Fifty years ago, this young woman was doing something one wouldn’t have dared doing in the first decades of television–she was watching it in the pool. In the 1950s or 60s, this would have been a highly reckless thing to do, since the high voltages involved could have lethal consequences if they came into contact […]
I don’t remember if I saw this particular magazine, the November 1970 issue of Popular Mechanics, but I did see magazines like it, and I was intrigued. I had absolutely no interest in sports, but I was interested in pulling in distant TV stations. We had it pretty good for television signals in Minneapolis-St. Paul. […]
If you wanted to become a ham sixty years ago, the September 1970 issue of Electronics Illustrated had everything you needed to get started. It contained a 16-page special section with a number of articles by prolific author Len Buckwalter, K1ODH. The section began with an introduction noting that barely a week went by when amateur […]
I suspect many of our readers have independently invented the idea shown here for an easy way to cook a hot dog. You simply run 120 volts through the hot dog, and the hot dog serves as a resistor and cooks itself. This incarnation of the idea was designed by prolific electronics writer Len Buckwalter […]
The students shown here are mastering the Morse Code by adhering to some hints contained in the July 1959 issue of Electronics Illustrated. The article, penned by prolific writer Len Buckwalter, W2GKI, reviewed some of the records and tapes that were currently available. Most of them were on 33 RPM records, but one set was […]
Fifty years ago, the vacuum tube was still king, although its days were coming to an end. The September 1964 issue of Electronics Illustrated contained several construction projects, most of which relied on tubes. The Micron Electron Tube Company advertised a few dozen common tubes for 37 cents each. Other tubes were available at reasonable prices. […]