Some PDFs that are worth a look

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Charles Krebs
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Some PDFs that are worth a look

Post by Charles Krebs »

I know that one of the more enjoyable aspects of this forum is looking over the solutions and methods used by members for their apparatus and photography. I also like looking over some of the really old science and technical books that are available on-line at certain places for ideas that might still be applicable today. Over at one of the Yahoo microscope groups someone mentioned older documents that are available at Anchor Optics (Edmund). I had a look and found a few that I find interesting. (In some ways they made me smile because many are so typical of the late 50's and early 60's science info that was directed at secondary school students.)

Have a look. Much is very (too!) basic, but in others there is certainly some good fodder for stirring up the creativity of the DIY minds here.

http://www.anchoroptics.com/documents/

ray_parkhurst
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Post by ray_parkhurst »

Older educational docs are always fun. It's amazing what you can learn from them, or spark ideas. Thanks for the link...Ray

Chris S.
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Post by Chris S. »

I've been enjoying these links, too. Thanks, Charlie!

--Chris

dmillard
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Post by dmillard »

Thank you Charlie - these have been very entertaining!

David

BugEZ
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A walk down Memory Lane...

Post by BugEZ »

Thanks for posting. Many of these publications were ordered by my father in the late '50s and I recall looking at them as a boy. He had a box of chipped lenses from Edmond Optical that he showed me when I was a child. As I got older and his interests moved on I was allowed to use the lenses in various science projects. One lens became part of the optical detector that I incorporated into a seismograph. My favorite of these optical "toys" was a pair of tank prisms left over from WWII. My friends and I had many adventures with the snoop-o-scope we constructed.

Once again, thanks for sharing!

Keith

DQE
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Post by DQE »

The tutorial document on graphical ray tracing was fun to read and filled in several gaps in my understanding of these very basic aspects of lens design and use. No references to Maxwell's equations!

It's interesting to think back on ancient times when computers were essentially inaccessible for ordinary mortals. One had to use things like T-Squares and drafting triangles plus maybe a slide rule to accomplish most tasks like lens design. I remember that even into the 1970s, access to computer-based lens design was mostly limited to industry- or academia-based optical designers. PC-based or minicomputer-based lens design packages mostly came along at or perhaps a little later than this time, IIRC.

The chipped lens projects and kits also brought back distant memories of times gone by.

I wonder how young kids or teens become hands-on interested in science or engineering nowadays? You can't do much to take modern electronics apart or understand how it works, unlike the hand-assembled electronics components purchased from Radio Shack of days gone by. Experimental sciences have all become very advanced and sophisticated, and may not become directly (hands-on) accessible to a young person until late in college or in grad school. It was pretty much that way when I was in college and grad school, in the 60s and 70s. Yet you really can't do much that is hands-on until and unless you've gone through quite a few years of advanced scientific education.

Perhaps macro- and micro- photography are still accessible to well-financed young people as long as you don't want to become involved in SEM, AFM, etc, etc.

Thanks for the links.
-Phil

"Diffraction never sleeps"

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Post by rjlittlefield »

DQE wrote:I wonder how young kids or teens become hands-on interested in science or engineering nowadays? You can't do much to take modern electronics apart or understand how it works, unlike the hand-assembled electronics components purchased from Radio Shack of days gone by. Experimental sciences have all become very advanced and sophisticated, and may not become directly (hands-on) accessible to a young person until late in college or in grad school.
Phil, you've gotten depressed on us! Spend some time at your regional or state Science Fair and I predict you'll get a very different picture of the possibilities. :)

My own view is that there are more opportunities now than ever before. Radio Shack still sells their excellent Electronics Learning Lab. That covers the basics of analog electronics, and unlike my childhood when it was painfully expensive to buy a 20K ohms-per-volt VOM, vastly better instrumentation is available today at Harbor Freight for under $10 (on sale today for $4.99). But instead of having to stop there -- struggling to implement anything interesting with discrete analog and tiny digital ICs -- the modern kid can go on to explore robotics with MindStorm, device control with Arduino, and of course motion capture with any webcam. Feel like putting lenses together? They're all still available, and now we have laser pointers to help reveal their behavior. Want to find out how these things work? Ask the Internet. The list goes on...

Now is a hard time to become interested in science? I disagree! :D

--Rik

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Post by ChrisR »

I think it was somewhen about the middle of the last century when technology left the bright inquisitive mind behind. Up till then if you really wanted to make a radio, sorry heterodyne wireless receiver, or understand your car or repair your household appliances, you could. (It seems a gentleman had to wear a proper necktie to carry out such inventigations, going by the illustrations.) After, there were metaphorical, if not physical black boxes, we just had to accept.

I found myself 600metres (2000ft) up a big thing recently, pondering how far we'd got since piling bricks, one atop another. That structure demanded technology not necessary before it, in a building. But it's just a building, right? Easy to understand? Yet it dawned on me, looking at the displays about multiple teams of technical people from far-flung nations, each required to do their speciality, that actually, NO single person understands the building. Doesn't stop them planning a taller one, though.

Roy Patience
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Post by Roy Patience »

Charles,

Thanks for the information. It brings back fond memories. I still have a "Chipped Lens Kit" and I remember reading many of the Edmund brochures.

My early experiments in electricity involved batteries, copper plating and hand-cranked generators. My hometown was making the transition to dial telephones and the old hardware was easily available.

Roy

DQE
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Post by DQE »

ChrisR wrote:I think it was somewhen about the middle of the last century when technology left the bright inquisitive mind behind. Up till then if you really wanted to make a radio, sorry heterodyne wireless receiver, or understand your car or repair your household appliances, you could. (It seems a gentleman had to wear a proper necktie to carry out such inventigations, going by the illustrations.) After, there were metaphorical, if not physical black boxes, we just had to accept.

I found myself 600metres (2000ft) up a big thing recently, pondering how far we'd got since piling bricks, one atop another. That structure demanded technology not necessary before it, in a building. But it's just a building, right? Easy to understand? Yet it dawned on me, looking at the displays about multiple teams of technical people from far-flung nations, each required to do their speciality, that actually, NO single person understands the building. Doesn't stop them planning a taller one, though.
These perspectives, especially the first paragraph, are what I was having a nostalgia attack about. One used to be able to look at most if not all of the parts of a typical car and with not too many hand tools, you could repair or just see how any of the parts worked. With some efforts and learning, you could do most all of the maintenance of one's VW Beetle, as I did during college and grad school Nowadays, it's not immediately obvious which things under the hood/bonnet constitute the engine! And my dealer mostly just hooks up my Volvo S60 to the Internet and then repairs (or most likely replaces) whatever components an invisible software package recommends after interrogating the 24 computers in my car (and after studying my car's error logs).

Yet I also acknowledge Rik's observations that perhaps things are just different, not completely inaccessible. Not everything is any more inaccessible than during my college and grad school days in the 60s and early 70s, even if most car engine repairs can't be done by a "shade tree mechanic" with ordinary hand tools.

Software projects as well as automation projects are certainly accessible - in my youth it would have been fantastic if I could have worked with computers in high school (or earlier?) rather than having to wait til (I think) my third year in college to take a FORTRAN course via an IBM mainframe.

Chemistry sets seem to have become mostly discontinued, probably due to legal/safety considerations. They were very popular in my childhood, along with kits to grow crystals, simple radio kits, discrete component electronics kits, etc...

Is computer aided design accessible at the high school level or earlier, for mechanical engineering or other disciplines? I would think one would need a fairly good background in the discipline before trying to use such packages. Also, most of them seem prohibitively expensive. Perhaps there are some simplified or student versions of the major design packages, but they usually presume you are fluent with the underlying discipline.
-Phil

"Diffraction never sleeps"

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