Secret labs

By the end of my second year in elementary school, my Scottish friend and I had become an ebullient, mischief inclined pair. As a result, my English improved from the primitive pidgin state to a recognizable, if still tentative, language. We got into the habit of waiting for the morning break at school and then take advantage of the short lapse of freedom to set off together and explore those rooms in the upper floors of the school building to which access to pupils was strictly prohibited. Not that we ever found any hidden treasure in any of them, but the very sound of the words "strictly prohibited" would make it an irresistible call to adventure. We were often caught and punished, but being among the school best pupils, the punishment handed out to us was usually much more lenient than what others received for lesser misdemeanors.



I tried repeatedly to convince her of the beauty of molecules and chemistry. When I once mentioned that with knowledge of chemistry one can produce things that explode, she finally started to pay attention. I invited her over to my place and showed her the thing I was most proud of: my chemistry lab.

My mother, who saw that my interest in chemistry had taken a very theoretical side, with molecular models, atomic orbitals and all that, had in fact decided that I needed a wet lab to make it all more concrete. In those days, there was a toy that was sold for children age 11 and older, which went under the name "The little chemical scientist" and consisted of a collection of glass tubes and various chemical substances with which to make experiments. There were solutions that changed color, things that produced big colorful flames, and my all time favorite: crystals that grew to considerable size. Despite the fact that I was a mere 7 years old, well below the age limit for this toy, my mother bought it for me and I set up my nicely equipped lab.



I doubt it that, nowadays, it would still be possible to buy such toys for children, with a supply of inflammable, toxic substances, and reactions that generate stinking fumes and bursts of flames. People don't trust their children anymore these days it seems.

My lab grew considerably in size the following year, when my mother took on a new job. She began teaching in a school that trained the specialist of the fashion design industry, which already back then constituted that part of the nation's main export.
When one says fashion design, people instinctively think of anorexic models on the catwalk and queer fashion designers dressed in black silk. Well, that's right, but there's a lot more going on behind the scene. There is the large industry of textile, especially silk, production, with the chemical labs that produce the dyes and pigments, the art historians that provide the themes and sources of inspiration for the "collections" that are produced every year, the highly specialized training of the people who learn how to make those drawings. Most of the people working in the field had passed through a specific school, where they were taught the secrets of the trade. I suspect my mother's decision to take on that job was as much motivated by her interest in art history and creative drawing as by the fact that the school had a large and lavishly equipped chemistry lab, with which it made consulting for all the firms in the trade on the production of textile dyes.

The school was closer to the place where we lived, so my mother no longer had a long train commute to get back home in the evening, but she quickly befriended the head of the chemistry labs at her new workplace and given free access to them. So she often stayed extra hours after her classes were over, to enjoy herself with chemistry research. Mostly the lab over there was equipped to investigate the bonds of various new brands of synthetic dye to fabric, especially silk and cotton. A very applied kind of research, driven by the immediate needs of the local industry, but I suppose still interesting enough on the theoretical side to give satisfaction to my mother's scientific curiosity.



So she was still coming home very late, but she sometime brought me spare glasses from their lab for me to use in my small scale home made experiments. Having real glasses from a real chemistry lab made me feel like I was doing real science. It felt great. I even got a lab coat and some extra substances for my experiments when I ran out of the ones contained in the original package.

I managed to impress my Scottish friend with my enhanced lab, but when she tried asking her parents for a box of the same "little chemical scientist" package, they adamantly refused on the ground that the toy box specifically said it was meant only for children at least eleven years of age and to be used only with adult supervision, while we were only seven years old and clearly intended to play with it on our own. That wasn't the end of the story though. She saved pocket money for quite a while until there was enough to get the box. We went to the toy store and with a cleverly improvised story about a present for a non-existent older brother she convinced the clerk to sell us the chemistry box. Out on the sidewalk we carefully inspected our catch. The next question was a more difficult one to solve: how do you hide a fully equipped chemistry lab with burners, flasks, stinking and colorful fumes, from the eyes and nose of inquisitive parents. After debating for a while we came out with a perfect solution: the storage room down in the basement of her apartment building. That lasted for a while, until neighbors became suspicious and alerted her parents. I was banned from their house and forbidden to see her outside of school. At the end of elementary school we went off to different school and lost track of each other. Out of curiosity, now that I am writing up this story in this blog, I looked up her name on Google and found her PhD thesis, in Chemistry, at a respectable American university. It is such a pleasure to see that parents sometime are unable to screw up their children's future, hard as they may try!

Objects trouvés

There were a number of objects around the house that caught my attention since early childhood, objects that belonged to the world of adults, shrouded in mystery, exerting
an aura of necessity about them - objects whose presence was needed, essential, whose services were sought for aims I was eagerly trying to envision.



There was the Olivetti typewriter. That was one thing in the house whose noisy presence was almost incessantly felt. My father was an early bird: he would wake up naturally at four in the morning, promptly get up, raise all the curtains, open all the windows and turn on all the lights in the house, presumably with the intention to show widely to the neighborhood the virtuous hard worker that he was, and prevent anybody else from having a good sleep until a more humane hour of the day. He would fix himself coffee and then sit at the typewriter and work away until it was time for me to get up and get ready for school. My mother, on the contrary, was not a morning person, to say the least. She would begin working in the evening, after my father had already gone to sleep and I was also put to bed. The typewriter was back in use then and she would keep on working through the night. Ordinarily, she would go to sleep shortly before the time when my father woke up in the morning, but unfortunately their schedule was not always to carefully timed. The worst times of the day, besides the meal times, were the brief periods in the evenings or in the mornings when their waking time accidentally overlapped.

There finally came the day when I was allowed my share of the use of the typewriter, in the hours of the afternoon, when I was back from school. I perceived that as an important step into the slow and painful rite of passage that gradually gives access to the world of grownups. Being able to type my own writings acquired an enormous importance to me, be it uncertain poems, musings over plants and minerals, or summaries of my readings about the distant civilization of the Pacific islands. I felt that by typing them up I was giving my own thoughts more weight, more credibility in the currency of the adult world, where thoughts of children are so easily dismissed as irrelevant. I typed anything I happened to think about: descriptions of chemical experiments, short stories, dreams, summaries of books.

I was fascinated by the typewriter and the strange distribution of letters on the keyboard, so different from the order in which children were asked to recite the alphabet in first grade. When I was told that the letters have been distributed in that order to slow down the typing so that it would not jam the machine I was flabbergasted: I typed slowly then, with just one or two fingers, and I had barely learned how to find the letters in the right places on the keyboard. I could hardly imagine somebody typing so fast as to jam the machine. I was even told that the order of letters on the keyboard had to be designed in different ways for different languages, because letters occur with different frequencies, and that got me to regard these machine with even more of a sense of wonder.



There were other mechanisms, no less fascinating. The adding machine looked almost like a typewriter, with a keyboard and a lever, but it did something magnificent and mysterious: it added and multiplied numbers! It took a longer time for me to gain access to the adding machine: it probably was a more expensive piece of equipment and my parents feared, rightly, that I might try to take it apart to find out how it worked. Finally, after I promised repeatedly that I would not try to open it and take the mechanism apart, I was allowed to use it. It was hard to resist the temptation to do exactly what I had promised not to do: I wanted to know how a simple punching of keys and turning of a wheel could perform what I thought only a sentient being was able, sometime with effort, to achieve. Musing over the adding machine, trying to imagine how it might have worked, without having the possibility to verify my hypotheses, was probably what got me to develop an early attraction for the idea of automated computation and I started dreaming the dream of our modern civilization, the dream of intelligent machines. It would be a few years still until I could get my hands on my first computer, but the germs of the fascination I felt with it when the time came had been planted already with the mechanical keys and wheels of the old adding machine.



The most exciting of all the object of the grownup world that surrounded me was certainly the slide ruler. It was a beautiful piece cast in ivory, which had once belonged to my paternal grandfather, the engineer, who had passed it on to my father when he became a student of architecture. This was no adding machine. There was no hidden mechanism to explore or guess: the functioning was all in full sight and very simple apparently. I understood that I had reached a further step in conceptual abstraction, where the difficulty of things did not lie in the complicated way in which a mechanism is assembled (that had always been for me, up to that point, the notion of "complicated") but in something conceptual that resides entirely inside the mind. There was a concept, a mathematical one, by virtue of which the mechanism turned something apparently trivial, like sliding two narrow plates one past the other, into a sophisticated calculation. Something called logarithms. And there were books with tables of logarithms which were consulted in the process of calculation. The slide ruler gave me a different sense of curiosity, not the maverick desire to take mechanisms apart to see how their building blocks are put together, but a sense of longing for deeper understanding, for getting hold of the key that opens the door of meaning.