Why I Love Technologies of All Sorts

Mechanics

As a child, I was fascinated by how things worked.  All by themselves clocks kept time, radios made music, and rockets flew.  Figuring out how such things functioned was my enduring compulsion.  That and dreaming of a future filled with wonders enabled by ever-advancing technology.

Disassembling things was a key tactic in my quest to understand.  When my age was in single digits, mechanical clocks became the first subjects of my investigations.  Time pieces easily gave up their secrets and patterns.  Taking apart a clock I’d always find a stack of gears, a ratchet mechanism, a tiny spiral spring, and a big steel ribbon wound into a coil.  The gears drove concentric shafts such that the hour, minute, and second hands moved at different speeds.  The steel ribbon served as the mainspring.  Wound by the user, it supplied the energy to measure and display the time.  The tiny spiral and ratchet mechanism regulated the clock’s speed.  Connected to the main spring they allowed the steel coil to unwind slowly, at a constant rate.  Although, I discovered, if I twisted the right gear hard, I could accelerate time by making the ratchet and spring oscillate really fast. 

I loved mechanical things because they were relatively easy for the budding inventor within me to understand.  Tracing the role each component played in the mechanism was generally straightforward.  But mechanics were so nineteenth century, I thought.  My focus was on the future and, in the 1960s, it was clear that the future was electronic.

Electronics

Because they knew of my obsession with technology, relatives sometimes gave me their obsolete, but still functional AM radios.  I remember staring into the guts of those devices while contemplating the intriguing mysteries they contained.  Little cylinders marked with colored stripes, square aluminum boxes hiding wires coiled on paper spindles, and always there was an odd component made of interdigitating, rotating metal plates.  Its center shaft was invariably attached to the station-tuning dial.  Finally, there were the small glass tubes each enclosing odd internal structures.  When the power was switched on, something within those structures glowed a dull red.

I knew electricity made radios work.  But what in the world were all those odd little components doing to the electricity that flowed out of the wall socket?  How did they—just sitting there without moving—change the electricity such that the radio produced voices and music?  I desperately wanted to know but I could think of no experiments I could perform that would reveal the answer.

Around my 10^th birthday, some saintly person (I don’t remember who) gave me a book about electronics.  It became my constant companion.  The first part of the book was about direct current (DC) circuits.¹  I ate up the information.  Switches, resistors, diodes, voltage, and current all made sense to me.  So too did making an electromagnet by wrapping wire around a construction nail.  Connect the two terminals of a battery to the two ends of the wire and the flow of current turned the nail into a magnet.  Stop the current and it’s just a nail.

I put my burgeoning knowledge to use by building a buzzer.  Besides the nail and wire I also needed a couple of rectangular strips of metal.  These I cut from a tin can.  (A “tin” can is mostly steel, and thus magnetic.)  The nail became an electromagnet as above.  The metal strips served as electrodes.   

The wire-wound nail and metal strips—bent appropriately—I mounted on a wooden block.  This was done such that, when the battery was connected to the coil, it pulled one of the strips toward the nail.  The second strip was positioned so that it touched the first strip when the electromagnet was off.  Then I wired the battery into the circuit such that the current could flow into the coil only when the metal strips were in contact.  When I connected the battery, current flowed through the coil.  Magnetic forces then made metal strip number one, move toward the battery, breaking contact with strip number two.  This stopped the flow of current, and strip number one sprang back to contact strip two, which reestablished the flow of current.  And so on.  The repeating cycle created a buzzing noise.  It sounded like applause to me.

Animation

We went to the movies very rarely when I was a kid—there were no theaters in my town, and my mother thought the whole cinema experience was somewhat unsavory.  But one movie I did get to see around age eight was “One Hundred and One Dalmatians.”  That began a years-long fascination with movies.  Although I loved the characters, the story, and the drawings, the thing that fascinated me most was working out how movies were made, and how I might make one.

I learned that movies are nothing more than a sequence of pictures, taken and displayed one after another.  To create an animation, you can take the pictures one at a time, changing the scene a little bit between pictures.  When you play back the sequence quickly, it looks like things are moving!

My mother had an old eight-millimeter, windup(!) Bell & Howell movie camera, probably from the 1940s.  She let me use it to investigate a career in film.  Mom’s camera was not intended for animation and had no features that made it easy.  However, I learned that if I turned the framerate down as low as it would go and flicked the shutter button in just the right way, the camera would oblige by shooting only a single frame.  That was all I needed.

I set up my animation studio.   With the camera bolted to a table, I made a roadway from strips of paper and used my Matchbox cars as actors. (The background was as plain as I could make it, I imagined a desert setting.)  By pulling the roadway toward the camera after each flick of the button, I could make it appear that the viewer was driving down the road.  And then all sorts of mayhem took place—cars drag racing, cars spinning out of control and crashing, and a car driving past a closing railroad gate and being smacked by a train.  

Astronautics

Around freshman year in high school I discovered model rocketry (probably from an ad in the back of a Popular Science magazine).  I mailed in my request and vividly remember the day the catalog from Estes Industries arrived.  (Estes Industries, founded by Vernon Estes, was a pioneering supplier of model rockets, engines, and components.)   For hours I thumbed through the pages, memorizing the descriptions of each rocket.  The colors were stunning—I can still picture the little cherry red rocket that captured my attention.   

Using money I’d earned mowing lawns, I  ordered the full complement: a starter model (Astron Alpha), launch pad, rocket motors, and the world’s simplest sextant (for measuring altitude).  When my supplies came, I followed the instructions carefully.  There was a lightweight “body tube,” a nosecone made of balsa, fins that had to be cut from a thin sheet of balsa, and a plastic parachute.  I cut, glued, and painted.  My rocket looked amazing!

I decamped to an open area not far from my house and setup the launch pad.  The electrical igniters in those days required a huge current to work.  Sixteen special “photoflash” 1.5-volt D-cell batteries were needed to set off the rocket.  I inserted the launch key, tested launch circuit continuity, counted down to zero, and pressed the launch button.  With a satisfying WHOOSH! the motor ignited, and the rocket leapt upward.  In only a second or two the engine burned through its store of propellent, but the rocket continues coasting higher.  Near apogee the “ejection charge” blew.  This made the nosecone pop off  the rocket, followed by the parachute.   The nosecone was tied to the parachute, and the parachute was connected to the rocket body by a long elastic “shock” cord.  Together the assemblage floated to the ground.

It was great fun and very exciting to build a rocket and have it actually work!  But, of course, you don’t invent the future by following instruction written by others.  The real fun, I knew, would come from creating my own rocket from scratch.  Estes Industries facilitated this.  They published pamphlets and books that described the principles of aerodynamics and ballistics: how to calculate the drag coefficient, how to compute the fin area necessary to stabilize the rocket, and how to estimate the maximum altitude your creation might reach.  

I went through the exercises and designed a couple of my own rockets.  One was a dual booster heavy-lift machine.  Another implemented a configuration I hadn’t seen anyone else try; it had the parachute eject rearward.  

Both my rockets found ways to fail.  When only one of the paired rocket engines ignited on lift off, my dual-engine rocket veered in a wide arc and didn’t get close to its intended altitude.  And the rear-ejecting rocket disassemble itself at least two separate times when the ejection charge blew.  That necessitated redesign and rebuilding.

Building something was always the ultimate test of my education and implementation skills.  If the thing worked, it meant I understood the subject matter and had done a good construction job.  If it didn’t work, it meant I was missing something.  Showing off a real device left me nowhere to hide.  The performance demonstrated my understanding or lack thereof.  

Robotics

Of all the technologies I’ve dabbled in, robotics has been my greatest love.  That’s partly because robots invariably require the harmonious confluence of several other technologies.  

The first real robot I ever attempted to build was Rug Warrior, developed for the Robot Talent Show (as described in Dancing with Roomba).  For it, I had to design and implement a chassis that was mechanically sound with a bumper able to move easily in two dimensions.  The microprocessor that controlled the robot had to be connected to sensors that I chose.   Developing that package required some electronic design along with a clear understanding of how sensors and circuits work.   Creating the robot’s program and implementing the new behavior-based robot control paradigm involved software engineering.  And finally, cleaning technology was critical to the robot’s functioning.  As described in the book, initially I didn’t get that quite right.

Building a robot is like solving a series of little puzzles (sometimes they are not so little!).  Each solution delivers a small reward.  First, is devising the concept for how your machine will operate.  Next comes constructing and testing each of the component systems.  When the systems don’t play nice with each other, there’s the gratification of figuring out how to resolve the differences.  And when, at last, the whole thing works as you intended there comes the parental-like satisfaction of seeing your creation working on its own.  

I’m still hooked on the joy of that process.

1. The second part of the book taught alternating current circuits. Those concepts were much harder and took a lot longer to understand. ↩︎