976: The two new . . .
Leaving Small’s Hotel, Chapter 33 continues
THE TWO NEW GUESTS were a couple. They took the smallest of the cottages, and for my reading of episode thirty-three of Dead Air, “101 Fascinating Electronics Projects,” they sat right up front, displacing Manuel Pedrera. She was a small blond woman, about my age, whom I will call Effie. There were silver threads among the gold of her hair, but the impression still was of gold, and if it was plated it was a good job, subtly done. Her boyfriend, if it is right to call a man my age a boyfriend, was the person whom I have called in Dead Air, and throughout my memoirs, Matthew Barber.
I HAVE BEEN CHASING MONEY ever since I was a kid, and I still am, trying to squeeze a living out of an old hotel and fifty years of reminiscences. In my fondest dreams of the future I imagine myself doing only what is priceless or worthless, but for now, here I am, doing what I do, doing what I can.
The flying-saucer detectors on which I once hung hopes of making big money (and which I also allowed people to believe would alert them to incoming warheads from ICBMs) used a compass needle to detect disturbances in the earth’s magnetic field caused by the saucers’ mysterious drive mechanism — or somehow or other caused by a warhead, in a manner that I didn’t even bother trying to understand, since I had no real conviction that the detector was worth a tinker’s damn when it came to detecting warheads. The needle acted as both sensor and switch, swinging within a circle of wire to complete a circuit that lit a warning lamp if a saucer came within range. One of my customers suggested that the detector should have an audible alarm, and my grandfather — an expert in the construction of gadgets of the saucer-detector type — informed me that to include a bell I would have to include a relay, which I could buy at an electrical-gadget supply house called Two Regular Joes. However, I was reluctant to go to the shop and buy a relay, because I knew that if I went there I would have to stand in front of a clerk and display my complete ignorance of what a relay was and how it worked. (There was also another reason. I feared that the clerk would try to take control of my project. He would explain to me what a relay was and how to hook it up to my detector, and end up redesigning my saucer detector for me on the flimsy grounds that he knew what he was doing. This fear of losing control of a project may be the reason for a famous characteristic of men: when traveling, we will not ask directions. We prefer to blunder along until we find our way on our own, if we ever do. Setting aside for the moment the plausible likelihood that our craving for adventure and novelty makes us prefer not knowing where we’re going, let me suggest that we do not want to ask directions because we do not want to surrender the leadership of the journey to someone else, and certainly not to a stranger, some hayseed leaning against a rail fence, scratching his balls and chewing on a stem of grass, whose only qualification is that he knows how to get from here to there. By refusing to ask directions, we are saying, in effect, “This is my trip, thank you, and I’m going my way, even if I’m lost.”) Fortunately, the Two Regular Joes published a catalog with a picture and description of every nifty gadget they sold. There wasn’t much useful information in the descriptions of the relays, but I found a kit that could produce 101 fascinating electronics projects, with a photograph of the kit that showed all the parts spread out as if they had exploded from the box. Among them was a relay, so I ordered the kit right away — to get the relay, of course, but also because one of the 101 projects was an electric eye, something I had long thought that I probably needed.
When the kit arrived, I discovered to my surprise and delight that the electric eye was one of the projects that used the relay, so that was the first one I made. It worked. I didn’t understand quite how it worked, but it worked. A photocell detected light (somehow or other), and bafflingly complex circuitry sent the news (somehow or other) to an electromagnet in the relay, which pulled the metal armatures of a switch within the relay to complete a circuit that would activate anything I plugged into the electrical socket wired to it. If I plugged a doorbell transformer into the socket and wired the transformer directly to a doorbell (that is, without another intervening switch, such as a doorbell button) the doorbell would ring when light was detected, and that was exactly what I needed, whether I understood how it worked or not. I added one of my basic saucer detectors at the front end of the process, and the Magnetomic Electronic Five-Stage Distant Early Warning Saucer-and-Warhead Detector was born. [At this point, I displayed the diagram that follows.]
Here is a pictorial diagram of the stages in the process. The flying saucer’s drive mechanism emitted electromagnetic radiation (magnetism), which switched the detector on and lit its lamp, which emitted electromagnetic radiation (light), which switched the electric eye on, activating a circuit that made the electromagnet close the relay, which sent power to the doorbell, which rang.
A schematic diagram of the stages in the process of detecting a saucer and raising the alarm, as I understood it, would have looked like this [I displayed the diagram below], with the black boxes representing stages in the process where I understood what happened but not how it happened.
I could see that this was not the most efficient way of achieving the desired result, but it was one way, and it was a way with a bonus: the resulting saucer detector was complicated, and it looked complicated, since it obviously had many more parts — make that components, or, better yet, component parts — than the basic model, including one entire 101 Fascinating Electronics Projects kit, and since I sold my detectors for twice the price of the component parts, I could sell this one for big bucks.
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