Such a beautiful article. Ramakrishnan VU2JXN sent it to me. It reminded me of how puzzeled we were when we found "Schenectady" on old shortwave receiver dials, amidst truly exotic locations. Rangoon! Peking! Cape Town! Schenectady? Obviously this was due to General Electric's location in that New York State city. But reading this article, I am thinking that the presence of Charles Proteus Steinmetz had something to do with it. His informal title (The Wizard of Schenectady) confirmed that we have been right in awarding similar titles to impressive homebrewers.
Here is the Smithsonian article that Ramakrishnan sent.
And here is a link to a PBS video on Steinmetz:
https://www.pbs.org/video/wmht-specials-divine-discontent-charles-proteus-steinmetz/
Here is a SolderSmoke blog post about "Radio Schenectady":
https://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/2020/07/radio-schenectady.html
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A giant amongst giants. Check out the group photo:
ReplyDeletehttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Albert_Einstein_with_other_engineers_and_scientists_at_Marconi_RCA_radio_station_1921.jpg
Note: Some identities may be uncertain.
Those identities are known, see my blog post:
Deletehttps://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/06/famous-people-meeting-or-not-plus-ultra.html
It would have been cool if Tesla had been there, de Forest not so much :)
Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
Rumor has it that a certain Californian homebrewer who is well-known to us is in fact a member of Plus Ultra! 73 Bill
DeleteWell he can get to Disneyland fairly fast if summoned !
DeleteChuck, WB9KZY,
ReplyDeleteThe "uncertainities" are in the text below the photo, but I agree with your assessment as to who's who.
Quite a group photo! I would have preferred to see E.H. Armstrong in the photo, as so much of his circuitry inside that building made radio possible.
I was looking at an Alfred Morgan radio book from 1920 where he dedicated the book to Tesla. However in a 1940 book on radio Alfred Morgan doesn't mention Tesla at all - Armstrong is mentioned several times.
DeleteThe 20's thru the 40's were productive times for the Major. My mentor (now SK) was amongst many other roles, had Armstrong as a mentor at W2XMN, Alpine. He related many stories about "the Old Man". Armstrong had a great team under him.
ReplyDeleteIt looks like Steinmetz wore a pince-nez. That's a known mark of a genius.
ReplyDeleteEdison was a tinkerer compared to Steinmetz
ReplyDeleteSteinmetz's successor Vladimir Karapetoff was also a pretty fascinating person. He wrote an entire series of articles showing that special relativity was nothing more than hyperbolic trignometry using time as an extra dimension!
ReplyDelete