McCollum drummed home electronic theory. Stories and set speeches from the twenty years he had spent in the navy, before he retired in pique at a rule requiring infrequent pilots to fly with a backup, spilled out with such regularity that some students took to giving the old favorites code numbers. McCollum would fidget with his spectacles, placing them on his nose, removing them and tucking them into his shirt pocket behind the pens in the streaked plastic pouch. He started with theory and followed up with applications. The students were paraded through Ohm’s law, Watt’s law, basic circuitry, magnetism, and inductance. They found that if they paid attention the lessons stuck and that their teacher planted seeds that kept sprouting. They solved elementary equations, linked resistors in series and parallel, and watched capacitors charge up. They built power supplies and amplifiers and learned how to manipulate alternating and direct currents.
McCollum was also the quality-assurance center. When students finished building radios, he disappeared into his stock-room, inserted some faulty parts and urged them to troubleshoot with their minds rather than their eyes. “You have got to be able to think it through,” he repeated. Keen students brought the devices they built in their bedrooms and garages for McCollum to scrutinize. He would jab loose parts with a screwdriver and wiggle the solder joints much like a rough dentist. On one occasion he criticized a knob on a power supply that Bill Fernandez had built because it behaved in the opposite manner to most knobs. Fernandez later said, “It was the first time I started to think about standards and human design.”
To reveal the power of electricity McCollum became a showman. He chilled his students with tales of acid burning the faces of people who carelessly jump-started automobile engines. With a flourish he produced props from a locked desk drawer and demonstrated well-tried tricks. He indulged in the mundane and would rub a balloon against his sweater and hang it from the underside of the television. Or he would dim the lights and throw the switch on a Tesla coil that generated high-frequency currents. The class would be left watching one hundred thousand volts leap from the end of the coil and illuminate a fluorescent tube held close by. And on other days the students in Classroom F-3 would see flames crackling up the rods of a Jacob’s ladder. McCollum made his mission plain. “I try to dispel the mystery of electrons. You cannot see them, but you can see the effect of them.”
Electronics was not, however, a purely intellectual quest. It was also a practical matter that with very little skill produced all manner of shrieks, sirens, ticks, and other noises calculated to amuse, irritate, and terrify. The same parts that built sturdy voltmeters and ohmeters could be turned to far more diverting purposes. From an early age Stephen Wozniak had a penchant for practical jokes and he usually managed to add a twist of his own. Throwing eggs in the dark at passing cars didn’t strike him as either entertaining or ingenious. But painting an egg black, attaching it to string hooked to lampposts on either side of the road, and suspending it at a height calculated to smack a radiator grill was more his style. Electronics opened up a new realm for pranks.
For instance, during his senior year at Homestead High School Wozniak salvaged some cylinders from an old battery that looked deceptively like sticks of dynamite. He fastened an oscillator to the cylinders and placed the combination in a friend’s locker with some telltale wires trailing from the door. Before long the tick-tick-tick of the oscillator attracted attention and not much later the school principal, Warren Bryld, was risking his life as he clutched the device and dashed for the empty air of the football field. “I just pulled the wires out and phoned the police. I was promptly chewed out for being a jackass.”
McCollum was also the quality-assurance center. When students finished building radios, he disappeared into his stock-room, inserted some faulty parts and urged them to troubleshoot with their minds rather than their eyes. “You have got to be able to think it through,” he repeated. Keen students brought the devices they built in their bedrooms and garages for McCollum to scrutinize. He would jab loose parts with a screwdriver and wiggle the solder joints much like a rough dentist. On one occasion he criticized a knob on a power supply that Bill Fernandez had built because it behaved in the opposite manner to most knobs. Fernandez later said, “It was the first time I started to think about standards and human design.”
To reveal the power of electricity McCollum became a showman. He chilled his students with tales of acid burning the faces of people who carelessly jump-started automobile engines. With a flourish he produced props from a locked desk drawer and demonstrated well-tried tricks. He indulged in the mundane and would rub a balloon against his sweater and hang it from the underside of the television. Or he would dim the lights and throw the switch on a Tesla coil that generated high-frequency currents. The class would be left watching one hundred thousand volts leap from the end of the coil and illuminate a fluorescent tube held close by. And on other days the students in Classroom F-3 would see flames crackling up the rods of a Jacob’s ladder. McCollum made his mission plain. “I try to dispel the mystery of electrons. You cannot see them, but you can see the effect of them.”
Electronics was not, however, a purely intellectual quest. It was also a practical matter that with very little skill produced all manner of shrieks, sirens, ticks, and other noises calculated to amuse, irritate, and terrify. The same parts that built sturdy voltmeters and ohmeters could be turned to far more diverting purposes. From an early age Stephen Wozniak had a penchant for practical jokes and he usually managed to add a twist of his own. Throwing eggs in the dark at passing cars didn’t strike him as either entertaining or ingenious. But painting an egg black, attaching it to string hooked to lampposts on either side of the road, and suspending it at a height calculated to smack a radiator grill was more his style. Electronics opened up a new realm for pranks.
For instance, during his senior year at Homestead High School Wozniak salvaged some cylinders from an old battery that looked deceptively like sticks of dynamite. He fastened an oscillator to the cylinders and placed the combination in a friend’s locker with some telltale wires trailing from the door. Before long the tick-tick-tick of the oscillator attracted attention and not much later the school principal, Warren Bryld, was risking his life as he clutched the device and dashed for the empty air of the football field. “I just pulled the wires out and phoned the police. I was promptly chewed out for being a jackass.”
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