The trouble is, it seems to be that one is always too young to ask the questions when those that know are still around...or, sometimes, the nature of their work was too secret. My grandad was always happy to talk about his time as a flight mechanic in the RFC in WW1, and I remember looking at his photograph album (which disappeared in mysterious circumstances after his death). There were two photographs in it I remember... one of a Vickers Gunbus with two doughty chaps dressed in long leather coats, and the second of the same aeroplane ten minutes or so later, as a total wreck...and the two chaps covered up on stretchers. He was later shanghaied into the Guards Machine Gun Corps, of which he never spoke a word; no chance of ever finding out more, as fire and bombing destroyed the records of the Machine Gun Corps.
My father was involved with radar and so forth in WW2; he was, to start with, a Calculator Maintenance Engineer...this was the equipment that gave the WAAFs on the plotting table the co-ordinates to plot from the raw radar data...Later he was at Trimingham in Norfolk with the "Mouse" station of the Oboe navigation and bombing system. He said they could, by remote control, drop a bomb down a factory chimney in the Ruhr....unless someone opened the door to the equipment hut, at which point the change in temperature would wreck the calibration!
After the war he was responsible for the maintenance of the first ever application of electronics to telephone switching...electronic directors, which decoded the dialed number to the required routing through the London network of telephones and replaced the electromechanical system. This system, using vacuum tubes called cold cathode counters, was, I understand, designed by Tommy Flowers at the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill; there he had built the world's first programmable computer - "Colossus" - installed at Bletchley Park, which had been used to decode the "Lorenz" cipher. These electronic directors sprang from this wartime effort, and were installed at Richmond telephone exchange, in South West London. Dad had spent a year at Dollis Hill with the team, learning how the system worked. The Leading Technical Officer at Richmond had been a prisoner of the Japanese, and said that the prisoners used to teach each other about whatever it was they knew....it kept their minds off their plight..and that was where he had learned about automatic telephony, as it was in the 1940s and up to the electronic era. One day some Japanese engineers were scheduled to come and view the electronic directors, and he had to be given the day off as it was considered that their presence would adversely affect him.
He was well liked throughout the service, and had never been known to be late; so, on the day he retired, all the clocks in the exchange were set forward by an hour and, when he arrived at 0750 as usual, the line had been drawn and he was nearly an hour late! Every one had been briefed for this, and no matter who he telephoned, they all kept up the story. He was more than somewhat bewildered, and it was only at lunchtime they let him in on what had happened.....