40s and 50s Memories
Patrick Fowles with a later morgan
The serendipity of 1960 was repeated in 1964,
when my summer job suddenly evaporated in
late June, leaving me jobless at a time when most
available jobs were already taken. However a
friend had been interviewing for a permanent
job at Mobil Research and Development
Corporation's basic research laboratory near
Princeton, New Jersey, and had overheard a
researcher there saying he could really do with
some help during the summer. I immediately
found out this researcher's name, called him
personally (you would have been proud of me,
Mr. Lyons-Wilson!), and talked my way into a
job over the phone. That summer job led to a
permanent offer in the Fall, and I joined MRDC
in February, 1966 and stayed thirty years.
During my early years at the Princeton
laboratory, I worked mainly on fundamental
research in boundary (very thin film) and
elastohydrodynamic (point or line contact, as
in ball bearings) lubrication, trying to develop a
unified theory of lubrication by describing how
the microscopic irregularities found on even
smooth surfaces interact as the surfaces slide
over each other. In the 60's this sort of work
was simply called lubrication science, but later
the term tribology (from the Greek tribos, to rub)
was coined which made it sound more esoteric.
I also used an optical elastohydrodynamic
apparatus developed at Imperial College to
create charts that allowed Mobil's engineers
and customer service representatives for the
first time to easily determine the proper grade
of any Mobil lubricant to be used in a particular
application based on scientific principles.
In 1979, after a year at MRDC's Product
Development Laboratory in Paulsboro, New
Jersey, as leader of the industrial lubricants
development group, I joined the management
ladder and returned to the Princeton Laboratory
as Manager of the Products Section, where I
had responsibility for lubricants and fuels
research, as well as work in several other
areas including phosphate rock extraction and
uranium leaching. In 1985 I moved permanently
to Paulsboro and eventually became manager
of the Products Research and Technical Service
Division, responsible for the development of
all Mobil's new automotive, industrial, marine,
and aviation lubricants and fuels, as well as
the company's customer technical service
support. In 1994 I took a temporary assignment
in the Products Marketing Division at Mobil Oil
Corporation's headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia,
before retiring in 1996.
On a personal note, the young lady whom
I hitchhiked to Kansas to see and I were
married in 1967. We have two children and
three grandchildren. Our son is a professor
of archaeology at Barnard College, Columbia
University in New York, and our daughter
teaches art in Austin, Texas. Both have been to
the UK many times; in fact our granddaughter
was born in Wales. Since 1975 we have lived
in northeastern Pennsylvania in an old stone
barn (c. 1848) which we bought as a barn and
converted into a residence. I did most of the
interior work, and its maintenance, together
with hobbies such as gardening, local theatre,
township planning, and my 1966 Morgan Plus
4, now take up most of my time. We also own a
small island in the Thousand Islands region of
the St. Lawrence river in upstate New York upon
which we built a house (again I did most of the
interior work) and where we spend as much time
as we can in the summer. We are, therefore,
by necessity, boaters, but we supplement
our daily boating when in summer residence
with longer cruises in our 25-foot mini cruiser
whenever possible. Between 2006 and 2008
we completed the ~6000-mile circumnavigation
of the eastern third of the United States, known
as the Great Loop. Anyone interested in our log
of this adventure and our other cruises can visit
our web site at www.the-fowles.com.
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