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I spent many happy hours reading _The Amateur Scientist_ in my Dad's pile of SciAms. I was never brave enough (or had enough pocket money) to build much, especi
by kabdib 14y ago
I spent many happy hours reading _The Amateur Scientist_ in my Dad's pile of SciAms. I was never brave enough (or had enough pocket money) to build much, especially the high voltage gizmos that required, as a rule, a "Model T spark transformer." That was just terrifying.
I built a Hilsch vortex tube out of plexiglass, some washers and some extra pipe. Mostly it just whistled obnoxiously; I needed a better source of compressed air than my bicycle pump and a small reservoir could provide.
I also built a spectrometer, with a transmission grating I got from my science teacher. That was nifty.
I miss this stuff. We are a poorer nation for losing it. "Make" magazine might fill in for the gizmo aspect of things, but not so much the science.
Pardon me, I have to chase the kids off my lawn. :-)
- jlgreco 14y agoA neat trick these days is to make spectrometer with a diffraction grating made by removing the backing foil of a CD-R so only the transparent plastic remains (I did it a few years ago so it may have been one of the other CD types. Basically if it looks rainbowy afterwords you should be good to go ;)).
- raverbashing 14y agoWell, you can use the CD with the aluminium as a reflection grating
- jlgreco 14y agoGood point. I used it as a diffraction grating in mine since that allowed me to construct the rest of it like I remembered them from highschool. So long as you can spit the light though there are a lot of options.
- Tichy 14y agoWait, "The Amateur Scientist"? When did that run? I was very inspired by the mathematical recreations column of SciAms as a kid. Who knows what I would have become had I also found an Amateur Scientist column :-/ Do they have any collections of that by chance? There was one for the mathematical recreations (or computational recreations, not sure anymore).
- Tichy 14y agoAh, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amateur_Scientist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amateur_Scientist - it run from 1928 till 2001, there is a book from 1960 and CD-ROMs with the articled from 1928 to 1999 (amazon.de shows only one used copy for 2200€...). 1999-2001 might be available online.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoThe US version of Amazon has the CD for $149. I got a free copy when I resubscribed at some point.