England Plus Paris: Part 9

This guy was the handyman at the Palace Court Holiday Apartments. He fixed this heater, making it look as if heaters made sense. Later on, I would find out that the shower was broken. He fixed that, too. I'll bet he could fix anything.

The train ride to London had been easy. Taking the tube to the Bayswater area had been easy. Finding a room had been semi-easy. The hard part: many places were full. The easy part: there were many, many places. Fortunately, I was in a nation of cheapskates who didn't care about eating well. So the Palace Court Holiday Apartments (later renamed to Palace Court Studios) were perfect for me. The rooms had kitchens. Thus, I would be able to cook up some good breakfasts and lunches; and the rooms cost a little more than plain B&B rooms, and thus no self-respecting Britisher would take them, and thus there was a vacant place for me.

The neighborhood was great for a tourist. It was full of restaurants, internet cafes, and laundromats.

You've Been This Way Before

(A different photo of me at Kensington Gardens. That's not the Albert Memorial)

Maintaining your sense of direction is pretty easy in Kensington Gardens because the trees and most of the paths are laid out in straight lines. Still, I was reassured to have the Albert Memorial as a landmark. I recognized it from a photo that my father had taken of my mom and me as we'd waited for him there.

I didn't remember the Memorial, only the photo. Was the photo a meta-memorial? A memorial mnemonic?

I walked to Victoria Station, which no longer had a London Tourist Information Centre. That is, they still had an office which helped with accomodations. But they didn't have people who could tell me where to find sites that were for geeks.

So I went from there in search of the Britain Visitor Centre at the base of Regent Street. Along the way, I found myself going past New Scotland Yard, Westminster Abbey, and Trafalgar Square. It occurred to me that I'd seen most of the sights of London just while trying to find an office that would help me to find the things that I wanted to see.

Around Picadilly Circus, I lost my way. I blundered through a sex district and through an open-air market. In the sex district, I was sure that I was lost, but I didn't want to ask anyone for directions. These people looked as if they were likely to mis-interpret anyone approaching them. By the time I emerged from there and into the open-air market, I was able to figure out where I was and how to get back to civilization.

If you're looking for the base of Regent Street, beware: the very base of Regent Street is called Waterloo. It's called Waterloo for a very small portion of its length, so small that many tourist maps don't show the Waterloo. But the signs say "Waterloo," and you'd be mistaken to walk past them while looking for "Regent."

Streets changed names a lot in London. Later, I would note the names of the street that led from my hotel up to my main restaurant area: Garway Road, Leinster Square, Prince's Square, Princess Square (perhaps a signmaker's typo for Prince's?), Ilchester Gardens, St Petersburgh Place. All of these name changes occurred over about half a klick, a space of about three or four blocks.

I eventually found the Britain Visitor Center, which had good maps, and was able to direct me towards some things.

Weather-Based Accessorization

While walking around London, I got rained on. I had my hooded rain jacket, so that was fine.

I noticed that many Londoners, true to stereotype, had umbrellas. If you've walked with me in the rain, you know that I avoid people with umbrellas. Consider the distance h, the difference between the height of the average American and my own height. Consider the distance h', the difference in heights between two people such that one of them is likely to poke the other one in the eye if s/he carries an open umbrella with insufficient care. I claim that h and h' are approximately equal.

Fortunately, most Londoners are tiny, and I was able to move amongst them without giving them any opportunities for accidental gouging.

Londoners had raincoats. One lady had a pink raincoat. It was very pink. It was pink enough to scare away the rain.

Hi, Standard

The Standard, an Indian restaurant on Westbourne Grove, was pretty good. The food had plenty of flavor. Just in case you didn't think it had enough flavor, there were dishes of chutney close at hand. This was just the thing to chase away a gray day. I would eat there a few more times over the course of my stay.

Full Circle

Berkeley Square was more of an ellipse. That is, there was a rectangle of buildings around it, but the park on the inside was more ellipse-ish. I remembered the old "Filthy Habits" comic book had portrayed the old Berkeley Square nightclub, but called it the "Berkeley Circle". Now I felt as if I'd found the real Berkeley Circle.

Really Big Jars

[Photo: I have no idea. I wish I'd taken better notes.]

I have no idea what this did.

The Royal Institution's Davy-Faraday Lab at 21 Albemarle includes a reconstruction of Faraday's lab and a museum of his artifacts and other pieces from the early history of electrical research.

Because they were painting, a door was left open that normally wouldn't have been, and I blundered into a storage room. Before a nice lady shooed me out, I caught a glimpse of old electrical devices and beakers. There were a lot of beakers. The world's supply of antique beakers would appear to be largely without limit. Anyhow, there were things to see outside of that storage room, in the museum proper.

There were big jars, jars that you might expect to see on an office water cooler. I knew that they'd used jars to store static electricity, but it hadn't occurred to me that they'd want such big jars. I guess they wanted to store up a big charge.

I learned that Faraday spent some time in Sheffield working on alloy steels. I saw a sort of artificial bismuth geode, but couldn't figure out what it was supposed to do.

Destiny on Tour

When my parents and I had gone to the UK in 1975 (when I was five years old), my mom kept a journal. Before I went on this trip, I'd read that journal. I found out that together I'd visited the Science Museum and Natural History Museum about five times over the course of a couple of weeks.

I thought, I never had a chance. I've been slotted into geekdom since the day one. I thought, I bet the Science Museum is still pretty cool. And it was.

A Brittle Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing

I didn't take this picture of the Cavity Magnetron. I grabbed it from a copy of "Treasures of the Science Museum", the catalog for an exhibit when some of the Treasures toured Japan. This was a great photo book, and I'd love to point you at a link where you could buy it, but I can't figure out the Science Museum Store web site, so never mind.

Zooming in on part of the cavity magnetron.

I'd studied up on the history of RADAR but not well enough. So at the Science Museum's information desk, I asked where I could see the reflex klystron.

Of course, I meant Randall and Boot's cavity magnetron. But I'd tried reading Metres to Microwaves and I hadn't understood it. All I remembered was that many of the devices had cool names. I'd remembered many of them. Unfortunately, this undermined my knowledge of the cavity magnetron, whose praises I.I. Rabi had sung.

But the people at the information desk didn't think I was asking a dumb question. How could they? They just thought I was asking a tough question.

So the people at the information desk left voice messages for a couple of curators and asked me to come back in an hour or two, after the curators would be done with their lunches.

The cavity magnetron is one of the museum's treasures and it had a nice display on the first floor where I saw it almost immediately and figured out what a doofus I'd been.

The cavity magnetron looked like any of a number of bulbous devices which are supposed to emit particles. But I was glad to see it.

But I was a prideful doofus, so I didn't 'fess up when I went back to the information desk. I just let them tell me that they didn't have a reflex klystron. I thanked them for that.

(At a family reunion later that year, I talked with my cousin Kim. She was working a summer job at SLAc, between semesters of learning design. She was diagramming things for them, but didn't know much about electronics. She said, "They have me [drawing] things like 'magnetrons,' but I don't know what they are. ...And 'klystrons,' too." So maybe I wasn't the only one getting confused by all this.)

Electronic Treasures of the Science Museum

They had a telephone exchange that handled four digits. Four digits. That dwarfed the Albuquerque three-digit exchange. It wasn't that much more interesting than Albuquerque's, though, perhaps because I couldn't get so close to the equipment.

Babbagemania!

The museum had various Babbage-related items. Although Babbage never finished his Difference Engine II, some geeks had decided to build one a few years back, and the result was sitting in the museum. There were other Babbage-related devices around, too.

E.g., The museum had a Scheutz engine. The Scheutzes were inspired by Babbage, but didn't try to achieve such high precision in their work. While Babbage didn't tend to finish things and died bankrupt, the Scheutzes finished some devices--and died bankrupt. They learned about Babbage's work from a description by Dionysius Lardner. I was hoping that it would be from something written by Ada Lovelace, but it wasn't.

Calculators of the Science Museum

A big photo of a teeny-tiny mechanical calculator

Mechanical calculators

The museum had a Curta from which they'd cut away part of the casing to expose the machinery inside. This did not make the device seem less miraculous.

Miscellaneous Treasures of the Science Museum

Eww!

Can you see the blister? It's close to the heel.

By Friday's end, I had a big blister. I'd done a little walking, but mostly I'd been standing around in a museum. I wasn't sure why that was more blistering than, say, stumbling around on the Cornish coast for most of a day.

Mandola

On the recommendation of the Lonely Planet guidebook, I went to Mandola, a Sudanese restaurant. I had Fifilia and fule which where nice. But the best part was a sauce made from green chilis, peanuts, garlic, and lime. That sauce would have made anything taste good. Wow. Really great.

They were burning some strange aromatic something in the restaurant, so I thought I wasn't going to like it, but that sauce turned it around. I'm drooling now even as I write about it. Mind you, the sauce looked really unappetizing, but it tasted great.

Departures: England Plus Paris: Part 9

Welcome to Bayswater