After my father passed in February following a very full, very accomplished 88 years, I had the less-than-pleasant opportunity to sift through his personal possessions. Amongst a multitude of books, printouts and miscellanea of his hobbies were some very old-school tools of design. Mechanical pencils and a large round cast iron sharpener, French curve templates, guides and so on. All from his days designing everything from trade show displays to R&D labs to battleships.
My father was an innovator. He subscribed to no particular codified “body of knowledge” but his results were inspiring. The majority of his great work preceded ubiquitous CAD/CAM installations. As a testament to what simply “got done” without technology, he had designed and built an enormous miniature model city for use in a military flight simulator, long before the existence of a computer that could render scenic imagery in real time. Quite literally he designed a system where a video camera “flew over” a terrestrial model while the video was piped to a CRT in the simulator’s cockpit.
