It was exciting to learn how a simple
telephone worked when I was a lad.
I made one in a wood box, and a friend
down the block made one too.
We used the fence wires to go as far
as we could, and pieced the rest together
with whatever wire we could come up with.
Record players and radios were exciting too.
My first radio was made with a razor blade and a
safety pin and some military surplus headphones.
Most commercial units contained vacuum tubes
at that time. They contained voltages from 300
to 600 volts. I lost track of how many times I was
shocked by touching the wrong place in one of them.
It was great to learn about the 3 basic parts: the
resistor, the capacitor, and the inductor, and the
more sophisticated parts like the rectifier, vacuum
tube, potentiometer, transistor and Zener diode.
Later years brought even more specialized parts.
I have had a project in mind or in progress most
of my life.
Even as an experienced adult, Tesla coils are hard
to make. They require some money, a lot of luck,
patience and planning, and a knowledge of several
principles: spark-switching, mutual inductance,
current capacity, high voltage insulation, resonance,
etc. Mine is not nearly as good as the picture.
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
Absolutely shocking, it would appear. The only thing I ever invented as far as electricity goes was a device to get worms to come up out of the ground so I could go fishing!