The Tale of the Would-be Electromagnet

[jamesq]

When I was a kid, I was in Cub Scouts. That means this all took place sometime between the ages of eight and ten. Call it 1976.

One of the other kids, a little asshole named Darwin, was showing off a project to the group, an electromagnet that he'd made for a merit badge. It was actually modelled physically after one of those big junk yard cranes you see in the movies. You know, something like this:


It had a lantern battery in the main compartment. The crane part was articulated, and the magnet could go up and down on a little line. It looked like model, was fully functional, was painted up really cool, and there was no way on Earth Darwin had done it by himself. I suspect his dad did it while he "helped" by fetching the occasional beer.

I went away thinking it was deeply cool. And I wanted to make one too. I wasn't too keen on all the model building, I just wanted something functional. I also wanted something a lot stronger.



I figured 120V wall current would make a magnet ten times more powerful than a 12V battery. There was only one problem with my reasoning. At no point had I learned that direct current was different from alternating current. Hell, at nine, I might not have even known that AC vs. DC even existed. It was all just electricity.

The Cub Scout manual had directions for making an electromagnet (basically, wrap wire around a handy chunk of metal and run current through it. Those instructions weren't anywhere near as sophisticated as these ones were. We had a lot of junk around the house, since we were pretty white trash. I needed a metal pole, a way to plug into the wall, and some insulated wire. I solved the last two items by taking an extension cord, cutting off the female end and then splitting it down the middle so that there were two insulated wires running out of the prong, ending in two severed wires. I attached the two ends to each other and wrapped it up with electrical tape. I didn't want to get zapped after all.

So now I have a cord that will do nothing but run current from one prong to the other. I wrapped it around the metal pole from my brother's weightlifting kit. It looked like the bolt in those instructions above, except the thing was a yard long.

I put some nails on the ground to test it, and I plugged it in. Several things happened more or less simultaneously.

• I short out the receptacle with a loud BANG and some smoke.
  
• The fuse in the fusebox trips, plunging the room into mild darkness. It was the afternoon, so there was still light coming in through the windows.
  
• The pipe I was holding became instantly too hot to hold and I dropped it.

I flipped the fuse back and discovered that the wall receptacle had scorching marks on the bottom. The lower port never worked again. The upper one seemed unaffected, but a wise man would have not trusted it. And I had the wisdom of a nine-year old.

I dropped the experiment though, because to seek help would expose my experiment to my dad, who would have likely whipped my ass (it was the 70s). So I never got my electricity merit badge.

It wasn't until years later that I figured out what I did wrong. Working with electricity when I didn't have a fucking clue? Ok, the two things I did wrong, that and the fact that AC and DC were different things.

When my buddy garething got into the electrical apprenticeship program, I asked him to help me with some wiring things in the house, and he swapped out the damaged-for-nearly-thirty-years receptacle, and also saw some other horrifying electricity-related things I did in the house. In return for this favour, he made me promise never to fuck around with wiring ever again.