To the Moon and Back chapter sampler

A Tech Kid Grows Up

could lie in bed and listen to music without disturbing anybody, and at no cost. It had no batteries at all, just a long piece of aerial wire hanging out of my bedroom window. My dad was a fitter-and-turner at the Cockatoo Island Dockyard and could not afford to send me to university. So on my sixteenth birthday I started a five- year apprenticeship as an electrical fitter–mechanic at the Cockatoo Island Dockyard, to work on wireless, radar, sonar, gyro-compass and weapon electrics. In the evenings I went to night school to study electronic engineering. In my spare time I played with all sorts of electrical bits and pieces. In those days, military disposal stores in Sydney sold an amazing range of surplus equipment left over from World War II, especially radio transmitters and receivers, along with a wide assortment of electrical components. I used some of them to make Dad a black-and-white television set — in the 1950s TVs were rare and expensive beasts! I even made myself a remote control so I didn’t have to keep getting up and adjusting the picture — it may be the first remote control ever made. If only I had patented it!

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