Eureka !

During my middle and high school years, I spent a great deal of time trying out crazy experiments. Churchill once said "Sucess is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing you enthusiam". I met with little sucess in those adventures; nevertheless the enthusiasm did not wane:-) Here are three of those adventures -

1) Electromagnets - When I was about 12, I decided to try building my own electromagnet. I took an iron rod, wound an uninsulated ( I can't believe I used that) wire around it, and connected it to the power socket and turned the switch on. I witnessed a mini fireworks display followed by a power outage for the rest of the evening. This was one of those few experiments that I did not attempt to repeat:-)

2) 'Go Go' - Around the same year, in a flash of inspiration, I set out to make a perpetual motion engine. The idea was simple enough. I took two toy cars, placed a magnet ( needless to say, it wasn't an electromagnet) on top of one, and a piece or iron on top of the other. I then fixed a small rod connecting the front of one car to the rear of the other. I was hoping that the magnet would exert a force of attraction on the piece of iron, and the car holding the iron, would in turn push the magnet-car ahead in an attempt to get closer to the magnet. Sadly, those lazy cars refused to move in spite of my repeated efforts at encouraging them with 'Go go ! Try harder!'.

3) 'Come come'  - Undeterred by the failure of the perpetual motion engine, I turned my attention to boomerangs. I had seen them on TV of course, and I wanted to build some for myself. So, equipped with a pair of scissors, and a few cardboard boxes, I cut out shapes that I called 'boomerangles', having recently been introduced to rectangles and triangles. I then stacked several such cut-outs using glue and rubber-bands to closely resemble what I had seen on TV. I naively believed that the laws of aerodynamics would bend themselves a little to accommodate the fancies of a 12 year old. Unyielding and exacting that they are, no such thing happened. 

With a flourish, I flung many of these boomerangs from the balcony of our fifth floor apartment, calling after them with "Come back ! come back! " Those disloyal boomerangs instead ended up landing on my neighbour's verandah, leaving him with a sizeable collection to start a museum of defunct boomerangs. I noticed that the neighbour treated those precious boomerangs of mine with far less respect than I did , for I saw him dump them into a dustbin with an expression of utter disgust, leaving me muttering 'Didn't I tell you to come back?'.

Soon after, I developed an interest in hobby electronics, and my table was converted to a junkyard of sorts, with LEDs, wires, soldering irons, resistors, alarm bells, and such like things all over the place. I built a few working, and several non working circuits, and had great fun along the way :-) More of those adventures in another post !