When I was in junior high school and high school, I would hang out at the Purdue University chess club. He was a regular, prone to laughter, a funny guy. We would play double speed chess (which we called "p'dorky") and other silliness. I had no idea he went on to do the cool things that he did.

His 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.

• sponaugle

  today at 6:59 PM

  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.

  • throwup238

    today at 7:33 PM

    Any chance all of that will be sent to the Internet Archive or Archive Team?

"A striking example of his forward-thinking occurred years ago on a beach in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where George-sitting on the sand with a laptop connected via his cell phone-became one of the first people to read email over a mobile connection to a computer at Purdue. As a friend noted, "This was a real bit of history… At the time Apple had a whole engineering team trying to do this and here's George on the beach making it happen.""

Amazing. RIP.

• finaard

  today at 8:12 PM

  The archived copy of his old website has a picture from the beach: https://web.archive.org/web/20000511210957/http://ghg.ecn.pu...

  That's the page mostly dedicated to BBQ lighting: https://web.archive.org/web/20000511170940/http://ghg.ecn.pu...

Lighting a charcoal grill with liquid oxygen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjPxDOEdsX8

• sponaugle

  today at 6:44 PM

  I was holding the camera for some of these videos. Such a great time!

• gorgoiler

  today at 7:32 PM

  It reminds me of a comment I once read about how alien visitors, upon arriving on Earth, would be appalled to see how we live our lives at the bottom of a giant gaseous ocean of 20% oxygen.

  Almost everyone and everything around us of any importance is one mishap away from going disappearing in a hot, sooty flame.

  • dekhn

    today at 7:46 PM

    For another perspective on this, see the book Shroud (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_(Tchaikovsky_novel)), there is all sorts of nifty commentary on oxygen related to your point.

    (it's a great book in general, but the bit about our use of a volatile gas for a living environment is pretty neat)

Sad to hear! I worked for George for all of my undergraduate time at Purdue. He was an amazing boss with such a passion for all things unix. For a while he had the UNIX license plate on his minivan.

George's personal home page (seems to be a mirror: https://www.bkinzel.de/misc/ghg/index.html) with the grill lighting video and the TWINKIES experiments (original site gone, but archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20060101093459/http://www.twinki...) were amazing web sites in the late 90s.

For you youngsters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._Goble

He was great in "The Birds and the Bees".