   Contact Kelli, temporary manager of Doug's "The Wondering Jew" |
Apr. 30, 2007 - 23:10 MDT WONDER OF MEASUREMENT My Grandpa was assayer at the Moly Mine in Red River, New Mexico and in listening to his tales of his prospecting days and hard rock mining days, as well as going with him to check out mines for sale in his area I got a good idea of what hard rock mining was all about. Found out mining wouldn't be my bag, cold, drippy, dark places were not for me. But his assay office was a completely different world. I began to get an idea of what assaying was all about. Watching him going about his delicate work. One thing he had that fascinate me was the scales in his lab. In a cabinet, glass doors and windows. So fine looking. That type of scales were used in many laboratories. One day, when he had a bit of spare time he said, "Lets weigh a cigarette paper." He put one on the pan and proceeded to add the little weights using a sliding bar to add the hairpin type wires to the beam. Finally he got a balance and wrote it down. Then he said "Lets weigh a pencil dot." He proceeded to dot the paper with a pencil and put it back on the pan. He added another hairpin weight to the beam, arrived at a balance and announced to me just exactly what that pencil dot weighed. Gave me an idea of the fine line one had to walk to arrive at a decision on some things. Later in my life in the power plant as a water analyst I used chemical tests and measuring instruments to determine the concentration of salts, impurities and needed chemicals in boiler water. Kept me on my toes it did, as monthly I had to gather water samples and send them to a lab in Pennsylvania for them to check. Luckily I must have been good enough that their tests pretty well agreed with mine. There were many times that I remembered Grandpa and his laboratory scales and his emphasis on accuracy. Later on in another job I learned to read a steel scale in hundreths of an inch, and a bit further how to read micrometers. Doing work that required the use of them. Real life things illustrated for me the WONDER OF MEASUREMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 comments so far
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