The Electrical Experimenter (1913)

http://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/electricalexperi04gern

by georgecmu • 9 years ago

70 19 9 years ago

library.si.edu

gravypod2• 9 years ago

I'd buy a re-print of these. These would go great in my college's ham shack. This is the kind of stuff that I imagine Marconi doing in his lab while smoking a cigarette and talking about airplanes being invented or something.

It's got some great projects for anyone who's looking to get into radio. Check out page 100 for an example of one of those crazy projects. It looks like it's a 50-foot areal hooked up to a 4-tap isolation transformer being AC coupled to headphones. It's using a basic single diode detection circut (you can check EEVBLog's latest video to see them being used in the spy bug detector). Nifty stuff and remindes me of fox hole sets

analog312• 9 years ago

I think that in some sense, the old radio magazine project articles are the original open-source hardware. There was certainly a tradition of developing something useful, and then sharing it with the world.

Animats• 9 years ago

Not quite. Look at all those ads in the back for patents, patent attorneys, and related services. Back then, the big thing was to be an inventor with patents. Tesla, Edison, Bell, DeForest, etc. all had strong patent protection.

a_thro_away4• 9 years ago

At the least, they were very much first principle kind of thing, often a tour de force of electromagnetic and mechanical nightmares. Mainframe line printers or upright vacuum columned 9 track tape drives come to mind and cause shudders.

I might recommend to search out the early chemistry books, as well. They explain the early chemistry and processes of so many things we take for granted, in a lost art kind of way. I love reading these kind of books.

jhallenworld• 9 years ago

Page 808: DeForest vs. The Electrical Experimenter. DeForest was trying to prevent advertisements of Audion clones.

dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp• 9 years ago

This is great. I wonder how many of the radio devices advertised or described in here would even be legal to operate today.

akiselev• 9 years ago

This book is almost a thousand pages long so I haven't done an exhaustive search but based on a random sampling... none. The first page I stumbled on was the "Experimental Chemistry" intro (page 110) and, after a paragraph on the virtues of buying stoppered beakers custom engraved with chemical symbols, it listed asbestos as the first piece of equipment. I'm going to (safely) assume that a book written before we knew about carcinogens or sharpies probably doesn't contain designs that would meet modern FCC electromagnetic interference standards. Hell, a significant portion of the things described in this book would be grounds for OSHA penalties and class action lawsuits if carried out in a work place.

On a side note: oh, how times have changed: (pg 942)

    Horse Sense
    
    If you work for a man, in 
    heaven's name work for him.
    If he pays wages that supply you your
    bread and butter, work for him,
    speak well of him, think well of
    him, stand by him, and stand by the
    institution he represents. I think
    if I worked for a man, I would
    work for him. I would not work
    for him a part of his time, but all
    of his time. I would give an un-
    divided service or .none. If put to
    a pinch, an ounce of loyalty is
    worth a pound of cleverness. If
    you vilify, condemn and eternally
    disparage, why, resign your posi-
    tion, and when you are outside,
    damn to your heart's content. But,
    I pray you. so long as you are a =
    part of an institution, do not con-
    demn it. Not that you will injure —
    the institution — not that — but when
    you disparage the concern of which
    you are a part, you disparage your-
    self. — Elbert Hubbard.

a_thro_away4• 9 years ago

On page 89 in the book Marconi's remote controlled boat doesn't talk about the transmitter (that I saw), but used a coherer as a receiver detector, something like a primitive diode I think. But if so, they probably used a spark gap transmitter attached to a long wire antenna, but splattered energy across a huge electro spectrum and traveled very very far, quite disruptive to any other receiver on all different wavelengths. Marconi used one of these for the first transatlantic wireless test as I recall. I remember books used to show you how to build one from a model A automobile coil IIRC, but I don't think it would be long before the FCC would knock on your door and would not be happy as they would maybe have to triangulate your location from different states?. A real Ham can verify all this, but I loved to pore over the old magazines, electronics, being old enough to search it out in the junk piles that were quite common before the 1970s.

cr0sh• 9 years ago

but used a coherer as a receiver detector, something like a primitive diode I think

From my understanding, a coherer was a radio-wave detector that used ferrite particles (in a small sealed glass tube, with wire at each end) that - when the radio signal was strong enough - would "stick together" and form a circuit; you can think of it as an RF-activated "reed switch" or relay. It was very crude, and not easily tunable.

Also - another interesting tidbit of info about early wireless: In order to generated the higher carrier-wave frequencies, they used special multi-pole alternators spun at high speed. Rather than only having a few poles, like a regular power generator, these RF alternators would use sometimes hundreds of poles. The RPM, multiplied by the number of poles, would determine the frequency of the output signal carrier wave. This was mainly used for telegraphy; I'm not sure if these machines had the bandwidth for voice. At the same time, they still produced a ton of power like a standard alternator - so it was essentially a way to generate "high power" (100s to 1000s of watts) RF (in the KHz ranges).

Another early technology of the time (used for a variety things - including motor control) was something called "magnetic amplifiers"; they are essentially weird variations on standard AC transformer technology. They can be made to act as audio amplifiers, as well as switches (like a vacuum tube or transistor).

johansch• 9 years ago

Page 314:

Killing Sharks by Electricity

kbart• 9 years ago

Heh, it's funny to see that ads haven't changed much in 100 year: "buy this book, learn at home and earn tons of money!" etc., just change web/cloud/mobile with auto/electric/radio.

kalleboo• 9 years ago

Interesting that the Smithsonian is cataloging/embedding Internet Archive material. A cursory web search doesn't turn up any history of their collaboration, is the Smithsonian just indexing the IA?

Here's a direct link to the PDF if you prefer that over the JavaScript reader [97 MB] https://archive.org/download/electricalexperi04gern/electric...

digikeri• 9 years ago

Smithsonian Libraries has been working with IA since 2006 to digitize our public domain material. We put it all on IA, but we also iframe the books on our site so we can create "collections" and have landing pages that let you browse all volumes of a given serial (among other things).

csense• 9 years ago

The article on solar power on page 316 is really interesting. Especially the artist's conception of a surprisingly modern looking solar panel, especially given that this was long before semiconductors were really understood.

The Electrical Experimenter (1913)

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