The only high voltage coil I ever had was a gag book that was rigged to give you a terrific shock when you opened it. I bought it out of the back of a comic book, where you could buy all sorts of gag stuff.
I did pretty good with the book shocking people and fellow 6th grade students, but then I made the mistake of letting the teacher open it (seemed like a good idea at the time). She shrieked and threw the thing across the room. Needless to say, my book got confiscated. Title on the book had a subtitle something like "Its a real shocker!".
We had several crystal radio sets, with antenna strung all throught the attic.
And a telegraph key practice set, which I never mastered, but my brother did.
You could make all sorts of electrical gadgets using kits from Radio Shack, and they all had discrete components, so you could get a better feel for what was happening then the modern "all-in-one" microchip.
My wife has some binary number jokes. I will ask here what they are.
I was always a bit confused by binary and the other non-base 10 systems. Gosh, I had enough trouble with the base 10 system.
I do remember being subjected to assembly code in school, and how tedious that was to do the shift registers and overflows, etc. We had one of the newer computers in one lab, which was a PDP11, and it had 12" floppy disks. Very modern for its time, but it ran assembly code. It had controlled outputs, etc.
We also had several analog computers in one lab, now that is an interesting computer, but very simple, just resistors, capacitors, and inductors, with knob control of the values for each.
Electronics has always confused me to a great extent, so I guess that is why I became a power distribution engineer, to avoid electronics. They keep creeping in on me though, such as with the VFD's, etc.
I have a Fortran compiler, and I still love that language. It took us to the moon (Fortran).
Yes this thread is meandering like a stream through the forest, but I am towards the end of a big project, and don't have the time to work on engines, so just a quick blog during break times, to relax and do something other than work.
I hope to get back into the modeling/casting thing in a few weeks, but hey, this thread is pretty interesting too.
I think I understand a little about physics, and if I understand correctly, matter is just very dense energy. If you split an atom, you can release a great deal of that energy. I assume the energy gets condensed into matter in the black holes.
As far as magnetic fields, light is an electromagnetic field, with its electrical and magnetic fields at 90 degrees. Why a conductor passing through a magnetic field causes the electrons to move in the wire, I don't understand.
And magnets further confuse me because nothing is moving with them, and yet they can push very hard on objects, but without touching them. Go figure. I do know the poles line up in all the material of a magnet, but that really does not explain it either.
Pat J