Positive feedback in electronics, or when a small change is feed into a loop to magnify itself is a vital part of electrical engineering.  But where did it come from and how does it work?  I actually know the answer to that: it was created by a 20-year-old college student named Howard Armstrong in his…

Table of Contents Edwin Howard Armstrong The Start of Armstrong’s Invention References Edwin Howard Armstrong It all started with an extremely smart and tragically stubborn college student named Edwin Howard Armstrong.   Howard (he went by his middle name) grew up in Manhattan when it was just a relaxed suburb of New York to middle class…

Lee de Forest routinely called himself the “Father of Radio” (it was even the title of his autobiography) and in a way he was right.  He invented the idea of wireless broadcasting, conducted many of the first entertainment radio broadcasts and even invented the most important device in radio, the vacuum triode or the vacuum…

Between 1907 and 1920s most AM radio was sent out using something called an arc transmitter (or a Poulsen arc).  In fact, the tragedy of the Titanic in 1912 was partially caused because they didn’t use the arc transmitter.  But how does an arc transmitter work, why was it created and what does that have…

What have you heard about Tesla? That he invented Alternating Current (AC)? That he and Edison fought the “War of the Currents” over AC vs. DC? That Edison hounded him? That he wanted to give everyone free electricity? That he was a Physics genius? That’s what I heard on YouTube and on websites and even…

According to many people, Guglielmo Marconi invented the wireless telegraph.  In fact, his name was so joined with wireless telegraphs that for many years’ telegraphs were called Marconigrams.  However, he wasn’t the first to make wireless transmissions nor did he invent most of the devices he used in his experiments.  How did this basically uneducated…

You might have seen the crazy cool demonstrations conducted with Tesla coils but how do they actually work?  Well, to really answer that question I am going to go talk about how all the parts were discovered and why.  Table of Content Start of the Tesla Coil Callan’s Invention Armand Fizau Nikola Tesla How a…

In the late 1800s there was a battle between different types of electricity, alternating and direct, that was called the war of the currents, (now a major motion picture starting my boyfriend Benedict Cumberbatch).  There are thousands of videos about this conflict but this is the first, as far as I know, that covers the…

How did Thomas Edison go from poverty to creating an electric empire as well as the first research institute?  Well, I’ll tell you and along the way I’ll talk about relentless drive, a strange philosophy on sleep, the invention of the phonograph, telegraph humor, lighting beards on fire, and a long-legged generator. Table of Contents…