Yep. And if that illiterate foreman was suddenly required to pass a college English 101 class in order to keep his job... the world would lose a perfectly good

Yep. And if that illiterate foreman was suddenly required to pass a college English 101 class in order to keep his job... the world would lose a perfectly good foreman. For some reason your story reminded me of Captain Bill Eddy, television pioneer of the 1930s and 40s. Here he is in his own words (from one of my favorite books: The Box: An Oral History of Television 1920 - 1961): "I started losing my hearing as a kid and was deaf when I entered the Navy, but I had learned to read lips, so every time they put me through the audio tests, they said I had perfect hearing. With the great knowledge of the Navy I was assigned to be sound officer on the submarine. I couldn't hear the signals coming from the enemy submarines, so I went to Kresge's department store and bought some parts and devised an amplifier where the sound signals came out as a movement on a dial. By looking at the dial, I knew if we were on target for an enemy ship and could fire a torpedo. It worked very well, and our submarine was the only one that was scoring hits. Soon, so many people had these amplifiers and were scoring hits that the Navy Department heard about it, and they asked me to develop a model of this amplifier using the finest parts. I put it together and it didn't work. In desperation, I went out to Kresge's and bought these cheap tubes and transformers and put together the Eddy Amplifier and it worked. It became a very interesting patent because it only worked with Kresge parts. That's how I got into electronics." "In 1934 the Navy finally tripped me up by changing to an electronic system of measuring hearing. I was sent to the Brooklyn Navy Yard for retirement." Fortunately, the Navy's loss was Philo Farnsworth's gain...