I was just born with electricity in my veins. As a child in elementary school (1960's) all of my science fair projects involved low voltage lamps, motors, knife switches, bell wire and lantern batteries. [Linked Image]

By age 10, I had graduated to repairing television sets. All there was back then was black & white sets, but most everybody had one. I would remove every vacuum tube from the set, carefully noting where they came from, take them all to the local department store's U-TEST-M machine and test them one at a time until I found the bad one. They all had specific part numbers on them and a catalog hung on the machine to cross the number over to the brand they sold. Almost every repair was a bad tube, a wire that had come loose or just a tuner that needed cleaning with an aerosol cleaner. People from all over the neighborhood brought their sets for repair. I probably worked on 1 or 2 sets a month.

The inside of a B&W television set is also where I first learned the function of a capacitor. I can remember to this day the surprise I received when I touched one in a set that had been unplugged for hours, only to receive a shock that knocked me to the ground. Thank God I was a lot closer to the ground back then. [Linked Image] I've been dealing with electricity in one way, shape or form ever since.