To the Moon and Back chapter sampler

To the Moon and Back

As boys, many of the men I would later work with were all fascinated by new technology — kids like Ron Hicks in Canada, and John Saxon and Mike Dinn in England. Mike took his model train engine apart to see how it worked and was unable to get it to go again. John made himself a crystal set when he was 12, as well as a massive three-stage radio receiver which covered the floor of his bedroom. It used three different kinds of batteries, including a lead acid one that needed to be charged at the local radio shop. It even worked — eventually. My friend Brian Hale also tinkered with old valve radios when he was a kid. His parents finally decided to find the money to send him to the Marconi School of Wireless in Sydney. He says: ‘They probably thought that if I liked taking things apart, it would be good to know how to put them back together.’ One day we would all be working together on a project more ambitious than any we had ever dreamt about. As Colin Power says: ‘I never thought that, when I left my country town at the age of 17 to train as a technician with the Postmaster-General’s Department (now Telstra and Australia Post), I would be part of one of the greatest technological triumphs of the 20th century.’

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