concepts of electricity you found interesting ..

Status
Not open for further replies.
Another C10

Another C10

Electrical Contractor 1987 - present
Location
Southern Cal
Occupation
Electrician NEC 2020
Probably 35 years ago when my instructor explained to me that ( and I'm paraphrasing T. James) theoretically a filament within an incandescent light bulb is a direct short, connecting the neutral and hot together which becomes so hot that the filament glows white .. further mentioning the only reason that little thin filament doesn't blow apart is because 1 element of the explosion is missing .. the air.

He went on saying, the lack of oxygen inside that little concealed environment harnesses the short to the point of getting the light through the intense glow of the filament brought on by the hot to neutral low resistance connection.

My young electrical enthused mind really opened up once I heard that.

now what was it that really opened your eyes to the amazing properties of our beloved electricity.
 
Another thing that amazed me about electricity and it's properties was the first time I sniped thru a live non-metallic cable with a pair of thirty dollar lineman pliers. This was of course many decades before non contact voltage testers were produced and sold.
 
2 fascinated me

How a transformer can have multiple taps of different voltages and on the load side things will always add up evenly like when doing a multiwire circuit the nuetral only carries the imbalance

The processes that radio tubes use to do the switching. These were just genius especially for the time they were developed and the tricks they use.
 
macmikeman said:
Another thing that amazed me about electricity and it's properties was the first time I sniped thru a live non-metallic cable with a pair of thirty dollar lineman pliers. This was of course many decades before non contact voltage testers were produced and sold.
Click to expand...
I've done that quite a few times since the voltage detector came out 😞
 
- The negative-resistance region of neon and other gas-discharge lamps. When current goes up, voltage goes down.

- The mathematics underlying three-phase power. I learned it the contemporary way, with textbooks, professors to clarify the textbooks, and established practice to provide tangible examples. Despite all that support, it was a challenge. Nikola Tesla figured it out all by himself with none of those resources. It's truly humbling to contemplate just how much of a genius he had to have been.
 
When I was a junior in high school, I took electronic in vo-tech school. The first semester was all DC. Easy-peasy.
Then second semester we went to AC, throw in a inductor or capacitor, and all the basic Ohm’s law stuff was no longer simple.

Impedance changes with frequency? Volts times amps is no longer watts? Yikes.

Life is like that when your 17 years old.
 
I recall being thrilled at being able to use the old Dry Cell battery and a nail, with many turns of wire around it, to make an Electromagnet.

old dry cell battery.png
I was also exposed to the concepts of incandescent light needing to be in a vacuum so the filament would not burn up in my early years.
I fondly recall creating a demonstration at my grade school science fare on that concept. Using an adjustable railroad train transformer
powering a fine piece of wire inside of a glass jar. Creating light for a short duration before the filament burned up. Creating a vacuum was beyond me at that early age.
 
ELA said:
I recall being thrilled at being able to use the old Dry Cell battery and a nail, with many turns of wire around it, to make an Electromagnet.

View attachment 2565058
I was also exposed to the concepts of incandescent light needing to be in a vacuum so the filament would not burn up in my early years.
I fondly recall creating a demonstration at my grade school science fare on that concept. Using an adjustable railroad train transformer
powering a fine piece of wire inside of a glass jar. Creating light for a short duration before the filament burned up. Creating a vacuum was beyond me at that early age.
Click to expand...
314538371_493173516192948_8665334742645903993_n.jpg

Me in about 1966 with that same dry cell
 
Another C10 said:
Probably 35 years ago when my instructor explained to me that ( and I'm paraphrasing T. James) theoretically a filament within an incandescent light bulb is a direct short, connecting the neutral and hot together which becomes so hot that the filament glows white .. further mentioning the only reason that little thin filament doesn't blow apart is because 1 element of the explosion is missing .. the air.

He went on saying, the lack of oxygen inside that little concealed environment harnesses the short to the point of getting the light through the intense glow of the filament brought on by the hot to neutral low resistance connection.

My young electrical enthused mind really opened up once I heard that.

now what was it that really opened your eyes to the amazing properties of our beloved electricity.
Click to expand...
I will add that the filament isn't exactly a short, is lower resistance than tying the supply conductors together though, and as it increases in temperature so does the resistance otherwise you would have much higher current at operating temperature. They do draw higher current when first energized but it heats up pretty rapidly and resistances goes up as current goes down. Inside the bulb isn't a vacuum but usually an inert gas that won't react with the filament, argon was pretty common AFAIK. Some early versions may possibly had a vacuum though?

Edison IIRC did not invent incandescent lamps, he found ways of making them better and possibly easier to produce as well. Sort of like Henry Ford didn't make the first automobile but did develop methods of mass producing them which was big for that industry.
 
I don't remember this but I was told by my dad that when I was around 4 or 5 years old he had a 9v battery and told me to stick out my tongue. I guess most kids at that age would react differently than I did, but he said that my eyes lit up and I reached out to take the battery then I ran into the other room saying "mommy, mommy, stick out your tongue!!"

I guess that started my interest in electricity. I would watch my dad take various electronics apart over the years and fix them. Of course I started taking things apart too. The Atari 2600 ran off a 9v dc power supply, i remember using a battery to run it. It only lasted a few minutes before the screen faded to black and white and it went dead.
 
When I was a little kid, my grandfather had a big shop behind the house that he used for working on all kinds of machinery. He used to deal in used machinery. He even had a room that was a machine shop with a line shaft in the ceiling with a big electric motor mounted to the wall. All leather belts going click clack. I don't remember this, but I was told that even as a baby I was fascinated by that motor that ran the line shaft.

I do remember being just a bit older and the guys that came to do business with my grandfather would bring me all kinds of motors, contactors, starters, transformers, etc., to play with and tear apart
 
acin said:
Building my first HEATH KIT transistor radio in 1959
Click to expand...
I built my first foxhole radio 1961, when I was six, from a book I found in the school library.

It just so happened that my dad used blue razor blades, so I had everything I needed.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top