Part 20
Let me tell you a triumphant and tragic story of John Goodman Household, born in England in the mid-1800s and who travelled to South Africa with his parents as a child. His parents were farmers. They settled in the Karkloof area of the Natal Midlands, some eighty miles from Durban.
John had an idyllic childhood, living on a farm and attending the local school. It was essentially an outdoor life, but strangely the boy, a prolific reader, became obsessed with a concept that increasingly occupied the minds of only a handful of men and possibly women around the world in the second half of the nineteenth century – the possibility of flying!
His first step into researching a means of flying was to shoot a number of large birds such as eagles and vultures and examine the size of their wings in relation to their body. This led him to calculate the size of the wingspan he would require to carry him into the air. His parents were initially impressed with John’s flair for various other mechanical inventions, but when he became serious about trying to build a glider that would carry his weight they, as staunch Christians, were appalled. The phrase, “If God had wanted Man to fly, he would have given us wings” was repeated to their son many times.
Undeterred, he carried on with his experiments. His first attempt was a farce. He used stout poles cut from Seligna Gum trees, covered with animal hides to form the wings. He then enlisted the help of a number of Zulus who worked on the farm to help him pull his unwieldy craft up into a tall tree; then, at his signal, the Zulus pulled it off the tree. The contraption promptly nosedived into the ground at the bottom of the tree. John was lucky not to have been seriously injured.
At this stage, the entire village of Karkloof was up in arms over the youth who defied God’s will, but nothing would persuade John from what seemed to be a suicidal mission. He made a number of further attempts to improve his glider without much success until help came from an unexpected source. Despite the religious controversy stirred up in Karkloof, no lesser person than Bishop Colenso, the Anglican Bishop of Natal and a noted amateur mathematician, took an interest in John’s quest. He realized that the previous gliders had simply been too heavy, despite their large wingspans. He and John experimented with various materials and finally came up with a combination of bamboo poles and shot silk (also called changeable silk).
Colenso was no stranger to controversy himself. He had been suspended from the Anglican Church in South Africa for alleged heresy. Apart from disagreeing with some passages in the King James Bible, he also realized that trying to convert Zulu men to Christianity was futile if they were to be forced to renounce all of their numerous wives save one. His argument was that Zulus entering the Church for the first time should be allowed to retain all their wives but their sons should then be persuaded that monogamy was the correct Christian way of life.
Colenso travelled to England and spoke to the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Anglican Church, who understood Colenso’s point of view and reinstated him. Meanwhile, the Anglican Church leaders in South Africa had appointed a new bishop, with the title Bishop of Maritzburg, the capital city of Natal. On his return, Colenso and the new bishop both claimed to be the head of the Church in that region, even though the new bishop was only named “of Maritzburg,” which, in fact, was the incorrect name for the city of Pietermaritzburg, so one suspects that the Church hierarchy was not fully certain of its new appointment. In the event, Colenso broke away from the Anglican Church to form the Church of England in South Africa.
All of which detours away from John, who finally succeeded in flying his latest version aided by Bishop Colenso’s mathematical calculations on the wing to weight ratio. He had his team of Zulus help take his glider to the top of a cliff behind the farmhouse. He had a tense moment before launching his craft. The Zulus refused to push him off the cliff, saying that it was against their beliefs to assist someone to commit suicide. John desperately pleaded with them, insisting he had no intention of killing himself and that the glider would definitely now fly.
The Zulus finally agreed and launched him into space. And indeed he flew! John was airborne for a mile and half but landed badly, hitting a tree next to the farm dam and breaking his leg. He had promised his mother that he would never fly again. He kept his promise, never married and died alone and lonely at the age of 97.
The point of this story is that we have Peter Warren, who became obsessed with the idea that computing systems could be greatly improved. He has for many years followed his convictions against all kinds of adversity and outright attacks to prevent his ExoTech system from ever seeing the light of day.
It takes a very special kind of person to ignore criticisms and all kinds of false data which tries to “prove” that his invention will never work. It takes a stubborn sense of certainty that there is a pot of gold at end of the rainbow.
ExoBrain is that elusive pot of gold and we are nearing the end of the rainbow. More and more influential people and groups are finally taking a serious look at ExoTech and realizing that, against the odds, there is a completely new, simple and workable system that will revolutionize computing forever.
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.