Author Tommy Atkinson
Who is Tommy Atkinson?
Tommy Atkinson is my pen name. Few people in America know that in Jolly Old England nobody ever heard of John Doe. Over there the standard name for no name is Tommy Atkins. All the sample forms in the British military are in that name. Ever wonder why British soldiers are called Tommies? So, Tommy Atkinson. (Kind of like Son of Kong, right?)
I am a man, fifty-four years old, who has had the good fortune to experience a broad variety of cultures. In my childhood my family were American diplomats, and I lived in a number of countries, mostly in the Middle East. We also traveled to a lot of places both in the Middle East and in Europe.
This is what I look like.
As an adult I have been somewhat of a misfit. I couldn't tolerate the academic system, so I set out on my own after
one semester of college. I have always been an inventor, and for some time when I was young I was an artist painter
and sculptor. The sculpture, however, led me into technology. (How do you make a bronze casting? For example.)
In technology I found the blend of the physical and the intellectual I was seeking. From the start, it was apparent
to me that to work with technology you had to have one of two things. You had to have a lot of money, or you had
to be a machinist, a welder, a draftsman, a foundryman, and a host of other things. I didn't have a lot of money.
The machine shop is the core of civilization, it's reproductive organs so to speak. In a machine shop, new machinery which has never existed before can be made from raw metal. If you're inclined to invent, the machine shop is where your designs go, for the prototype to be made at least. So, I became a machinist. Trouble was, nobody wanted to train any machinists. The way it went was, they paid to train an apprentice, and when he got his Journeyman's card, he said, "Thanks a lot," and went elsewhere to work. So, I got some old books and studied how it was done. Then I went to some auctions and finally bought a 10" X 36" Atlas metal lathe. The lathe is maybe the most basic machine tool, and I trained myself to run it.
Then I applied for a job with a big company and said, "Yeah, I'm a journeyman." I was 18 years old at the time, and the foreman looked at me funny, but he didn't point out that I would have to have started my apprenticeship at 14. I guess he figured if I was full of myself, the shop floor would show me up in about five minutes.
I made it through. My first eight hour shift went by like a flashbulb. It seemed like I began working working on the big 20" American engine lathe they assigned me to, and in about ten seconds eight hours had gone by. (To give a little perspective, my Atlas weighed about four hundred pounds and had a half horsepower. This American weighed about fifteen thousand pounds and had twenty horsepower. (It would eat steel like a wood chipper.)
To make a long story short, I worked there two years and ran virtually everything they had, teaching myself how to run each new machine as I went. Then I quit and started a machine shop of my own in Oakland, California. (In the San Francisco Bay Area) I ran that company for ten years and then sold it and went into Regulatory Law. What that means is that I got involved at the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) in the area of customer generated electric power. I had invented a system where a gasoline type engine drove a thing called an Induction Generator and put electricity into the wall. The waste heat (from the radiator and the exhaust and the oil) was used for whatever the owner might need heat for. It's called cogeneration, and it could have been used right down to the household level. You could make a water heater that did this. Gasoline type engines run well on natural gas, and they and the induction generator, which is nothing more than an ordinary electric motor, are cheap and available. But, the utility company had to accept and pay for the power. I had considerable success for a one man band, but it was never going to make any money, so sadly I had to give it up.
By that time I was penniless, a common thing for me. I went to work for the University of California at Davis and worked there for another ten years. There I encountered about every kind of technology there is. The last thing I did was design and build a hydraulic earthquake simulator for the Civil Engineering Department. (In a team including a couple of professors and a number of other techies, but I was essentially the core guy of the project.) This earthquake simulator was to be mounted in the bucket of the world's largest geotechnical centrifuge and had to operate at fifty gravities. It had 120,000 pounds of thrust and shook the 10,000 pound model at frequencies up to 300 cycles per second. It was capable of releasing a million watts of energy while flying around in a 60 foot diameter circle at 170 miles per hour (indoors). A challenging project which we pulled off as a first generation success.
About the end of this time, I began writing novels. I had written reams of technical stuff in my life, and I started writing fiction as a form of recreation. People liked my stuff, and finally I decided to try to make a career out of it, so here I am.
Tommy Atkinson