gar
Senior Member
- Location
- Ann Arbor, Michigan
- Occupation
- EE
190102-0919 EST
On the subject of experiments.
I do experiments in all sorts of places. Such as: living room, kitchen, bedroom, pantry, garage, basement, backyard, out in the country, at the shop, and anywhere that is useful. Not just in a laboratory.
The pantry is a very constant temperature low air flow rate location. The kitchen provides water, heat, cold, and table space. Also natural gas, but I have no active ports in the house. So propane gets used for these needs.
The garage provides freezer space, table space, hot and cold temperature chamber. Haven't had a car in the garage for 30 or more years. At one time my machine shop was in the garage.
The living room is good for taking pictures, and doing miscellaneous experiments.
The bedroom is radio communication, and RFI experiments.
The basement is photo lab, machine work, electronic work, parts storage, computers , printing, all sorts of test equipment, place to do some electrical power measurements, chemistry, storage of mercury, and office and computers.
Den is computer and copier location. In days past my wife did silk screening in the den.
The shop is a different location 2 miles away. Mostly my son's stuff. About 8 CNC machines, and manual machines, sheet metal equipment, welding, grinding, and material storage. I have worked fom home or other places all my life.
I have gone out in the recreation areas where Consumers Power and DTE interconnect and measured the direction of ground current below the high voltage lines. It was not parallel with the power lines.
Henry Ford was chief engineer at a Detroit power plant in the 1890s. He used some of their capability to do somethings, but he had a shed at the back of his rented home on Bagley Street where he had a machine shop, and made his first gasoline engine. This engine was first run on the kitchen sink with his wife dripping gasoline into the engine. Ignition was from the electric socket over the sink. His first car, the quadricycle, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Quadricycle was built in that shed. The Bagley shop is now in Greenfield Village.
Thomas Edison did experiments at home as a boy, and still as a boy at other locations, like the baggage car of the Grand Trunk Railroad as it was going between stations. Because his chemicals started a fire in the baggage car he and all his equipment were thrown off at Smiths Creek, Michigan.
In 1876 at the age of 29 Edison invented what maybe the world's first industrial research facility at Menlo Park, NJ. Before this he was an individual having to go many different places to have work done to accomplish a given invention. Also true of other inventors. With the invention of the research park he was able to bring together many of the inter-related needs to develop a product in one place, efficiency. Edison's development of the electric power industry was greatly aided by the invention of Menlo Park. Here all of the pieces needed to create a practical electrical system were developed (invented). An efficient dynamo, a light bulb with adequate life, a high voltage parallel system, switches, sockets, fuses, metering, etc. The Edison Effect (diode), magnetic core saturation, and means to remove gasses from bulb components, were discovered at Menlo Park.
Today a single inventor can do a lot, but there are many things that can not be done outside of a large research facility. There is no way I can make a microcircuit in my basement, but 2 miles from me they can make the world's smallest computer in a 100 million dollar facility. I could possibly design such a device in my basement, but I could not make it.
Inter-related with experiments there are various people types. Idea people are inventors. Examples are Ford, Edison, Tesla, Igor Sikorsky, Babbage, Howard Aiken, Arthur Burks, John von Neumann, Jonas Salk, Julius Lilienfeld, Bardeen, Brattain, Shockley, Hewlett and Packard.
.
On the subject of experiments.
I do experiments in all sorts of places. Such as: living room, kitchen, bedroom, pantry, garage, basement, backyard, out in the country, at the shop, and anywhere that is useful. Not just in a laboratory.
The pantry is a very constant temperature low air flow rate location. The kitchen provides water, heat, cold, and table space. Also natural gas, but I have no active ports in the house. So propane gets used for these needs.
The garage provides freezer space, table space, hot and cold temperature chamber. Haven't had a car in the garage for 30 or more years. At one time my machine shop was in the garage.
The living room is good for taking pictures, and doing miscellaneous experiments.
The bedroom is radio communication, and RFI experiments.
The basement is photo lab, machine work, electronic work, parts storage, computers , printing, all sorts of test equipment, place to do some electrical power measurements, chemistry, storage of mercury, and office and computers.
Den is computer and copier location. In days past my wife did silk screening in the den.
The shop is a different location 2 miles away. Mostly my son's stuff. About 8 CNC machines, and manual machines, sheet metal equipment, welding, grinding, and material storage. I have worked fom home or other places all my life.
I have gone out in the recreation areas where Consumers Power and DTE interconnect and measured the direction of ground current below the high voltage lines. It was not parallel with the power lines.
Henry Ford was chief engineer at a Detroit power plant in the 1890s. He used some of their capability to do somethings, but he had a shed at the back of his rented home on Bagley Street where he had a machine shop, and made his first gasoline engine. This engine was first run on the kitchen sink with his wife dripping gasoline into the engine. Ignition was from the electric socket over the sink. His first car, the quadricycle, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Quadricycle was built in that shed. The Bagley shop is now in Greenfield Village.
Thomas Edison did experiments at home as a boy, and still as a boy at other locations, like the baggage car of the Grand Trunk Railroad as it was going between stations. Because his chemicals started a fire in the baggage car he and all his equipment were thrown off at Smiths Creek, Michigan.
In 1876 at the age of 29 Edison invented what maybe the world's first industrial research facility at Menlo Park, NJ. Before this he was an individual having to go many different places to have work done to accomplish a given invention. Also true of other inventors. With the invention of the research park he was able to bring together many of the inter-related needs to develop a product in one place, efficiency. Edison's development of the electric power industry was greatly aided by the invention of Menlo Park. Here all of the pieces needed to create a practical electrical system were developed (invented). An efficient dynamo, a light bulb with adequate life, a high voltage parallel system, switches, sockets, fuses, metering, etc. The Edison Effect (diode), magnetic core saturation, and means to remove gasses from bulb components, were discovered at Menlo Park.
Today a single inventor can do a lot, but there are many things that can not be done outside of a large research facility. There is no way I can make a microcircuit in my basement, but 2 miles from me they can make the world's smallest computer in a 100 million dollar facility. I could possibly design such a device in my basement, but I could not make it.
Inter-related with experiments there are various people types. Idea people are inventors. Examples are Ford, Edison, Tesla, Igor Sikorsky, Babbage, Howard Aiken, Arthur Burks, John von Neumann, Jonas Salk, Julius Lilienfeld, Bardeen, Brattain, Shockley, Hewlett and Packard.
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