Trivial Matters ( Part - I )

In life people keep on inventing or discovering few things on their own. This might be quite trivial for one and important to another. I did have fair share of these discovery moments. I thought to pen some of them which I think were great moment when I found them out. Some of them were larger projects and I had my share of setbacks on them. I leave it to your judgement how trivial they are.

My first moment was when I was about 6-7 years old. In hot summers some time we used to sleep on roof of the house along with our grandfather, it was spectacular site to watch the clear sky, those days it used to be clear sky. I could cite the moon in all its glory winning and waning. While it is to wan I could see crystal clear the rim of the moon on the darker side. I concluded that this phenomenon was due to the earth shadow. All I know by that time is that the moon reflected the suns light and did not have its own light. I remember confirming form my grandfather and it was one delightful moment for me to find this out all be myself. It is truly a trivial matter if I look back but was a great moment for me those days.

Life becomes serious as you grow up. Sky was replaced with a fan to gaze at. An idea stuck me that a perfect automobile can be build using this motor. I used to dream of building an automobile using it someday or even better driving one. Till this day I do not know driving probably waiting for my dream cart to ferry me wherever I want. So the research started with one of the encyclopaedia in my grandfather’s collection. Gosh, I now understand how much I missed internet those days. What I found out was no breakthrough in the technology itself but I found an enhancement for the same, a perfect renewable energy concept. What I saw was a simple diagram still fresh in my mind that of a U shaped magnet and a coil running thru it, explanation was while you turn the coil it will produce electricity. Now this was the bingo moment which started the stint of my day dreaming. What I thought was the battery could power the motor initially for the vehicle to move and then I could have four of those generators attached to the four wheels, what I thought it was enough to power the car once in motion. Even more I thought of the wind power, if the electricity generation was not enough I thought of putting small fan blades with the small generator in multiple no’s to close the gap. An accelerator was going to be a simple knob they use for the fan and hence to be contended with 5 speeds that it could offer.

The first setback this project suffered was when I watched a electrician repairing one of the fans in the house. He could hold the fan blades easily while the power was flowing to the fan, and as soon as he left the fan it wormed to its top speed. It worried me that how it could take the starting load of the dream car if it’s so powerless. It was time to get a mentor and hence I confided it to the best help available, hence my mentor was “Deba Bhaiya” our car driver. He heard the project with great interest and then put a lot of technical jargons in front of me like, What about Clutch? And Gears? Etc. I became too much for me to handle and I realised that I would need some formal education to start this project hence the project was shelved and it still remains there. Well now I just keep watching “Reva” on road as if they have stolen my idea and implemented it in very unprofessional way. The nearest that I came to the prototype of this car was much later in form of a line diagram using GW Basic and a PC with say 4.7Mhz speed and two floppy drives, those days there were nothing called hard disk to my knowledge. This was the last of my effort towards this direction.

It was exciting to know that water is made of two molecules of Hydrogen and one molecule of Oxygen, but more than bonding of Hydrogen and Oxygen what interested more was there separation. Electrolysis was of great interest and thought that this experiment can be tried at home. Motivation was to collect the Oxygen do administer it to my friends who were sick, no matter what the ailment is Oxygen would be good to heal the person was the thought. Hence started the process, since we did not have access to test tube in home first an empty glass jar was organised. Then the in second part two pieces of wire were organised. An afternoon time elders used to have a nap and hence was a perfect time to do this test. Wire was put in the plug on the one end and dropped to the wire, what happened next we did not have a clue as it cut the power supply to the house. Hence the major setback to this project happened. I still remember the task of putting away everything away as if nothing has happened was the bigger challenge.

I knew for sure that it will work and hence decided to repeat this with much more saner way. The Big jar was replaced with a small empty bottle of Homeopathic medicine. Source of power was the battery from my grandfather’s torch. To my joy it worked. I could see very tiny bubbles from one of the wire. But it was a partial success as it was the unwanted Hydrogen to which I did not have any application whatsoever. So I did know that the negatively charged wire was emitting Hydrogen twice the capacity that of Oxygen. Hence this safe experiment remained an experiment and I could not go ahead my intention of administering oxygen to my ailing friends. I am sure if they know about it now they would be thanking their luck.

Science really interested me but it was one demon everywhere in science which made me move away from it, and that was Mathematics. We used to have our mathematics teacher who was a ambidextrous (Person who can write with both the hands), short and stout (people who know him and if they read this will think I just called him skinny). All he did was stand in the middle of the blackboard and start solving sums from one end of the board to the other end without even mincing a word. We students used to have gala time chatting at the back as if no one is there. Hence the interest in science was mostly fuelled by magazines like “Vigyan Pragati” a quite inexpensive one, if I remember correctly thirty rupees was the annual subscription and seventy five paisa was the per issue cost of this weekly publication. The most interesting thing it contained was do-it-yourself project it used to have. In one of this project there was one to make a radio station.

It really caught my fantasy and started day dreaming about having my own radio station. More application was that we can spy (not sure on whom) and communicate with friends (Fellow spies) on their portable transistors. Hence the Bill of material was neatly copied in a piece of paper to be taken to shop which vended electrical components. Once beating the crowd to the main counter at “Burma Radio Ghar” reached out to the sales men to see if he had all the components and it’s pricing (funding was another challenge). Finally once the sourcing and funding problems were solved the project was already delayed by two months.

Then came the time to put the things in place, did everything carefully to the book but the thing decided not to work for me. Then came the right time to find a mentor for this project one of my friends uncle came to rescue we used call him “Raja ka mama”, we actually never bothered for his actual nomenclature. He did the setup in just an hour and the thing started working. This was the last exciting thing in the project as the range was pathetically less which refused to go beyond few meters. Actually I was still not ready to give up and made the TV antenna work as the radio station antenna but there was only a marginal improvement in the range. So that was the end of the spy and his team there.

To be continued . . . . . . . .