two inches wide and mostly a half-inch thick. With two internal spools, I can load it up with magnetic tape. This tape can also come pre-recorded with commercial music. The machines to play them will go into a home but the good thing is that they go in a small portable machine. It will be transistorised and powered by batteries. Youngsters will now be able to carry around their music as they are starting to do with their transistor radios. More money comes from placing similar units in the dash of a car and in the home."

I had spent a great many hours working on simple tape units and could see the details in my mind. They were very finicky and this made me study them in more detail. The same tape could be used for dual track stereo or a wider variety for multi track recording in a studio. The Dolby addition, along with the ceramic head with the two ears, would make this unit far in advance of anything else.

"Are you going to do all this?"

"Well I could use a hand or two. One has to be on his wallet."

"You need an army or maybe five armies with many hands. I have to ask again, how are you going to do this?"

"Oh, one I can make this afternoon if Mr Berger has one micro curie of Americium oxide and a few loose parts. The information on that substance appears in a textbook I just read and may be the best choice. Do you happen to know an entrepreneur that can finance this venture with me? All I can do is make the original unit then fill out the details for all the patents. The units have to be sold worldwide or the rights sold worldwide. The latter is quicker but the former makes more money."

"Hmmmm I might be able to find somebody you can trust, I hope."

"I was hoping he would bite at the idea. Perhaps he can see if he can use a very recently made American corporation as a way of breaking into the lucrative American market."

"That can happen. Let's make some first. May I come and watch?"

"If you take my little friend with us but I fear she'll get bored."

The girl's head had gone back and forth to stare at who was talking as if this were the most important conversation she heard. It probably was but she wouldn't know it.

John called Mr Berger earlier than was first intended because he was now very excited and could smell money in everything I spoke of. When John found out that the school did have a small amount of Americium oxide he was almost jumping for joy.

Corinne took me to her room and I got her dressed. She wanted her hide dress but I said, "We are going to a historic event. You need to be dressed like a little lady."

"K."

John hurried to the university and we waited five minutes before Mr Berger arrived, even though he has a shorter distance to drive. We all shook hands.

The man was about sixty. He wore a hat as almost all men did in the fifties. He was slight of build with a prominent nose.

Mr Berger said, "I've heard a lot about you young man. John is quite proud of you, as if you are his only son."

"That would makes me quite proud too to be thought that way."

John said, "What I said before was a drop in the bucket. Jeff is working on his second potential Nobel Prize he claims, and many individual projects that would make a great deal of money. All together they make the kind of money Jeff wants to build his mercantile empire."

Mr Berger looked at me. "Are you Jewish too?"

"No but I was circumcised and I like money. Does that help?"

He laughed so hard he had to hold himself up on his car. John laughed loudly too and wiped his eyes. "Let's get a move on. The rest of us are losing money with these things not on the market."

I said, "The majority of this project is electronic. Can we rob a student from the Electrical Engineering or better yet, hire a student in that field to do some of the leg work?"

"Good idea," came from both men and they smiled.

On the way into the building Mr Berger said, "Exactly how much Americium oxide do you need?"

"I assume this is still a restricted substance. When we put our patent application in we have to make another application to get access to this material. They will want to set limits on the amount of radiation per unit. One micro curie may or may not be the limit but if we go to just ninety percent of that then it is looked on as even smaller."

John asked, "How dangerous is this?"

I spoke before Mr Berger, "I noticed your watch as the face that glows all the time. I know it's not a phosphor. The radiation from the radium is in the neighbourhood of twenty five millicuries. Your watch is on your body many hours a day and produces twenty eight thousand times more radiation than my device. My device has the added benefit of being mounted on the ceiling and out of reach of most children."

Mr Berger said, "The young man is right about the radiation levels. Whether this amount of radioactive substance is enough for his project is unclear."

I said, "Well let's find out. I have the circuit drawn out and we can modify it with the parts that are available."

The university labs were large but Berger took us to a smaller one that I think he used himself. I drooled again over the equipment and supplies. They were at least forty years older than the tools I had in my other life but those were all gone while these were here and worked.

Mr Berger made some phone calls as I looked at his library. Corinne would get bored easily so I spent some of the times talking about what was easily seen and interesting. There were a few interesting minerals that she liked for while.

Two young men came to Mr Berger for some instructions. He gave the first my list of parts and sent him off to get what was needed while the second went for equipment not in this lab.

Mr Berger said, "I have to go to our vault and get the Americium," then left. He was back in fifteen minutes and I just worked to find the solutions to my other plastic needs.

The young men came back and put their burdens down then stared at the lead container with the distinctive symbol.

I said to them, "Are you guys able to follow an electronic schematic and build a simple device on a perforated board?"

The shorter one said, "I'm third year electronics. Bert is chem but has a year of electronics."

"You want a small job for a few hours? It may be making history or prove that I'm full of shit."

Both young men liked the idea of making some money. "Test the transistors for gain. They have poor quality control at the plant. Make up a chart for all six transistors. We won't need them all though."

I took two small ceramic pads about an inch and a quarter square and a quarter inch thick. The thinnest sheet metal was cut to fit the pads but one side would overhang just a bit. One piece of metal got a small hole in the middle. I had to look for some tools to remove the rough edges and make both pieces of metal flat again. Fine wires were soldered to each of them where they would overhang the ceramic.

My Berger weighted a small slip of very thin glass then added less than one five thousandth of a gram of the substance from the lead box. This was all done close to or inside the glass enclosed precision balance.

I glued the flattened metal with the hole to the ceramic base and used the other piece of ceramic to bond it to the other portion of metal. The leads stuck out but were not above each other. I allowed Mr Berger the honour of applying the tiniest amount of glue to the first piece of ceramic. With glasses on and a steady hand, the speck of Americium oxide went onto the glue. The wafer was put down and a glass tumbler put over it to keep out contamination.

The young men made graphs on the sheets as the individual transistor data was added. The quality was very poor in the earlier transistors and as with almost everything else too. There was enough data now and Bert switched to another transistor.

With a scratch pad I modified the circuit with different values of resistors and caps. The resistors were just as bad as the transistors. There was no tolerance band, some were only within twenty percent of their rated values. John came over and I said, "Measure the value of the resistor and write the value on a piece of paper. Push a lead through the paper so I know which one you are referring to."

Mr Berger got the same job while I made up a small circuit to test caps that used known resistance.

I used the last meter while Corinne handed me the parts. This time I ripped the paper into small portions and wrote the value on it. Corinne pushed the lead through the paper and put them on the bench.

A half hour later we finished the survey. The ceramic blocks were stacked so the metal on them was close but not touching. Shims of paper in the four corners would give me varying separations and still allowed unobstructed air travel between the plates.

A dc power supply was put across the two sheets of metal to see how conductive it was. This data was tabulated and wasn't anywhere near being what it had been in a damaged unit I had investigated in the early 90s. I tinkered with different shims to move the two metal plates until I found the sweet spot.

The schematic was altered now with the data we had gathered and the values of most of the parts were altered. Everyone but Corinne was looking over my shoulder. She happened to be on my lap.

When the circuit was done, I handed it to the two helpers. "Just put it on the board. If it works you'll have to take it apart and put it on a much smaller section later."

They picked out the parts they wanted with our more accurate listing.

"I have to go pee."

"Mr Berger, would you please direct us to the nearest washroom?" We hurried up and this time I was not asked to clean her. Perhaps it was only when she, in her words, went number two.

Corinne watched as the board was populated then the piezoelectric module was mounted. The ceramic section was then mounted and finally the DC supply hooked up to provide the requisite nine volts.

I picked up a screwdriver and said, "Now is the time to see if the thing makes some noise." Turning to Corinne I stage whispered, "Cover your ears we are going to scare the rest."

She smiled as I touched the two sheets of metal that slightly protruded from the ceramic. A loud noise was heard and I grabbed Mr Holtzman's thigh. He dutifully jumped to Corinne's laugher. He gave me a dirty look then smiled at his granddaughter.

"I need a nicotine addict, gentleman."

All four took out a pack and I watched as they lit up. It had been a while since they had a cigarette.

"Mr Holtzman, will you blow gently toward the gap in the ceramic?"

He gave a small puff and everybody jumped, even Corinne. It reset in ten seconds and the rest took turns trying to find the smallest amount of smoke needed to trip the device.

I pulled Mr Holtzman aside. "In your own opinion, is this a sellable product if we can get approval to use the Americium?"

"Oh, it is very marketable Jeff."

"You put the patents out in my name. You hire the three men in here and get them to sign a secrecy agreement. You have to pay them. You also have to tie the university into this deal for a portion of the profits or you will not get more Americium for our test bed. The men work on making this a polished unit that could be tested by various government bodies here and in the United States. The profit goes to pay your expenses and what is left over we split fifty, fifty. If it's possible, will you use the corporation I am setting up to get some of the business?"