alt Hacker NewsHis obituary or wikipedia page are well worth a read for what he was involved in - though he probably is best known for lighting a BBQ in under 5 seconds by use of liquid oxygen, and getting into trouble with the local firedepartment for that.
He used to have that video on his website - which I've discovered via a Usenet discussion not too long after it happened. It was one of the first videos I've downloaded via a web browser, and almost certainly the first video made with a digital camera I've ever seen.
Replies
> he probably is best known for lighting a BBQ in under 5 seconds by use of liquid oxygen
Well, now I know what we should be pouring if anyone plans to use the expression "pour one out for…"
One of the first videos you downloaded... Well, from the other end, when it went 'Viral' it maxxed out the OC line that Perdue had, for a week. completely. I saw it once, a year later... and of course... found it hysterically funny, and shared it with my students... "Goble using a bucket attached to a 10-foot-long wooden handle to dump 3 gallons of liquid oxygen (not sold in stores) onto a grill containing 60 pounds of charcoal and a lit cigarette for ignition. What follows is the most impressive charcoal-lighting I have ever seen, featuring a large fireball that, according to Goble, reached 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The charcoal was ready for cooking in - this has to be a world record - 3 seconds."
"Looking at Goble's video and photos, I became, as an American, all choked up with gratitude at the fact that I do not live anywhere near the engineers' picnic site."
https://web.archive.org/web/20120416173854/http://baetzler.d...
George was really into video stuff - he had stacks of 8mm video tapes in his office, and of course stacks of exabyte drives. He had many different cameras and was always trying new ones out. He was also a really early adopter of laserdiscs, and I have a few discs he gave me when I graduated.