Yesterday I had lunch with Roger and Eileen Kimber. Roger and I worked at Bell Labs in 60s. It brought back a flood of memories of the four years I spent there. It was only years later that I discovered that I had the perfect job at the Labs. I was very productive and never worked a day there. I was fortunate enough to actually find another perfect job later in life, but that is a story for later. However, our little lunch meeting reminded me of some of the fun things i did while working there.
Roger and I shared a lab work area which had work benches and our desks electric and electronic equipment necessary to do our jobs. One of the projects was during the discovery and changeover of the U.S. coinage from coin silver to the laminated coins that we have today. Roger was assigned the task of insuring that the new coins would work in the Bell coin operated telephones.. He had been instrumental in the design of the single slot coin phone.
Halfway down the building was a life test room and Roger had a setup feeding coins continuously through the coin detecting device on the telephone. Coins were fed into it and would pass properly through the mechanism and belt fed back to the top to do it all over again. If there were a jam up, he had photocells monitoring the path to notify him.
There were wiring troughs throughout the building containing many wires which could be used to signal remote information. Information was sent through these to a buzzer on Roger’s desk to let him know of a problem. I figured out which set of wires he was using and added a little push button on my desk to make his buzzer work. I would at random times push the button just to watch him run down the hall to find a problem that didn’t exist.
After a couple of weeks, I confessed to him, and he took it in good humor. There are many more stories to follow.
