Electricity and electronics in my life
One of my first memories with
respect to electricity, is the facination with a blinking light attached to some
toy that a boy brought with him to kindergarten. I must have been five years
old. I was facinated with it because I could not understand how it could blink
all by itself. At that time I already knew you had to make a circuit with a
battery, a switch and a light. It was only many years later, that I realized
that the little light had a bi-metal in it, which when heated by the light,
switched it off.
Electric experimentation kit
This was some kit, which contained various
electrical experiments starting with simple switching circuits, from electrical
magnets till a working electrical motor. You had to wind the coils all by
yourself.
Taking apart old televisions
It must be around the same time, that I
got an interest in electronical devices. Up in the attic we had some place where
my father made some attempts for making miniature trains. My uncle and his son
were very succesful with doing this, but my father never found the time or the
energy to finish his. The place became our electronic junk yard. For many years
there were always some broken radios or televisions lying around this area being
taken apart for their components, which might become useful in the future. I had
a whole collection of radio tubes. I cannot remember every having done something
useful with any of these components.
EE1050 & EE1052
When I
was in sixth or seventh grade, my parents bought for me the Philips Electronic
Engineering kits EE1050. I remember showing some of the electronic experiments
in the class room.
Later on, we also bought the EE1052, an extension kit with which you could
build a radio receiver. I cannot remember that I every succeded in building a
working radio from it. I do remember that I made many attempts afterwards, with
components which I bought in a little shop in Utrecht, but also that these
experiments never lead to any working radio receiver, how much I did my best.
Building a five-by-five display
I was already facinated with displays,
and one time, I spend a great part of my pocket money to buy 25 little lights
(with lense) in order to build a five-by-five array of lights. I was already
dreaming how with switches, I could make all kinds of interesting patterns, but
after I had put the whole thing together, it didn't work at all as I had
precieved. It was much later that I realized that I should have used diodes for
each of the individual lights. I did have a lot of fun, building all kinds of
lights in my bedroom in the years that followed. I remembered that at one point
I had build a display of the radio tubes, which was lighted from the other side
of the room by one of these lights in combination with some big lense my father
had brought home one time.
A digital watch
On June 24, 1977, when I was in highschool, I bought
such a digital watch with these little red LEDs and magnification glasses. It
was rather expensive, but I was very proud of it. For some time I would write
all digits as they were displayed on the seven-segment displays.
Digital electronics
I remember building some counter and a decoder with
a seven-segment display. I remember that I was rather disappointed when the
thing didn't want to count properly, but instead displayed random numbers. It
was only much later that realized that a simply touching a contact with a wire
was generating many spikes.
Voice distortion
I vaguely remember making some device (from a kit) for
voice distortion and taking it with me (or dreaming about this) to the Evulon (a
technics museum by Philips) to try it out on an instrument displaying a freqency
spectrum of sounds spoken into a microphone. But I also have some memory that
they whole thing never worked properly.
A pocket calculator
I also remember the first pocket calculators with
the same time of LED displays. I remember drawing schematics to make some kind
of computer with a pocket calculator. It never did result in anything.
Losing interest
Finally, I lost interest in electronics, because it
seemed that I was not very successful in making working devices, and was hoping
that I would have more success with computers. Which I did.
