As a Washington "burrocrat" for about 20 years I had a number of curious experiences. Whether or not I was able to improve the government, is a separate question.

When I was working at the US Patent Office Scientific Library, I felt that the lighting at the card catalog was so dim that I suggested we set up a miner’s lamp concession so that people would be able to read the cards. A few months later, adequate lighting was installed.

On my first day on duty at the Patent Office, I looked down and saw a little mouse by my chair. I reached down to scratch between its ears but it went off to the next room. I heard some sounds indicating that some of the ladies did not approve of mice. So I went to the rescue, tapped on the floor, and thus enticed the mouse into the open. I picked it up by the tail and put it into a trash box. My new boss said I ought to get a Presidential medal for this deed. I suppose the paperwork is still being processed somewhere in the White House.

While serving as a reference librarian, I saw an elderly gentleman digging through the cards. I offered to help him. He said he was looking for books on a certain topic. I said: "The best book on that subject that I know of was written by so-and-so." The visitor said: "Yes. I know. I wrote it. But I am trying to find out what my competition is up to these days." I suppose I warmed his heart by mentioning his book first. We became friends and he let me help him with other things. He was interested in the analysis of the lead content in bones from ancient Roman cemeteries. It seems that the bones of the rich people had a high lead content. The rich could afford to drink brandy concentrated in leaden vessels. The lead probably accounted for the sterility of some of the ancient Roman noble families whom the Emperor Augustus used to scold for not producing enough children to carry on their bloodlines.

One patent I had on display in the Patent Office Scientific Library lobby attracted the attention of an official of the German patent office. It was a patent issued in 1872 to Mahlon Loomis, a Washington dentist, for what is now called radio. It was for "an improvement in telegraphing." The new factor, the "improvement" was that you did without the wires. This patent was issued before Marconi was born. But Marconi is usually given the credit. The German patent official asked for a copy and I gave it to him. I suspect that Loomis, as a dentist, had noticed some electrical interaction from one mouth to another among his patients. His test program was carried out on the Massanutten mountains of Virginia. A science teacher told me he would have rejected the application, since Loomis explained his invention in what the teacher considered "bogus science." His rejection would have been illegal. So long as the device worked, the inventor’s explanation was not a basis for rejection.

The ship model submitted by Abraham Lincoln in connection with his application for a patent was itself a work of art. We had it on display in the Patent Office Scientific Library, along with the patent itself. The invention had to do with a system for lifting ships off sandbars. I never heard that Lincoln’s system was ever put to use.

I noticed that patent attorneys were ordering copies of articles cited in opposition to their clients’ patent applications. This involved a clumsy step in which Patent Office employees interpreted the bibliographic citations and found the call numbers used by the library. I suggested that we photocopy and publish the periodicals directory, which included the call numbers, so that the examiners could include the call number with the letter of rejection. When this list was finally published, only enough copies were made to provide them to the patent examiners, but none, even for sale, for the patent attorneys.

I was invited to teach for the Department of Agriculture Graduate School

and found a young German lady in one of my classes. I told her of one of my old tutors, a Miss Katharina Horn. When she returned to Germany, my pupil got in touch with Miss Horn. Miss Horn and I were thus enabled to resume our friendship.

One of my pupils gave me a book published in 1845 on the art of using the human memory efficiently. I eventually found that the same system had been used by Homer, Herodotus, the author of the Acts of the Apostles, and other writers as various as Virgil, Chaucer, Melville, and Mark Twain.

One day, a tall, gracious gentleman visited our library. He was from Mexico and we spoke in Spanish for a while. It turned out he was the ambassador from Mexico, Ugo Margain. A few weeks later I received a set of books he had edited, sent in appreciation of my helpfulness.

William Anthony Deller, head of the patent department of International Nickel, told me that he had found that as a metallurgist he was not paid as much as the patent attorneys. So he became a patent attorney. With his metals background, he eventually came to head the company’s patent work.

An old patent attorney told me that his career in patent work had begun in 1892. That was the year my father was born. Another old attorney told me that whenever one of Thomas Edison’s patents was being litigated, Edison’s attorneys were desperate to keep him off the witness stand. It was his custom to sign, as though he were the inventor, applications on inventions where the credit should have gone to the real inventor. Edison should have accepted assignment of the patent rights, rather than signing as though he were the inventor. Such false signing invalidates a patent.

When the Japanese decided to study Western patent systems, to decide which they should adopt, they settled on the American approach, which included a Patent Office search to determine that the invention was new and would work as described. This gave the patentee a presumption of validity and a protected market until the product had time to get established. The French patent system, followed by many other countries, gave no such presumption of validity. The German system also followed the American approach. It is interesting to notice that the Japanese, the Germans, and the United States have become leaders in industrial innovation.

I was commissioned to prepare indexes for the proceedings of a series of conferences on live virus oral polio vaccine developed by a Dr Sabin. The US government had forbidden even experimental use, in the United States, of the Sabin live virus vaccine. Other countries around the world had used the Sabin vaccine with excellent results. They preferred it to the less effective but more profitable Salk vaccine. (I joked that a certain Congressman had neglected to take his oral polio vaccine, caught oral polio, and couldn’t speak in public.) The conferences on the Sabin vaccine moved the US government to permit trials in Miami. These tests, using the vaccine on a sugar cube or in a little cup of sweet juice, were so successful that the Sabin vaccine came into general use and polio largely disappeared as a public health hazard. For various reasons the less effective Salk vaccine is usually credited with the elimination of polio.

When I worked at the library of the Department of Agriculture, a Senator’s office got in touch, asking for a certain old newspaper. The newspaper area of the library stacks was disorganized. I recognized that it might take me a week or two of digging to find what was wanted. I said a prayer. And found it on the next shelf I looked at. I joked that the Supreme Court might order me fired for praying in connection with my official duties. But I risked it.

In another situation I offered to help an official who was going from shelf to shelf. He seemed sure that I would not be able to help. I prodded, and he told me what he needed. I said: "You mean the book published by so-and-so in 1908?" He agreed. I handed him the book and asked who needed it. He said he wanted it for an Agriculture official in Minnesota. I phoned our librarian in Minnesota, asked if he had the book and if he knew the man who needed it. The answer to both questions was yes. So in fifteen minutes or so, the book was handed to the borrower. My immediate superior was mad at me for not sending our copy as an interlibrary loan. This would have added a scalp to her interlibrary loan statistics. She changed her tune a few days later when our office received a letter from the office of the Secretary of Agriculture thanking us for my help in that case. The letter was a better scalp for the files.

A young lady who worked in our library noticed the word hypergolic and decided that if anyone ever needed it, she would have it ready. Sure enough, a few weeks later a patent office official was flitting from book to book. The young lady asked if she could help and was brushed off, since the matter was obscurely technical. She persisted. The official said he needed a word describing a fuel "that would catch fire on exposure to air." She much surprised him by asking if hypergolic were the word he needed. It was.

The Argentine embassy sent me a box of bottles of Argentine wine as thanks for my help to some of their officials. By the Civil Service rules I was not supposed to accept such a gift. I didn’t feel free to return it; so I asked various officials what should be done with it. The answers ranged from my being told to take it home and say nothing officially about it, to advice from Shirley Temple Black’s office of protocol in the State Department to take it to a certain office which would store it for use at diplomatic functions.

When I was putting some cards on alphabetical order I noticed that there is a pattern to the alphabet. Each vowel is followed by a series of consonants in a repeating series. This can be called the "periodic table of the alphabet." I brought this pattern to the attention of an old scholar concerned with the history of the alphabet. He brushed it off with the comment that "We know the history of the alphabet and there is no time when such a pattern could have been imposed on it." Another scholar expressed interest in the pattern and suggested a serious approach to making sense of it. The pattern is

(The letters w and j are new to the alphabet and do not fit the pattern. But b, f, p and v resemble one another. C, G, K, Q, and X are gutturals. L and R have some resemblance, as do S and Z. The letters D, N, and T are "alveolars" and the shapes of capital O and P resemble Q and R, except that Q and R have tails. There are other resemblances,)

My election to the presidency of the Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia came about from my having noticed that Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is based on the analogy between the life of the nation and the life of a prophet. I mentioned this to a certain Congressman and he introduced me to the Lincoln Group. They invited me to present a talk: Lincoln’s Hidden Persuaders: The Literary Structure of the Gettysburg Address. A judge of the Patent Court called me next day to share his own observations on the subject. Eventually I was elected president of the Group, which was a very congenial task, even though I was born in Alabama.

My wife and I raised eight children. This has been a valuable part of our life and spiritual development. Various high-IQ groups have helped. The young children usually enjoyed attending local gatherings of Mensa and ISPE, and the Cosmos Club. Shortly after I had attended an international high-IQ gathering in Baltimore, my daughter, Eve, saw a Mensa sticker on a car in Annapolis and saucily asked the nearby people:"Who’s the nut with the Mensa sticker?" A Viking-type man raised his hand. Eve said: "You should drop Mensa and join the ISPE. You’ll meet a higher category of weirdo!" The Viking said he’d met some ISPE people at the recent Baltimore meeting. Eve said that if he had been there, he might have met me. Fact is, he and I had spent several hours in very interesting conversation.

Our nearness to Washington led to our having the privilege of playing host to Pamela Boal, an English wheelchair jockey with about seven undiagnozable diseases. She came to study "programs for the handicapped" headquartered in the Washington, DC, area. I was able to introduce her to a handicapped member of Congress who talked with her for hours. She commented that she would not have been able to get such access to a British member of Parliament. Another group she met was HEC or Handicapped Encounter Christ, a retreat and fun movement of weekends for the handicapped.

An elderly Methodist, Mason, and public relations pioneer, Ray Miller, asked me to prepare an index for his biography of Monsignor Ligutti, a Catholic priest and agriculture advisor to the Pope. Dr. Miller organized a series of seminars at the Cosmos Club in Washington. When he developed Parkinson’s disease, he arranged to have me stay with him at the club and introduced me to Robert LeBaron, and others. LeBaron had been President Wilson’s aide at the Paris peace talks in 1919. Mr. LeBaron had excelled in a dozen or so careers, including nuclear energy. While in Paris he studied radiation physics with the Curies. He eventually served as White House contact for the leaders of the Manhattan Project that built the A-bomb. I met Mr. LeBaron again the day before he died. One Christmas eve I was much touched to find the head of the Masonic Scottish Rite come to visit Ray Miller and bring Christmas greetings.

My father suggested that I take the children to visit Justice Hugo L. Black. They had been friends in Mobile, Alabama, many years before. Justice Black’s office arranged for an audience. After giving each of the children a pen, with advice on being careful what they might sign during life, Justice Black offered to listen to questions. My six-year-old daughter, Mary Grace, asked him: "Were you named for Victor Hugo?" Black smiled and said: "No, but I was named for a cousin of mine, and he was named for Victor Hugo."

Years later Mary Grace was arrested for carrying a sign (showing the First Amendment) on the Supreme Court grounds. Her arrest was set aside by the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. This decision was appealed to the Supreme Court (Berger vs Grace, about 1980). Instead of excusing itself in a matter in which the Court was involved, the Supreme Court heard the case and decided (9 to 0) in Mary Grace’s favor. Her husband, Sebastian Graber, was her attorney. One of the justices said, "You just want to win this case." I don’t know whether or not Justice Black was still on the Court.

When visitors come to Washington, I explain the shape of the Capitol dome as the effect of hot air from Congressional debates rising and pressing against the "ceiling wax" of the old Capitol ceiling.

A similar bit of whimsy has to do with a stone on the Mall with the phrase "Zero Milestone." It suggests that this is the tombstone of a famous chef named Zero Milestone, cousin of the inventor of Minestrone soup. Zero Milestone is supposed to have come over with Columbus and taught the Pot-o-Mac Indians how to make macaroni. He started the hospitable custom of always having a pot of macaroni beside the entrance of every teepee.