My Brother: The Engineer

From early on, it was obvious my brother would become some kind of engineer. He had little interest in History or English at school, it took two or three goes to pass English Language at Ordinary Level, but when it came to Maths or Physics or anything mechanical or electronic, he was a natural. This was also apparent in the toys he had. 

In the few years between us, toys became more sophisticated and technological. My early toys were mainly metal, the most complex being a Hornby clockwork train set, a Meccano construction kit, and a working model steam engine used only under supervision. My brother’s toys were more electronic, with increasing use of plastics. He had a Scalextric electric motor racing track, Lego instead of Meccano, and model aeroplanes that were light enough to actually fly. 

Two toys in particular showed his talents. The first was a Philips Mechanical Engineering kit he received around the age of 9 or 10, followed by a matching Electronic Engineering kit shortly afterwards. 

Suggested Projects: Mechanical Pump and Electronic Organ

The mechanical kit had a variety of plastic wheels and aluminium parts that could be assembled in limitless ways, and an instruction book of projects from the simple to the sophisticated, such as clocks, pumps and vehicles of various kinds. They were powered by elastic bands, water power, air pressure, or gravity, or by the electric motor included in the kit. The electronic kit was similar, with resistors, capacitors, coils, transistors, diodes, switches and loudspeakers, which could be wired together to create circuits on a baseboard. Suggested projects included radio receivers, amplifiers, alarms, a moisture indicator, and a time switch. With both kits together you could create vehicles controlled remotely by lights or sound. 

Brother with his Electronic Engineering Kit

But my brother had most fun when he began to dream up his own projects. He made a device to administer electric shocks, and another to close his bedroom curtains automatically when it got dark, and to open them again with a switch. There was a similar device for the door. 

We moved to a house where the previous owner had a burglar alarm which we wanted taken out, but the alarm company removed only the control unit, leaving all the wiring throughout the house and the magnetic door switches (which is how alarms worked then). Before long, my brother had a panel in his bedroom indicating which doors were opening or closing. No one could sneak up on him. He worked out a way to tap the magnetic emissions from the house telephone wire, and could listen in to everything that was said. Another device automatically switched on the tape recorder if there were any sounds in his unattended bedroom. 

Not all went as intended. Up later than he should have been, an air-raid type siren he was making went off in the early hours next to our parents’ bedroom. 

He tried out all kinds of ideas. Our parents had a butane-fuelled cigarette lighter refilled from a pressurised canister. He used the canister to make a powerful flame thrower that could squirt burning gas and incinerate the enormous spiders that lived behind the garage. And, if they were squirted with non-burning gas,, they dropped frozen solid to the ground and smashed into brittle pieces. 

At a time when relatively few got into university, he was offered a place at Bradford to do Mechanical Engineering. Not only that, but tipped off by an uncle who was active in the engineering professional bodies, and knew who was going to be on an interview panel, their interests, and hence the questions they were likely to ask, he got a bursary from the government’s Property Services Agency, and was paid a salary. He had, of course, to work during the university vacations, and was expected to remain with the agency after graduation. He was based in  Croydon, designing air conditioning systems for a series of new prisons under construction, when he became ill, and we lost him a month before his thirty-seventh birthday. His children are older than that now. He would have been 69 today.