concepts of electricity you found interesting ..

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So I'll add the fact we could figure out when we did with what we did with regards to early electrical anything is just amazing. The stuff tried in the 1700s and 1800 was glorified alchemy but the combination of the scientific method and that alchemy got a lot of high fruit if you will. I think we're missing that into the great wild yonder type discovery. Ya a lot was wasted and we do understand so much more but that's what people thought when they'd figured out the math of gravity and practical steam power.
 
Wondering how many of us are ham radio operators? I'm general class. Although I haven't really been active since moving up here. I really should be, I finally have room for whatever antenna I want, even some 160 meter monstrosity
 
I was both a ham and a commercial radio operator, back in the day when everything was analog and a lot of vacuum tubes were still in use.

I dabbled in 220 Mhz, but abandoned it because nobody on the air had anything interesting to say.
I built some crazy high-gain horizontally polarized 11-meter antennas for 100 mW transceivers. Connected Chicago and Texas once.
And I built some equipment for the 1700-meter band. (160-190 kHz) Lived in the suburbs and did not build any full- or half-wavelength antennas for that.
 
I just chose "electrician" out of the dark. I had a family started and needed something other than beer drinker on my list of abilities.

Studying EMF and it struck me that if a field is collapsing as another expands there should be some sort of current limiting action.
Woa! I was brilliant, until I turned the page and the next heading was CEMF. I hadn't needed to struggle with the concept. All I needed to do was turn the page. So goes my lifes story.
 
When I was a late teenager, right around the time I was just starting to work for an electrician, I was working on this 1974 cb360 motorcycle with breaker points. I couldn't get the damn thing to work,. Problem was I was trying to set the points thinking it would fire when the contact closed. Talked to the motorcycle repair shop guy and he explained that it's when it opens that the magnetic field collapses and the spark is created. I thought that was cool .

I remember also being amazed when I first learned that a transformer has no electrical connection between the primary and secondary.
 
electrofelon said:
When I was a late teenager, right around the time I was just starting to work for an electrician, I was working on this 1974 cb360 motorcycle with breaker points.
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My first bike was a '72 CL450, my second was a '73 CB750, both of which had dual points, too. I used either a light bulb or the turn-signal beeper as a points-open indicator when setting them.
 
drcampbell said:
… 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.
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In his head! He didn’t put anything on paper until long after he had it all figured out.

I met a man like him decades ago, he was the father of my roommate’s girlfriend and a nuclear physicist at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. He was absolutely brilliant but fit the “nutty professor” trope to a T. You could pose any complex math problem to him and he could intuit an answer without hesitation, then he was always right. But ask him his daughter’s favorite color and he was stumped.

My big “Aha!” moment with electrical things was when an Engineer I worked with took the time to walk me through AC induction motors in detail. I knew what they were and how to make them work, how to protect them etc. etc. but I was still stumped by the inner details of how they spun without brushes. He broke it down for me because he was training me on VFDs and to understand how they work, you have to truly understand AC induction motor theory, something that had been glossed over in my formal schooling.
 
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When I was in junior high school I had an old tube combination radio / 45 rpm record player I fooled around with. My family had an intercom system connecting the kitchen with another building. I was fascinated by the capability of a speaker to also be a microphone, so I got a speaker that exactly fit the sound hole of my acoustic guitar, taped it in place, and ran the wires from it into the plug from the turntable, thereby inventing the electric guitar. Immediately after that I discovered feedback, which scared the hell out of the cat.
 
drcampbell said:
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.
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Jraef said:
In his head! He didn’t put anything on paper until long after he had it all figured out.
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I read that Tesla would think about electrical machinery running, just all in his head, to see how it would work and if anything would fail. Kind of like a computer simulation but done in his head.

When I was in my mid teens I tried to get as much info as I could about Tesla, more for Tesla coils than motors, generators, etc. Without the internet, the best I could do is go to the downtown Chicago library. I did manage to find quite a bit of info there. Around that time they were talking about tearing down the building, but fortunately it was saved and is now the Cultural Center. Some pictures of the upper floor with the world's largest Tiffany dome:

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By the way, here's what's left of a vacuum tube powered Tesla coil I built when 15 years old, minus the plate and filament transformers, and the 811A tube which ran at about 1200V.

Tesla_coil1.jpg
 
Jraef said:
In his head! He didn’t put anything on paper until long after he had it all figured out.

I met a man like him decades ago, he was the father of my roommate’s girlfriend and a nuclear physicist at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. He was absolutely brilliant but fit the “nutty professor” trope to a T. You could pose any complex math problem to him and he could intuit an answer without hesitation, then he was always right. But ask him his daughter’s favorite color and he was stumped.

My big “Aha!” moment with electrical things was when an Engineer I worked with took the time to walk me through AC induction motors in detail. I knew what they were and how to make them work, how to protect them etc. etc. but I was still stumped by the inner details of how they spun without brushes. He broke it down for me because he was training me on VFDs and to understand how they work, you have to truly understand AC induction motor theory, something that had been glossed over in my formal schooling.
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My thesis advisor in high energy physics at Stanford (who later won a Nobel prize for work he had done years earlier) liked to build one of a kind digital electronic circuits (as prototypes or just unique equipment) using wire wrap boards.
He had a set of pinout drawings for the ICs he was using and then proceeded to wrap the connections to produce a working circuit without ever bothering to produce a schematic with pin numbers on it. He made sure he had chips with all the elements he needed for the circuit and then just wired it. It always worked!
 
GoldDigger said:
My thesis advisor in high energy physics at Stanford (who later won a Nobel prize for work he had done years earlier) liked to build one of a kind digital electronic circuits (as prototypes or just unique equipment) using wire wrap boards.
He had a set of pinout drawings for the ICs he was using and then proceeded to wrap the connections to produce a working circuit without ever bothering to produce a schematic with pin numbers on it. He made sure he had chips with all the elements he needed for the circuit and then just wired it. It always worked!
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I used to love tinkering like that. Fortunately, by the time I got into it, wire-wrap boards were replaced by breadboards:

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My mom got shocked when she was pregnant with me. We knew right then, she says. What do I know. True story.

Also, I helped my best friends dad troubleshoot a receptacle at a pool hall when I was 13, found where an animal chewed through some smurf and the wire. Been shooting pool and doing some sort of electrical work since then. I did dabble in some high-end custom cabinet and trim work for a year and loved that, too. If I ever get out of this industry, I'll take up wood working I'm sure.
 
Sea Nile said:
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.
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As a teenager I built a shortwave receiver ( may have been a Heathkit) that required a 67.5V battery.
As we walked home from the store ( Radio Shack?) with the required battery, I dared my friend to put his tongue on that battery.
Never thought he actually would but he did. As I recall he spun around a couple of times as he let out a yelp.
oh ... To be young and stupid again...
 
In my college physics class we were trying to find out the charge on an electron. It involved 2 metal plates, charged with 500 V DC, with a reversing switch. You spritzed oil into the gap between the plates, and used the switch to make the droplets go up.... and down..... and up....
I was explaining this contraption to a friend, and pointed at the metal plates. Very closely. I had a pinhole drilled through my fingertip that took forever to heal!
 
PaulMmn said:
In my college physics class we were trying to find out the charge on an electron. It involved 2 metal plates, charged with 500 V DC, with a reversing switch. You spritzed oil into the gap between the plates, and used the switch to make the droplets go up.... and down..... and up....
I was explaining this contraption to a friend, and pointed at the metal plates. Very closely. I had a pinhole drilled through my fingertip that took forever to heal!
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Aka the Millikan Oil Drop experiment. For his work in this area and also the photoelectric effect, Robert Millikan became the second American to be awarded a Nobel prize in physics.
 
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