Brian's Home Page

Content that interests me and perhaps others might find useful

Extra Stuff Goes Here

Sometimes this would be called a sidebar or aside, but it doesn't always have to be on the side to be called a sidebar. Sidebars can be on tops of things, below things, but they are usually beside things – hence it being a called a sidebar.


The Reason This Web Site Exists

This web site is disorganized. Sorry about that. It began in the very earliest days when the World Wide Web first permitted public access (outside of universities). I used Windows Notepad to code up some of this new-fangled HTML text-tagging code and used whatever content I had on-hand. It was just an experiment, for kicks. But the content was accessed and links from other web sites appeared. So I became reluctant to completely scrap it all and reorgainze it properly. This non-traditional home page is likely my last reorginization attempt; and for most purposes, I doubt if anyone needs to come here. The search engine web crawlers index my content and from the stats, I see that my content pages are being accessed directly from search engines.

By training I'm a historian of science, and in grad school I presumed I'd end up as a history instructor at a community college somewhere. But life takes strange turns and instead of being a teacher, I spent 39 years pretending to be a systems engineer in the software industry. I somehow pulled it off. I'm now retired and able to research and write about the history of science & technology, principally radio and electronics technology.

One result of my retirement free time is my book, The Wright Engineers: Inventing the Airplane. This is the engineering story of the invention of the airplane by the Wright brothers. It is aimed at middle grade readers and above, students who have an interest in aviation or engineering. Indeed, the book has nearly equal emphasis on aeronatical science and engineering. More details may be found on the book's website.