Contemplating the series of accidetal events that nudged my life along its course, the earliest I can remember is this.
My grandparets had a set of encyclopaedias. I think they must have been Canadian since the pictures I can recall (I was too young to read) were of the Calgary Stampede, a 'modern' streamlined steam locomotive powering through the Canadian Rockies, and so forth.
Despite the lavish colour plates, the picture I really loved, and came back to time and time again, was not unlike this:
I knew it was just a radio, my gran told me so, but it was a view of a radio that I'd never seen or imagined. Maybe it was my first experience of non-representational art. It made me feel that life held deep mysteries that were just not apparent on the surface, even in something as commonplace as a radio.
If my attention had been caught by an equally mysterious page of, say, hieroglyphs, maybe my life would have taken an entirely different course.
I can't re-capture the romance now, I know too much. Knowledge drives out mystery and wonder. But I'm intrigued to know how adults would feel, seeing something like this for possibly the first time.
Lest you think it's something that could only be of interest to grubby oiks in boiler suits who wash their hands with Swarfega, I'll let on that the circuit above was designed by Sir Douglas Hall, 14th baronet, last Governor of Somaliland, who would have been as likely to wear a tutu as a boiler suit. I mean he'd be equally unlikely to wear either, but I know nothing of his private life...
I've deliberately left it looking a little grubby and skewed, because the beauty isn't in the lines and shapes, it's entirely in the mind. Does the 'picture' say anything to you?
chuck | July 11, 2009 - 11:45
It suggests that life's mysteries can be explained and reduced to formulae. But only in scientific terms. The mysteries remain. How's that?
FTSE100 | July 11, 2009 - 11:52
There's no right answer, Mr. chuck, just whatever you feel! :)
Ewan | July 11, 2009 - 13:47
I guess it means that seeing this circuit diagram was your 2001 moment...
And we all know how that ended, Footsie...
'Daisy,Daisy...'
poetjude | July 11, 2009 - 15:32
One of my earliest memories .. I was two or possibly just turned three and sitting on Portsmouth beach staring at awe at a fish (I guess it must have been a weever) in a bucket. I just remember the beatiful green pattern on its back before my mother went ape because it was poisonous. That was common all through my early life ... my father (the amateur naturalist) bringing in hedgehogs to show us and my mother going mad because of the fleas in the house. I will never forget crouching in the heather waiting for the grass snakes and lizards coming out to bask in the sun, or waiting at dusk in a patch of common where we knew a barn owl hunted. Or one summer I brought in a bowl of frogspawn and watching the black dot elongate day by day and then the tadpoles break free and then watching their gradual transformation into frogs.
I studied biology and inevitably ended up specialising in zoology and parasitology.
I'm afraid your picture reminds me too much of A level physics (which I struggled with 16 years ago) to evoke anything in me. Though I often have what I can only describe as near religious experiences at nuclear power stations. I think it is because they are always set in half beautiful places on the coast but it is as you say, an imaginative experience. I hear the turbines and I think about nuclear fission and the infinitesimal scale at which such great power has its origin. Matter itself and the universe suddenly seems to thrust its paradoxes and riddles at me.
jude
NaziWifebeater | July 12, 2009 - 09:16
The radio map is humanised by what appears to be a face.
Personally, I see a strange and slightly sinister beauty in large objects which rotate, namely wind turbines and those big spinning things you get at airports.
threeleafshamrock | July 12, 2009 - 13:24
Looks like a George Best solo run but you've left out the goalposts.
One of my earliest memories is of looking up my auntie Anne's nightie and thinking 'we will never get a plaster to cover that cut..' Spent a lot of my life trying to repair as many as I could.
styxbroox | July 12, 2009 - 14:35
It doesn't remind me of anything in particular but I can 'see' a couple of 13amp switch sockets. Which on reflection reminds me of my first job as an electrician's apprentice for a company, and their 'humorous' initiation ceremony, which if carried out today would result in them ending up on the sex-offenders register for 10 years. Good diagram Footsie!
FTSE100 | July 13, 2009 - 11:56
Interesting comments.
Does it need to be 'humanised'? If asked to give my expert opinion on what manner of creature could have created the drawing, without hesitation I'd say, 'it's humans. No mistaking it. I've seen their stuff before.' I think it's human as hell.
I can even deduce a fair amount about the human who created it. For a start, he didn't do it for money! It isn't a design that would ever be manufactured commercially, and the designer knows that.
It was probably published in a now defunct radio magazine - Practical Wireless, Radio Constructor, or whatever. The guy is a hobbyist, but an above average one. The circuit is ingenious but of no commercial value.
He had an idea and wanted to see if he could make it work. Exactly what I do when I put up my stories on ABC. I don't care whether my stories are commercial, I just want to see whether I can make my ideas work. I think it's about as human as you can get!
Wrestler | July 13, 2009 - 14:14
That's one weird radio circuit. it has semiconductors (transistors) plus a thermionic valve ('tube' in the US) working on 12v. I know they had some cold cathode valves for portables, but this has a heater. Valves normally work at higher voltages (80v or so).
The other thing is it looks like a traditional local oscillator/mixer valve, which would produce an intermediate frequency for a superheterodyne - but then there are no intermediate tuned stages.
So in my non-artistic, technical view, it remains (or is even more of) a mystery.
I think this circuit is solely an artistic creation, it would never appear in a radio mag, it makes no sense at all technically.
FTSE100 | July 13, 2009 - 14:46
It isn't a superhet, it's an example of Douglas Hall's strange brand of reflex circuit. The mix of components is indeed eccentric - silicon small-signal transistors and a germanium power transistor, a job for which germanium is least suited. And, of course, the triode-heptode valve you mention. Three generations of components in one circuit!
Wrestler | July 13, 2009 - 15:00
yep, I went back and looked at the component numbering and it was consistent, something an artist would never think of.
tretchicovmanicova | July 14, 2009 - 09:55
it looks like a circuit diagram for a radio receiver; if you build it you should be able to find out. kindly, `t. imaan tretchicovmanicova
"there is naught so disobedient as an untrained mind."