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email(at)jaredyates.com
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 Posted: Sat Jun 30, 2012 9:17 am Post subject: National Electronics Museum in Baltimore |
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I just spent a few hours going through the National Electronics Museum, very close to the BWI airport. The exhibits are primarily about military and government electronics like radar, communications, navigation systems, and countermeasures. Seeing such complex and antique systems really puts homebuilt wiring in perspective! We really have it easy. The exhibits also show what folks have been able to achieve in the last 100+ years, which is an alarming amount. I would highly recommend a visit for anyone who is feeling overwhelmed with light plane avionics and wiring. You'll leave with a proverbial kick in the pants of motivation after seeing how much our human predecessors were able to overcome, sometimes under extreme adversity. One exhibit left me thinking, "those guys built a terrain following radar for the B-52. Why haven't I finished my airplane again?"
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nuckolls.bob(at)aeroelect
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| Posted: Sat Jun 30, 2012 1:37 pm Post subject: National Electronics Museum in Baltimore |
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I would highly recommend a visit for anyone who is feeling
overwhelmed with light plane avionics and wiring. You'll leave with
a proverbial kick in the pants of motivation after seeing how much
our human predecessors were able to overcome, sometimes under extreme
adversity. One exhibit left me thinking, "those guys built a terrain
following radar for the B-52. Why haven't I finished my airplane again?"
Because you don't have a cast of thousands and a production
budget of $billions$. Yeah, all that stuff is pretty mind
bending. I spent too short a time in the Smithsonian Museum
of Science and Industry about 35 years ago. I remember marveling
at early examples of particle accelerators, cloud chambers,
and a SMALL chunk of the 50 ton, 18,000 vacuum tube ENIAC computer.
I remember thinking about how much of that stuff looked like
it was built in somebody's garage . . . indeed it was. You couldn't
pull a catalog off the shelf and order one for any amount of
money, nor could anyone tell you exactly how to build one.
You whipped out your hammer, saws, wrenches and soldering
irons and went at it . . . with stuff you got from the hardware
store.
The only computer I'd personally had contact with before the
Smithsonian was a cast-off device offered to Wichita University
when my yet to be friend and mentor was dean of engineering. He
needed to raise $5000 in a hurry to transport the carcass to Wichita,
built and air-conditioned space to house it and get it set
up. Budgets were set two years out and the present year's budget
didn't have any surplus. He called Olive Ann Beech and explained
his problem. Ms. Beech threw a party at her house the next weekend
and Monday morning, she walked into Ken Razak's office and
turned out her purse on his desk. Out fell the checks and cash
necessary to get the computer moved to Wichita.
I was a junior in H.S. that year . . . a friend of mine who
was a senior and math whiz was already taking college courses
at the university. He managed to get a time slot on the new
acquisition (I think it was like 3 a.m.) where he was allowed
to run his peg-board program on the computer. I think he had
to go back another time to finish the experiment after discovering
some bugs. I remember my physics teacher showing us two
pieces of paper on which Ralph had taught the computer to
type out 6 columns of numbers like the log tables
in our math books. On the left column were numbers 1 to 100.
The next five columns were the inverse, square, square
root, cube and cube root of the number in the first column.
Pretty heady stuff in 1960!
Speaking of the B52, I had to take a class in "Wirebooks
101" at Boeing to learn how to trace the electron pipes
around the airplane. No two airplanes were wired exactly
alike. Each airplane left he factory with a set of ON-BOARD
wire books. They were 8-1/2 x 11 inch sheets in 12 or 13
volumes about 6" thick. The organization of those things
was amazing. You could pick any wire, read the number
stamped on it, go to the book and find out everything you
needed to know about it even if it ran across multiple
pages and volumes in the set. That 100 plus pounds
of paper could now be fitted into a palm-top or simply wi-fi
connected to an Ipad.
Yes, creatures that walk around on two legs and consume
resources on the planet are demonstrably capable of some
amazing things . . . if they can just be convinced not
to get into lethal arguments! Hope to take my grandson
on a trip 'back east' . . . got a couple of weeks of things
to show him . . . not the least of which is Voyager hanging
in the lobby of the Air and Space unit. It's got two B&C
regulators in it.
Bob . . .
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