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Today, we try to make a radio. The University of Houston's College of Engineering provides this series about the makers that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity produced them. How I grooved on stories and daydreams when I was 9 years of ages! And radio offered them. Go Here For the Details gave us the words, our minds drew the photos, which was a powerful combination.
However listening constantly ended prematurely. You were always called away-- to school, to supper, to tasks, and to bed. There was a way around the problem, however it wasn't easy. You could construct your own crystal set. That was an easy primitive radio whose heart was a polycrystalline swelling of galena, embeded in lead.
You pecked away at its surface with a great wire probe called a feline's- hair. Sooner or later you hit simply the right facet of the crystal-- one that reacted to the station you 'd set on a home-made coil. The signal was weak. There was no amplifier. You listened to it with earphones.
You 'd be able to listen to music, or I Love a Secret, and no one would know. Mechanics Illustrated or any of a hundred how-to-do-it books all discussed, in formidable information, how to make a crystal set from hardware-store parts. But you were nine years old, and something constantly failed-- a loose wire, a terribly wound coil.
In the end you were left reading comic books with a flashlight. The radio permeated American life with remarkable speed after its creation at the end of the 19th century. Here's an old Kid Scout handbook, published simply a few years later on-- in 1910. It tells you how to earn a benefit badge in Radio.
You also needed to construct your own set, using a tube-- not a crystal. Then you needed to select up a signal 25 miles from a transmitter. Naturally, all that was for 14-year-olds. But you were only 9, and making a radio was far much easier to dream about than to do.
Of course, that want actually became a reality. Today you can let Dvorak and Britten clean you into sleep. However I still wish I could have made one of those temperamental crystals sing me to sleep. I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the method innovative minds work.