[time-nuts] Digital Clock kit - no Integrated circuits!

[J. Forster]

As an undergraduate at a technical school, there were guys who were
utterly hardware clueless in the dorms. The roomie of a friend was such a
guy.

Over winter vacation, I took his GE clock appart and flipped the magnet
structure over so it would run backwards.

He came back, dug out some EE books (he was a high honors student) and
studied them for a while. Then he said Aha!, unplugged the clock from the
wall and got a pair of scissors and some tape, and cut the line cord,
swapped and spliced the wires, and plugged it back in.

When it still ran backwards, he was very, very puzzled. Needless to say,
my buddies and I who had watched this nearly died laughing.

I swear this story is 100 % true. Maybe he had the last laugh though. He
wound up running a huge agency in DC.

-John

==============



>
> phk at phk.freebsd.dk said:
>> That is what was known as a "synchronous clock".  Tom has one running
>> off his atoms on his web-page...
>
> When I was a kid, I took apart my share of clocks and/or clock radios.
>
> They all had the same basic mechanism.  It was a shaded pole motor with a
> semi sealed unit that included the first layer of gears.  I never took
> apart
> one of the units.  I assume the rotor had a permanent magnet so it would
> run
> synchronous to the line frequency.
>
> That was 50 years ago.
>
>
> --
> These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's.  I hate spam.
>
>
>
>
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