Moments of personal discovery

I was talking to a college student about his math problems in physics and since I was always good at analogies, and applications, I was able to help him out pretty quickly. During that time, the subject came up of a "pushy" professor that always seemed to have standards that were "too high" and expected results "beyond the text". It recalled to mind something that happened to me when I was in PHY101 (or was it 102?.. anyway..) when studying light, gases and electricity.

I had an extremely "pushy" prof for these classes, who always seemed to be looking for something beyond what we could provide. It did push us, and I thought that was the main reason.. to get us to learn as well as we could. But I found out, that wasn't the final reason.

I was in a lab that had us with an assemblage of boxes and gas tubes. The boxes were coils, magnets and spring. They were designed to capture electric energy, create a magnetic field, and then when the field was great enough attract the spring loaded magnets and close the circuit, releasing the energy stored into the gas tubes, and thus, lighting them. I'm sure many of you have seen this thing.. it looked like WWII surplus

So, they were very noisy, since they clattered at many times per second, and I was frustrated with the noise. I could get it to work nicely and properly, but it was just so loud I was getting irritated. Then I remembered something: Air has a breakdown voltage, doesn't it? I had seen a few sparks flying from sticky springs, slow to close the contact.

So, I got a pair of nylon pliers and played with the thing until I got it to work on spark gap *alone*. No clattering, no magnet needing to close noisily. I thought, "Well, the instructions were to make the thing run as smoothly as possible, so it must be ok" I then took to my math and worked out various distances and currents, etc, to make it work better. Once I had that worked out, I cut a number of plastic rods to prop open the damn thing at the proper distances for the various gases/tube sizes. I didn't need many.. just a few.

Said prof then came over to my bench saying "I dont hear any noise from over here, Mr. XXX.. everything alright?" I thought "Oh great.. he will get mad at me for doing it this way.. but screw it, I'll show him what I did."

"Everything is fine! Here look..." and I lit up a neon tube. He saw immediately what I was doing and *smiled* (that was rare). "Did you get it to work with all of them?" I showed him that yes, I did.

He chuckled, "Good. That's the first time in three years that a student in this class has figured that out. Show me your numbers.."

Needless to say, I got an "A" in that class. And "pushy" prof gave me a great recommendation later, after a few more, similar personal discoveries I made while in his labs.

It's nice to get a pat on the back when you do something cleaver.

Fortunately I've not been forced into such a position, but by nature I have always been curious like that. Making that one extra mental step seems to be what seperates the engineers from the techs.

Tim