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![To Be, Or Not to Be [a Metal] - Do Astrophysicists Know the Difference?: Kirt's Cogitations™ #374 - RF Cafe](miscellany/homepage-archive/2026/images/big-bang-universe-creation-kirt-blattenberger-hp.gif) As a
multi-decade-long amateur astronomer, I have read countless articles written by
astronomers who refer to all elements heavier than helium (#2 on the
periodic table of the elements) as "metals." Ostensibly, the origin stems from
early detection of heavy elements in stars, based on heliographic spectrum
investigations, where iron - being the most abundant stable byproduct of
supernova explosions - was most readily observed. I wondered if the "metals"
nomenclature came from the next heaviest element, lithium (#3 in the periodic
table), being a metal, thereby laying the foundation. Not so, claims AI, since
lithium is very rare overall in the universe, and not readily observed. For
clarity, I also procured the scientific distinction...
 I usually learn something new with each episode
of Mac's Radio Service Shop, but not necessarily related to electronics. Such is
the case this time where after Mac gives Barney a quick lesson in how to determine
a transformer's winding turns ratio when needing to create an impedance match circuit.
He then, while discussing whether "free" repair estimates are truly free or of any
real value at all, he uses the phrase "a horse on you." Maybe it is because I don't frequent bars that
I had never heard that, but after a little research I now know it refers to a bar
dice game called "'Horse." "A horse on you" is when you lose the final round of
a 2-out-of-3 challenge. "A horse apiece" is when you and your opponent each win
one round in a 2-out-of-3...
 "Data centers for AI are turning the world
of power generation on its head. There isn't enough power capacity on the grid to
even come close to how much energy is needed for the number being built. And traditional
transmission and distribution networks aren't efficient enough to take full advantage
of all the power available. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration,
annual transmission and distribution losses average about 5%. The rate is much higher
in some other parts of the world. Hence, hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services,
Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure are investigating every avenue to gain more power
and raise efficiency. The potential virtues of
high-temperature
superconductors..."
 Consumer grade
thermoelectric coolers have been around for so long now that most
people probably assume there is nothing wondrous about the discovery that makes
them possible. I still marvel at the process that allows the application of a current
through physical junction of two dissimilar metals (certain
types) to produce a cooling effect rather than the I2R heating normally associated
with conductors. This article from a scientist at Westinghouse Electric's research
laboratories provides a nice introduction to the subject of thermoelectricity from
both electric current generation based on the application of heat to a dissimilar
metals junction, and the aforementioned cooling effect possible from passing a current...
 FM radio has been in the news fairly frequently
in the last couple years as phone manufacturers and the
National Association of Broadcasters lobby the FCC and politicians
to mandate the inclusion of FM radio capability into every phone manufactured. In
a ploy to exploit the gullibility and egos of said bureaucrats and pols, their primary
argument that FM radio is a "first informer in times of crisis," assuming of course
that people will miss news of "the big one" when and if it occurs. To my knowledge,
successful reception of FM radio on a cellphone requires the listener wear a set
of wired ear buds since the wire from the phone to the ear buds functions as the
antenna. What percentage of cellphone users would bother to carry a set of ear buds?
I, of course, am a huge proponent of...
 Arthur Brach created many
crossword puzzles for Popular Electronics magazine in the 1950s and
1960s. Unlike the hundreds of RF Cafe Crossword Puzzles I designed over more than
two decades, the PE puzzles usually have a few words that are not specifically related
to electronics and/or technology. Still, they are a good source of a brief break
from the day's business. You will need to print out this crossword puzzle to work
it, since it is not interactive. Have fun.
 "Fair
Trade" was a policy established in the post-WWII era in response to what consumer
retail groups considered business-ruining cost cutting by dealers who offered to
sell products at or barely above cost in order to steal profit from other stores.
So-scheming stores planned to make up for the low profit margin with high sales
volumes. Doing so drove a lot of the local competition out of business, leaving
the crafty dirty dealers to later raise prices. Stores that had manufacturer-sanctioned
service shops often got screwed because they were obligated to repair items like
TVs and radios that were bought from another dealer who did not do service work.
Profit margins on repair work - at least from honest shops - were typically very
low, so the owners depended on new product sales...
 Yowza, yowza, yowza
(The Jazz Singer),
QentComm's stock will be rising soon! "Quantum technology is already alive and
well in telecom networks, and although security is the top-of-mind use case, telcos
are also looking at quantum to make networks more resilient and transmit information
more quickly. Comcast announced this week it completed a trial with AMD and Classiq
that leveraged quantum software to find independent backup paths for network sites.
Elsewhere, Deutsche Telekom and Qunnect successfully demonstrated
quantum teleportation over an existing fiber network in Berlin..."
 The persona of Scott Adams' "Dilbert" is
described exactly in the opening sentence of this article in a 1930 edition of
Radio-Craft magazine. It is amazing - if not frustrating - to realize how
long the perception of science-minded people being introverts has been around. Dilbert's
"pointy-haired-boss" is nailed in the second sentence.
Georg von Arco is celebrated here as a major contributor to the
advancement of early radio, particularly wireless telegraphy equipment development.
Interestingly, as brought to my attention by Melanie as she did the text clean-up
after OCRing the magazine page, von Arco worked at the Sayville radio transmission
station on Long Island, New York, where the Telefunken Company's Dr. K.G. Frank
was arrested and interred for the duration of the World War I for sending out
"unneutral messages...
 Lots of Hams still use this tried-and-true
system for
tuning antennas for efficient operation on a variety of bands.
There are plenty of multi-band designs that rely on traps to reactively isolate
portions of the antenna that properly resonate at the desired frequency, but there
is usually a price to be paid in VSWR. Poor VSWR; i.e., higher mismatch loss, can
be overcome with higher transmitter output power, but the real sacrifice for poor
matching is loss of receiving range. The utter simplicity of using an insulated
cord to vary the physical length of the antenna element(s) for tuning is hard to
beat. It could be impractical on a setup where access to the antenna mount is difficult,
but my guess is most people can make good use of it...
 In this 1958 Popular Science magazine
article titled "Russian
Proposes Global TV," Soviet engineer V. Petrov proposed a global TV relay using
three geosynchronous satellites at 35,800 km altitude, launched 120° apart from
the equator at ~6,000 mph to match Earth's 24-hour rotation. Fixed over sites like
the USSR, China, and USA, they would relay signals - uplink on meter waves, downlink
on microwaves - via inter-satellite links, enabling worldwide broadcasts beyond
line-of-sight limits with directional antennas mitigating solar interference. Each
would require 10-kW antenna power, potentially reduced via pulsed transmission (note
digital waveforms in the drawing). This closely mirrored Arthur C. Clarke's 1945
Wireless World article "Extra-Terrestrial Relays," which...
 Frequency crowding has evidently been an
issue since the early days of radio according to this 1930 article in Radio-Craft
magazine. The situation was really bad in the earliest times when unfiltered spark
type transmitters were the norm. Those pioneers could be credited, I suppose, with
being the first users of wideband communications, but it was not because they chose
to do so. Here author Clyde Fitch discusses the debate over whether there really
were such things as sidebands from modulation and makes an argument for their existence
based on analysis of various types of modulation. In particular, he predicts the
coming popularity of single sideband receivers with crystal-filtered channels, and
the need for matching SSB transmitters with... wait for it... carrier and sideband
suppression...
 "A new transceiver developed by electrical
engineers at the University of California, Irvine boosts radio frequencies into
140-gigahertz territory, unlocking data speeds that rival those of physical
fiber-optic cables and laying the groundwork for a transition to 6G and FutureG
data transmission protocols. To create the transceiver, researchers in UC Irvine's
Samueli School of Engineering devised a unique architecture that blends digital
and analog processing. The result is a silicon chip system, comprising both a transmitter
and a receiver, that's capable of processing digital signals significantly faster..."
 Somehow, after being in the RF business
for four decades, I have to admit to not being familiar with the term
"acceptance angle" for antennas. That is after having read scores
of articles on antennas. Maybe I did and just don't remember - embarrassing. Acceptance
angle is mentioned and explained in this article during the description of rhombic
antenna characteristics versus dipoles and multi-element designs. Although the author
focuses on television installations, information provided on signal reflections,
shadowing, ghosting, multipath, etc., is applicable to radio as well...
 Electrolytic capacitors have long been the
components that provide the highest capacitance density factor, that is, they have
the highest capacitance value for a given volume of space occupied. Anyone familiar
with electrolytic capacitors is aware of the polarization indicated on the package
(a marking or unique physical feature), indicating that there is required direction
for hookup; in fact, a backwards connection can lead to an explosive failure. While
physical construction of electrolytic capacitors have evolved over the decades since
this article was published, the fundamental operation has not. It is interesting
to note the reference to capacitors as "condensers," a name still commonly used
with internal combustion engine ignition systems and with some AC motors that use
them at turn-on for providing a starting coil phase shift...
 This 1959 Popular Science magazine
reprint of a 1925 Radio News magazine article focused is on visionary physicist
Robert H. Goddard's proposed Moon Rocket as a means to test
whether radio waves can traverse interstellar space, potentially enabling communication
with other planets. Amid recent radio achievements, including mysterious signals
during Mars' approach and solar disturbances recorded on Earth, the piece challenges
Oliver Heaviside's theory that radio waves are confined by Earth's atmosphere. Goddard's
innovative rocket, propelled by successive explosive charges to escape gravity and
reach the Moon, would carry a compact radio transmitter in its nose cone, broadcasting
signals throughout its flight. Astronomers would track...
 This week's
crossword puzzle, as with all RF Cafe puzzles, uses only words
pertaining to engineering, science, mathematics, mechanics, chemistry, astronomy,
etc. You will never find a reference to some obscure geological feature or city,
or be asked to recall the name of some numbnut movie star or fashion designer. You
will, however, need to know the name of a famous RF filter design software author.
Enjoy...
 "Broadband achromatic wavefront control
plays a central role in next-generation photonic technologies, including full-color
imaging and multi-spectral sensing. A research team led by Professor Yijun Feng
and Professor Ke Chen at Nanjing University has now reported a significant advance
in this field in PhotoniX. The researchers introduced a hybrid-phase cooperative
dispersion-engineering approach that combines Aharonov-Anandan (AA) and Pancharatnam–Berry
(PB) geometric phases within a single-layer metasurface. This strategy enables
independent achromatic control of wavefronts for two different light spin states..."
 As with the article in this month's issue
of Radio-Craft magazine (December 1937), the reference to a 200th anniversary
is understated by 88 years for 2025.
Luigi Galvani was sort of the Benjamin Franklin of biology in
that just as Franklin demonstrated that lightning was a form of electricity, Galvani
showed that signals sent from the brains to the appendages of animals were electrical
in nature. In my high school days in the 1970s, we duplicated his experiment by
making deceased frogs' legs twitch when motivated by a D cell. Today, such an exercise
would likely be met with demonstrations by animal rights people (whose lives, BTW,
have probably in some way been improved as a result of previous such experiments).
But, I digress. Mr. Galvani's name is...
 Superheterodyne receivers were originally
the sole domain of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which owned the patents
and refused to license them until around 1930. Hugo Gernsback, a contemporary editor
of the era, provides a little insight into the superregenerative receiver circuits
superheterodyne was about to replace, and why it was an important improvement in
technology. Sidebar: The question often
arises regarding the difference between a "heterodyne" circuit and a "superheterodyne"
circuit. The most popular answer that "super" refers to the IF being located above
the range of human hearing, which peaks at about 15 kHz. Doing so assured that
any IF leakage into the audio circuits would not be discernable by a radio...
 Carl and Jerry stories are usually a good
mixture of teenage curiosity, adventure, and electronics technology, but this "Out
of the Depths" episode is a bit too far-fetched. The first ninety percent of
this 1957 Popular Electronics magazine tale fulfills expectations, with
the boys applying their shared interest in technology while attempting to learn
and apply the technique of luring elusive fish from their safe dwelling places and
onto the ends of their hooks. A car battery, DC-to-AC inverter, tape recorder, and
high-gain microphone are the basis for the scheme. Things were going well, and I
expected the normal hard-fought victory with big, fat bass in their creels - and
then something only slightly more believable than finding a crashed alien spaceship...
 RCA, the
Radio Corporation of America was not merely a manufacturer of
radio, television, and phonograph equipment for home entertainment. The company
also made vacuum tubes for all sots of electronic equipment, and produced a weekly
radio broadcast called "Magic Key" on the NBC Blue Network. Sticking to their communications
roots, RCA today markets televisions, microwave ovens, Android-based tablet computers,
DVD / Blu Ray drives, telephones, 2-way radios, radios, clocks, antennas, and many
other devices - with no tubes in sight, not even in their TV displays...
 "Scientists at the University of New Hampshire
are using artificial intelligence to dramatically speed up the search for
new magnetic materials. Their approach has produced a searchable database containing
67,573 magnetic materials, including 25 previously unknown compounds that retain
their magnetism at high temperatures, a key requirement for many real-world applications.
'By accelerating the discovery of sustainable magnetic materials, we can reduce
dependence on rare earth elements, lower the cost of electric vehicles and renewable
energy systems, and strengthen the U.S. manufacturing base,' said Suman Itani, lead
author of the study..."
 Breaking News!
Espresso
Engineering Workbook™ v3.2.2026 has just been released. This makes the 49th
worksheet added. It calculates magnitude, phase, and group delay for Butterworth
and Chebyshev lowpass, highpass, bandpass, and bandstop filters. Outside of the
kilobuck simulators, finding a calculator for phase and group delay is extremely
difficult - believe me, I've searched extensively for years. Espresso Engineering
Workbook™ can be downloaded free of charge. All you need is Excel™ v2007 or newer.
It is provided compliments of my advertisers. Contact me if you would like your
company added to the next release.
 Disneyland opened its gates in Anaheim,
California on July 17, 1955. It was billed as the most high-tech theme park in the
world, with a "wow" factor on par with the World's Fair extravaganzas. One of its
much-ballyhooed features was the "realistic" jungle safari tour with life-like animal
automatons and authentic 3-D jungle sounds. This article, published less than a
year after opening day, highlights some of the equipment and methods used by artists
and engineers to achieve the effects...
|
 • Revisiting
the
1996 Telecommunications Act
• China's
BeiDou Satellite (their GPS) Does Emergency Messaging
• How & When Will
Memory Chip Shortage End?
• At Age 25, Wikipedia
Refuses to Evolve
• Amazon Leo Asks FCC for
Satellite Launch Extension
• FCC Gives
Amazon OK for 4,500 More Satellites
 The
RF Cafe Homepage Archive
is a comprehensive collection of every item appearing daily on this website since
2008 - and many from earlier years. Many thousands of pages of unique content have
been added since then.
 Most of these matches of the devices and its
inventor are pretty easy for people who have been around electronics for any length
of time (well, not if the length of time is a day or two), but a couple just might
stump you. This
Electronics Inventors Quiz appeared in a 1963 edition of
Popular
Electronics magazine, so you won't be challenged with knowing the inventors of the LCD or
MEMS devices, but neither will you have to know who came up with the abacus or
the Archimedes screw (or who's buried in Grant's tomb)...
 Ask anyone who has ever asked me to fix
something electrical or electronic and they will tell you my motto on such things,
born of extensive experience, is that the vast majority of the problems are caused
by poor electrical contacts of one form or another. The culprit can be a dirty or
broken connector, a cold or broken solder joint, a dirty potentiometer (contact
between wiper and resistor), etc. I have repaired everything from ceiling lights,
to car starters, to kitchen appliances, to large screen TVs simply by finding and
repairing connections. When possible, I always do a final cleaning with isopropyl
alcohol and then spray with a silicon contact protector. This
Contact Shield product from Channel Master would be a good choice. I can honestly
say I cannot think of a single instance where the restored connection failed again.
Of course sometimes it is not that simple, but enough that my initial approach to
troubleshooting - unless a broken or burnt component is immediately apparent - is
to unplug and inspect connectors (then plug-unplug-plug to wipe contacts clean),
flip switches on-off a few times while applying various directional forces (left-right,
up-down, twisting), tugging on wires, etc. People's eyes light up in amazement when
a sophisticated piece of equipment starts working after doing so. Then, I me
 This
subscription renewal for Radio-Electronics magazine was tucked
inside one of the group of 1969 issues I bought on eBay. It's not a big deal,
but is always interesting to see how the companies communicated with customers
in the day. Note that the mailing address for Radio-Electronics is simply
Boulder, Colorado, with no street address given - all the mailmen must have
known where they were. The cost was $12 per year...
 Chapter 12 of the U.S. Navy's basic electronics
training course discusses
electromagnetism. It follows on the heels of the sections introducing
magnetism and electrical currents. The Navy (and the Air Force, I must add) is renowned
for its high quality training and for turning out graduates that perform highly
in both their service duties and in private industry after separation. It describes
the electromagnet as being like a natural or artificial magnet in its attractive
force, is tremendous and can hold tons of iron. Because this magnet is powered by
an electric current, the magnetism can be turned on and off with the flick of a
switch. Electrically-powered magnets are called electromagnets. Electromagnets come
in all sizes and shapes...
 You probably are aware that major retail
corporations like Sears and Montgomery Ward contracted with established appliance
manufacturers to create their own brands for sale in their mail order catalogs and
brick-and-mortar stores. Sears had their Kenmore line of kitchen (also Cold Spot)
and laundry products, Craftsman line of tools, and Silvertone line of radios. Wards
had the Signature line of appliances, Powr Kraft tools, and Airline radios. Both
companies are basically defunct at this point. I was always a big Sears customer,
and was sad to see them get scuttled by moron management. Montgomery Ward products
all seemed second rate compared to Sears. Montgomery Ward, founded in 1872 closed
its last stores in 2001, but unknown to most people is that they still have an Internet
presence as wards.com. Sears Roebuck & Co., founded in 1892, still has a few
stores open and is online at sears.com (and craftsman.com). Anyhoo, I ran across
this 1924
Montgomery Ward Radio catalog that is chock full...
 As with my hundreds of previous
science and engineering-themed crossword puzzles, this one for February 23,
2020, contains only clues and terms associated with engineering, science, physical,
astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, etc., which I have built up over nearly two decades.
Many new words and company names have been added that had not even been created
when I started in the year 2002. You will never find a word taxing your knowledge
of a numbnut soap opera star or the name of some obscure village in the Andes mountains.
You might, however, encounter the name of a movie star like Hedy Lamarr or a geographical
location like Tunguska, Russia, for reasons which, if you don't already know, might
surprise you.
 Halli(gan) and (hand)crafters,
a portmanteau of those two indicated words, was founded in Chicago in 1932 by William
J. Halligan. The company designed and manufactured radio equipment for hobby, commercial,
and military applications and quickly became very popular amongst their users. As
was customary for U.S. businesses, Hallicrafters ran a Christmas advertisement in
the January issue of magazines where they appeared, as with this 1941 issue of QST.
The January edition, as is common even now, is typically mailed in early December,
getting it in the hands of readers in time for Christmas...
 Each week, for the sake of all avid cruciverbalists
amongst us, I create a new
technology-themed crossword puzzle using only words from my custom-created
lexicon related to engineering, science, mathematics, chemistry, physics, astronomy,
etc. You will never find among the words names of politicians, mountain ranges,
exotic foods or plants, movie stars, or anything of the sort. You might, however,
see someone or something in the exclusion list who or that is directly related to
this puzzle's theme, such as Hedy Lamar or the Bikini Atoll, respectively. Enjoy...
 Narrow-band frequency modulation (NFM) was
a relatively new technology in 1947, having been advanced significantly during World
War II. Amateur radio operators were just getting their gear back on the air
after having been prohibited from transmitting for the duration of the war (see
"War Comes," January 1942 QST). Few were probably thinking about adopting
and exploiting new modulation techniques, but for those who were and recognized
FM as the path to the future of radio, QST published this fairly comprehensive
treatment of both frequency modulation (FM) and phase modulation (PM). Mathematically,
FM is the time derivative of PM. Both modulation schemes vary the carrier frequency
in some proportion to the baseband signal. Author Byron Goodman provides some insight
into the techniques...
 As with my hundreds of previous
engineering and science-themed crossword puzzles, this one for May 3, 2020,
contains only clues and terms associated with engineering, science, physical, astronomy,
mathematics, chemistry, etc., which I have built up over nearly two decades. Many
new words and company names have been added that had not even been created when
I started in the year 2002. You will never find a word taxing your knowledge of
a numbnut soap opera star or the name of some obscure village in the Andes mountains.
You might, however, encounter the name of a movie star like Hedy Lamarr or a geographical
location like Tunguska, Russia, for reasons which, if you don't already know, might
surprise you.
 Hmmmm, I'm not quite getting the comic on
page 59, unless it's referring to the remoteness of the "customer." In 1960 when
it appeared in Radio-Electronics magazine, some would have likely considered
it scandalous. The editor probably justified the theme the way National Geographic
did their jungle tribeswomen exposés (pun intended). I like the page 78 comic with
the unique typeface used to represent the guy's hurt foot. In 1960, such characters
would require hand-drawing or the special
Dial-A-Type typewrite ball sold to enable direct typing onto paper. On page
118, what kind of clip is that? (get it?). 1960 was also the era of wireless remote
control of everything, as implied in the page 128 comic. Enjoy.
 Here is another one of those ads you would
not likely see in a present day engineering magazine. Today, you'll routinely find
racier images in JC Penny and Target advertisements (although in the latter example
the girl might not be a real girl). Loral Electronics is a well-known defense systems
contractor founded in the late 1940s by William Lorenz
and Leon Alpert. Loral specialized in aerospace and avionics
(airborne) systems like radar, radios, satellite navigation and communications.
They also had a component distribution division which sold, among other items, the
Arcolytic capacitors represented in this 1968 Radio-Electronics magazine
promotion. Lockheed Martin bought Loral in 1996, the same year Loral was accused
of transferring missile stabilization technology to China, which was useful in their
Long March intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program.
 I have mentioned this before, but nearly
always the setting for John Frye's "Mac's Service Shop" technodrama stories coincide
with the time of year corresponding to the month in which it appeared (for the northern
hemisphere) - in this case the July 1952 issue of Radio & Television News
magazine. In addition to that, Barney's crack about Mac using his slide rule to
try calculating who the president would be is also time-appropriate since 1952,
being a Leap Year, was also an election year (Eisenhower beat Stevenson, BTW) ...but
I digress. Mac's actual preoccupation was with
open wire transmission lines. With the rise of UFH broadcasting on the horizon,
he predicted that such lines would become popular due to their lower signal attenuation
compared to standard 300 Ω plastic-insulated twin lead. Open line (aka ladder
line or window line) at 500 MHz exhibits about a quarter the loss when dry
and as much a twentieth the loss when wet (depending on the quality of the standard
300 Ω twin lead)...
 One of the Notable Tech Quotes which has
appeared on RF Cafe is, "The nice thing about standards is that you have so many
to choose from," by computer scientist Andrew Tanenbaum. In the middle of the last
century, a change in the fundamental understanding of current flow precipitated
what has become a very large opportunity for people to misunderstand descriptions
of
current direction caused by a difference in voltage potential (voltage) - depending
on the era a particular description was written. Beginning with Benjamin Franklin,
electron current flow was assumed to be from positive to negative, ostensibly but
incorrectly, because a positive thing must contain an excess of something (charge
carriers - electrons) and a negative thing must have a deficiency. Hence, current
flowed from an excess source to a deficient sink. We now know that negative things
contain more electrons (relatively) than a positive...
 Space exploration and exploitation has always
advanced quickly. Sputnik and Explorer were launched in 1957 and 1958, respectively.
They were the world's first artificial satellites, and had only one-way communications
from onboard scientific payloads to earth stations which picked up the signals (many
amateur radio operators received the data as well). In a little over half a decade,
multiple two-way communications satellites were in orbit, and instrumented probes
had already reached the moon, Venus, and Mars. Results of the International Geophysical
Year (IGY) effort are rightfully credited with setting everything in motion. This
article from a 1965 issue of Popular Electronics magazine reports on the state of
the art in satellite technology. Not mentioned is the concurrent rapid advances
being made in rockets, tracking stations, and orbital and space navigation capabilities
which were an integral part of the program...
 If you or someone you know is just starting
in the realm of radio and want a really nice pictorial presentation of the basics
of
radio wave propagation, then this one-page article from a 1935 edition of
Short Wave Craft is just what you need. Phormula phobia
(aka formula fobia) will not be an issue for anyone.
The fundamentals have not changed in the intervening 85 years, and this same sort
of analogy is still used in introductory physics classes today.
 The
Underwriter's Laboratory (UL) is an entity that seems to have been around forever.
A lot of people - maybe most people - assume that it is a government entity. In
fact, it is a non-profit organization sponsored by the National Board of Fire Underwriters.
Its roots are traceable back to the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. Concern over the
potential fire hazard of Edison's light bulbs was the impetus for the effort. Another
aspect of the UL that a lot of people don't know is that the UL label of approval
is no guarantee that the device works properly, only that is passes standards of
safety as it relates to fire hazards. This article in the August 1955 edition of
Popular Electronics magazine gives a brief history...
 Carl Anderson and Jerry Bishop in handcuffs?
Say it ain't so! Has the pair of good-natured, upstanding high-tech sleuths gone
to the Dark Side (George Lucas was 18 years old in 1962 when this was written)?
Read the tale entitled "Pure Research Rewarded" as told in this 1962 issue of
Popular Electronics magazine to see how the two figure into a plot to kill
a local judge, and why they decide to cannibalize a service station television set
for parts. What has come over Carl and Jerry? |
