How to write up and experiment!

GuanYin

Oh, if only I had the guts to do something like this.

Anyone else ever work with germanium?

(Que Captain Google)

Capt'n Midnight

From the "The Invention That Changed The world" - Robert Buderi (1996)
ISBN 0 349 11068 9

Paragraph about Herbert W. B. Skinner of Bristol University. P317 another researcher into semiconductor resistance.

"Everything about him was untidy",Robinson remembered. "His suit was unpressed and he had a filthy pipe, and he dropped tobacco all over himself and everythig he was doing."
But Skinner knew the barrier layer, the layer of impedance that formed when the cat's whisker touched the crystal and in which lay another key to the later solid-state revolution. He demonstrated a hands-on, intimate knowledge - one of the byproducts of Rutherford's insistance that his boys do thier own dirty work. After the British radar effort moved from Dundee to Worth Matravers theat May and became the Telecomunications Research Establishment, Skinner would sit in his laborartory hour after hour making microwave detectors from silicon or galena. These he would seal , whiskers and all in quartz tues that he would blow himself, and then tap with a knife until the sensitive crystal settled into what was hopefully its optimum mechanical and electrical state. Skinner measured the resistance with a standard meter. When the value was five times the greater in one direction than the other, he carefully put it aside and said: That one's all right, nobody touch it." Similarily, Skinner wouldn't anyone clean off his knife. "No, no, no don't touch that knife, that's perfect - it's momentum is just right". Meanwhile, the room filled with his nicotine.

The book skips over a lot of the early development of Radar and focuses mainly on the US part of it. But there is a lot of step by step detail about were and how the whole semiconductor revolution came from - and reading it totally debunks any claim that the technology came from Aliens.

echomadman

Banking on my hopes that whoever grades this will just look at the pictures, I drew an exponential through my noise.

rofl, that reminds me of doing electronics labs on friday mornings with blinding hangovers

Capt'n Midnight

I remember a tale from way way back where some postgrads were earning money by doing graphs for some professor or other (before PC's were available) and one of them used to put a little spike in the graph "cos yer man loves these".