PRISMATIST

Several months ago my daughter began asking me to write answers to questions that she was curious about. This is one of those questions and my answer.  

 

I have often thought about inventions that changed my grandmother’s life, but hadn’t really thought much about the ones that changed mine.  Having just transcribed a letter written in 1956 to my grandmother where my mother described getting her first automatic washer, this question takes on some whole new parameters!  Before, we had a wringer washer which was just a big tub that filled with water and soap, agitated clothes, but instead of a spin cycle, we had to run each piece of fabric through the wringer - two cylinders that squeezed much the water out.  As I remember the process, the wet clothes went into another tub to be rinsed and then put through the wringer again.  Those cylinders kept moving unless you pressed a release bar, so we had to be careful to not get fingers or hair caught in the wringer along with the clothes!  An automatic washer certainly cut down on the steps!  All we had to do was load the clothes and turn it on…. then magically it would do its thing and all the clothes would be washed, rinsed, and spun nearly dry!  I think we kept the wringer washer for a few years specifically to wash diapers. I remember mountains of them needing to be folded, which became my job.  Before we got an automatic dryer, all clothes had to be hung outside on the clothesline(s) to dry.  I definitely remember doing that…. there was a specific way to hang shirts and pants so they would not need much ironing.  Clothespins were in a bag that slid along the line as you pinned up the clothes, always connecting one diaper or shirt to the next.  Dad’s slacks were loaded onto pant stretchers, again to reduce the amount of ironing necessary.  So automatic clothes washer and dryer definitely made a big impact on our household.

 

A few years after we got the automatic clothes washer, I made the mistake of observing that if the dishes were done after each meal there wouldn’t so many to do after supper.  So dishwashing, especially after breakfast and lunch in the summertime, became one of my chores.  I soon figured out however, that if I was washing dishes, Mom would find someone else to do other chores.  I had a lovely time playing with the bubbles; making dishwashing last as long as possible. We got an automatic dishwasher after all 7 of us had been sick with some sort of bug.  Dr. Anne Nichols (our family doctor) told Dad that an automatic dishwasher would sanitize the dishes better than handwashing and gave him a prescription for a dishwasher.

 

The biggest impact on my life in several worlds came with the invention of the computer.  Dad’s job was keeping all the statistical records for DePauw University…. all on IBM punch cards which he could sort in different ways and bring out reports.  He said he could (but wouldn’t) tell us anything about our student teachers from the university, except who they were dating at the moment!  As the Statistical Service Supervisor, Dad was trained to use the first computer that DePauw purchased.  It still used the punch cards but could sort them out in many different ways.  When I was a freshman in high school (1963-64), he taught me and a couple of my friends (Chris Johnson and Gail Anderson) how to program that computer using GOTRAN and FORTRAN.  At that point, the  computer only did what we told it to do and no more.  I guess that's still true, but programming is much, much more complex!

 

The computer we learned on was not as large as some IBM computers at the time.... it was almost portable if you had a large truck and a hoist.  As I remember, it was about the same size, length and width, as our dining room table that could seat 8 comfortably.  It was taller though, about my shoulder height.  Dad had fun learning all about its capabilities and not just things useful to the university.  One of my favorite stories he told was about the day he and a student were running a program with a batch of punch cards and discovered the computer could make music.  It must have been a Saturday, because they were listening to a football game on a little transistor radio that they had set up on top of the computer.  As the cards ran through the computer, they noticed that a beep interrupted the game every time a particular card went through. They began experimenting with different configurations of holes in the punch cards and discovered that they could change the pitch of the beep with particular changes in the pattern of the holes.  They could change the length of the beep by the number of times they ran one card through in succession.  I don't know if they got the original project done that day, but they did end up with a deck of punch cards that made the computer play the University of Illinois fight song through the transistor radio!  He was very proud of that deck of cards!  I never did get into composing computer generated music, but about 10 years after my first programming experience, my first piece of computer generated art was done using punch cards and a dot-matrix printer.  

 

Every job I've had required me to learn to use both different hardware and software - Mac and PC - saving data on punch cards, 5" floppy discs, 3 1/4 "floppy" discs that were much more rigid, thumb drives, CDs or DVDs, and clouds. The sad part is that what was saved on one system is no longer readable on the next, while my mother's letter, written in pencil on 3 pieces of yellow paper in 1956 is still perfectly readable, at least for anyone who can read English written in cursive.  These stories, written on a computer and saved in a cloud somewhere, may still be readable by my grandchildren only if they are printed in a book.  

 

Re-reading Mom's April 1956 letter to her mother-in-law about sick kids (all 3 of us had temperatures over 102 the previous week, with mine being highest at 104.8) and the washing machine, gave me a snapshot of my mother and father’s lives that I wouldn't have otherwise....

     " Oh I almost forgot to tell you" Mom wrote, " - without a word other than mentioning of thinking about it! Hubert had an automatic G.E. washer delivered Sat. aft. Now he can say it is for me!  And believe me I do appreciate it, but I'm sure he appreciates as much as I do!  Payments won't start until June & he had the house refinanced so those payments wouldn't run quite so much.  What with my new washer & my new broom that I asked for and got for Easter - no wonder I can keep my work done up!"  

 

When she wrote the letter, Mom was expecting her 4th child. Twins were born next month. Brother Dave was still using diapers, and all of the diapers were cloth, which needed to be washed and dried!  I'm glad we had the washing machine -it did make a huge difference in our lives!