Memoirs of a Tracy Kid
While I was growing up in Tracy, I was what you might call a science nerd. From a young age, I was always interested in science, especially electricity and radios.
I would anxiously wait for each Saturday morning TV episode featuring Mr. Wizard, an hour-long science class with zany experiments based on the scientific principle that was the subject of that morning’s show. For Christmas presents, my parents would diligently search for science kits from which I could build little electric motors or crystal radios.
As I grew older, my parents bought me a HeathKit Electronic Workshop which was a small board with all sorts of electronic components mounted on it, each with a little copper spring at the end of each lead. I could use wire to connect the various resistors, capacitors and other electronic components together according to the different diagrams included with the kit. As a result, I had a working AM radio, intercom, AM radio broadcast station and many other electronic gadgets.
I ran a wire from my bedroom to the fence along our back yard and over it to our neighbor’s house two doors away and used the intercom to talk to my best friend at the time, Jimmy Ware.
When I got to high school, I attended a science fair that was an annual spring project of the Tracy St. Mary’s Catholic School.
I was mesmerized by all the interesting science projects the students proudly presented and wondered at the time why the public schools didn’t have a science fair. While I was at the science fair I met a St. Mary’s student, Greg Von Bokern, who had made a radio-themed project that I found especially interesting. In the following years, Greg and I became good friends.
Although the Tracy Public schools never had a science fair, when I was in 10th grade, I joined the Science Club. Most of the larger school districts had science fairs at the local high school level and the science fair project winners at the local level went on to the regional science fair.
Since Tracy didn’t have high school science fairs, anyone who was a member of the Science Club and was interested in developing a science fair project was automatically allowed to present a project at the regional level.
My first science fair project when I was in 10th grade was to build a giant Tesla Coil from scratch, utilizing supplies I found at the Rignell Hardware store or the mail order company, Allied Electronics based in Chicago.
For many readers who might not be familiar with a Tesla Coil, it is a large electric transformer which raises the 120-volt standard household voltage in several stages until it can reach voltages exceeding 1 million volts at very high frequencies. If there was ever a mad scientist’s toy, this was definitely it! I built the main part of the transformer during a blizzard in February 1965 when school was closed. This was the secondary winding of the transformer which involved winding thousands of rounds of fine insulated wire around a 5” diameter plastic sewer pipe which was over 3 feet long.
For two days I sat in our living room recliner patiently rolling the plastic pipe in my lap while trying to keep the wire lined up with no space between each winding. When completed, my Tesla Coil was able to generate long sparks over a foot long and light up florescence bulbs that I held in my hand several feet away from the Tesla Coil. The bulbs lit without any wires attached to them.
This monster lightning generator created all sorts of havoc in our basement. You would immediately smell the ozone odor it created when you started down the basement stairwell. When I wasn’t blowing fuses or tripping our house electrical circuit breakers with my Tesla Coil, my younger brother and sister watched in amazement from a safe distance whenever I fired up the big "T" while our pet cat, Smoky, fled upstairs to a far corner of my bedroom.
My Tesla Coil project earned several awards including a Blue-Ribbon award at the Regional Science Fair in Mankato. (By way of background, the Tesla Coil was invented by Nikola Tesla in 1891.)
During my junior year, my science project was another electrical device that converted sound waves generated by a record player into invisible, infrared light waves.
These light waves could be transmitted optically several feet and then converted back into sound waves generated by a speaker hooked up to a small tube amplifier.
It was wireless communications using light waves instead of radio waves. Because they were light waves, if you blocked the light waves between the transmitter and receiver, the sound stopped.
The principle behind it is the same as that used today by telecommunications companies when they use fiberoptic cables to transmit invisible optical signals that are the backbone of today’s internet. This project also earned a special Blue-Ribbon award at the regional science fair and it allowed me to advance to the state-wide Science Fair held at Macalester College in St. Paul.
My senior year science fair project was the most interesting. By then I had become very interested in Ham Radio and had obtained my Amateur Radio license. For this science fair project, I built an ultra-high frequency radio transmitter utilizing vacuum tubes that produced 100 watts of radio frequency power in the same frequency spectrum used by mobile phones today. Then I built two separate chicken egg incubators and placed an antenna in one of the incubators which was shielded with aluminum foil to prevent the radio waves from reaching the other incubator (the control incubator).
Next, I went down to the local Tracy Poultry Hatchery and purchased 48 fertilized chicken eggs and placed 24 in each incubator. I operated the incubators for a little over three weeks while I transmitted radio waves 24 hours a day in the incubator with the foil shielded antenna at high power levels to see if any of those chickens would hatch and if they would be deformed in any way.
Now this might not seem like a lot of work, but my mom and I soon found that raising chickens in our basement is a lot more work than it might seem. First, since my homemade incubators using 100-watt lights bulbs with a thermostat for heat didn’t have any mechanical device to roll the eggs, someone had to set a timer and manually open the lid and roll each egg every four hours. I religiously set an alarm each night to wake up in the middle of the night to roll the eggs.
When I was in school during the week, my mom took over the job of "mother hen." One of those school days, one of the thermostats stuck in the "on" position and my mom had to come to school and get me out of class to go home and fix the thermostat so the eggs didn’t become hard boiled!
After about 28 days, the chickens started to hatch and we needed to take the little chicks out of the incubator and let them run around the corner of the basement which we had fenced off. We had to first mark them with a magic marker to keep track of which chicks had suffered the trauma of high frequency radio waves at close range while the embryo was developing in the egg. Of the 48 eggs, 45 hatched and low and behold, all the chicks appeared normal and didn’t seem to have been affected at all by the radio waves. It was not the type of result that wins awards at science fairs.
We kept the chicks in the basement for a few weeks until they got big and created way too much chicken poop for our noses to stomach. My nearby uncle happily took over raising the chickens on his free-range farm. This was the first and last time I ever attempted raising chickens. With the current egg shortage due to the bird flu, I might reconsider raising chickens again, only this time in our back yard (I think that my wife might veto that idea).
While I never won any awards at the State Science Fair, my good friend, Greg Von Bokern, did much better than I and won the top award at the state level. He went on to compete at the international science fairs in Detroit and Fort Worth during his junior and senior years. Greg was probably the most successful science fair participant ever to graduate from the Tracy School system. Most of his work involved research on lightening and tracking severe thunder storms using radio receivers with directional capability.
He was able to track severe thunder storms, which were often accompanied by tornadoes, utilizing the radio equipment he built. After graduating from high school, Greg joined me at Iowa State University where we both earned degrees in Electrical Engineering.
Next month: Jr. & Sr. Prom
