The Prairie Spy

Alan “Lindy” Linda

I’ve been alive long enough to witness marvelous changes. Good ones. Probably. You decide.

In 1966, still trying to avoid going to Vietnam, I started courses at the University of Iowa. I noticed a posting on a school bulletin board. The University Speech and Hearing Research Institute was looking for a part time electronics tech. I graduated from the two-year Electronics program in Mason City, Iowa in 1964. I applied. Started a 20-hour a week gig.

What the research team were doing was trying to find and amplify the electrical signals that are sent to the brain by the cochlear, a small structure within the ear that basically changes sound to electrical impulses. Cats were our subject matter. My and the lead tech’s job was to find, design, or build-modify electronic equipment that could amplify those tiny, tiny electrical pulses. The problems: First, the research docs had to probe around in that cat’s brain and find the signal, using a micron-sized needle hooked to an amplifier. Then the problem: Amplify that signal many thousands of times, while keeping out extraneous tv, radio, lighting, etc. static and interference.

I was there two years, taking a full electrical engineering load, and working 20 hours a week. The University decided to build a new Hearing Research facility. I was offered the head tech position. But I couldn’t get into any National Guard units. (No one else wanted to go to Vietnam either, turns out.) So I missed out. And then I went to Vietnam, too.

And now?  It has become common to use what that research has produced, namely cochlear implants,  to give babies and adults their hearing. Amazing. I was there at the beginning.

Yesterday, the workers that are installing glass fiber communications cable to use here on the farm showed up. I talked to the guy, quizzed him about this miracle that has become so common. A tiny glass fiber not much bigger than a human hair can carry 800 gigabits of information. Right now, on dial up, we consider ourselves lucky to get 15 megs. (A gig is a million million. Meg just one million.

Fresh out of electronics in 1964, I went to work for Western Union, based out of Minneapolis. Workers such as I covered five states, removing all the old telegraph stations, bypassing them. The telegraph key, such a miracle once, was gone. Suddenly, using wires, we had a way of transmitting written documents, using Telex typewriters, which could produce a typed document sent from one typewriter to another. No more slow regular mail. Business was demanding more of this.

Western Union thus had a brief fling with success, since they had the copper wires that could carry that Telex signal. We bypassed those small “keyed” stations. Hooked up businesses all over. I spent my days wiring 100-pairs of copper wire into a large terminal block; wiring 100 pairs out the other side. We worked overtime. One pair of copper wires could carry one transmitted signal. One more pair could bring it back. Long days. Lots of wires.

We spent a lot of time down at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Mn., broadening their signal input and output ability. Large rooms were filled with Telex typewriters, receiving medical information from around the world. No people around, hardly, just all those clacking machines. The din was deafening.

Other rooms were filled with people typing stuff in, sending it out. 

Didn’t think much about it. But those miraculous clacking typewriters were dinosaurs.

And now glass fiber.

What a miracle. 

Modern miracles are coming so fast that we have lost our perspective on them.

But I haven’t.