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But materials were hard to find and very expensive. Two items one had to buy: valves and headphones. "I asked my friend where he had found the sheet metal to make the plates of the capacitor. He took me to a row of small shops which had a metal-faced ledge below the shop window. The metal was thin and seemed easy enough to remove.

I used about 15 plates and to this day I have no idea what the capacity of the finished capacitor was. Some small items for the receiver could be found in a little shop owned by an old man who charged exorbitant prices, so I decided I must go to Moscow for the valve and a single headphone that I needed. "But Moscow was three days and two nights away by train, and it was the middle of winter.

It was, he told me, a variable capacitor and he was going to use it to make a radio receiver. The contraption was enormous by today's standards and must have weighed about half a kilo. My friend said it had a capacity of 250 micro-micro farads, which meant absolutely nothing to me at the time. "When he completed his receiver I became very interested and decided I would build one too.

I was afraid the large flat top of the aerial would attract thunderbolts. When I finally connected the aerial to the receiver I heard ABSOLUTELY NOTHING." I asked him how he tuned the receiver. He said he had put many taps on the coil and he twisted his antenna to these taps trying various combinations with the tuning capacitor. "All I heard was this breathing noise.

The tuned circuit consisted of a coil with a small pressure operated capacitor across it. A carbon microphone with a dry cell in series was connected to two or three turns of wire wound over the coil. The assembled kits were tested close to each other and they worked.

When I approached my knee to the metal leg of the work-bench I would lose the station I had been listening to." He said the tuning capacitor he had made was obviously too small and he had to alter the taps on the coil continuously. He later found out that it was the new broadcasting station in Vienna, Austria, which transmitted the sound of a metronome throughout the night.

Frank Nelsen and Nance Codiss moved on from display case to display case, each of which showed another kind of pod cut in half. The interiors were all different and all complicated... Membranes with a faint, metallic sheen laminated or separated by narrow air spaces as in a capacitor, for instance... Balls of massed fibre, glinting... Curious, spiral formations of waxy tissue...

There wasn't any sign of trouble except that the TV channel went dead for a second, until a stand by commercial with singing cartoon figures cut in. But Frank Nelsen somehow put his hands to his head, as if to protect it. Mitch Storey, with a big piece of stellene in his brown mitts, stood up very straight. Gimp, at a bench, handed a tiny capacitor to Eileen, and started counting, slow and even.