Fond Memories of Fast-Moving Milk Bottles and Toy Boats

Quote of the Day

Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.

— John Steinbeck

Figure 1: Machine Filling Milk Bottles. (Source)

Last night, I was watching a show on the Science Channel called How It's Made. This episode reminded me of an old movie I was shown in elementary school that started my interest in science and math. The message here is that you never know what will stimulate the interest of a child.

Last night on "How It's Made" they were showing machines filling bottles with a beverage. This show stimulated my memories from first-grade when I was shown a 16mm movie about how milk came to our door every morning. I still can remember almost every detail of this movie. The story started with a cow eating grass and ended with a bottle of milk on a kitchen table. What really caught my eye was the filling of the milk bottles by machines. It seemed like magic the way the bottles were put into a fast-moving row, filled while moving in a circle, and then capped. I became driven to learn how those machines worked and to build my own machines. I began my quest by asking Santa for an erector set. Things just grew from there.

Back in those days, every house in the town of Osseo had a small box that a milkman would fill with glass bottles of milk. The picture below is very similar to the milk box that my family had.

As the oldest of five children, one of my jobs was to move the milk from the box to the refrigerator. Seeing the magic that brought milk to our door made the mundane seem really interesting.

Youtube has many videos showing bottles being filled. I cannot find the original movie that I saw, but the video embedded below is similar in content to the bottle-filling sequence from the movie I saw originally.

While I am on the subject of children's videos, I noticed that Paddle to the Sea is also on Youtube. This is a very cute video that also made an impression on me. I actually tried to carve my own little wooden boat after seeing this movie back in second-grade.