[LRflex] Re: Request for advice - the Piper PA-12
- From: "Nevin B. Greninger" <greninnb@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <leicareflex@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:25:17 -0400
Hi from Nevin from near Pittsburgh.
I have enjoyed the discussion of the graphics and the PA-12 that was built
in Lock Haven, PA where naturally Piper Aircraft was located. My father
started working for Piper Aircraft in 1942 after we moved off of the chicken
farm. As a youngster I had a newpaper route and delivered the paper to
William Piper, Jr the son of the founder of Piper Aircraft that had been the
Taylor Company.
In 1977 with a Polish colleague, a research mining engineer, I had the
opportunity to take a sight-seeing flight down the Grand Canyon beneath the
rim for 215 miles, landing at the small airport at the southern end of the
Grand Canyon. There were three of us going down the Grand Canyon, including
the pilot. My Polish friend sat in the co-pilot seat, giving him a great
view. On the return trip to Las Vegas, we had an additional passenger but
we flew above the rim. The plane was a twin-engine Piper plane. Such
flights are no longer permitted because of the danger and the disturbance to
the environment. The flight down under the rim required great pilot skill.
While I was a student at Cornell back in the 1960's, I had to take several
graduate courses in aeronautical engineering - one in general fluid
mechanics and one is gas dynamics - and recall taking a book bag one day to
class that was my newspaper bag for the Lock Haven Express. My teacher and
academic advisor was Bill Sears and he mentioned he was familiar with Piper
Aviation.
I had to take two aeronautical courses to prepare me for a research effort
in chemical kinetics in shock waves. It was an interesting project using a
single-pulse shock tube that allowed conventional sampling and analysis with
a mass spectrometer. My research advisor was a chemical kineticist who
studied under Linus Pauling at Cal Tech. While pursuing some graduate
studies at Penn State University, I had the opportunity to hear Theodore von
Karman deliver two seminars - one on MHD and the other on the teaching of
thermodynamics. He was the first director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
at Cal Tech and is featured on a US postage stamp. Bill Sears did his
doctorate under Von Karman.
So my days at Cornell were exciting and I had also great teachers in
physics. I listened to Hans Bethe in his intermediate quantum mechanics
course only for a short while, having to give it up as the weekly homework
sets took almost 30 hours to complete and I also had to work on a research
project. I had completed the basic quantum mechanics course though from a
youngster, Ken Wilson, who was born in1936. He had his own approach and I
regret that I did not put a lot of time into that course. Ken Wilson later
went on to win a Nobel Prize in Physics. for work inquantum theory. The
course from Bethe for me with my chemical engineering background was just
too difficult. Bethe was the chief theoretical physicist in building the
A-bomb and was the one President Kennedy turned to to assess the need to
resume nuclear testing.
At Cornell I had the opportunity to listen to the "great" one, Richard
Feynman, deliver the Messenger Lectures Series that the Mathematics
Department sponsored. His lectures for the laity were titled "The Character
of Physical Law," which the BBC came from the UK to tape..
These lectures were then turned into an elementary book, entitled "The
Character of Physical Law." Feynman was a great lecturer. He worked for
Bethe on the Manhattan Project , handling the computations at Los Alamos.
Both Feynman and Bethe received Nobel Prizes in Physics - Bethe for
explaning the nuclear reaction on stars..
If some of you Licaflexers are engineers, you might find the 3-volume set -
The Feynman Lectures on Physics - most fascinating. His students were
freshmen and sophomores. H. C. Van Ness a chemical engineering professor in
his thin book on "Understanding Thermodynamics," borrowed the approach of
Feynman in developing an understanding of the First Law. Van Ness went on to
say on page 2 if I recall that any serious student of engineering should be
reading out of Feynman's three-volume set on physics. These books are not
easy - for one must know some vector calculus.
The Feynman set has been read by many graduate students to prepare them for
their qualifying exams. I have the greatest respect for Cal Tech and still
turn to Feynman's Volumes I and II. Two of my Polish friends with doctorates
in physics tell me they enjoy reading out of Feynman's three volumes.
Feynman admitted that at times his lectures were too difficult for the
freshman students. At times though he had many professors in physics sitting
in on his freshman and sophomore classes to see how he taught physics.
Feynman was not only a great lecturer but also a safe cracker and a bongo
drummer. One time on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos he cracked the
"security safe" for special documents and left the message inside, "Guess
Who?" If the dial on the last setting had not been spun, he could take that
reading and soon figure out the combination of the safe.
Feynman in 1965 shared the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum
electrodynamics with Tomonaga from Japan and Schwinger from Harvard. With
QED Feynman in an elementary book remarked how good QED was in computing the
the magnetic moment of the electron - something that has been experimentally
measured with great accuracy. He said, "If you take the experimentally
measured value and represent it as a line stretching from LA to NYC and put
down beside it the value computed by QED, they differ by the width of a
human hair." In 1965 the French (Jakob et al) won the Nobel Prize in
Medicine for their Lac-Opron model for the regulation of gene expression in
E. Coli - that was one of the great years for molecular biologists.
So in closing, the discussion of the PA-12 brought back great memories for
me who had the opportunity to hear fantastic lecturers at Penn State and
Cornell.
Enjoy life.
I hope some of you have found my comments of interest.
Take care.
Kind regards,
Nevin who was born on June 20, 1936 and on tomorrow will have his first
Virtual Colonoscopy at the West Mifflin Imaging Associates Laboratory
----- Original Message -----
From: "William B. Abbott III" <captbilly3@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <leicareflex@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, March 14, 2010 6:34 PM
Subject: [LRflex] Re: Request for advice
> David,
> If you Google N4003m, you get:
>
> Airframe Info
> Manufacturer: Piper
> Model: PA-12 Search all Piper PA-12
> Year built: 1947
> Construction Number (C/N): 12-2880
> Number of Seats: 3
> Number of Engines: 1
> Engine Manufacturer and Model: Lycoming 0-235 SERIES
> Link this airframe to another registry number
> Owner
> Registration Type: Individual
> Address: Union, CT 06076
> United States
> Region: New England
> Status
> Certification Class: Standard
> Certification Issued: 1998-05-05
> Air Worthiness Test: Unknown
> Last Action Taken: 2007-05-15
> Current Status: Valid
>
> Guess who the "Individual" mentioned is! I'll give you three guesses and
> the first two don't count.
>
> Best,
>
>
>
> On Mar 14, 2010, at 12:12 PM, David Scollard wrote:
>
>> Charlie, I've spent a lot of time pondering this, but completely without
>> success - what is the significance of the rather cryptic diagram that you
>> always append at the end of your letters, just below and to the right of
>> your signature, and above the aphorism by von Braun? If it's not too
>> secret
>> to share, a deciphering would be greatly appreciated.
>>
>> best, David Scollard
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Charlie Falke" <chfalke@xxxxxxx>
>> To: <leicareflex@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>> Sent: Sunday, March 14, 2010 9:13 AM
>> Subject: [LRflex] Re: Request for advice
>>
>>
>> On 3/14/2010 10:00 AM, Sonny Carter wrote:
>>> Unless one is very famous already, I cannot fathom why a limited edition
>>> would make your prints more valuable.
>>> Perhaps you are very famous, but I wasn't aware of that.
>>>
>>> I was just looking at some 1940-50's photography for sale here in New
>>> Orleans yesterday, and though some prints were obviously from scanned
>>> negatives, and newly printed by modern means, they had other prints from
>>> the
>>> negatives priced much higher. These were still making revenue for the
>>> photographer's family.
>>>
>>> I'm not so sure how well the "real" prints do against the others, but,
>>> once
>>> you cut up the negative, that's it for "original prints." You just
>>> have
>>> to
>>> ask yourself if you are famous enough or productive enough to limit your
>>> editions.
>>>
>>> I imagine that among photographers who sell prints there are some shots
>>> that
>>> sell over and over, despite the number sold, despite the price. "Moon
>>> over..." comes to mind. You can buy a print of that shot today in "A
>>> Gallery for Fine Photography," just ten blocks from where I sit. I
>>> forgot
>>> his asking price, but hey, No one cut up that negative, Thank God.
>>>
>> Sonny,
>> Prints are available from Ansel's negatives from 24 of his negatives,
>> made in 8x10 size by enlargement from the original negatives. These
>> are printed by a student of his that is familiar with the extensive
>> dodging and burning that were essential to Adams' work. A straight
>> print from one of his negatives typically looks pretty boring. There
>> is an example of this using "Clearing Winter Storm" in later editions
>> of his book "The Print" which is quite an eye opener. It's a little
>> ironic in context that Group f/64 called it "Straight Photography". :-)
>> The limit to the number is that he agreed to stop making any more
>> at one point, and obviously can't change his mind now. It doesn't matter
>> that the negative still exists, because nobody would know how to make a
>> print from it like he did, and it wouldn't have his signature on it.
>> According to the "A Gallery for fine Photography" web site, their
>> price varies from $5000 to $175,000. Large prints are more. I saw
>> a 16X20 at the gallery in Yosemite in the 80s that they wanted around
>> 2 something for, IIRC. The record was $609,000, in 2006.
>>
>> --
>> Charlie Falke _____ /\
>> | __/\__/------/__)
>> |(____\/_________/
>> "One test result is worth | |/ `o
>> one thousand expert opinions" - Wernher Von Braun 0 N4003M
>> "Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Albert Einstein
>>
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