My second job after college was working for a company that built cooling towers for electric power plants like the big hyperbolic natural draft towers that are symbolic of Three Mile Island. We built both the natural draft towers that stood 500 feet tall and the fan driven towers that were only about 60 feet tall. My job was to help design and test the internal water and air flow components. Testing was kind of difficult because we worked in rented office space a couple miles from my house. We were having a problem with the flow efficiency of our water nozzles so I volunteered to build a test setup in my backyard. It consisted of a 7.5 horsepower, 220 volt water pump, 12 feet of 14 inch diameter pipe suspended 8 feet in the air, a series of feeder pipes and valves that controlled the water velocity in the pipe past the nozzle, a viewing window in the pipe above the nozzle and a 55 gallon drum on a beam balance scale to measure the water flow. We recirculated the water from my swimming pool. We had that set up in my backyard for about a year. The viewer window was key because it showed us that we had cavitation at the nozzle entrance. The nozzle attachment was redesigned to stick into the pipe farther. This eliminated the cavitation and improved the nozzle efficiency from about 70% to over 90%. This was huge when you are trying to pump hundreds of thousands of gallons per minute through 2000 to 6000 nozzles. While we were doing these tests, the company was planning their own building. We were promised that they were going to build the air conditioning cooling tower twice as big as it needed to be with a test lab room on the side. This would have allowed us to perform all kinds of flow testing. As we were wrapping up the test in the back yard, the president and vice president came by to see the set up. They even climbed up the ladder to look through the view port. There reaction was very positive, saying we should be doing more of this. Within a couple of weeks, during the finalizing of the building plans, it was announced that they would not be building our test lab. I saw the writing on the wall and left shortly after that and not too long before they moved into their new building. Last week I was driving home and saw this. The building they built without a lab is being torn down. I can’t tell you how old that makes me feel.