3 ms·

I'd buy a re-print of these. These would go great in my college's ham shack. This is the kind of stuff that I imagine Marconi doing in his lab while smoking a c

I'd buy a re-print of these. These would go great in my college's ham shack. This is the kind of stuff that I imagine Marconi doing in his lab while smoking a cigarette and talking about airplanes being invented or something. It's got some great projects for anyone who's looking to get into radio. Check out page 100 for an example of one of those crazy projects. It looks like it's a 50-foot areal hooked up to a 4-tap isolation transformer being AC coupled to headphones. It's using a basic single diode detection circut (you can check EEVBLog's latest video to see them being used in the spy bug detector). Nifty stuff and remindes me of fox hole sets

analog31 10y ago
I think that in some sense, the old radio magazine project articles are the original open-source hardware. There was certainly a tradition of developing something useful, and then sharing it with the world.
- Animats 10y ago
  Not quite. Look at all those ads in the back for patents, patent attorneys, and related services. Back then, the big thing was to be an inventor with patents. Tesla, Edison, Bell, DeForest, etc. all had strong patent protection.
  - gravypod 10y ago
    How many people violated Tesla's patents? It's all in the character of the person not in whats written on paper. Tesla didn't care what you did with his stuff so long as you weren't an outright dick and you were attempting to learn something. Google the quote "Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents." for more back story.
  - analog31 10y ago
    Both coexisted. There was a community actively sharing knowledge, and a bunch of people trying to pursue patents. And a patent itself was intended to be a compromise between openness and monopoly.
- a_thro_away 10y ago
  At the least, they were very much first principle kind of thing, often a tour de force of electromagnetic and mechanical nightmares. Mainframe line printers or upright vacuum columned 9 track tape drives come to mind and cause shudders. I might recommend to search out the early chemistry books, as well. They explain the early chemistry and processes of so many things we take for granted, in a lost art kind of way. I love reading these kind of books.
  - philipkglass 10y ago
    I love James Sheridan Muspratt's Chemistry, theoretical, practical, and analytical, as applied and relating to the arts and manufactures from 1860. Volume 1: https://archive.org/details/chemistrytheoret01muspuoft https://archive.org/details/chemistrytheoret01muspuoft Volume 2: https://archive.org/details/ldpd_10922488_002 https://archive.org/details/ldpd_10922488_002 Most of the theory is nonsense by modern standards. But it's amazing to see how sophisticated the chemical process industries were already in the mid 19th century. And it's self contained: the manufacturing processes start from plant matter, things you can dig out of the earth, or other materials whose manufacture is described in the same book. The difference between this and a modern chemistry or chemical engineering textbook is, for a rough analogy, the difference between exploring how computers work on an Apple II vs. on a powerful modern laptop with all the Debian packages installed. The modern environment is broader and more powerful, but the older one has the benefit of making all the pieces visible at once and down to a low level. (Well, it's a benefit for the curious anyway. I won't claim that experience with old 8 bit computers makes for measurably better developers, or that reading dusty historical tomes makes for more capable chemists or ChemEs.) Another thing that I enjoy about old chemistry books is the engagement of all the senses. Chemists observed and wrote about color, crystal texture, scent, the sounds procedures made, and even taste. Bad for life expectancy, great for reading. NMR spectra, though far less ambiguous and far safer for identifying substances, just aren't as much fun to read. The procedures that are described may be horrendously unsafe but they also reliably include enough details to reproduce. I hate the abbreviated style that you see in some modern articles where the authors are thrifty with detail in the experimental section. These old works were written to inform other people of useful and/or striking observations about nature, not to grind for XP on the track to tenure, and it shows.

analog31 10y ago

I think that in some sense, the old radio magazine project articles are the original open-source hardware. There was certainly a tradition of developing something useful, and then sharing it with the world.

Animats 10y ago
Not quite. Look at all those ads in the back for patents, patent attorneys, and related services. Back then, the big thing was to be an inventor with patents. Tesla, Edison, Bell, DeForest, etc. all had strong patent protection.
- gravypod 10y ago
  How many people violated Tesla's patents? It's all in the character of the person not in whats written on paper. Tesla didn't care what you did with his stuff so long as you weren't an outright dick and you were attempting to learn something. Google the quote "Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents." for more back story.
- analog31 10y ago
  Both coexisted. There was a community actively sharing knowledge, and a bunch of people trying to pursue patents. And a patent itself was intended to be a compromise between openness and monopoly.
a_thro_away 10y ago
At the least, they were very much first principle kind of thing, often a tour de force of electromagnetic and mechanical nightmares. Mainframe line printers or upright vacuum columned 9 track tape drives come to mind and cause shudders. I might recommend to search out the early chemistry books, as well. They explain the early chemistry and processes of so many things we take for granted, in a lost art kind of way. I love reading these kind of books.
- philipkglass 10y ago
  I love James Sheridan Muspratt's Chemistry, theoretical, practical, and analytical, as applied and relating to the arts and manufactures from 1860. Volume 1: https://archive.org/details/chemistrytheoret01muspuoft https://archive.org/details/chemistrytheoret01muspuoft Volume 2: https://archive.org/details/ldpd_10922488_002 https://archive.org/details/ldpd_10922488_002 Most of the theory is nonsense by modern standards. But it's amazing to see how sophisticated the chemical process industries were already in the mid 19th century. And it's self contained: the manufacturing processes start from plant matter, things you can dig out of the earth, or other materials whose manufacture is described in the same book. The difference between this and a modern chemistry or chemical engineering textbook is, for a rough analogy, the difference between exploring how computers work on an Apple II vs. on a powerful modern laptop with all the Debian packages installed. The modern environment is broader and more powerful, but the older one has the benefit of making all the pieces visible at once and down to a low level. (Well, it's a benefit for the curious anyway. I won't claim that experience with old 8 bit computers makes for measurably better developers, or that reading dusty historical tomes makes for more capable chemists or ChemEs.) Another thing that I enjoy about old chemistry books is the engagement of all the senses. Chemists observed and wrote about color, crystal texture, scent, the sounds procedures made, and even taste. Bad for life expectancy, great for reading. NMR spectra, though far less ambiguous and far safer for identifying substances, just aren't as much fun to read. The procedures that are described may be horrendously unsafe but they also reliably include enough details to reproduce. I hate the abbreviated style that you see in some modern articles where the authors are thrifty with detail in the experimental section. These old works were written to inform other people of useful and/or striking observations about nature, not to grind for XP on the track to tenure, and it shows.