Part 45
I may come back to my life story at some point, but for the moment suffice to say that I grew up in Cape Town from age of 10, went to school 1,200 miles away outside Durban Natal and then left school on a train that travelled 2,500 miles from the East Coast to Walvis Bay, the port of what is now Namibia on the West Coast.
However, I have just had a long chat on Skype with one of my film partners, Johann Schutte, in Johannesburg. I wrote a blog about him recently as one of three South Africans that were closely involved with space travel. Out of the blue today he told me a story about his childhood that in the nearly forty years I have known him, he never told me before.
He grew up at Steelpoort, a mining village in the Bushveld, about forty miles northwest of Lydenburg in what was then the Eastern Transvaal where his dad was involved in the chrome mining industry. Johann, from all accounts, was an exceptionally bright child. He matriculated at the age of 15, when the average age of school-leaving matriculants was about 18. At the age of 8, he had a life-changing experience. Their family farm was far from the regular routes of the airlines and it was a rare occasion if a plane appeared in their skies.
However, one day, Johann was playing outside the house when he heard an aircraft fly overhead. He looked up and saw a light plane heading towards the mountain on the other side of the Steelpoort River at the bottom of their property.
At the last moment, the plane turned and descended steeply, making a forced landing on a dirt road running beside the river. Johann ran barefoot across the veld towards the river, crossed at the bridge and approached the plane.
The pilot was checking something in the engine. He turned and greeted Johann, who had never been close to a plane before. The pilot explained that the engine was behaving erratically so he had put it down as a precaution. He had already figured out what was wrong and felt he could fix it. Johann walked around the plane admiring it and dreaming what it must be like to be up in the clouds looking down on the earth below.
A while later, the pilot fixed the problem, closed up the engine cowling, said goodbye to the little boy and took off again. For weeks afterwards Johann was obsessed with the idea of flying. He got his parents to buy every book and magazine on flying that they could lay their hands on.
Johann then decided to build his own aeroplane and, with the consent of his dad, he scrounged some planks from the mine and also found some very hard wood that he soaked in water and, over a period of time, molded into the shape of a propeller. He then collected some old rubber tubes from the trucks at the mine’s transport division and cut it into wide strips. He then fastened it to a hook at the back of the propeller at one end and then to another hook in the tail of the plane.
Johann spent literally months studying the structure and shape of aeroplane wings. He found that, by soaking the wooden planks in water, he could make them pliable enough to shape them exactly to the design of the wings he was copying. In those days, lightweight wooden crates were used mostly for packing fruit and vegetables. The thin strips of wood from these crates helped Johann to make the leading edge of the wings. His mother had a thin florally decorated plastic tablecloth for the kitchen table, but somehow it had acquired a hole and Johann used it to cover the wings, while parts of the washing line were used for the controls.
Finally, the plane was built. Johann, with the help of a young African boy called William who was slightly older than him, built a launch pad on top of the garage roof. The idea was that Johann would actually fly the plane from the launch pad. He and William used to play together all the time as kids, so it was natural that William should help him.
With the aid of the giant elastic bands he had fashioned from the rubber tubes and a broomstick as propeller stopper after winding the elastic bands to virtual breaking point, he had William standing by, holding the tail and, on Johann’s signal, William pushed the plane forward on the launch pad, while Johann pulled the broomstick back, so that the propeller would start turning as the bands unwound. As William pushed the plane, the propeller started spinning and Johann and the plane went shooting off the launch pad and, on the first occasion, after a few moments of flight, it crashed onto the lawn below.
Johann’s parents were furious, convinced that Johann, now aged 9, was going to kill himself. Undeterred, Johann went back to the basic mechanics and, with further attention to the wing-to-weight ratio, Johann was ready to try again. This time he waited until there was a strong headwind blowing for extra lift. He could actually feel the plane trying to lift off the launch pad as the wind was blowing over the wings of his craft.
The elastic bands were wound to the maximum. William gave the craft a big push. Johann pulled the broomstick and the plane took off this time but swooped down towards the ground, then suddenly catching an updraft, he flew up and over a fence, continuing upwards until the elastic unwound and the propeller stopped. Johann was then about 20 feet in the air and collided with a big thorn tree.
Mr and Mrs Schutte were confronted by the alarming sight of their 9-year-old son sitting on top of a thorn tree in his wooden aeroplane!
Johann says that one of the big white thorns penetrated the bottom of his foot and took nearly six months to work its way out.
As he was telling me this, I became increasingly intrigued, because it had echoes of another story I actually wrote as a television series, which I have also written about in a previous blog. In brief, it is the story of John Goodman Household, who, in 1876, was one of the first people in the world to fly an aircraft without an engine, effectively a glider.
His early attempts were very similar to Johann’s. Household had a team of Zulus push him out of a tree and he promptly went splat on the ground below the tree. Unlike Johann, he had no idea of the mechanics and the science of flying. He had built his first glider with strong wattle poles and covered them with dried animal skins. The result was ridiculously heavy and he was lucky to survive.
Later, he met Bishop Colenso, a mathematics scholar and an obvious character. He had been convicted of heresy by the Anglican Church in South Africa for daring to suggest that a Zulu, who traditionally had five or more wives, was unlikely to become a Christian if he had to dump four of his five wives. Colenso had the idea that this Zulu should keep his wives, become a Christian and then they would teach his sons to be monogamous. He also disagreed with certain passages in the Scriptures. Anyway, he returned to England and pleaded with the Archbishop of Canterbury who reinstated him.
Colenso returned to South Africa and helped Household get his wing-to-weight ratio right. Household actually flew a mile and a half in a craft that was built, under Colenso’s instructions, of bamboo poles and shot silk. This was despite the fury of the villagers where Household lived, who very religious and actually said that, “If God had intended Man to fly, He would have given him wings!”
I told Johann about Household whom he had heard of before and we marveled that he and the 19th century pioneer had had almost identical ideas and were obsessed with flight, except that Johann as a would-be astronaut was aiming for the moon and Household was simply happy that he could fly.
It is men like this who make our world interesting in the same way that Peter Warren makes it very interesting and exciting for those around him who are part of his ExoBrain team. In Peter’s case, however, his reinvention of the way in which computers should think and operate, will change the world to some degree. Johann Schutte and John Goodman Household on the other hand, have been part of the rich fabric of life that may not make them “household” names but we are surely enriched for having known them!
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.