For the next week or so (and possibly longer) BBC Radio 7 will have a play about the life of Geoffrey Pyke, the inventor of Pykerite and the Habakkuk ice-based aircraft carrier, on their ‘listen again’ service.
The play’s an hour long and called Habakkuk Of Ice and more details are here
I just listened to it and it’s good fun, with a lot of detail!
I’ve always have been fascinated by pykrete. Plus Pyke was an oddball. I’ll see if I can catch this.
I wonder how much it would cost to make a nice sized yacht out of the stuff, sort of like a floating version of the ICEHOTEL.
“Oddball”? What? Just because he only wore pajamas, ate only raw herring and broken biscuits? No, man, that’s what makes him a genius!
It delighted me no end to learn that the “Science!” guy in Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science” was Geoffrey’s cousin Magnus Pyke-- a classic British eccentric himself, by all accounts. Don’t ever stop making 'em, Britain.
Speaking of eccentrics, Stephen Frye is apparently a big one. When the iPhones came out in the US, he promptly bought one, and until they were released in the UK, used his with an international roaming plan! (For those of you who don’t know what this means, it meant that Frye was shelling out huge amounts of cash just to use his phone, when he could have hacked it and used a UK SIM card in it, and paid normal UK rates. :eek: ) He’s since bought himself a UK iPhone, since he still can’t drop a UK SIM card in his US sold model.
Oh yeah, Pyke’s book about his WWI experiences is available as a free download from Google.
Stephen Fry is a genius (IMO) - not so much in terms of his achievements (which are many, and significant), but the man has a razor-sharp mind and appears to have retained and mentally indexed every little scrap of information that has ever passed before him. I don’t think there’s any subject you could discuss with him and not come away having learned something new.