Ponderosa Knack! Bonanza Astronomy!

I loved this episode, and I think most of you guys will too. I was alerted to it by an article by famed comet hunter David Levy. Wow! I never would have thought that in a 1962 episode of the cowboy show Bonanza, we would find amateur astronomy and experiments to determine the speed of sound and the speed of light. Amazing. There is no radio in this so it is not really The Knack, but young Mr. Michelson (yes, the Nobel Prize winner) does set up a shack-like workshop and he is trying to measure c. So this is all very Knack-like. There is also a very nice moral to this story, a moral that is related to our notion of an International Brotherhood of Electrical Wizards.
Three cheers for Ben Cartwright!

You can find the episode here. It runs for 48 minutes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzPRGV0HbMk

Our book: "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics"http://soldersmoke.com/book.htmOur coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmokeOur Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20

Oscillating Light Bulbs

Oh man, this is some fascinating stuff: old light bulbs found to be oscillating at VHF! Wayne, VA7AT, stumbled upon this phenomenon at age 13 while engaged in Knack activities. Now Joe Sousa explains the physics behind the emissions that caused Wayne's light bulb to interfere with the broadcast of baseball games. How long until AA1TJ has one of these bulbs on the air, making contacts? There is much in this that would appeal to Michael: light bulbs, weird physics, translations from German... You gotta love the BNC connector plugged directly into the bulb. Check it out the radio museum article here.

Hi Bill

There was a question posted on Antennex E-mail discussion group talking about how a vacuum type light bulb will oscillate and radiate RF at about 100MHZ. This answered the question I had since I was a boy of 13 experimenting with a light bulb in series with an electrolysis bath (aluminum electrodes with table salt dissolved in water) and 117vac. The bulb dimmed with the electrodes apart and at a certain position the radio I had on blanked out with fissing sound. I had to shut down the experiment quickly because the neighbors were listening on their favorite baseball game and cussed loudly .

I now know what happened on that fateful day. Here is a site I found about the oscillating light bulb http://www.radiomuseum.org/forum/rustika_lightbulb_fm_measurements.html

Wayne VA7AT

Our book: "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics"http://soldersmoke.com/book.htmOur coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmokeOur Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20