Slick clay and cloudy water © Eric Hoeppner 2003 *************************************************************************************************** I remember growing up in the Southwest part of the state, over in Bradley Junction just south of Mulberry, in the late 60's, in to the 70's. It was small town Florida, with lots of agriculture, and phosphate mining. Back then it was considered safe for kids to be out by themselves, so we were. Saturday mornings, Tom and I would meet at the old pit. I don't know about Tom but I could not leave the house until I had breakfast and made my bed. I would try and not move all night so I would not have much to do to make it in the morning. Then I'd splash a little milk in a bowl and sprinkle in a few cereal flakes and I was ready to go. Ok, remember to put the bowl in the sink and throw a spoon in. On the way I would grab an egg or two from the hen house. Sometimes Tom would have a fire going and a flat blade shovelhead over the fire as a frying pan, cooking whatever he could get from his house, we would cook our breakfast as the morning haze burned off. Maybe smoke a dried grape vine. Work on our smoke rings, then hit the pit. Hitting the pit was our term for swimming. It was an abandoned phosphate pit. Deep, with water a bluish white color. We had found a slippery clay section of the bank we would wet down and use as a slide, fun, but that clay would get in to everything, hair, shorts, ears. It stuck like cement. If we got out without really doing a thorough rinsing it would dry like cement too. As good Florida students we sort of remembered our Florida history from 4th grade. They had talked about our exports: cattle, oranges, and phosphate. Phosphate was one we could remember even though it was over three years back. I think we remembered it more from the local newspaper, our parents talking about it and how phosphate was slowly digging out the entire town, some sections of land and houses had been bought out and plowed down just for the mineral under the overburden, that top layer of earth covering the good stuff. One Saturday morning after our swim we got on our bikes and headed over to the active pit down at the far end of town. They had scraped of the top fifteen to thirty feet of earth and made huge piles. We liked to push our bikes up to the top, stand there in the bright light, and blue-sky, feeling the light breeze blowing, like we were the kings of the land below. We would sit on the bikes with one foot holding back the force of gravity, trying get our nerve together and decide who would go first. These piles were gigantic. They had scraped an area bigger than two or three JM Fields stores, including their parking lots and piled it into mountain ranges to be pushed back in after the treasure below had been plundered. From our mountaintop we could see the big diesel Cat; it looked as if the shovel on that thing could pick up a small house with one bite. We kept talking about trying to sneak over and explore that machine some time when it was not running, but how could we? It was biting its way through the clay matrix that held the phosphate 24 hours a day every day of the week, cutting down another 10 to 20 feet into the ground. I told you the pit was deep. We bet each other it was over 40 foot deep and thought of all the things that could collect down that deep and never be found again. We would spend hours watching that big shovel scrape out the earth and dump it in a near by pit to be broken apart with high pressure water hoses and pumped off in a thick slurry through a long pipe to be separated in a big spinning machine. One day we where were on top, ready to ride down Suicide Hill on our bikes. We both started at the same time. We had picked our destination on the distant flat ground, a big rock. The loser would wash both bikes. Fast speed down hill. We weren't using the brakes, it was a race. The stakes were high. As we went flying down to the bottom we both had to swerve to miss a slow moving maintenance truck. We ended up hitting a shallow depression of pudding-like clay and sliding for many yards. Now that was fun, but cleaning up after was going to be a challenge. The guy in the truck stopped and had a good laugh watching us try and get to some ground with a little more friction, falling and splashing many times. When we were standing safely with our gray clay covered bodies and bikes, he proceeded to tell us we were trespassing and should not be here. He then asked if we were ok. He let me use his wrench to get my chain back on my bike and told us of the old days before electric or diesel when they use to use mules, picks, and wheelbarrows and hand pumps for the water. This was back in the 1880's when they first discovered phosphate in Florida, up in Hawthorne in Alachua County where his daddy had worked. We thanked him and told him we needed to get going, this layer of clay was beginning to set up. Back at the pit, we hit it, hard and long. We dove, jumped and splashed, that clay did not want to come off. We were afraid to bring our bikes in for a rinse. If they slipped we would never find them in that deep cloudy water. That evening as I was washing and oiling my bike, dad came out to hear of the day's adventures and why my bike was so mud covered. At the end of my recounting of the day he told me that the company had just bought several hundred more acres in the old section of town where many people were second and third generation renting the same land. They would have to move. I asked what would happen if they did not. He told me the law would come move them out, but that was never really a problem. As the big machines got closer and shook the ground the drinking wells would get clouded and go bad, some of the old foundations would sag or sink causing the houses to start splitting open. I asked if it was out near Ms. Audrey's place. I had known Ms. Audrey from the time I was a little baby. She would take care of me some of the time. That lady knew her southern cooking, I thought she should open a restaurant it was so good. Her husband worked for the company like my Dad and most folks in town. Ms. Audrey would bring in extra money, real money not script issued by the company for use in the company store, she would do this with her vegetable garden and doing housework for the people on the other side of town. After her husband had passed, I would help her with her chores and she would pay me a little or sometimes bake me a pie from those sand pears she had growing on her place. Why was it the folks on that side of town were evicted and plowed under and the people on the other side got paid to move to new houses? It just did not seem fair. Dad told me she would probably be moving on real soon. The lights from the night crew running that big machines were shining in her windows now......
Archimedes and the Crown Or Rub a dub dub the kings crown in a tub © Eric Hoeppner 2006   It was the year 260 BC,or 240 or thereabout, (they counted backwards in the BC years) that was a long time ago, I was only 14 and a servant in the court of the tyrant king, Hiero of Syracuse, I don’t mean New York, I’m talking the Greek independent state in Sicily. Hiero was not that bad a guy back then and only used the tyrant thing when he meant business.   I had been given the job of working with the now famous, but this was before he got famous, the now famous Greek mathematician, Archimedes.  I never did find out if that was his first name or last name, we all just called him Archimedes.    On this one particular day the new crown came back from the crown maker guy and Hiero wanted to know if the crown maker guy had really used all the gold to make the crown or had he mixed in some silver or some other cheap stuff. We put it on the official scale with that smooth stone on the other end and it balanced the same as the lump of gold Hiero had sent away for the crown making.    He still did not trust the crown maker guy and told Archimedes, “As your Tyrant king, Hiero of Syracuse, you need to prove to me this crown is pure gold and no filler, be off with you, and take the boy with you.”   We are back at the lab, well, Archimedes’ place, and he sits there staring at that crown for almost a day. He claimed he was pondering. Me? I was bringing in food and cleaning up the dishes and watching him stare. I kept trying to figure what that strange smell was and from where it was coming.  I finally figured it out after I had carefully cleaned the entire place.  It was him, he and his pondering. I don’t think he had bathed in years. If he was going back to see the king I thought it a good Idea to clean him up a little.   I hauled buckets of water to fill a tub, got all his bath stuff set out, and  then stuck my hand in to see how cold the water was… cold!  I put a pot of water over the fire and heated it until it boiled, then I added the hot water to the tub.  It took the chill off, but now the tub was full to the very top.   Now what happened next was a little strange. When Archimedes got in the tub he noticed that as he immersed himself in the tub, not only did the water level rise, and over flow onto the floor, but his apparent weight seemed to decrease, he felt lighter.   I stood there ready to take a good verbal lashing for my foolishness; I should have realized that an object displaces water equal to its volume. Instead he looked at me as he realized that two objects of equal weight will displace different volumes of water when immersed unless their densities are equal.   He leapt out of the tub, grabbed the crown and ran down the street yelling, "Eureka! Eureka!".  I took of after him, tripping over his clothes. I grabbed the clothes, thinking he would realize he forgot them by the time he got to Hiero’s place.   I wanted to find out why he was running naked through the streets of Syracuse yelling, “I have found it, I have found it.”   He explained to the king that silver or almost any metal is less dense then gold. If we filled some pails with water and got some lumps of silver of the same weight, bla bla bla, well any way this went on for hours.  What was I doing? I was bringing in more and more pails of water and running all over getting chunks of metal of different types from the metal smith.  Just after sunrise I heard Hiero call for a messenger to bring him the crown-making guy, he said, “Tell him the Tyrant King, Hiero wants to see him.”   It got pretty ugly. After that, it seemed that the crown-making guy had taken out a good chunk of gold and replaced it with some cheap filler.   Archimedes proved this. He put a chunk of gold on the balance and a stone on the other end; it balanced. Then he put the solid lump of gold in a pail full to the top with water. It overflowed in to the bowl it was in.  Next he put the crown in another full pail and collected the water as it overflowed. There was more water displaced, proving that the crown was not pure gold.    They took the crown maker guy away and I don’t think I want to know where.   I got to clean up the mess while Hiero and Archimedes had several vessels of wine and slapped each other on the back and talked of what a team they were.  As we left, Hiero hollered to him, “Hey, Archimedes write it all down, I will call it Archimedes Principle and present it when I meet with the other rulers at the rulers convention at the end of next month.”   Archimedes went on to do a bunch of boring math stuff.  It kept me busy with getting papyrus and making ink from berries and such and cleaning up all his stuff from failed inventions. Later on he would be known as one of the three greatest mathematicians of all time together with the English guy, Isic Newton (1643-1727) and the German Caral Gauss (1777-1855). But Archimedes was almost 2 thousand years ahead of them with his math stuff.    Occasionally I would get out in the field with him to build some of his crazy inventions.  He made some great war machines that were used to defend Syracuse.  Some really strange contraptions with compound pulley systems. He made some non war stuff too, like that irrigation screw pump thing that real helped with the food production. This created more leisure time and more people moving in and more land being converted to agriculture and, well… civilization and life.  So, if you can, get a part time job with someone that may become famous some day. That’s probably what moved me to become a science teacher and why I am standing here today.