Looking backward from 2010-06-13 to 1969-11-30.
Ah, the price of acquired knowledge can indeed be high; particularly for an inquisitive little boy, whose curiosity over how things worked, far surpassed his knowledge of how to put them back together once he’d opened them up to learn what was inside. Yes, this curious cat was me, and sometime during the fall of 1969, I disassembled the second record player, which my parents had bought me for Christmas, 1967. I had taken my first one apart as a kindergartner sometime in 1966, and promptly damaged it beyond repair. So thinking that I was too young to appreciate the intricacies of such equipment and that I should therefore go without music for a while, my parents delayed buying me another for over a year. But thanks to Mom’s love of listening to her record collection, and the fact that we had no other LP players in the house, they relented and purchased a green and white music machine with a removable lid, as I worked toward completing second-grade.
But the major problem with these players was that they required a “needle”, that rode inside the groove of the record, as it spun, in order to “read” the musical vibrations, and translate them into electrical impulses which, were then amplified up to room-filling volumes. Extremely delicate, this needle often broke, and cost approximately $3 to replace. I broke several of these during the first year we had the record player and after the fourth one, Mom and Dad had enough, and stopped immediately purchasing new ones.
So, being unable to play records without a needle, for months, the player collected dust in my little bedroom at third street, where I kept it stashed, in plain sight, underneath the east-facing window. In fact, that was the only window in my room. Now by this time, I knew that no little people inside sang or played instruments, when one played a record. But still, other questions flooded my mind, and emboldened me to investigate further with a screw driver in hand. These included the following:
- Why did the player get warm?
- What made the turntable spin?
- Why did it hum?
- How did the speaker work, and how could it sound like people singing, when there was no one singing inside?
- What was an amplifier?
- What happened inside when you switched it on?
So, one dreary fall day, after all the leaves on our maples and oaks had fallen, but before the first snow flakes coated the grass, I decided to investigate these questions. There was nothing else to do, with the weather so damp and cold, and with no needle, I couldn’t play the thing anyhow. So, I entertained myself by removing the silver Philips-head screws that bound the motor board to the box-like bottom part. The motor board was the top piece of the enclosure, on which all the mechanical and electronic parts were mounted.
Actually, dis-assembly was easy, even for a pre-adolescent like me. Loosening a screw at each of the four corners of the square-shaped motor board provided immediate access to the interior, allowing me to peer into the dark cavity underneath the turntable. Since I had powered the unit on (not OFF mind you) before starting, I immediately noticed an orange-glowing spot inside as a gust of heated air wisped past my face. What was that light?
I lifted the now-free motor board out of the case and wondered in amazement at the cone-shaped contour of the four-inch, full-range speaker; this was one place this soft hum came from. So I fondled the speaker’s cone from the back, and notice it vibrating in lock step with the hum. I also found that if I pressed the cone, the hum subsided a little. Curious. What made that paper vibrate, and why did the noise get softer when I restrained it?
I gaped at it, and saw the big nut that held the tone arm in place, as well as the very fine pair of extremely flexible and twisted wires that connected the arm to, what I later learned was the amplifier module. That amp piece also contained the orange glowing light protruding from it the same way that a light house sticks up from a sandy beach. This luminous orange dot topped a dusty, gray-colored glass cylinder with a silver nipple at its crest, which I found out later was a 50C5 amplifier tube, about two inches long approximately, and way too hot to touch. In fact, I couldn’t handle the tube for more than a second or so without getting painfully burned. I surmised that this must have been what made the record player warm on the outside after you played it a while; this 50C5 tube generated much of the heat, as well did the motor. But I had so many more questions, and so, I pressed on with the exploration.
I also noticed that blocking the turntable from spinning made the speaker hum a little louder, and the tube glow even brighter; that glow turned from naval orange to sandy yellow. I thought this was the coolest thing, and I wondered at it in amazement. I later understood that this happened because the tube’s heater was connected in series with the motor windings, and this meant that when the motor drew more power, it forced extra current through the tube; thus, intensifying its glow. Since restraining the motor caused a significant increase in the current, the tube naturally glowed brighter. But at the time, there was nothing natural about this phenomenon to me, and I looked in awe; repeatedly holding and then releasing the turntable to observe the tube grow correspondingly brighter, and then dimmer.
Then, I studied the motor with its fast-spinning wheel that had serrations at its rim; probably for cooling its iron core and windings. I touched that too and got a start as the teeth at its edge tickled my index finger. The motor had insufficient torque to cut my skin, though I didn’t know this then. So it scared me a bit, and I avoided it for some days; but not for long.
Eventually, my youngest sister (Jojo) came to my closed bedroom door, announcing that it was dinner time. So I hid the exposed unit under my bed and headed downstairs, for I knew that I’d be in serious trouble should anyone discover this latest result of my insatiable curiosity.
When I returned to my bedroom an hour later, day had completely given way to night, and I dwelled on what the orange-glowing glass tube would look like in the dark. So I turned off all the lights and felt my way to the bed, hurriedly sliding out that musical box of mystery once more; the thoughts of which had distracted me all the way through supper. I plugged it in and switched it on. I watched impatiently as gradually, after several seconds, the orange light returned; first appearing as a dusky, deep red, then a brighter, reddish-orange, and then finally, it settled in as a full-blown fiery orange that was just shy of amber, that reminded me of the embers of some very hot camp fires I’d seen the previous summer. The motor whirred too. Yet on this occasion, the 50C5 tube was what completely captivated my interest.
As I watched, something even more curious happened once the orange light in the top center of the tube, just underneath the glass nipple, reached full brightness. The speaker’s quiet humming I’d noticed earlier came back, and as it did, another, much dimmer glow appeared in the 50C5. As the hum grew louder, so too did the intensity of this new, deep blue light in almost exactly the same proportions. What on earth caused this?!?!? Blue was always my favorite color anyway and this blue, though quite dim, was the deepest, most beautiful shade of high-frequency light that I’d ever seen. Why did it appear only after the orange light reached full brightness? What tied this blue light to the humming speaker? Why, when I turned off the switch, did the blue light go out right away but the orange light took a few seconds to go completely dark? How was it that when I turned the player on, the blue light would take a few seconds to appear? How was the blue light related to the orange light?
These questions fired my imagination and fueled my interest in electronics for years, until 1972 when I attended my first electronics class. Even before the teacher had completed the introduction involving how to wire up bells, buzzers, and push buttons, I asked about that tube that I’d observed some three years earlier, and why it glowed blue. He first assured me that I wasn’t crazy, then went on to explained that this luminescence resulted from electrons inside the operating tube striking the inner surface of the enclosing glass. So the only time you’d expect to see the glow would be when power was applied, because otherwise, there would be no electron flow to ionize the atoms in the glass and create that blue hue. Further, the orange glowing cathode in the middle of the tube, that I’d seen first when I opened up the record player, enabled the electrons to flow from it, to the plate which encased this cathode. The plate was located nearest to the tube’s glass envelope. In a perfect world, all electrons originating at the hot cathode would be absorbed by the plate and flow out of the tube through the plate connection pin. But this world is not perfect. So, some of the electrons completely pass through the plate, and their momentum carries them to the glass envelope, where they strike it and make the outer glass shell glow blue.
The blue glow and the humming went together because the 50C5 provided the audio power to the speaker. As it turned out, the tube can only amplify and thus provide speaker power, whenever electrons flow inside. Without this current in sufficient quantity, there is insufficient amplification, weak or non existent output to the speaker and thus no hum, and there’s no blue glow either; thus the reason I observed that the speaker hummed only when the tube glowed blue. This current flow made both the speaker hum and the tube glow blue.
But in 1969, I had no electronics teacher to explain this operation and so, to figure it out over the next few days, I unbolted the amplifier module, the filter capacitor with its four multi-colored wires, and I pulled the speaker off the motor board with brute force in order to see the front of its black-paper cone. Whoever put this thing together used rivits instead of screws to fasten the speaker, and so a flat-head screw driver did not as easily work to remove it, though it did make a great prybar for snapping those rivits loose. Unfortunately, breaking the rivets nullified all chances of putting this contraption back together without help, as I had no idea of how to replace the broken fasteners. I couldn’t ask for help either because Dad was the only person in our house who’d know how rivits worked, and I was convinced that he’d kill me if he learned that I had cannibalized yet another music box.
So, for a few more days, I pondered over this growing mess of electronics under my bed; I’d pull it out and handle the motor, capacitor, speaker, and amplifier module. But soon, loose rivets were no longer my only problem, for with all the moving about and wire-flexing that resulted, the wires that connected the motor to the amplifier, and the amplifier to the speaker, and the power leads to the on-off / volume combination knob, began breaking. I had no idea where they went either, and even if I did, I’d not be able to re attach them securely, as they had originally been soldered in place, and I surely didn’t know how to solder, much less what solder even was. Now did I have access to a soldering iron. In fact, at this point in my budding electronics career, I’d never seen a soldering iron. So, like the first record player, I once again found myself totally befuddled about how to reassemble it.
For weeks, I carried this fearful, sick feeling of apprehension in my gut, suspecting that Dad would eventually learn what I’d done and be quite upset. It was just a question of when. But in my ignorant, youthful way, I thought I could hide the foiled fruits of my inquisition. So, while he had no clues about my latest distructive experiment, I imagined ways of avoiding his wrath. I could hide the record player under a sister’s bed. Then when he found it, he’d think that she had done the dirty deed, and thus I’d be off the hook. Or. maybe if I put it in the trash, he’d never realize that it was gone. He might even forget that he’d ever bought it for me in the first place. Eventually, I settled on the second option because I didn’t want to get my sisters in trouble for something they did not do.
So I spent some days planning how I’d get the record player out of the house and into our big garbage cans in the east alley beside the dog pens. This would be difficult, as Dad was the one who always took the kitchen garbage out there several times each week. I’d therefore have to wrap up the record player and all its broken wires and rivets in an opaque trash bag, and take it out very late on the eve of garbage collection day, after Dad went to bed. Sounded like a good plan at first. But then I remembered that the garbage truck often did not arrive until mid-morning, and that Dad often carried the last bags of trash out just prior to leaving for work at 7:00 AM.
Well, this piece is getting pretty long. So rather than enumerate all my thought gyrations over how I’d get over on Dad, suffice it to say that I did not succeed. Dad came into my bedroom one day to chat. But unknown to me, some parts from the record player weren’t tucked fully out of sight under the bed, and he saw one (the cylindrical electrolytic capacitor) near the top of the bed. “What’s this?” he queried. Then, he reached down, grabbed the capacitor, and pulled. Then, out slid the motor board, to which the capacitor was attached by the multi-colored wires. “What’s this?!?!” His question became no longer a question, but more of a statement, that whatever this thing was, it should not have been found, all exposed, under my bed. He didn’t care that I was intensely curious; either that, or he knew too little about electronics to satisfy my inquisitiveness by explaining why that tube glowed blue.
I was punnished. I got smacked and tanned with a belt, yelled at, and shamed. Sometimes, Dad would literally slap us kids upside the head when he got very mad. In fairness to him, this didn’t happen much. But this time, he cracked me a good one; the sound of which was so loud that it made my ears ring, and at the moment of impact, I saw a lightening-like flash. Then, he confined me to my bedroom for two days, and I had to cope with the headache that his slap had deposited.
I never fully forgave him for that, and in the several years that followed, I felt closer to my electronics teacher at WPSBC than to my father. Though our relationship would be civil throughout the nearly thirty-five years between then and when he passed away in 1997, I rarely ever felt comfortable reaching out to him as a son after that. We never had the talks about girls that would likely have been so helpful to me; particularly in a house full of girls (my sisters and mother). Indeed, I could have benefited from hearing more of the male perspective. As it was though, I often avoided him, fearing that he’d hit me again, and he on all but a handful of occasions, didn’t want to talk much about personal things. To come to think of it though, that was the last time he ever swatted me that I remember; Mom told him later, that if he ever walloped me on the head again, that she’d leave him. He took her warning to heart. But, the damage was done, and we never quite got past it.
So parents? Never, ever hit your kids, because it has a much more profoundly negative effect on them than just teaching them right from wrong. It’s drawbacks far outweigh its positives. Corporal punnishment hurts, not only physically. But it’s emotional injuries go deep, and you just might never be able to take it back, even if you apologize. Dad never apologized. But even if he had, I’m not sure I could have allowed bygones to be bygones. So before you smack, think of a different way. Instead of getting fearfully angry and then doling out the physical punishment, Dad would have done well to talk openly and calmly about the blue tube with me, or connect me with an electronics guru who could. After all, I didn’t disassemble the record player to be a bad kid, and I wasn’t bad because I did that, though his punishment suggested that he emphatically thought otherwise. I just wanted to know how it worked. But instead of considering that, he palmed me. Then, afterwards and always, I carried a hint of suspicion toward him, and I found it exceedingly difficult to openly talk to him about anything. He was a good provider and always kept the house warm and in great repair. But this act forged a chasm between us that neither one of us had the power to bridge. So if you wish to build an impenetrable wall between your kids and yourself, hitting them or needlessly humiliating them during punishment is a sure-fire way to do it. Take the time to explain why that tube glows blue and don’t punish ther curiosity. Regard this as sacred, not folly, and you’ll do right by your children.
Take care.
Tom Hesley
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