Leonard's Metals

Even if the first part of this post is not of interest to you, read the rest for an intimate part of the story.

I found out some interesting information a few days back. Fox news had a brief piece about treasure hunters finding an anchor from a 15th century ship in the Caribbean. The hunter believes the anchor is from one of the ships Columbus used.

That in itself would be everyday boring to me, but the story mentioned astronaut Gordon Cooper made the treasure map while he was orbiting around the earth in a Mercury space capsule in May 1963. Now the story had my attention. The video showed an anchor perhaps 5-6 feet long and about 6-7 inches at its widest point. The anchor is 15th-century Spanish and believed to have been from one of Christopher Columbus’ ships. It strikes me that in 1963 the U.S. had the ability using magnetic anomaly detectors to detect a small anchor (from outer-space) that was buried in 500 years worth of sea bottom sand and barnacles. I can only wonder what technology they have now.

Here is an interesting side story on the Mercury space capsule. Joyce’s father worked at a place called Leonard’s Metal in Saint Charles Missouri. Leonard's was a subcontractor for McDonnell Aircraft when they were building the Mercury space capsule. Joyce’s father worked on the space capsule. He did very exacting metal work and had thousands of dollars worth of precise measuring tools, when that was a lot of money. One day as he was working on the capsule, he had just drilled a hole after painstakingly measuring the drill used and the finished hole dimension. The U.S. government inspector came walking by, looked at the hole, pulled out a sharpened pencil, placed it part way into the hole and told Joyce’s father the hole dimension was wrong and he would have to re-do it. Joyce’s father was furious when he got home that night. He relayed the story to Joyce’s mother. “I spend money every week on precise measuring tools and all I really need is a sharpened pencil!” Joyce’s mother’s response was, “Well Larry, why didn’t you ask that inspector where he got those calibrated pencils from?”

I remember working at Litton when the quality inspectors would always find some reason to reject lots of circuit boards that were good. The reason was they thought it was their job security.