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Old 4th Nov 2020, 10:23 pm   #1
high_vacuum_house
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Smile Ridiculous thoughts and ideas from a young age

Following on from the confessions thread brought back several ridiculous thoughts and ideas that I had about how the world of electronic items worked when I was at a very early age.

My first accidental encounter with an appliance was with the cooker and noticing the pretty red glowing colour the long element coiled around the top of the grill was making. I decided to grab it to investigate, but luckily my mum could see what I was going to do and although I had a nasty burn on my hand the surprise came when my mum picked me up and put my hand under the cold tap before I felt any pain.

I couldn’t get my head around how aerials worked and was mystified about how music could come from a radio with nothing more than a sticking up bit of wire to receive it and thought there is a hidden wire somewhere running to the transmitter though I never found it !!

Television tubes were a real mystery as they were silent and nothing was ever seen moving around inside within the bowl no matter how hard I looked down the vents of our Thorn Courier monochrome television. I had convinced myself for a time due to their shape and made of glass that they were filled with water !!

The most peculiar thought I had was when my dad gave me an old RS catalogue for me to read at an early age and seeing a section containing DIN rail with associated relay bases and terminals. I had understood what rail was (what trains run on!) and put 2 and 2 together and believed that once you had put the relay bases ECT. on the rail, they would move along the rail on their own like a toy train

My dad gave me a couple of battery operated electronic sets and I quickly learned things like why a series resistor is needed for an LED when you put 9V across it. My dad taught me electrical load power theory, op-amp theory, RC and L network mathematics as well as sequential logic theory whilst I was at school. most evenings after school I was given a problem to solve involving solving it mathematically then proving it with an oscillator and oscilloscope. Hence the building of the Maplin minilab project which was designed for analogue and digital electronics.

Christopher Capener
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Old 4th Nov 2020, 11:24 pm   #2
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Having observed that two batteries in series light a bulb more brightly than a single one I couldn't understand why putting a battery in series with a loudspeaker didn't make it louder.
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Old 5th Nov 2020, 12:08 am   #3
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Default Re: Ridiculous thoughts and ideas from a young age

When I was 6 my dad let me play with the crystal set he had built when he was a boy. At some point a crystal diode had been wired across the mountings intended for the galena crystal and cat's whisker, it was probably a 1N34 like this:

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I was sure if I watched it closely I would see it light up.
Also I misunderstood my dad when he said I should turn the tuner knob back and forth to make it louder, I thought it would get louder and louder the more I did it.

I found an ARP whistle in a wardrobe and must have annoyed my parents with it. My dad explained that because it was a real police whistle I shouldn't blow it or a policeman was bound to hear it and I would be in trouble.
I never dared blow it again.
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Old 5th Nov 2020, 12:53 am   #4
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Dai Corner View Post
Having observed that two batteries in series light a bulb more brightly than a single one I couldn't understand why putting a battery in series with a loudspeaker didn't make it louder.
Yes, I remember being disappointed by that experiment also. I think I even tried wiring an extension speaker through a potentiometer (Salvaged volume control) and being disappointed that it only reduced the volume and did not increase it!

Chris
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Old 5th Nov 2020, 1:10 am   #5
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My earliest introduction to electrical experimentation was the ladybird book “magnets bulbs and batteries” i was very young maybe 6 or 7. Todays D cell was known as U2 and they were paper wrapped over the zinc body. I was born in late 1962, not sure when they changed to the tin encased SP2, ,but that would help date the following experience...
I distinctly remember rigging up a front lamp for my pedal scooter. I used sellotape to attach the U2 to the handlebar, without the paper cover. I used one of those chrome dolly switches. I must have been very pleased with myself when the bulb lit and went out when I operated the switch. The next day however it did not come on at all. Turns out I had wired the switch across the battery rather than in series with the bulb, and the off setting was simply shorting the battery. Of course the battery was completely flat.

Last edited by unitelex; 5th Nov 2020 at 1:33 am. Reason: Corrected SP2 to U2
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Old 5th Nov 2020, 1:20 am   #6
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Default Re: Ridiculous thoughts and ideas from a young age

One of my first projects - I would have been maybe 10 - was a crystal set, but I simply could not see how anything electronic could work without power so I assumed the power arrangements must have been 'omitted for clarity' and spent a lot of time trying to think how best to power the circuit

Many years later I became aware that 'deluxe' crystal sets sometimes did or do use a battery to bias the rectifier to the point where it is almost, almost conducting so that even the smallest amount of RF will be enough to tip it into conduction but I had no inkling of that at the time.
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Old 5th Nov 2020, 1:23 am   #7
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Default Re: Ridiculous thoughts and ideas from a young age

As a youngster repairing televisions, I was confronted with a Thorn 3000, with L602 open circuit.

To my, as yet, untrained mind, an inductor was just a length of wire, so I shorted it out.

After the BANG, I quickly learn the theory of switched mode power supplies.
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Old 5th Nov 2020, 7:30 am   #8
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When I was about 6, I had learned (and seen practically) that a permanent-magnet motor of the type used in toys and construction kits would also work in reverse as a generator. The excellent Fischertechnik EM1 kit had an experiment where you coupled 2 motor spindles together, powered one from a battery and connected to the other to a light bulb, which lit up rather more dimly than it would on the battery directly.

Anyway, I then spent a long time trying to gear 2 motors together and link them electrically so that the generator one would power the driving one. At that age I didn't realise I was trying to make a perpetual motion machine.
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Old 5th Nov 2020, 8:19 am   #9
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Once, I can't remember how old I was but I was quite young, I decided to make my electric train set go faster.

I had worked out that when I turned the knob on the control box to vary the speed it increased the volts on the track to make the train go faster.
I also knew that the control box took in a high voltage (mains) and reduced it for the train.

You can see what's coming. I somehow managed to hold a pair of live wires to the track and expected the train to wizz round.
Of course there was a flash and bang and the house fuses blew.
How I did not kill myself I do not know, my father, who was an electrician was furious.

Many years later, when I understood electrics, I took apart the train that had taken the full mains voltage.
The copper brushes that picked up the power from the rotating train wheels had spot welded to the wheels and the suppression capacitor across the motor had gone short circuit.

I broke the weld and rubbed down the wheel where it had welded. I cut out the capacitor and tested it. To my suprise the train ran again. The capacitor had saved the motor.

Peter
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Old 5th Nov 2020, 9:29 am   #10
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Aged about 11, I had my train set on a board. I decided I wanted a high voltage National Grid pylon as part of the layout. I used(i think) a pair of identical frame output transformers from old tv sets I had destroyed, connecting the high resistance windings to each other and the low resistance of one to my 15v ac transformer auxiliary output. I soon got a belt off the hv side and realising the voltage was pretty high, started drawing arcs from the bare wires, just for fun. Dad was not amused as it wiped out the old 405 tv he was watching!
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Old 5th Nov 2020, 9:34 am   #11
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At about 12 I thought "why not make a small portable cassette player", this was years before the Walkman emerged.
 
Old 5th Nov 2020, 9:39 am   #12
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Not spectacular, but stupid - my first mixer was a passive jobbie, very simple. Four channel pots feeding one master - and no resistors on the sliders. Couldn't work out why I had to have all four channels open to get anything out at all...

If anybody doubts the not infrequent comment on this forum that "we've all done it", this thread provides ample proof!
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Old 5th Nov 2020, 9:39 am   #13
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As a youngster I had a torch I was to take to my first cub camp. It ued on of those flat (shaped) 4.5v batteries but I didn't understand voltages properly. I went through the box of spare torch bulbs to find the brightest, an duly fitted it. It was noticeably brighter than the original. You can guess what's coming. Yes, when I switched it on for more than a few seconds the bulb failed. Must have been a lower voltage bulb. Of course tis only happened once I was at camp so no chance of rescuing the correct bulb. Bizzarely it happened when myself and a friend were trying to see what happened when two beams of light crossed.
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Old 5th Nov 2020, 9:54 am   #14
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As a four year old, I can remember telling my teacher that the school was being wasteful scrapping their old Decca monochrome tellies and buying colour replacements. I explained that they should have just changed the tubes for colour ones

When I was slightly older, a friend and I tried running a wire from my house to his, two roads away, with the intention of making some kind of intercom. We got all our longest bits of flex, stretched them out, and tucked them neatly under peoples' front fences and hedges. The reality then dawned that we only had about 5% of the length we needed!
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Old 5th Nov 2020, 10:36 am   #15
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Yes you have to marvel at it. Electronics is magic, until you understand how it all works.
For me there's still a huge amount of magic about it. I'm not so sure I want the magic to go away!
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Old 5th Nov 2020, 11:30 am   #16
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After acquiring my first cassette recorder and recording songs off the radio or from my own or friends' records to make what we called 'mix tapes' I came up with the idea of record shops doing this on a legal, commercial basis.

It didn't happen at the time of course, but now we can buy and download individual album tracks. Even that has almost been superseded by the monthly subscription 'all you can eat' services.
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Old 5th Nov 2020, 11:44 am   #17
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I was about 12 years old I was given a selection of then scrap TV sets. Mainly TV22's and similar. Knowing a small amount of TV theory I knew that the video information was on the cathode of the tube, so I duly ran a lead from the cathode to the aux input on our tape recorder and tried to make a video recorder.
I also used one to make a large screen scope. I disconnected the line and frame coils and replaced them with resistors and fed the left and right channels of an amplifier to the coils.
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Old 5th Nov 2020, 11:44 am   #18
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As a kid I was intrigued by the idea that you could operate a WWI-style 'trench telephone' using only one wire and earth-return.

Several old telephone-handsets from the demolition of the local rail signal-box/woodyard were acquired and wired, but no communication resulted. I hadn't understood the need for a battery to energize the carbon-mic. When this was realised, I started with a 4.5V battery given to me by my brother, and we got it working.

"Will it go louder if I use a higher-voltage battery?"

Of course it would - one of my aunts had a hearing-aid that used 22.5V batteries that looked a lot like a longer version of a PP3 with a terminal at each end, and I managed to acquire a bunch of the used ones. Wiring several in series gave greater loudness but the carbon-inserts in the phones had a short-and-unhappy life.

This all in turn led on to 'ground communications' using garden spades/forks as electrodes, the output of an old radiogram as transmitter, and a pair of ex-Army DLR5 headphones to receive. We managed to 'work' over a couple of hundred yards (it was a rural area so no annoying AC hum).

Later, a CR100 and a transmitter working on about 85KHz (using a TV line-output valve screen-grid modulated from the primary of the aformentioned radiogram's output-transformer) got us a good half-mile, again using spades/forks/lengths-of-angle-iron as earth-electrodes.
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Old 5th Nov 2020, 12:20 pm   #19
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Default Re: Ridiculous thoughts and ideas from a young age

For me, a ridiculous thought from not quite such a young age. Around 30 years ago, the engineering staff kept rabbiting on about Laplace Transforms. In my minds eye I was imagining a sort of "larch-lap" woven variable transformer for phase shifting purposes. My new knowledge served me well for years going on about fitting a laplace transformer into this system to introduce phase shift until I realised that the engineers were talking about a mathematical process. All those engineers must have thought "technicians, know your limits!"
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Old 5th Nov 2020, 2:06 pm   #20
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Some time in the early 80s, before Trevor Bayliss had a similar idea, I thought about making a wind up radio...likely 1982 as my parents had bought me a Decca wind up gramophone so I'd be nine years old.....My idea had the same sort of principles as Mr. Bayliss' but everyone I spoke to about it said it was a silly idea as batteries were so easy to come by. I hadn't thought about remote parts of the world where people are too poor for batteries.

Younger still I opened up the back of the family TV set (an Invicta branded thing) and soldered wires to the loudspeaker terminals...the other end of which I connected to a mini jack for my little cassette recorder. I merrily recorded the soundtrack to some of my favourite TV shows before my dad realised what I'd done and told me about such things as live chassis. Really, if he didn't want me to experiment he shouldn't have taught me how to solder....I cannot have been older than 6.

I remember not quite understanding how radio controlled cars worked. My cousin had one and my first thought was that the electricity must be transmitted from the controller to the car somehow through the air. Then I saw that the car had batteries too and I had to rethink. But I still didn't understand it for a few more years.
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