school

(photo: Tim Jones, Darkroommatter.com)

I learnt only recently, while researching the early use of computers in schools, that my physics teacher from the late seventies, John Page, had died during 2009. Better known with implicit consent by his nickname ‘Bumble’ (possibly after the Dickens character, I was never sure), he was certainly a character himself.  He was also a teacher who encouraged me to think.

Reproduced from the Gateway Magazine

For sure, Bumble covered the official syllabus – wheeling out totally worthy but ultimately plain vanilla air pucks, weights, springs and the like.  But the most interesting discussions – the ones that have stuck with me -  followed some of his more wacky off-the-wall demonstrations.

On one memorable occasion, as an introduction to Newton’s Laws of Motion and the Gas Laws, Bumble kicked off the lesson by discharging a black powder pistol at the front of the classroom.

Lesson protocol started in the usual way.  The class in silence, with Bumble making his ponderous walk up to the front bench of the teaching laboratory.  He tended to always look downwards, his eyelids giving the impression of one who is asleep.  Just normal procedure so far then.

Except today there was a revolver in his hand, one chamber of which he proceeded to load: methodically inserting pieces of cloth, then gunpowder, then cloth again (no actual slug thank goodness), before compressing the package with a small ram rod.  We all remained silent, and nobody moved.

Gateway Grammar School, Leicester (Photo: Tim Jones)

This was before the time, in the UK at least, that any crazies had run amok in schools massacering innocent children with firearms; so I guess we felt intrigue rather than fear.  This was Bumble anyhow – he did weird stuff.   With the last addition of a copper percussion cap, the gun was pointed in the general direction of the laboratory wall, and fired.

Seconds after the most enormous bang echoed through the now smoke-filled laboratory, the Head of Physics, Mr Gill, closely followed by the Head of Chemistry, Mr Scottow, tumbled into the lab looking suitably alarmed.  They’d clearly not been pre-briefed on this one, and were expectant of some terrible fate having befallen us.  I remember their expressions changing from shock to relief, with an after-smirk of resignation, as the gunman stepped out of the smoke.

Stunts like Bumble’s Colt Navy demo got our attention, but were also the intro for quite stretching discussions in the more formal lesson that followed.  In this case, when we’d all settled down, Bumble got us thinking about how long a gun barrel would have to be before the bullet changed direction and went back the other way.

Imagine the thought processes needed for that.  First off, there’s the non-intuitive realisation that a projectile in a tube can change direction if the pressure behind it falls sufficiently relative to the pressure in front of it – which theoretically can happen in a long enough gun barrel.   Then there’s the skill of mentally extrapolating the familiar (short barrel) to unfamiliar extremes (hugely long barrel).  Thinking in abstraction and at scales beyond normal experience is useful, for scientists and non-scientists alike, in appreciating the scales relevant to fields as diverse as evolutionary biology and cosmology (and presumably also super-gun design).

Sections of the 'Big Babylon' Iraqi super-gun at the Royal Armouries, Fort Nelson, Portsmouth (Photo: Tim Jones, Darkroommatter.com)

Then comes the actual physics and chemistry of the deal: mechanics, thermodynamics, kinetics, friction, shock-wave propagation – not to mention the maths needed to sort the thing out (I don’t remember if we came up with an actual quantitative answer, and suspect an analytical solution is only possible with major simplification.  I’ll have a think and report in a future post.)   So, all sorts of good stuff.  And of course the follow-on lesson can cover ballistics, catching up with the bullet when it leaves the gun.

In a similar vein, my introduction to fluid flow through constrictions and Bernoulli’s principle took the form of the largest firework rocket I’ve ever seen being launched from the school playground.  In the follow-on lesson, we talked about rocket nozzle design.   No one was surprised to learn Bumble, as well as being a physics teacher, was a licensed firework maker who designed and cast his own nozzles.  I still marvel that the thing came down ‘safely’ in the confines of the school yard.

So that’s how I remember Bumble.  I guess we might at times have got distracted into non-syllabus material; but that’s a danger with all real-life problems if they’re studied with sufficient rigor.  And as Bumble’s teaching style was pretty much the antithesis of spoon-fed exam practice, it wouldn’t have suited all-comers.  On a practical note too, with the security position being what it’s become, even since the late seventies, it’s probably unwise for teachers to be firing pistols and launching rockets in quite the way I experienced.

In principle though, I love the attitude and approach to education Bumble represented, and hope kids are still enjoying equivalent spectacles – albeit in a tamed down form.

For all our sakes, I hope we haven’t seen the last of the Bumbles.