“I didn't have a mentor to help me, really, so each time a motor failed, I had to do tons of research and try and troubleshoot what went wrong,” he says. “But eventually on the 15th motor, I was able to get a working prototype.”
I imagine most 17 year old would not have kept going 15+ times until they arrived at something which worked.
As adults, we forget that 17 year olds are still living their lives in a world of what they don't know, not in what they know. And once they do know they can be very insistent about being right. Because, it's all they know.
It's also how a team of 16-17 yr olds can somehow manage to win when the odds are completely against them. All they know is what they want to see happen. And they will keep trying until they succeed, the clock runs out, or the other team makes it painfully obvious by completely routing them.
Honestly I've made a career of this but I never got close to building a novel engine as a kid, I was too busy wanting to play C+C or breaking through my parents tea collection, trying to smoke them and calculating if there was a high or how much it caused me to cough.
None of my 5 were heavy into social media, even tho I was for 15 years.
One followed my skillset and became heavy into computers/electronics (8y-now) and old cars (19y-now).
The other 4 didn't pickup strong hobbies. I believe it's because there weren't available examples that fit their abilities.
Two settled on gaming (one now a technician tho). One does music and graphic art.
The best part to me is the large amount of designs one shouldn't bother to talk about because it is much more important to hysterically moan about potential perpetual motion than discus any motor/engine improvement.
Like the guy who makes his own chips. Super impressive but there's no way in hell I could've ever afforded to do that (I did look into it when I was 18)
I ended up being able to make a few primitive items from my tubes of glass, but of course, it was a silly pursuit that led nowhere. So I moved on to my next project, making a solid fuel rocket from scratch, then an arc furnace, then gunpowder, then a homemade gas-mask, etc. So it was for a curious kid in the 60's. I'm lucky I didn't burn down the house. This of course was made possible by the lack of an internet (and of course periodicals like Scientific American back when it was great and really about science).
I admire the 17-year old in the article for coming up with something in this age when it is so much easier to entertain oneself by surfing the net.
Remember when you could get the ingredients to do things like that easily; sometimes even in a "Science Kit for Kids!" one would buy at Caldor or the like? Man, how times have changed.
I call it luck.
I decided not to proceed, when understood, that I have no way to put it off.
I didn't :)
It's all about the quantities.
(^when I was younger I remember being amazed by all the stuff you could get in French supermarkets, aisles and aisles of school supplies, summer toys/beach items, clothes, etc. - seems they were much earlier in that trend, and still seem to lean further into it, though it's been a few years since I've been.)
Overwhelmingly that's now handled by independent gun stores, or a select few sporting good chains (eg Dick's Sporting Goods - the largest sporting goods chain in the US - which sells a restricted set of rifles and a few shotguns; they came under pressure not long ago to get rid their guns and they capitulated and reduced what and how they sell [1]).
Big corporations in the US are drastically more sensitive today to gun issues and the related bad PR that goes with selling guns (even Walmart has rolled back their selling of guns).
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-dicks-sporting-goods-deci...
> Internationally, Aldi Nord operates in Denmark, France, the Benelux countries, Portugal, Spain and Poland, while Aldi Süd operates in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Hungary, Switzerland, Australia, China, Italy, Austria and Slovenia. Both Aldi Nord (as Trader Joe's) and Aldi Süd (as Aldi) also operate in the United States with 1,600 stores between them as of 2017,[11] and the U.S. is the only country to have both Aldi companies operating outside of Germany.
Trader Joe's sells all house-brand products aimed at a higher quality and price point.
I have seen potassium nitrate stump remover on the shelves at my local Fred Meyer (Kroger). If you can't find find it on shelves it's easy to order:
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Potassium-Nitrate-Powder-99-8-Pur...
The vast majority of fireworks and rockets I made as a kid used potassium nitrate as an oxidizer. 5 pounds will provide many hours of entertainment and education.
I’ve volunteered for a youth leadership camp every summer since 1998. Our attendees are 16-18 y/o males exclusively (there’s a female version of the camp but I don’t work there so I have no opinion on that side). Our attendees have been thru a selection process, so I’m not seeing a representative cross section of Ohio, US males of that age. In our sample, though, the number of focused and determined young men is very high.
I’m not at all surprised a 17 y/o would have the drive and determination to keep trying over and over. Not all of them are that way— surely it’s a very small percentage. Nonetheless, that determination isn’t an anomaly in my experience.
Older you get less there is time and energy. And more responsibilities.
Innovation doesn't always need the big team but time, deep understanding of a few (one?), patience, dedication and endurance.
I built the first one basically out of scraps and rtl SDRs, second one out of slightly better Chinese crap then ran out of money.
Would be a compliance nightmare to sell either iterations. If I could do it with TDR instead I don't know
All this leads me to conclude that we need to do better so these resources to innovate and learn are accessible to all.
Where do you see resentment? It's like saying "anyone could have been Bill Gates" except that Bill Gates had access to lab computers much earlier than any other kid of his generation (and his family was well off, too). A touch with reality is always helpful in an ocean of optimism.