Jerry Baker

I wonder if it was named after the year that the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, because I thought it might have been about the same size and shape as that rock was. It was one of the earliest IBM computers that had transistors instead of vacuum tubes, and it was about the size of a large desk.

I'm also interested in knowing if there's some general formula for the way the numbers of IBM computers, such as the 650, the 701 and the 704 were assigned.

He was an astronomy teacher, the son of Martin and Dorothy Grant, who both taught at Iowa State Teachers' College, in Cedar Falls.

According to his wife and parents, his life was going extremely well. He had received a congratulatory letter from the Army Ballistic Agency and Jet Propulsion Lab for his research, and was planning to accept an offer from Illinois University to teach radio astronomy and direct a satellite research program in the fall.

He was using the Sohio library for research and spent a normal day there. He had called his wife late in the afternoon and told her what time he'd be home for dinner and suggested that they go to a movie that evening.

Everyone was shocked the next morning, when his body was found hanging from a tree. He did not leave a note and had shown no signs of depression.

I didn't meet the Grants until 1959. There are people who suspect foul play.

"There are so many unanswered questions. He had everything to live for," said his parents.

The current (July/August) issue of Archaeology has an article titled, "Who Were The Hurrians?" This is a brief synopsis of that article:

http://www.archaeology.org/0807/abstracts/urkesh.h...

Several things in that article caught my attention. One was the word "Urkesh," the name of an ancient Hurrian city. It almost seemed a compound of the names of two of the world's other oldest cities, namely "Ur" and "Kish." Those names are in the Bible, with Ur as the birthplace of Abraham, and King Saul being a "son of Kish."

That article mentioned a Hurrian city named "Khwarezm." However, there seem to have been more than one Hurrian city by that name. One was (if I remember right) the capital of the Syria-Iraq region where those scientific excavations are occurring, and the other is north of Iran, in Uzbekistan or somewhere in that region, with which I'm not familiar.

http://www.answers.com/topic/khwarezm

He, and his "Plasmofalt," a polymerized building material, were the subjects of a story in "Popular Mechanics," in the September, 1951 issue, if I remember right. In 1965, not long before he died, I wrote to him, and he replied. I wrote the Wikipedia article about him, several years ago, and I obtained copies of his 3 patents, but I can't find anyone who has much knowledge about how he made and used Plasmofalt.