Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son (1922) | Hacker News Reader

Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son (1922)

gutenberg.org

98 pointsjasperpilgrim13 comments

It’s always kind of wonderful to read older texts. For one, the style is often much more approachably clear; for another, sometimes you find hidden gems of history.

One of my favorite bits of science history is the first edition of a text on metallurgy, that was meant for sales reps for a carnegie steel affiliate company.

The purpose of the book was to give sales reps enough clue to not embarrass themselves; it’s evolved and the book, now in its 8th edition or something, is a standard reference text for undergraduates.

Anyway the first chapter or so of the 1914 text was explaining the basic chemistry of the universe and went something like:

The three things that make up our physical universe are: matter, which is stuff that has mass; energy, which is the capacity to do work; and the luminiferous aether, which is the medium through which light propagates...

I think you mean luminiferous aether, unless there’s a pun in there I’m not getting.

Ether is a perfectly valid spelling in British English. See meaning 3 at https://www.lexico.com/definition/ether.

Its valid in American English too, frankly and see it used frequently.

Out of the ether, Ethernet and so on.

so either aether or ether. :)

We take the name ethernet for granted now, but it really is quite a clever name.

nowadays it is practically just a point-to-point network, but the original implementation was a bunch of clients connected to their private "aether" all shouting out to each other.

I’ve been reading a lot of H.G. Wells’ nonfiction. As a child in a one-room English schoolhouse, he was still being taught the four “elements” of earth, water, fire, and air. Aristotle would be proud!

but everything changed when the martians attacked.

And in a lot of cases, they don’t assume you already know xxx because it was new then.

What is the name of text on metallurgy?

I dislike reading a book in my browser. Here's the Project Gutenberg page with all file types for offline viewing.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30688

“Why does it get hot? Because when the electrons stream through it they bump and jostle their way along like rude boys on a crowded sidewalk. The atoms have to step a bit more lively to keep out of the way.”

I can be a bit dense sometimes, and the imagery helps me to grasp the concept. Fortunately, the book is packed full of descriptions like this.

You might enjoy this old radio program where Jean Shepherd discusses getting his Class A ham radio license when still young and in school:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22fl5JtoZXU part 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR46E_WV6vc part 2

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