Santa Monica CA
When I graduated in May 1995, academic jobs were scarce and I was somewhat burned out, a recurring problem I have had in life. My sister-in-law, Miriam Kouzel Billington, lived with my brother Stephen in Santa Monica, California, and told me about a small vacant apartment. I rented the apartment and devoted the next year to improving my computer skills.
In June 1996 I participated with my father in an experimental program at New York University to develop a prototype CD for educational use. This used content from a slide-lecture course that my father gave at Princeton University on the engineering of the last two centuries. In October 1996, a foundation gave him some funding to produce a CD and I got part of the work. I cannot say that my aptitude for multimedia authoring was equal to my aptitude for research, though, and we were very fortunate that a small multimedia firm in Seattle, Mindsai, helped us to finish the project in the spring of 1998.
From 1998 until 2018, I worked mainly for my father, at first doing research and writing in support of the slide-lecture course, one of two that he taught (and later co-taught with other faculty) until his retirement in 2013. I also co-authored a book with him, Power Speed and Form, in 2006 that explains the great innovations of the late 1800s and early 1900s (eg. telephone, electric power, automobiles, aviation). This was a sequel to The Innovators, a book that he wrote in 1996 on the first hundred years of American engineering.
In early 2000, the owner of my apartment needed to sell and my parents loaned me the money to buy it. My mother and father passed away in 2016 and 2018, leaving me with a small income to supplement social security. In 2020 I completed on my own the third and last book that my dad and I had planned, From Insight to Innovation, to bring the story of American innovation up to the present. In 2016 I also finished an engineering history of the Golden Gate Bridge for the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District. The aim of these books is to make key technical events accessible in engineering terms without calculus. I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities and to the National Science Foundation for grants to me that helped to underwrite this work.
My dissertation is also in print (although priced only for libraries). Since 2020,I have been sifting my father's papers for archival preservation and plan to write an account of his career. My sister Elizabeth is preserving the recordings and papers of my mother's career as a pianist. My next project will be a family history that will make use of some old papers I inherited from my namesake, the first David Billington (I am the fourth), who was a Union officer in the Civil War.
Here is a photo of me and my two nieces, Zoe and Francesca, sister-in-law Miriam, and sister Sarah.
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