The Road to Africa
In the 1940’s and 1950’s, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour made a series of “Road” pictures to exotic locales, such as The Road to Bali, The Road to Zanzibar, and The Road to Singapore. An unlikely set of circumstances would put them on the road and they would end up in the exotic place mentioned in the title of the film.
Two days ago, I returned home after a month in a place I never thought I would ever visit. It’s indeed an exotic locale. You might be wondering what road could have possibly taken me there. Would it surprise you to discover that right now you may also be on the road to an exotic place yourself? You always have the option of stepping off the road, and staying where you are, but by seizing opportunities when they’re presented to you, you could follow the road to a surprising destination.
As a pre-teen, I didn’t realize that I was on the road to anywhere in particular, but I was. I received a short wave radio for Christmas one year and used it to listen to radio stations from different places around the world. At night I could pick up WLS from faraway Chicago, Deutsche Wellen from Germany, and even Radio Moscow from the other side of the world. My body was stuck in New Jersey, but my mind was on the road to exotic places.
A little later I became a ham radio operator and communicated with fellow hams in countries around the world. I built amplifiers, radio transmitters, and receivers from the odd assortment of components that I found around the house. My father was an electrical engineer, so there was always an ample supply of resistors, capacitors, and vacuum tubes for me to experiment with.
I went on to become an electrical engineer myself, which was another step along the road.
The road hasn’t always been straight. After becoming a digital design engineer, I moved to software developer, then to technology manager, sales manager, and marketing manager. Along the way I became an author and a college instructor.
Eighteen years ago I joined the Oregon City Toastmasters Club and became a Toastmaster. The steps from newbie Toastmaster to Distinguished Toastmaster took me further along the road. At that point I had no idea where the road might be leading, but had faith that it was going in a good direction.
My Toastmaster training gave me the confidence to believe that I could be an effective speaker to just about any audience on just about any topic. When I discovered that I could go on cruises to exotic places absolutely free, just for giving talks on the ship, I applied to do just that. Over the past five years, I’ve visited 25 countries on cruise ships, most of them more than once. However, none of those visits were to countries on the most exotic continent of all, Africa.
Africa, considered dangerous and politically unstable, is not on the itinerary of many cruise ships. I figured it would undoubtably be the last continent that I would ever visit, if I ever visited it at all. However, that was before the cruise I lectured on this past summer. I lectured on astronomy on two legs of an around the world cruise, starting in London and ending in Los Angeles.
On that cruise, I delivered 17 lectures, almost the equivalent of a full quarter course in astronomy. In one of those lectures I described the transit method for detecting planets orbiting other stars. That lecture turned out to be a key step along the road, because after the lecture, a man in the audience, Bill Young, came up and told me that what I had described reminded him of how his business worked.
In the transit method, the light from a distant star is blocked slightly by a planet passing between the star and the observer. Bill’s business was to detect small amounts of metal on the body of a human being. A human body has a characteristic signature when it passes through a magnetic field. This signature is altered slightly if the person is carrying metal. Thus metal on a person can be detected in a similar way to the way astronomers detect a planet orbiting a distant star.
I was fascinated and expressed a strong interest in Bill’s business. He was from South Africa, where there are a lot of gold mines, and where people sneaking small quantities of gold out of the mines are a real problem. His business is to deter such thefts by making it impossible for a person to get out with gold, without being detected.
Bill made me an offer. He invited me to come to South Africa for a month to learn about his business and to learn if it was something I wanted to do. I had several things going for me, thanks to the strange, twisted road that I had been following.
* I was located in America, a market that Bill was trying to break into, and I understood American business.
* I was an electrical engineer, and Bill’s product was electrical.
* I had sales and marketing experience, and sales and marketing were the two areas where Bill needed the most help.
* I was a persuasive speaker.
* I had the ability to learn a new topic quickly.
* I knew how to teach others what I had learned.
I went to South Africa for a month, and learned a lot about gold mining and gold theft. I learned about metal detection and access control. I learned that Bill’s company, Saflec, builds the most sensitive metal detector on the market, and that there was a huge opportunity for it in the Americas.
I left Africa with Saflec’s support in starting up my own company to market Saflec’s metal detectors and access control systems in North, Central, and South America. Bill will join me in my booth at the annual mining engineering show in Seattle in February, and I’ll be presenting a paper on our metal detection technology at the show. I expect my new company, Goldfinger Global, LLC to be successful and I expect to have a lot of fun along with a lot of hard work in making it successful. I also expect that I’ll be hiring some people along the way, and thus helping in a small way with America’s unemployment problem.
Who would’ve thought that a short wave radio received as a Christmas present would have set me on the road to Africa, and after Africa, back to the Americas? I certainly would never have imagined it. What about your road? There’s no telling where the road will take you, if you are bold enough to keep walking along it.
