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Nov. 24, 2004 Richard Steinmetz died about 20 years ago. He should probably be famous in his way, but he's not. As a young man, he enlisted in the Army for WW2 and was assigned to a unit which assembled Bailey bridges, which allowed men and machines to cross rivers in Europe. He never spoke much about his military exploits, but he was one of the first to reach one of the Hitler's concentration camps and had a few words to say about the barbarity of the treatment of those prisoners. (If you don't know who Hitler was, look him up.) This especially galled him because his ancestry was Germanic. He was distantly related to Charles Proteus Steinmetz. If you don't know who he was, look him up. Richard Steinmetz shared some of the great mental ability of his ancestor. He was very quick at mathematics, he was a fine bridge player, nearly national tournament quality. He was a pretty fair athlete, having been a baseball pitcher in his youth. He was a natural musician, a fine self-taught guitar player, and he had met and played informally with Merle Travis. If you don't know who he is, look him up. He was a natural leader and should have ended up as an entrepreneur running his own company, perhaps, but fate wasn't that kind and he worked many years as a supervisor of a small rubber- manufacturing company outside Columbus, Ohio. But none of the above is sufficient reason for you to know his name. But you all owe him a debt of gratitude. A very famous rubber chemist had been hired to develop self-vulcanizing rubber. This would allow rubber to be bonded with other materials such as cloth or leather without the need for adhesives. The famous chemist worked long and hard, trying different formulas and manufacturing processes, varying the intervals on the Banbury mixers, but nothing ever worked and he gave up. However, Richard Steinmetz did not give up. He continued on alone in the apparently futile effort to create self-vulcanizing rubber, and one day he succeeded. And that is how the tennis-shoe-running-shoe- cross-training-shoe-Nike-Adidas-Reebok-Air-Jordan industry was actually made possible. ------------ About the author Brooks A. Mick: 63-yr-old physician, still practicing medicine but retired from the US Army. Write just for the fun of it, but working on novel in the vein of Tom Clancy's politico-military genre. Email: brooks15@cox.net ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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