School life / Henry Fanshawe School, Dronfield, 1991 to 1992, and a drawer in 2011
If the Data Logger Does Not Say Hello, Give Up
In 1992 a Dronfield sixth-former who hated chemistry wrote his teachers a guide to the black box nobody could work. Our eldest has just written me one for the thermostat.
Paul Vernon pretty much hated A-level chemistry, he says, so his teacher took him to one side and asked what he thought about doing something “computer related”. He said yes. She left the room and came back with a brown cardboard box: a load of cables, a small black box and, on top, the manual. The gist of what she said, as he remembers it, was: see what you can make of this, because the science department had no idea how it worked.
It worked. On him, I mean. The box took longer.
The black box was a VELA, a Versatile Laboratory Aid, a data logger that had apparently sat idle for years. He took the manual home, read it properly, and used the thing to run titrations with a pH probe and a regulated burette, producing proper titration curves on a BBC Micro. A second experiment tracked the pH of fermenting liquids over two or three days, until the school had a power cut overnight and the results were lost.
Two or three days of data, lost to a power cut: A-level chemistry’s version of the dog eating your homework, if the dog were the National Grid.
Then, in July 1992, his teachers asked him to write them an introductory guide, so they could learn the basics and use the thing more often. A pupil, writing the instructions for the staff. In August 2011 he found it again, OCR’d it, fixed the grammar, reworked the calculations, added photos and put it online, eleven pages long.
It is a fine document. Before the section on working out parameters it says “Calculators at the ready!”. And its troubleshooting advice for switching on is the most honest ever printed: VELA should say “HELLO”, and if it does not, check the connections and try again, and if it still does not work, “try once more and then give up!”
Every printer sold in Britain should come with that sentence on the lid.
Our eldest, who is seventeen, installed a smart thermostat in March, and at my request wrote me a guide to it. Four pages, two diagrams, a contents list. Page three, before the schedule settings, says CALCULATORS AT THE READY, which he claims he thought of himself. My husband has not been given a copy. He has been told he is not ready.
On Saturday the heating came on at 3am. I checked the connections. I tried again. I tried once more.
Then I gave up, exactly as instructed. It is the first set of instructions anyone in our house has ever followed to the letter.
Sources
- The BBC Micro in my education
- Getting started with the VELA Versatile Laboratory Aid
- VELA – Versatile Laboratory Aid
- About Retro-Kit
Notes from the School Gates is a light-hearted column: home scenes and family characters are invented; schools and public facts are real. About the column