By Chance by Martin Corrick

Author:Martin Corrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588368188
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

11

In the late 1970s the decline of the F. R. Butler company became sharply steeper, and its employees began to drift away. The typists went, and their typewriters with them, all save the last, which was presented to Bolsover: an upright Imperial, a very grand machine that was already a relic, and was soon put away in a cupboard, having been replaced by a word processor.

Kitty was seriously ill by then, so his attention was distracted, but Bolsover saw that Butler’s was on the slide. What should he do? He began to sketch a curriculum vitae. When it came to the properties of steel tubes, he knew a lot about wall thicknesses, inside and outside diameters, transverse metal area, inside cross-sectional area, moment of inertia, section modulus, radius of gyration, and so forth. And the manner in which fluids and gases moved in tubes—he knew something about that, too: that was fluid dynamics, a large and complex topic. This knowledge was particular to pipes and valves, but one can’t be any sort of engineer without picking up a lot more. On his desk at Butler’s was an old copy of Newnes Engineer’s Reference Book—never called by its proper title, but simply “Camm,” after its editor, F. J. Camm, one of engineering’s household gods. He was the editor of Practical Engineering and the author of numerous technical works—Gears and Gear-Cutting, Practical Mechanics Handbook, A Refresher Course in Mathematics, and so forth. In those days, in discussing an engineering problem, somebody was sure to ask, “But what does Camm say?”

Bolsover’s copy of Camm had been inherited from his predecessor. “You can keep him,” said old Arnott. “I don’t want him near my deck chair.”

The book possessed in its heft, its binding, and the fine translucency of its pages a strong suggestion of the Bible; its authority, in Bolsover’s view, was considerably greater. Within Camm’s 1,376 pages was a definitive statement of the theory and practice of mechanical engineering. Abbreviations and units, thermodynamics, the laws of fluids, stress formulae for beams, heat treatment, British standard specifications, cutting speeds for twist drills, moments of inertia, and more than three hundred other topics. Riffling through these pages reassured Bolsover that, despite his spending sixteen years in the same room, he knew about engineering.

In part, Bolsover’s broad knowledge of engineering theory and practice was due to his work as a technical writer, since he might find himself writing about any aspect of Butler’s work, but his browsing in Camm’s pages had certainly helped. He was in the habit of opening the great tome at random during his tea break and testing himself, say, on the best cutting speeds for plane and shaper tools. Camm’s attraction was not just his extensive knowledge but his certainty; in his foreword, Camm had written: “It is confidently expected that the work will be accepted as a standard in an industry where standards are the order of the day.”

His knowledge of Camm convinced Bolsover that he was capable of writing about

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