Thursday, May 17, 2012

My great-grandfather Eddie as my personal link to era of High Modernity

    The dates of famous scientist Lise Meitner, 1978-1968, perhaps better fits the contours of the age of Peak Scientism and High Modernity.
   But I never met her - I did meet and do remember my great-grandfather. He is my personal link, no matter how remote, to this era I write so much about, think so much about,dream so much about, but was not and never will be, a part of.

     Great-grandfather, Edmund Ormrod Collinge, was conceived in December 1879, as Romanticism laying dying and lived just long enough to see it return in the guise of the foppish clothing worn by all aspiring British pop stars in the mid-sixties, before dying himself in August 3rd 1966.
   As fitting his Era, he worked in Engineering, in the British sense of that term, in the North of England where 'muck is money'.
   He loved motorcycles and my grandmother May's first memory  (she was born in 1900) was riding on the back of her dad's motorbike with her baby brother beside her. This was well before WWI and not long after such powerful bikes were perfected.
   His sons love the new science of radio and radar - my father planned to follow along as an engineer too but ended up instead as a naval navigation/gunnery officer and a philosopher-painter.
    Eddie's great-grandson Richard did become a flying navigation officer in Canada's airforce, on Hercules aircraft, before becoming a project officer for an investment bank.
    My interest  in science and engineering- via this journal "Global Commensality NEWS" - is not in hands-on lab or field science but in these activities impact on society - and society upon them.....

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