It’s Thanksgiving time here in the States, and one thing I’m thankful for is, as one might expect, my children. Haley, Ashley, and Joshua are all good kids. What I often find most interesting about them, despite how self-absorbed this sounds, are those parts of me that I see residing within them.
Haley definitely favors Dorothy in looks and stature, my half-Japanese wife being on the short side. Though remarkably precocious intellectually as a baby, Haley seems destined to be a jock. There’s nothing wrong with that, but sometimes I think the only thing she inherited from me is poor penmanship. Ashley favors my side of the family in looks, and was taller than her mom by age nine. If I were to pick one of my kids who is most likely to pursue a literary career, she’s the one. She also shares my interest in science and nature, and is the most likely of the three to bury herself in a book and get cranky when interrupted. She wanted both a microscope and a telescope for Christmas and she got them. She invents robotic alligators out of Tinkertoys and dreams of one day finding Narnia for real.
My son Joshua is the youngest, and has personality traits in common with both of his sisters. Though my girls were tomboys, when Joshua came along, Dorothy and I saw the difference between little girls who act like little boys, and an actual boy. Though the girls played with their share of toy cars, Joshua was our first child to take a picture of a car from a magazine and make motor noises as he raced it along the wall. His sisters share his interest in making things, but they are not at all as fond of breaking them. Only my son exhibits, as did I, that typical behavior of the mechanically inclined child—deliberately taking or breaking things apart just to see what’s inside or how they work. More than that, he’s the only one that likes to exhibit a thing with springs and gears, or chunks of circuit boards with stray wires and colorful capacitors, as an objet d’art.
With age comes maturity, or at least the requirement to keep up the appearance, so I, of course, no longer tear things apart just to scope out their insides. Okay, that’s a lie. Actually, I don’t hesitate to help Joshua take things apart if he can’t quite manage it on his own. And I still do it for myself, only now I claim that I’m “harvesting parts.” Sometimes I even keep those parts, if for no other reason than that they are pleasing to the technological eye.
However, taking things apart to see how they work just isn’t as fun as it used to be. I don’t think it’s because I’m older—the problem is that technology isn’t as transparent as it used to be. Sure, you can still disassemble a simple wind-up watch and figure out what the gears do and how the spring mechanism drives the gizmo. But you can’t learn a whole heck of a lot when you open up an electronic watch unless you already know quite a bit about them to begin with.
The same goes for a TV or even a simple AM radio. Take the back off the radio and at best you only see a few wires. Most everything is on a circuit board, and some of the components are literally black boxes looking more like a Cubist’s idea of a spider than anything having to do with electricity!
I miss those days when technology was transparent to the mechanically inclined boy or girl. I only caught the extreme tail end of that period, and only benefited from it as much as I did because my father (about whom you can read in my June 2006 Alternate View, “My Mysterious Father”) knew how to do everything and I could watch him.
Perhaps that’s also why Golden Age science fiction sings to me with such a sweeter voice than most of the more recent stuff. I don’t think it is just because I was reading Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke when I was 12 and thus connect those stories to my own youth. I think it’s because those writers grew up in an era when most technology was accessible to the educated layman in a way that most of it now is only accessible to those with a technical education.
There is a good description of that era in the author’s preface to Electrostatics by A. D. Moore (1), which is essentially a how-to book on build-it-yourself electrostatic machines. Born in 1895, Moore grew up in Pennsylvania, and had this to say about his formative years on page 15:
“I was raised on a farm, where there are many problems to be solved and many handy things to be learned. And when painters or roofers or carpenters or plumbers or threshers would come, endless questions could be asked—and I surely asked them . . . But when loose from farm chores, I spent lots of time in the plumbing shop, the hardware store, the blacksmith shop, the foundry, the machine shop, the brickyard, the lumber mill and the glass plant. There were the coal mines to visit, and the coke ovens. There was a power plant, where the engineer was my friend. There was the streetcar line, where the motorman was my friend. There was the telephone man, who came to put new dry cells in our telephone, and he would give me the old ones to use in my experiments. It was a very rich environment for a kid who wanted to be an electrical engineer. . . .”
Moore’s experiences were hardly unique for engineers who came of age in the early decades of the twentieth century. But he then contrasts his era with ours:
“Coming back to you: today, safety rules prevail, and you, to my great regret, cannot wander at will in a glass plant or other factory. ‘KEEP OUT’ is a familiar sign. This denial of free access to American industry is a great loss to a full childhood, and believe me, a great loss to science and engineering.”
And I can only agree. Clarke’s observation about sufficiently advanced technologies being indistinguishable from magic has applied in our own era at least since the advent of VCRs unprogrammable by most owners. True, we know we aren’t really dealing with magic, but the practical result is often that we might just as well be. Going to the shaman or going to the IT guru, both do tricks that look like magic.
What’s a body to do?
Even though the thirst remains to take things apart with my hands, I’ve found a substitute to slake that thirst, and that brings me to something else I’m thankful for, Lindsay’s Technical Books (2). I found out about Lindsay when reading the little three-line classified ads in the back of a Popular Mechanics in the barbershop maybe 15 years ago. Lindsay offers exactly the kinds of books a guy like Moore would like to see in every library, often reprinting books from a long lost era. For instance, one of my recent purchases was a reprint of the 1935 Shortwave Radio Manual, edited by Hugo Gernsback and H. Winfield Secor. Gernsback is none other than the man after whom the Hugo award is named.
In that Alternate View about my dad, I talked about how he used to have his own radio and TV repair business. Once for fun he decided to make a four-tube radio receiver straight from the schematics, only he laid it out to physically reflect pretty much exactly the way the schematics depicted the circuitry. He built a wooden base and the tubes were inserted upside down so that the connections to the sockets would be visible. For the common chassis ground he used a buss bar of thick copper wire. All of the wiring was straight, just like the lines depicting wires in the diagram.
Unfortunately, at the time I was too young to appreciate that radio, and I have no idea what ever became of it. But the memory stuck in my mind and I used to think how cool it would be to go one step farther, and actually build a tube radio with homemade tubes. That is, to actually make the cathode and anode and grids of a vacuum tube by hand, then enclose the unit inside a bell jar and pump out the air.
I never actually did it (well, haven’t yet done it), but someone else has, and surprised and delighted I was when the (then) latest Lindsay’s Technical Books catalog arrived featuring Instruments of Amplification by Peter Friedrichs. There’s a picture from the book right there in the catalog showing exactly what I’d had in mind—you can see the cylindrical anode with a wire-spiral grid and a cathode inside that, all enclosed in a spherical glass bottle. According to Friedrichs, these model tubes give performance comparable to the earliest vacuum tubes. If you’re at all like me, your fingertips are already tingling in anticipation of making one of these yourself.
For those who want to emulate Moore in this day and age, I really know of no better place to start than the Lindsay’s Technical Books catalog. If you don’t have your own machine shop, Lindsay has books that will show you how to make your own. I mean that literally—books are offered that will show you how to make a metal lathe, milling machine, drill press, sheet metal brake, and others, and all from scrap materials. A few additional titles will give you the flavor of the offerings: Build a Two Cylinder Stirling Cycle Engine; Automobiles 1913-15; Steam Engine Projects; Manufacture of Bricks and Tiles; Electrical Things Boys Like to Make; Secrets of Building An Alcohol Producing Still; Building Small Barns, Sheds, and Shelters; Mechanical Devices for the Electronics Experimenter; Metal Spinning; How to Build a Forge; Procedures in Experimental Physics; and incredibly, Saturn: The Complete Manufacturing and Test Records, perfect for anyone who wants to take a Saturn V Moon rocket apart to see how it works, but doesn’t happen to have one at hand.
Even though I’ve been getting Lindsay Book Catalogs for years, I’m still amused by the unusual and humorous nature of some of the offerings, like the I Just Love to Fart Cookbook, which contains recipes to enhance the flatulence in your life. There is also Gems of American Architecture, a mock-catalog featuring 22 different “brands” of outhouses from their final golden age during the Great Depression. And if you’re into siege engines, there’s The Art of the Catapult by William Gurstelle, in which you will learn about catapults, both their physics and their history, and how to construct your own working models.
A. D. Moore finished that last paragraph I quoted about our era with this thought:
“What can you do to help make up for it? You can steam ahead on your own, as an experimenter, learning about materials and processes and functions, having your own failures and successes, acquiring common sense and judgment as to what will work and what won’t. There is just no substitute for acquiring this kind of know-how.
“If this book does nothing more than coax you into experimentation with electrostatics—or anything else!—it will have served a good purpose.”
And that goes for this column, too.
References
1) Electrostatics by A. D. Moore. ISBN 1-885540-04-3. You can find it at www.electrostatic.com.
2) You can request the latest Lindsay’s Technical Books catalog at www.lindsaybks.com, or by writing to Lindsay Publications Inc., P.O. Box 538, Bradley, IL 60915-0538. (Catalogs are free in the U.S. and Canada, $4.00 US for the rest of the planet.)
