Crystal Detector

When I was a kid my crystal radio kit was beer powered! https://archive.org/details/dicksmithsfunwayintoelectronicsv...

Dad bought me Dick Smith's electronic kits when I was 8 (it was an Australian thing). I didn't wind up going the EE route, but I will credit it with giving me the basics early in life so that whenever talk of capacitors and resistors came up I knew how to properly parse the information.

Yeah the part about not requiring batteries was fascinating to me when I was little. My dad had located an old one from somewhere; I remember him showing it to me and having grown up with what were more modern radios at that point, the fact it could work without batteries was somehow at the same time mystifying but also made the world of electronics seem more approachable.

Reading about this leads me to wonder if there are certain benefits to many of these very old designs that have been lost due to overlooked priorities. As in, I'm not saying we should all be using crystal radios again but having a functional radio that doesn't require power seems like a plus at some level.

> Like, my family isn’t religious at all and as an adult I’ve come to identify as a materialist, but that… that was the closest thing I can think of to a religious experience.

I like to think of electromagnetism as a form of magic (in the supernatural/religious sense). In the days before radio, the idea of moving energy and information over pieces of metal or thin air would be considered sorcery or witchcraft. Today its so much more advanced with pocket computers literally putting the world at our fingertips. I can casually talk to people on the other side of the planet in near real time.

Funny. I was fascinated in the same way by the crystal (germanium diode) radio kit I built as a kid but I wish now I'd built one of the "oatmeal box" more-or-less-from-scratch radios. It's probably easier than ever to do that - you can get galena off ebay.

to be fair there's not much on the air these days to pick up using a crystal anymore (around me at least)

but an SDR would let you teach much much more about whats going on in the invisible :) https://www.hanselman.com/blog/software-defined-radio-is-a-g...

https://smile.amazon.com/NooElec-NESDR-Mini-Compatible-Packa...

Yes. They were able to draw wire for jewellery. The could smelt iron so they could have made electromagnets, generators, electric motors, transformers, and loudspeakers. That's enough for spark gap transmitters and wired telegraph.

Hero of Alexandria made, or at least described, a simple steam turbine. But it was just seen as a toy or philosophical talking point and it wasn't until over a thousand years later that steam power became useful.

Half the challenge is knowing that something can be done and having some idea of what might be achieved. The rest is just work. :-)

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile

Well, only with the technology of electricity as a prerequisite. Which was invented not far from Rome and recorded in Latin: https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=Ha9gAAAAcAAJ&pg=GBS.... ... in MDCCLXIX, or 1769 as we now represent it.

Neither the Roman nor Greek empires seem to have had many of the "practical tinkerer / gentleman scientist" social positions which were very important in the European age of discovery.

Radio was invented after we had Maxwell's equations - a theory that predicts electromagnetic waves. They probably could have built a radio, but they wouldn't have had the idea that one was possible without a couple hundred years of advancing math and physics.