ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area Were you born this way?

I've always been fascinated by everything electrical and electronic as far back as I can remember, an interest I inherited from my father.

I was playing around with batteries, bulbs and bits of wire at the age of 5, which would have been 1971. I remember helping dad route cables when he rewired a house we moved to at about the same time, an I too was fascinated by the wiring in my grandarents house.

This wss an old Victorian house in north London, and although parts had been modernized, it still had some switchgear dating from the 1920s/1930s, including an old lighting fuse-box in a polished wood case with a glass panel covering the big porcelain fuses.

I don't know about you guys, but I've always been a radio & electronics enthusiast as well. I remember getting some books from the library and building some simple transistor radios and amplifiers when I was about 8, and by that time I was often helping dad with his projects.

Friends & neighbors knew of my interest, so we always got given old unwanted equipment like tape recorders, radios, etc, Jumble sales in the 1970s also provided a lot of older valve (vacuum tube) equipment cheaply, and by that time my parents figured I knew enough about safety to be let loose with the higher voltages.

By the way, my first experience of how forceful electricity can be was at the age of 4 when I went to "help mommy" unplug her vacuum cleaner. Before she ould stop me, I had the plug part way out, but then put my little fingers behind it to get a better grip - straight across 240V. Ouch!