Tag Archives: Abraham Truss

And that’s a wrap

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My visit ‘home’ has come to an end. I had a wonderful time visiting with family and friends, and I achieved a lot. I sorted through the last of over 500 boxes of my dad’s files, and cleaned up my mom’s garage.

Last year working in the garage was almost all I did while here. This year I balanced the work with visits to friends and family. This year it really felt like a holiday. It helped that the majority of the work was done on my last trip, and yet it still took 7 trips to the dump with a packed RAV4 to clear out and recycle the last of his files.

I’ve kept 6 boxes of his work that I don’t know what I’m going to do with? This is his work that I know is innovative and brilliant, but who do I share it with? And how? My dad would have wanted it thrown away, but it would be sad to see the knowledge and insight he was able to achieve vanish.

But for tonight that is a question that will have to wait until another day, because I head home in the morning and this trip is a wrap.

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The accompanying image was taken with my mom after a walk earlier this evening.

Lateral Thinking

Like I mentioned yesterday, my dad passed away leaving hundreds of boxes to sort through. Today I found a few with memorabilia and one specific one I was looking for with a diesel fuel formula he invented. Most of the other boxes were files with copies of patents and research my dad collected. Although, there were also quite a few boxes with some strange topics he also ventured into.

As a self taught generalist, my dad was always taking ideas and combining them, and he wasn’t afraid to delve as deep into ‘wu wu’ science as he did into ‘legitimate’ research. He had a knack for seeing connections where others didn’t.

So it was no surprise when I found these periodic tables where he was identifying the elements that were prime, double prime, and Fibonacci numbers, and looking at their isotopes.

This is the kind of thing my dad did. He would think laterally and make unusual connections that would be completely missed by anyone else… and the reason they would miss it is because there isn’t a logical connection.

My dad developed a CRO/REDOX process to chemically extract platinum and other precious metals from catalytic converters and recyclable computer components. He actually got a test lab built and proved the technology, while scientists at the Ontario Research and Technology Foundation (ORTECH, now ORF-RE) said it couldn’t be done, and even after it was proven said, ‘This shouldn’t work’.

But like many things, my dad had a different angle, and in this case a different perspective on the chemistry behind the process. And when he built the prototype, he made it modular so that he could expand it rather than rebuild it. For many reasons, including terrible timing with a stock market crash, this project never got off the ground.

The ideas that my father combined allowed him to be extremely creative and innovative. He was brilliant in the connections he made. Yet that same ability was also a disability. My father was also an end-of-the-world prepper, and followed a lot of conspiracy theories.

The same lateral thinking that made his scientific mind so brilliant also created lateral (read more as sideways) connections to far out conspiracies that kept the ideas alive long after others had moved on. Among his boxes and boxes of printed patents and research are other boxes with articles that I would describe more as delusional rather than just ‘fake news’. In fact these articles date back as far as 2004, long before the term fake news existed.

I think the internet broke my dad. He was a doomsdayer since the 80’s. After we watched World War III, a miniseries that aired on NBC on January 31, 1982, he turned the TV off and had a heart-to-heart with his kids. He basically told us that WWIII was inevitable in our lifetime. I remember getting upset not just that the world was going to end, because at 15 I believed everything my dad said, but also that my younger sisters were crying as he broke this ‘news’ to us. Why did they need to know this at those ages?

It got really bad with Y2K, that’s when he started ‘prepping’, storing food and collecting thousands and thousands of dollars worth of supplies. Supplies we now need to get rid of for pennies on the dollars spent. But what really made it worse after that was the internet. Dad found all kinds of websites that he considered reliable, some of which where known Russian propaganda sites, but that didn’t phase my dad who believed all kinds of conspiracies about big media. Now I’m not saying that big media is fully trustworthy, but I’d put more weight on them than on Russian propaganda websites.

So lateral thinking was both a blessing and a curse for my dad. Making incredibly insightful scientific connections made him a brilliant scientist and inventor. And making incredibly dubious doomsday connections made him a paranoid prepper, who always believed ‘the shit is going to hit the fan’ at any moment.

There is a fine line between brilliance and madness.

Boxes and boxes

My father passed away in late April. He was a wonderful and complicated man. He spent his entire life reading and learning. And among many other things he was an inventor. He was a genius, and also very quirky. In addition to being brilliant, he was also a zealous doomsday prepper. This complicated his ability to focus on his inventions, which is a shame because he had some proven technologies he invented that never came to life.

I’m visiting my mom now, and one of my tasks is to sort through 500+ boxes of files my father amassed, in an oversized garage. He was quite OCD, and would make multiple copies of patents and other research, and put them in individual file folders and then put those in file folder holders, the kind with a metal edge to fit into filing cabinets. But he didn’t have enough filing cabinets so they went into boxes.

Most of what I’ve uncovered so far is going to the dump. It’s reams of paper copies of things anyone can find freely on the internet today. My dad filed them as a way to remember as opposed to a reference he continually went back to. That said, in the coming days I’ll share some stories about his amazing memory and ability to find files in unmarked boxes and file folders.

But for now I’ll be in a garage with hundreds at boxes looking through them and searching for some of his inventions. I think it would be sad to throw away things like the formula to mix diesel fuel and water in a perfect solution that runs more efficiently than diesel on its own… one of the inventions or rather discoveries of my dad.

It’s sad to think that his brilliance wasn’t shared with the world. I hope I can salvage something that can be valued and put to good use. I only have a few hundred boxes to search through, and I say ‘only’ with a lot of sarcasm. In many ways these boxes represent who my dad was far more than his ashes do. He was happiest when reading, printing, filing, and ultimately boxing everything he learned and found important.

And so into the boxes I go. It’s a daunting task, but I’m developing a rhythm, and will hopefully not have to spend my entire trip boxed up in the garage.