My Final Year M Sc at AU, Vizagh, was the best of times and the worst of times, to steal the opening line of Dickens' Tale of Two Cities. Our theory classes were deeply depressing but our labs were fantastic. We were allowed to do experiments in the Research Labs. In particular, I can never forget the thrill I had while doing the 6-hour experiments in the Spectroscopy Labs built under the supervision of S Bhagavantam (Raman's collaborator).
We were allowed to work with a high-resolution spectrograph, taking real time photographs of the line spectra of iron and copper and band spectra using (evaporating) carbon rods as electrodes between which arcs are passed. Loading the film into its chamber, taking the photograph of the spectrum, going to the dark room, opening the chamber in total darkness, developing and fixing the film stuck on the glass plate, counting seconds by practice, and calculating the wave numbers by comparing them with the standard 'iron chart'...the entire experience was lovable.
And the 'spectroscopic accuracy' demanded needed 7-figure Log Tables, only a couple of which were available in the Department. In contrast to the 4-figure Clark's Tables which were the thinnest we ever bought, the 7-figure ones were the size of a primitive Calcutta Telephone Directory. And of course there was no question of 7-figure antilog tables...we had to use Log Tables in the reverse by interpolation.
Even Hans Bethe couldn't have memorized them.
After passing M Sc, I was asked to assist my 3-year senior, JRK, in the calculations that went into his Ph D Thesis (I got Acknowledgments in 3 of his papers and did a joint paper with him much later). The experience was miserable. I had to numerically compute, on tables spread over twenty drawing sheets with 50x50 slots in them, the Electric Field Gradients in crystals using the so-called (nonsensical) 'point charge model'. The entire exercise took 3 months of numerical calculations 7 hours a day.
And I was given a Facit Calculator to do it with. The thing was totally mechanical with maybe wheels and gears inside and equipped with a number keyboard and a cranking handle. It may now be a museum piece but research scholars used to fight for its possession for a day or two. Addition, subtraction, and multiplication required turning the handle clockwise, but division required turning the handle the other way round till a 'jingle bell' rings, when you have to go back by one turn.
At the end of 3 months my fingers were aching, somewhat like what happened much later to me when I had to keyboard endlessly on my PC composing the (infamous) 250-page Jumbo Lecture Notes to meet a deadly deadline and got such severe shoulder cramps that I didn't touch my PC for one whole year, happily.
When I joined IIT KGP in 1965, and went to the Accounts Section to ask for my first pay bill I found each of the 20 or so tables there equipped with a Facit Machine whirring with squeaks and bells and then I understood I have arrived at a 'rich' institution, unlike my poor University. Fortunately however, none of the Research Labs in our Phy Dept needed such heavy computations to need a Facit thing, except the X-ray Lab which boasted of an electro-mechanical hybrid calculator with glowing tubes and a keyboard as big as a mini-piano's and with capped rubber tubes to be pulled and inserted into slots here and there like the old-fashioned Telephone Exchange consoles operated by girls with head phones saying: "Number Please!"
And then someone told me that IIT KGP recently acquired an IBM 1620...story for tomorrow...
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Blind Man's Bluff
I think I told you a story I read half a century back in a weekly magazine...but no harm repeating.
A handsome youth wearing dark glasses enters this sleeper compartment of Madras-Mail, shuffles, and tries to sit in a vacant seat opposite to what turned out to be a lovely girl, touching her here and there. The girl takes umbrage but says nothing. He then leans forward to push his suitcase under the seat opposite to his below her and happens to touch her legs saying, "Excuse me!". Still the girl tolerates. And after a few minutes, decides to pull out a book from inside his suitcase, this time falling over her lap fairly squarely.
The girl slaps him so hard that his glasses fall off and he vainly tries to pick them up...turns out he is totally blind...
I am daily reminded of this story nowadays. I park my car in front of a tea-stall and ask for the cheapest (Rs 4) chai. It is served in the thinnest possible plastic dispo, too delicate to handle if the chai is really hot. I am ok with it if the 'server' is Yadayya, the fortyish man. He just shoves the cup onto the counter and I pick it up with shaky hands.
Trouble comes when his youthful wife mans the counter. She has this habit of pouring tea in a dispo-cup, holding it in her hand by two fingers placed diametrically on its rim and pushing it towards me to be picked up from her hand. That means I have to place my two fingers on the rim at the ends of the diameter at right angles to hers; and I can't ask her to place it on the counter for fear of offending her in her noble gesture to an old man.
As you know, my right eye is practically dysfunctional, and working with one eye means I lose stereo-vision and have to grope delicately back and forth. And I don't look blind...not at all.
So, if you happen to read a news-item like: "Retired IIT KGP Professor slapped in Hyderabad," you now know how.
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