I’ve been putting off this post since I started the blog. It’s embarrassing. I’m proud of what I did, but telling it makes me feel a little like one of those old guys who never stops talking about the night his forward pass won the big game.

Still, if I hadn’t done what I’m going to tell you about today, I would never have done what I did the summer after (tomorrow’s post), and if not for that, I would still be driving a tractor in Oklahoma. So here goes.

1964-5 was my junior year in high school. That was the year I took both junior and senior English because I was running out of classes to take, and that was the year I discovered science fairs. We didn’t have one in our tiny school, but their was a regional competition one county over. I had recently discovered Shirley Moore’s Science Projects Handbook, which was the bible for the science nuts (nerd wasn’t a word yet) of my generation.

America was in space; the Mercury project was completed and Gemini was waiting in the wings. I was enthralled with space, but also with ecology. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was about to make ecology a household word, but no one in my world had heard of it yet. I decided to put the two together and build an “Ecosystem Operable in Weightlessness”.

Lets get real. Boy scientist builds spaceship and flies to Arcturus only happens in the very old pulp stories. I wasn’t going to build something that would actually fly in space. It was an exercise in design, with as much building as I could pull off with limited resources.

The idea was that at that time NASA needed to keep to keep some creature in weightlessness long enough to see what it would do to its body. Laika the Russian space dog hadn’t lasted long, and the longest Mercury flight had been 34 hours. I proposed a design that would put two mice in a closed ecosystem with algae. It was set up so that the algae tank would spin to provide just enough gravity to keep the water separate from the air, but the mice would be weightless in a separate chamber.

The fun was in the details. The mice would be housed in a two part plexiglas bubble, with a wire mesh floor at its equator. Waste would pass through he mesh, carried by the airstream and drop down into the algae tank.

That part actually got built. I made the algae tank of plexiglas, heated and formed around two round pieces of wood. I blew two half domes with a plywood form, an air compressor dragged up from shop class, and an oven borrowed from the home-ec teacher.

As I’ve said before, most of my education came outside of the classroom, thanks to indulgent teachers. They did the right thing, but it would get them fired if they did it today.

I bolted the half domes together through flanges formed during the blowing process. With two mice, Hing and Ho (named after the meerkats in Andre Norton’s Beast Master) in the upper chamber of the dome and a mass of Ankistrodesmus from a local stream in the algae chamber, connected by an aquarium pump, the ecosystem was as far finished as I could manage by the time of the science fair.

The physical result was limited by my resources, but the design went much further. To transfer the food to the mice, I had designed a pump, patterned after a Wankel engine (all the rage in Popular Mechanics that year). It was to send algae laden water up through a tube where it would be flushed over a fine mesh screen. The water would return to the tank on the airstream, leaving the algae for the mice to eat.

I did actually experiment with feeding them Ankistrodesmus. I strained it out of the water, dried it over a light bulb and passed the algae wafer into the mice’s cage. They went wild. You would have thought it was ice cream.

The design called for a small tube to carry a continuous airstream from above the algae water to strike the inside center of the upper dome, bringing the mice fresh air and carrying away waste as it returned. There a larger tube would carry the waste to the bottom of the algae tank.

To get water to the mice under weightlessness, the design called for the airstream from the algae tank to first pass through a Hilsch vortex tube, which split the airstream into hot and cold halves. The cold half was to pass between two thin metal plates. The warm (and moist) half of the air was to play onto the outside of these plates, leading to condensation and a continuous source of water for the mice to drink.

So why am I telling you this? Because this was the first step toward my future.

I didn’t know that at the time. I just did it because it was a challenge and more fun than I had ever had, but it led to a Fleming Fellowship, and that changed my life. more tomorrow.