Category: Well I thought it was neat!
Will went to retrieve his trusty wheelbarrow only to
find it had already shuffled off this mortal coil.
Ours is a lamentably disposable society. There is a floating garbage island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean currently twice the size of Texas. No kidding, Google it. I really don’t consider myself much a tree hugger, but that’s just embarrassing.
It has not always been thus. Like most of society’s resplendent ills, the impetus for all this blasted trash can be traced back to criminals and lawyers. In 1982 some still-unidentified psychopath slipped potassium cyanide into bottles of Tylenol in the Chicago area and killed seven random strangers. In response, nowadays everything from OTC drugs to meat thermometers and valve stem caps comes sealed in copious disposable clear plastic. While the threat of random poisonings was and is vanishingly rare, the threat of a manufacturer being sued for failure to encase their products in impenetrable plastic remains quite high.
This pervasive attitude extends to some of the most unexpected spaces. I once bought a car touted as being 72% recyclable. It seems everything, including automobiles, is now designed from the outset to be discarded when its service life is complete.
No major infrastructure rebuild project is complete without a commemoration. Will left this brief note to his wife on the underside of the new handle.
Past Performance Does Not Guarantee Future Results
My grandparents’ generation was not so encumbered. They darned socks, patched clothes, repaired appliances, cultivated vegetables, farmed chickens and just generally made do. They also spanked the Nazis and kicked the Imperial Japanese all the way back to their modest little island. They were, in my humble opinion, better than are we.
My grandfather came of age during the Great Depression on a rural Mississippi farm. They grew their own food, so they never went hungry. However, they didn’t have much beyond that. As a result, when he needed something, he just built it.
I enjoy woodworking and maintain a decent wood shop. My shop sports two wood lathes. One came from a factory and is immensely capable. I haven’t turned it on in a decade. The other my grandfather built from scrap bearings and an old washing machine motor. I use it all the time. I find the machine and the man who built it to be frankly inspirational.
The end result might not look like much, but it has a story and just drips character.
The Quandary
We live way out in the sticks. Beating back the surrounding jungle is a relentless, never-ending proposition. Keeping Mother Nature at bay requires a handful of dedicated tools. One of those is a wheelbarrow.
Our wheelbarrow has been part of the family for a generation. It has hauled dirt, concrete, gravel, bricks, mulch, firewood and children. Nowadays, it doesn’t get used very often, but when called upon, it is indispensable. On this fateful day, I went to fetch the family wheelbarrow for something or other, only to find it long dead.
Entropy is the technical appellation. Everything in the universe spontaneously descends into ever greater states of chaos. I attribute this to the unfortunate sin nature of man. In a practical sense this means everything breaks. In this case, the front tire was flat and the twin wooden handles were rotten to the point of uselessness. Now I had a decision to make.
I could zip into Home Depot and procure a fresh wheelbarrow, shiny and smelling of paint. However, that’s not how my grandfather would have done it. He’d have stripped the old wheelbarrow down and built it back up himself. I opted to follow his example.
The humble Dremel tool is the handiest tool in the shop. With enough steel stock, fiber-reinforced cutoff wheels and time, you could build a tank with one of these things.
Transformations
This industrial resurrection was easier said than done. The sundry nuts and bolts were horribly corroded and were, in some cases, literally encased in concrete. The rotten handles were frankly friable and little more than kindling. However, the chassis of the thing seemed unkillable.
The bolt heads were indeed irredeemable. I put a cutoff wheel on my Dremel tool and slotted the opposite ends of the bolts to hold the things in place until I could break them free. Penetrating oil, a jumbo standard screwdriver, a big honking crescent wrench and about half-an-hour eventually dislodged all of the intransigent fasteners. A trip to the local hardware store produced a fresh tube for the tire.
The new handles began life as pressure-treated 2×6’s cut to shape. I used the remnants of the old rotten handles to site the bolt holes. During assembly the whole monstrosity shook, flopped and rattled like a cricket on a hot skillet. Once I tightened down the sundry bolts, however, the old girl snapped rigidly in place, ready for another 25 years of cheerful service
Will’s grandfather built this wood lathe from scratch using discarded bearings and an old washing machine motor. Will says, “That guy was awesome!”
Deep Magic
It’s still an old wheelbarrow but it somehow sports more character than a new one might. I scribbled the date and a modest love note to my wife on one handle to commemorate the event before striking out to whatever mundane task precipitated the resurrection in the first place. Like me, the wheelbarrow isn’t much to look at, but it’s tough, resilient, reliable and loyal.
There’s a bigger message to be found in this repurposed old garden implement, something deep and profound. We were both worn out, ugly, and useless, suitable only to be discarded and forgotten. Then we were attended by the carpenter. He saw something in us that others might not. He poured himself into the task of creating something new, fresh and useful. In a manner of speaking, both of us have simply been redeemed.
Admiral Hyman Rickover bullied physics, bureaucracy, and common sense into submission and birthed the Nuclear Navy. His side quest, the pint-size NR-1 on truck tires, became the weirdest, coolest tool in Cold War deep water.
From Polish Kid To Nuclear Pit Boss
Admiral Hyman Rickover was unique in the annals of the US military. Born in Poland and brought to the US as a child to escape persecution of Jews, Rickover took his first paying job at age nine, earning three cents an hour holding a light for a neighbor who was operating a machine. He entered the US Naval Academy in 1918. In 1922, Rickover graduated 107th out of a total of 540 midshipmen.
Rickover was acerbic, difficult, and mean. However, he was also notorious for getting stuff done. He spent World War 2 organizing and fixing things on ever-increasing scales. He helped coordinate repairs on the battleship USS California in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attacks and ended the war in command of a ship repair facility in Okinawa.
When Nuclear Power Hit The Ocean And Everything Shifted
The Manhattan Project and the two prototype nuclear weapons that ended World War 2 changed the way the world worked. A vast effort was subsequently expended developing novel applications for nuclear energy as both tools and weapons. In 1946, Hyman Rickover took a job at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. His passion became nuclear power for warships.
The original plan was to use miniaturized nuclear reactors to drive US Navy destroyers. Rickover, however, felt that effort would be better expended on submarines.
The Navy, like all bloated military enterprises, enjoys a great deal of administrative inertia. Superior officers who disagreed with the driven little man had him assigned to an office in a disused female restroom in an effort to sideline his efforts. Rickover bulled his way through in the same way he did everything else in his life.
Pressurized Water, Unlimited Endurance, New Tactics
In February of 1949, Rickover threw himself into the development of a pressurized water nuclear reactor for submarine propulsion. The prospects were indeed tantalizing. If he could pull this off, Rickover faced the possibility of a stealthy warship that could operate submerged indefinitely. With essentially unlimited energy, a theoretical nuclear-powered submarine could make its own breathable air and clean water.
It could patrol the world’s oceans at will, loitering as needed to avoid detection. At that point, crew endurance and food stores became the limiting factors in operational deployment. Rickover felt that this was a crusade worth fighting for.
His was an inexplicably unpopular position. As a result, Captain Rickover’s superiors wanted him put out of the Navy for failure to achieve flag rank. The list of names the Navy submitted to the US Senate in 1953 for congressional approval of admiral rank did not include Rickover’s.
Where approval of this list is typically a fairly routine, perfunctory thing, the Senate, in this case, refused its blessing without Rickover. The Secretary of the Navy subsequently convened a special promotion board with the express purpose of approving Rickover for that list. The US Senate left the exchange happy, and Rickover got his star.
The S1W reactor that Rickover developed was a miracle of 1950s-era technology. Highly reliable and exceptionally safe, this device would fit into a submarine hull with a 28-foot beam. In 1954, the US Navy commissioned the USS Nautilus, powered by an S1W. The Nautilus was the world’s first operational nuclear-powered submarine.
Safety Record That Shamed The Soviets
Building a compact, self-contained nuclear power plant was a Gordian challenge. Making that device safe to operate for long periods underneath the sea bordered on impossible. However, Rickover pulled it off.
Over the course of the Russian nuclear submarine program, there have been fourteen known catastrophic reactor breaches. Thanks to Rickover and his superhuman compulsion for detail, the US Navy has had none. Spillover tech from US Navy nuclear programs contributed substantially to the safety of American terrestrial reactors as well.
The Interview Chair Trick And Other Rickover Tortures
Rickover was driven beyond all reason. He was also a miserable boss. He personally supervised the launch and shakedown sortie of every nuclear boat launched on his watch. During his tenure as chief of the Navy’s nuclear programs, every candidate for the nuclear power course had to interview with him personally. The content and nature of these interviews became the stuff of legend.
I have a friend who survived his encounter with Rickover. He said that, for starters, Rickover sawed off the front two legs of the chair you sit in a bit shorter than the back two. This meant that if you tried to get comfortable during the interview, you would gradually slide forward out of the chair. Rickover then proceeded to grill you mercilessly just to see how you responded under pressure. Candidates who lost their composure were remanded to Rickover’s unlit coat closet for a time to regain their wits before resuming their interviews.
Power, Eccentricity, And The Personal Submarine
All seriously powerful people are eccentric. These eccentricities either drive them to their unusual positions or develop subsequent to their arrival. I would submit Elon Musk, Howard Hughes, Donald Trump, George Soros, Adolf Hitler, and Vladimir Putin as examples. These eccentricities are not necessarily bad. However, there inevitably results a sense of entitlement to one degree or another.
I’m not blaming these people. Were I Elon Musk with half a billion dollars in the bank and my own rocket ship company, I’d expect some cool perks as well. In Rickover’s case, he felt he needed a personal submarine.
CIA vs Rickover Over Nuclear Turf
At such rarefied levels, military operations often distil down to petty little turf wars. Flag officers are absolutely insane about maintaining their own little fiefdoms. Hyman Rickover felt that all nuclear-powered submarines should answer to him personally. Naval Intelligence and the CIA felt otherwise.
The CIA co-opted the USS Halibut as an underwater intelligence gathering platform as part of Operation IVORY BELLS. IVORY BELLS was a fabulously successful initiative designed to locate, isolate, and tap Soviet underwater communication cables.
The communists assumed the cables were secure, so they did not bother encrypting their communications. Once we tapped into these cables, we could surveil Russian military activities in real time with no one being the wiser.
NR-1 The Tiny Nuclear Sub That Went Where Divers Could Not
The very existence of the Halibut was like sand on Hyman Rickover’s eyeballs. When he realized that the CIA wasn’t going to give its spy submarine to him, Rickover decided that the next best thing would just be to build his own. Rickover’s personal nuclear-powered midget sub was designated NR-1. NR-1 was launched in 1969 at a cost of $30 million. That would be about a quarter billion dollars today.
NR-1 was an exceptionally capable machine. She could safely descend more than 2,300 feet deep and use her remote manipulator arms to do Sneaky Pete stuff on the ocean floor at depths well beyond the capabilities of even hard-suit divers. To thrive at those depths, the hull had to be perfectly circular and utterly uniform. Tolerances were less than a millimeter all around. Under Rickover’s direction, naval engineers pulled it off.
Not even the Father of the Nuclear Navy could write a check for a quarter billion bucks without some good reason. Rickover, therefore, declared that NR-1’s mission was actually Deep Sea Rescue. While an honorable pursuit, NR-1 didn’t technically possess the means to rescue anybody. It just went really, really deep.
Inside NR-1 What Made It Work
While NR-1 was an exceptionally capable machine, it was also cramped and fairly austere on the inside. Crew space for the 7-man complement was minimal, and support equipment for stuff like food preparation was decidedly suboptimal. The boat would sortie for up to a month at a time, during which the crew subsisted on instant TV dinners. However, the tech built into the vessel was unprecedented.
Lead shielding for submersible reactors is always a technical challenge in submarine design. NR-1 got around this by incorporating a single lead bulkhead that separated the miniaturized reactor in back from the crew spaces up front. Once complete, NR-1 would indeed operate submerged indefinitely. In actual practice, the limiting factor in operational deployments was the capacity of the toilet.
NR-1 incorporated a set of wheels on the bottom that allowed the sub to creep along the ocean floor. These wheels were equipped with otherwise standard Goodyear truck tires. One crewmember was positioned on his belly in the bottom of the sub behind a set of portholes. In this configuration, NR-1 crept along the sea floor gathering up the remains of Soviet nuclear missiles that splashed down after operational tests.
What We Know About NR-1 Missions And What We Don’t
Even today, nobody is completely sure what NR-1 actually did operationally. Her conning tower and sail were painted orange in keeping with the charade that she was actually a search and rescue boat. In 1976, NR-1 located an F14 fighter jet that rolled off the deck of the USS John F. Kennedy and sank in 1,960 feet of water. Ten years later, she helped locate the remains of the space shuttle Challenger after it broke up in flight. NR-1 was formally retired in 2009.
Hyman Rickover got a special dispensation from Congress to spend a total of 63 years in uniform. He was the longest-serving member of the US armed forces in American history. Rickover served under thirteen different Presidential administrations and oversaw 3,000 ship-years of accident-free nuclear warship operations.
Despite his legendarily grueling work ethic, Rickover was married twice and fathered one child. His first wife died of natural causes after 41 years of marriage. The Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarine USS Hyman Rickover was commissioned in 2021 and remains in active service today.
Despite this draconian approach, or more likely because of it, US Navy nuclear power officers have earned a righteous reputation for excellence in both military and civilian circles. Rickover succumbed to a stroke in 1986 at age 86, four years after he retired from the Navy. His nicknames included “The Father of the Nuclear Navy,” “The Kindly Old Gentleman,” or, simply, “KOG.” Rickover’s ghost still drives the Navy’s nuclear power program to this day.
NR-1 Specifications And Quick Reference
| Model | NR-1 |
|---|---|
| Caliber | N/A |
| Barrel Length | N/A |
| Overall Length | N/A |
| Weight | N/A |
| Capacity | 7 crew |
| MSRP | $30,000,000 (1969) |
Pros And Cons Of Rickover’s NR-1 Legacy
- Pros: Extreme depth capability, remarkable safety culture, innovative mission systems like manipulator arms and seafloor wheels.
- Cons: Cramped crew conditions, limited galley, ambiguous official mission, zero true rescue capability despite the cover story.