Chris Dean’s Personal Website

From a very early age, in fact ever since my dad started to teach me maths at the age of three or four, I have been interested in solving problems. This was partially due to my inquisitive nature, and my mum’s interest in crosswords, and other such puzzles that I tried to help her solve when I was a little older. My dad was a blacksmith at Chatham Dockyard, where he made springs. Conveniently, he is very creative and very good at metalwork and his main hobby was (and still is) wrought iron work, especially making gates.

We have a large workshop in our back garden, and a 10 ft high forge that he built to aid in his metalwork. Ever since the age of about five I was encouraged to be outside with him, and learn what he was doing as a start in learning a trade. There are many technical and creative aspects to his work, these started me thinking in this way too, and I have found this to be very useful in many areas of my life.

Aside to metalwork my dad had a passion for trying to make broken things work. This is probably due to the fact that he had never been, and we have never been financially ‘rich’, and as a result, if he saw a broken TV set or old stereo system dumped by the side of the road for example, then he would stop his car, pick it up, bring it home and try to fix it, and most of the time he succeeded. However, there were times when he couldn’t fix these things and would pass them onto me (and my younger brother) to play with (in terms of dismantling and destroying them).I must admit that that I didn’t learn very much in dismantling these old pieces of electrical equipment, but it did start an interest in electronics.

Dad also liked science fiction series on TV and in the movies (as did mum, although to a lesser extent), these programmes were always on around teatime (six o’clock) and I can remember watching them whilst eating my dinner, from a very early age. Dad’s like for things like Star Trek and The Invaders, also influenced me and started my interest in Science Fiction, although nowadays I prefer to read the older stories like The Time Machine or The War of the Worlds. I find that modern novels are more suited to the cinema, and I enjoy them there, but otherwise they seem quite bland and ’samey’.

When I was a bit older, about six or seven I was bought a ‘junior tool kit’, which was a real but not very practical, woodworking set, that I tried to use to make different things, just like my dad, however these were not very successful. Things carried on like this, me working with dad, playing with the TV’s, trying unsuccessful woodworking projects, watching Science fiction TV, and the like until a few years before I started secondary school.

When I was about nine or ten, I asked for an electronics kit for Christmas. It was nothing big, just a small pre-wired circuit board, with springs for connection terminals and a series of wires that you could configure in different ways to produce about fifty different things. Most of these things didn’t interest me at all, electronic counters and the like, but a few really caught my imagination. One was a burglar alarm, which really worked, but only for about five minutes, and another was a transistor radio, which was much more successful.

The radio was great because it had the one key thing that meant that no-one ever knew that I was listening to it when I should have been asleep – an ear piece. Mum never liked the idea of things like Walkman’s as she thought that noise playing directly into our ears would damage our hearing (as a young child I had a little trouble with my hearing, amongst other things), but she never realised what I could be doing with this ear piece, and as a result, for the next two years or so, I used to secretly listen to the radio late at night under the bed sheets.

Being a normal child I also liked the idea of making a mess and blowing things up. Having graduated past mud pies and the like, I started to think that chemistry was a pretty neat idea, and wanted a chemistry set. Mum didn’t like the idea of this too much either, as she thought I may hurt myself, but when I was eleven she reluctantly bought me one for Christmas (or rather Father Christmas brought me one). This was fine the set was OK and I tried a couple of the experiments, but these soon bored me, so I began just mixing things up. I also knew that vinegar was acidic, so I put this into my test tube with the other chemicals, and then corked it. Bad move! The vinegar reacted with one of the chemicals and popped the cork off of the tube and a sticky black gunge, started to bubble out over the worktop in the kitchen (where I was ‘experimenting’). I soon cleaned this mess up before mum saw it, and everything was fine until a few days later.

A friend of mine wanted to come over and play, which he did, and I showed him my new chemistry set. Mum had also just bought some nice peach coloured curtains and blinds for the kitchen that she was particularly fond of. Another bad move! I told my friend about what happens when you mix everything together and add vinegar, but he wanted to see it for himself of course. So he proceeded to mix everything

together and cork the test tube, and just as I was about to warn him not to, he started shaking the tube rather quickly. Well in no time at all, the cork and the rest of the top of the test tube actually blew away, and the kitchen ceiling, our clothes, but worst of all mum’s new curtains and blinds were covered in, you’ve guessed it, sticky black gunge. Great. My friend was sent home, me to my room, dad had to paint the kitchen ceiling, the curtains became clean after five or six washes, and from now on I had to do everything outside!

Like most kids at the time, I was taken over a fair bit by the advent of computer games, and this started a further interest in electronics and particularly computing, but also took me away from what I ’should’ have been doing with dad. As I got older, my interest in computers was also building and I moved up from pure games systems, to the Amiga 1200 which was a cross over between a cheap computer and a games system. I haven’t mentioned my entrepreneurial streak yet, which is probably due to helping my dad out at boot sales when I was young. This lead to me trying to make money out of my computer, which I did. Once I had gathered together the technical know how, I began producing disk based interactive catalogues of small pieces of freely distributable software (usually games) which I was to sell to my friends. This worked well, and I made a few pounds out of X-Project PD (my ‘company’), but the most useful thing about this in general, was the wealth of knowledge I gained about computing via doing this. After the Amiga I got into building PC’s for myself and others (making me a few hundred pounds over the years) and one of my other main interests is web site design, although I’m also a qualified windows expert and budding programmer – but that’s enough of my CV.

As I reached secondary school age I was becoming more interested in this area of study and while I seemed to excel at most things at school, I particularly liked science. Whilst at school it is safe to say that my interests were well nurtured by the teachers, and I was supported well by mum, dad and others like my granddad. I learned a lot, and this is where my interest in what once was the boring aspects of chemistry and physics, came from.

At school we sometimes used to have pen flicking ‘fights’, where everyone in the class flicked their fountain pen at everyone else, and everyone went home with an inverted pattern of the night sky on their shirts. Now and again I didn’t really want to be part of the ink ‘fights’ but still got covered all the same, sometimes more so for not joining in, but I remember one day when I got my own back quite well.

We had a chemistry lab class on a Wednesday afternoon, just after lunch, and that morning I had got covered in ink, which I wasn’t pleased about. In the lab class we were doing experiments on very, very weak acids and alkalis, using phenolphthalein indicator, all of which are colourless when separate.

Well, to cut a long story short, whilst using the pipettes, a little alkali got fired across the room and down the backs of some of the people that had covered me in ink during the morning. When they felt it hit it was colourless, and thought that they had been spayed with a little water, which was good from my point of view! Next they were sprayed with a little phenolphthalein, just a bit further up from the alkali spot, and again they thought nothing of it. The class carried on as normal, and over the hour strange things had started to happen to people’s shirts.

As we had done these experiments before, I knew what to expect. When phenolphthalein is mixed with even the slightest bit of alkali it turns bright purple-red, and as the alkali and the indicator seeped up the shirts, they met and made great big purple blobs – which was great! Luckily I was never found out by the teachers (at least), and I got away with it, although I realise it could have been dangerous now. Anyway, it was good fun at the time, and once people cottoned on, most other classes were also doing it as well!

Well that just about wraps it up for inspirational, life changing events, of course there were others too, but these were a few of those that stick in my mind. My teachers at school, and my college lecturers kept my interest in science ticking over nicely. At the end of my A-levels I still couldn’t tell what I liked better out of chemistry and physics, the two sciences I really know anything about, and as a result I decided to do a degree that involves both, namely chemical physics, and that is where I am today. I’m still encouraged by my parents, and they both like the idea of me being nearer to the frontiers of science, and so do I, although I’ve still a long way to go yet!