Painting a Bakelite radio cabinet

A bit of history might help you understand things. Once upon a time, light switches and receptacles were designed to be able to handle AC and DC. What happens when switching DC? Arcing. So, switches and receptacles, and switc hes in everything from lamps to toaster had to be arc-resistant. In additio n, manufacturers did not have 100 years of historical data to design from. So, things were over-designed (by modern standards), heavy (by modern stand ards) and many have withstood the test of time and survive to this day. Tod ay, switches are either AC or DC, designed to very specific standards, and as long as they are used within those standards, will also last indefinitel y.

Capacitors started as foil-and-glass devices, evolving to foil-and-paper (c heap) sealed with paraffin wax + some bees wax for workability (cheap), and some were potted in tar (even then, manufacturers understood that the mate rials had self-decay problems) and various other methods were tried - and d iscarded over time. BUT, remember, EVERYTHING WAS NEW back in those days. N obody had 100+ years of data to use, and what we understand today as being very short blind alleys were enticing options. So, there is a LOT of crap o ut there that was perfectly functional when made. Electrolytics evolved sim ilarly and improved similarly. As did resistors, even tubes. Nuvistors, dev eloped about the same times as reliable transistors, were thought then, and perhaps still, to have a pretty-much indefinite service-life as compared t o a standard tube.

So, now the evolution of consumer-grade electronic components, caps, resist ors, transistors, and so forth, has made them into commodities based on unp rotected (no patent protection) technology using cheap-as-hell materials an d largely automated manufacturing processes operating at a precision that w as not possible back-then. Meaning that a Visay-Sprague has no competitive advantage over the Grace L. Furgeson storm-door and capacitor company, or t he Wa-Chen capacitor company operating out of a garage in Shanghai. But tha t Wa-Chen capacitor is superior in every way to the Sprague wax-paper cap p roduced in 1947. Or that plastic-encapsulated cap produced by Philco in 196

2. You really need to step back and take a 20,000 view of this hobby. Don't pl ant your feet 'back in the day' as you *DO* have 100 years of data to pull from, and you *DO* have the opportunity to bypass the mistakes of others an d go directly to the proper solution. There is not one person in 20 that un derstands the sequence of events necessary for the lamp in their ceiling fi xture to light up at the flick of a switch. They take it for granted. Back in the day, that simple result was the nearest thing to magic the world had ever experienced. If you understand how we got here, you need not repeat t he mistakes, or duplicate the errors, or repeat the learning process as exp erienced over the last 100 years. Save yourself the pain.

Otherwise the appearance of idiocy you seem to cultivate so carefully may, in fact, be your reality. That would be sad.

Peter Wieck Melrose Park, PA

Can you tell where the rest are made?

Entropy's effect would seem to create just the opposite -- whitespace ever expanding until e v e n l e t t e r s w i l l b e t o o f a r a p a r t t o r e l a t e t o e a c h o t h e r .

Jonesy

That's not entropy, which is the tendency for all attempts to organize this newsgroup to turn into randomized rubbish. It's also not the expansion of the universe, which would increase the font size along with the inter-character spacing. After all the great ideas are eliminated, whatever is left, no matter how dumb, must be the cause. In this case, it's caused by authors being paid by the page. In the distant past, authors were paid by the word. This resulted in numerous abrevs, contractions, and hypenations to increase the word count.

However, it was tedious to count words. So, publishers changed to counting pages instead. That changed the style sheet to gigantic fonts, absurdly wide margins, margin notes, double and triple spaced lines, two spaces between sentences, a heading on every page, and footnotes that nobody reads. What's important is that the tool to make all this happen is the white space character. Prior to these changes, the worlds supply of white space was adequate for all forms of publication. Afterwards, the supply of white space began to diminish. That happened to me, when I pressed the space bar, and nothing happened. I quickly inserted a flash drive full of empty space, which allowed me to continue writing. However, that's only temporary as AGW alarmists are already proclaiming impending doom. Little wonder that NASA is trying to resurrect the space program, so that we can replenish our supply of white space from outer space.

Unfortunately, I do not have an answer to the white space depletion problem. Conservation is only a temporary measure. Eventually, we will run out of white space resulting in the implosion of all written text and the rationing of white space. It might be possible to use black paper and white printing because unlike the supply of white space, there's plenty of black space available inside the nearest black hole.

That reminds me of my invention of logarithmically-lined paper because there is always just a few extra lines of writing which (when we used to do long-hand) just needed to be fitted in to that last page...

Mike.

Mike Coon wrote on 9/30/2017 7:11 PM:

That one was pretty good! You should get that patented. lol

That should be poly-mumble-ene.

There are naming standards for chemicals and compounds which I believe includes plastics. Chemists are amazingly human (and childish) in their naming of various compounds. There are enough examples to fill a Wikipedia article:

Should you ever be in a position to assign a name, please resist the temptation to be excessively clever. I didn't. Because I had one foot in engineering and the other in marketing, I was honored with the task of assigning a model number of a marine radio that I helped design. Most of the other radios followed the pattern COM1, COM3, COM21, etc (this was before the IBM PC serial ports used the same designation). Without the slightest hesitation, I proclaimed that COM1C will be the next model number. It was about a week before anyone noticed the obvious. I soon became a candidate for immediate execution by those who had to rewrite the product releases and hastily retrieve those had been mailed.

Polyethylene isn't the only plastic with some naming confusion. See table 2:

I agree with everything you say except for nuvistor reliability. We were constantly replacing them in RCA tuners back in the early 70s.

Agreed that the very earliest did suffer from poor QC. But after a pretty s hort shakedown, they became exceedingly reliable. The biggest problem with them was either a poor vacuum (no getters, no way to draw out air by indivi dual tube) or loss of vacuum. As the technology progressed, these were solv ed to the point that were they as inexpensive as contemporary transistors, they may have survived in volume production to this day. They were very cos tly as compared to solid-state devices, however.

Peter Wieck Melrose Park, PA

Yep. I like it. I did some searching through various online patent search databases and did not find anything even close. Plenty of semi-log paper graphs, but nothing suitable for writing. They all have the necessary semi-log horizontal lines, but they also have equally spaced vertical lines, which makes it difficult to use as writing paper.

I think it just might be patentable. No clue how you're going to sell the idea to a manufacturer of rules writing paper. It's far too easy to clone and steal:

In honor of the cats that like to plant themselves at the center of attention:

If you like researching patents, I have another one for you. This was a joint invention with a colleague, also decades ago, and mostly about coming up with the name...

"Panickers" (panic + knickers). An incontinence garment specifically to cope with the gut impact of sudden fright!

Mike.

The issue is not the number of letters/symbols in an alphabet. The issue is not the amount of white space on a page. The issue is all about clarity of communication.

Symbols that increase clarity or reduce the potential for confusion are goo d. Symbols that are there based merely on form or tradition do neither.

The additional i does nothing for Aluminium. The additional u does nothing for Colour, Behaviour et.al.

Tongue firmly in cheek.

By the way, Surveyors have been using a decimal scale for hundreds of years (since 1620) - the Chain Scale. In the US, the Ramsden Scale (1785) divide d feet into 10ths, and Chain Scale tapes are still used by surveyors to thi s day -those not using GPS devices, that is. Note that most surveyor measur ements are in decimals.

Ain't history fun?

Peter Wieck Melrose Park, PA