I think my great-grandfather fits the type. He was an X-ray technician, starting in the 19-teens - learned the trade, in fact, from a man who'd studied with Roe

I think my great-grandfather fits the type. He was an X-ray technician, starting in the 19-teens - learned the trade, in fact, from a man who'd studied with Roentgen. This is in the age when one had to make one's own vacuum tubes, and get really deeply into electronic theory and practice to make it work, and every setup was, to some extent, bespoke. X-ray led him into amateur photography - he'd take off-cuts from the large-format films home and wind his own cartridges in the darkroom he built in his basement. My dad inherited his pre-war Leica camera, and I have a few of his (very good) prints on my walls. The electronics led him into amateur radio. In the 1920s the airwaves were so clear that with a 1w set he was able, from San Francisco, to contact fellow hams in Germany and New Zealand; my grandfather rembered several of them coming to visit. He was, I suspect, from stories about his extreme social awkwardness, somewhere on the spectrum. Definitely a geek.