Dream Dreams and Make the World Better — The Adventure Continues!

SEE HERE "... nothing is withheld from us what we have conceived to do. ..." said Russell Kirsch It's amazing when you meet a legend.  Aren't legends all supposed to be dead?  It's also a reminder of how much we take the technological landscape for granted.  Everything has been created by someone, often many someones working together or in isolation.

I had a similar experience myself.  I had been asked to give a talk on the history of magnetic sensing, since I was an expert on MAD (Magnetic Anomaly Detection).  At the end of the talk an elderly gentleman started questioning me about the history, especially a part I'd only gotten by literature research from an old article in Scientific American.  It was about using saturable core magnetometers to do airborne magnetic surveys.

I began talking with him about his adventures and discovered his name was Otto Schmitt and that he was the inventor of the Schmitt trigger which was one of the fundamental circuits that went into early digital computer devices since it stored current state and could be switched.  I was blown away.  I don't know why but I just assumed that all those people whose names were attached to things like that would be dead.  This happened back in the late 1970's in a place on the University of Minnesota campus I think.

Those who have created the modern world still walk among us and it is our duty to continue the adventure.