affable-lurking

On on Dec. 16, 1947 - sixty years ago today - the world’s first transistor was constructed and tested at Bell Labs, New Jersey, USA. Those responsible for the device were William Shockley, the theorist and John Bardeen and Walter Brattain who actually constructed the first one.

What started life as a heap of precariously balanced parts…

…ended up kick-starting the microelectronics revolution.

Today’s equivalent to Bardeen and Brattain’s part is one of the myriad sub-millimeter sized black specks you’ll find on the PCB of just about any modern electronics. Yet even these dwarf their tiny sibblings on the silicon die of a CPU, where they are packed with more than 150 million to the square centimeter.

I’m in need of a high-voltage, low current DC power supply temporarily for an experiment in the lab, prices for these from the usual suppliers run into the hundreds of pounds. Given that all (all but the very best ones anyway) they consist of is a string of diodes and capacitors in a Cockcroft-Walton configuration, I decided to build one.

C-W generators are reasonably safe devices unlike their very similar cousins, the Marx generator. The voltage developed by the generator might be very high in both cases, but the C-W generator supplies very little current, whereas the Marx gen will deliver something more fatally akin to a lightning bolt. That’s not to say you can’t hurt or kill yourself with a C-W gen, just that you’ll have a bit of a harder time managing it. If you have an ioniser in your house, it will be very little more than a few stages of a CW gen and some resistors for further current limiting.

So, that’s the high-voltage, where does the coincidence come in? It happened that yesterday while flicking though my copy of the December CERN Courier, I spotted a feature on Cockcroft and Walton splitting the atom using equipment based around the generator bearing their name. I may going into the details of their achievement in another post, but for now a photo of them in their finery (and not just because I can then count this as an EDW post. Oh no…)

Ernest Walton, Ernest Rutherford and John Cockcroft.

The new job is going reasonably well, I’m not sure that I’m over-keen at being introduced to people as the solution to all their troubles, but I hope I can be useful.

Tomorrow I have to entertain, persuade and divert some industrial partner visitors. Progress on the project they are coming to see is pretty much non-existent and the person working on it is, rather conveniently, away from looking after her sick child…

Tomorrow I’ll probably quickly set up a laser and some optics to launch some light into the sensor to at least make it look plausible (it might even work…), but explain I can’t show any results yet because I don’t have the samples (this is true, I don’t even know what the samples are).

Hopefully a spot of hand waving and illusion will send them off thinking they’ve seen something great, after all we are supposed to know more about this side of the project than they are.

Of course if they send someone possessed of a clue, I’ll just explain the situation and pick their brains for some ideas.

I’ve often wondered just what my cats get up to when they shoot out of the house in the morning heading for parts local, but unknown.

I’ve pondered fitting them out with a camera to capture their day, but never done more then ponder it. A chap in America has taken the idea and made it work Projekte CatCam. The cat’s trip starts here.

Engineering I approve of.

Are you bored? Then why not make a Thermic Lance out of tin-foil and spaghetti?
Go on, you know you want to.