- My Geiger counter project is still alive, but I ordered an old telephone magneto from eBay and it just got here. Now I have to work up a scheme to transform its hand-cranked 120VAC to 900VDC in the capacitor bank. Will report back once that section of the device is in the can.
- I’ve seen these people in used bookstores and tent sales, and although I knew (vaguely) what they were doing, I hadn’t seen a detailed description of the culture. Here’s why you don’t find lots of bargains at used book sales.
- A correspondent who will remain nameless suggested that, since I’m fighting ongoing shingles pain, I should get a Colorado medical marijuana card and do a series on the Colorado weed scene. After all, an MMD is the third-closest retail establishment to my home (after Blockbuster Video and a nail shop.) Well, no. I’ll go with gabapentin. But if you’re curious about the kind of nuthouse medical marijuana has become (at least in Michigan and probably Colorado as well) read this.
- Taco sauce cleans the oxide layer off of pennies, leaving bright metal in its wake. How? We’re not entirely sure, but here’s an interesting discussion of the question–and some fun citizen science.
- The Soviet Union had a lot of hardware done and mostly tested for a lunar landing circa 1970, but it didn’t have the required launch power of a Saturn V, so the program was mothballed and the landers abandoned. (Thanks to Frank Glover begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting for the link.)
- On the same site, and in the same vein, are some photos of early Soviet snowmobiles, many of which were powered by aviation engines and air propellers rather than treads of some kind.
- This may be TMI about chicken nuggets. You judge. I’ll stick with beef.
- Here’s an interesting take on the Periodic Table, called Helix Chemica, from the 1944 book Hackh’s Chemical Dictionary. “Hackh” is a wonderful name. I think I’ll steal it.
- Our President wants a better America through science, technology, engineering, and math. A little more glue behind the Presidential Seal would be a good start.
- Ok. This is silly. But there is something wonderfully, goofily likeable about it.
- Like I predicted, people are going to be making jokes about this thing forever. I liked this one. Not only epic fail, but epic humilation. Anger is deadly.
Odd Lots
The Fox vs. Skunk Conundrum
We got hit with a skunk cloud the other night, and as I cranked windows shut it struck me: We haven’t smelled skunk in several weeks. That’s remarkable, because when we first moved here we’d get intense skunk clouds at least once every night and often twice. (Here, a “skunk cloud” is a passing front of skunk smell, distinct from getting sprayed directly.) The cloud drifts with the breeze and half an hour later it’s gone unless the night is dead calm.
We considered these a fact of life, and they were with us for the first couple of years we lived here. In the fall of 2004 a skunk gave birth to a litter of four kits in the space between our house and our neighbor’s, and we have a video of the kits cavorting and wrestling with one another probably six feet from one of the lower level windows. After that skunk clouds gradually began to get scarcer, and at just about the same time, we spotted the first red fox we’d ever seen in the neighborhood. In fact, it was the first red fox I’d ever seen in the wild in the US, anywhere. (We did see one in Surrey, England, in 2000.) In 2007 a dead skunk appeared in the gully behind our house, stinking to high heaven but also heavily chewed on. I was unaware that anything but great horned owls prey on skunks, but something clearly did this one in, and by the smell of it, the last few minutes had been quite a battle.
Back in 2008, I first saw a fox running past the house with something white in its mouth. I thought it might have been something filched from a trash can overturned by a bear, and thought no more about it. However, after that we began seeing fox running around with small white objects in their mouths on a regular basis. It was not one fox, but at least two. (Their coloring is noticeably different, as you can tell once you see the same individuals two or three times.) I couldn’t get close enough to see what the white objects were until a month or so ago, when I spotted a fox digging furiously in the side of the hill next to our stone stairway. Right beside the hole was something I immediately recognized as an ordinary chicken egg.
We’ve seen fox carrying eggs twenty times or more now, to the point where it’s unusual to see a fox trot by the house without one. Somebody in the near vicinity is obviously feeding them, since there are no chicken coops in our squeakily tony neighborhood. I’ve been finding eggshells in the gully all summer. The fox are sleek and healthy, and not nearly as skittish as they used to be.
Feeding wild animals is never a good idea, and in most places it’s against the law. I want fox to be afraid of me, and if they can’t somehow find a sustainable place in the local ecosystem, feeding them doesn’t fix the problem. I’ve even got an idea who’s doing the feeding, by tracking the fox as we track meteors: I take note of which direction they’re running when they have eggs in their mouths, and the lines all point to somewhere down toward the end of the Langdale cul-del-sac.
I might pursue it…but we don’t need the skunks here. If the fox are driving out the skunks, overall it’s a plus, and pace Woody Allen, the fox need the eggs. (I don’t know how they repel skunks, and online research hasn’t turned up much.) On the other hand, if the neighbors in question stop feeding the fox, we’ll have starving and eventually diseased fox limping around, which is sad on the surface of it, and a possible hazard to people walking small dogs. (Guess who.)
This isn’t a storybook world. Animals compete, fight, and die–far too often in my gully. There are no good answers. But at least we can leave our windows open at night.
Prayers and Squares
St. Raphael’s parish surprised Carol this past Sunday with a prayer quilt. It’s an interesting church ministry called Prayers and Squares that I’d never seen before coming to St. Raphael’s, but it’s evidently quite common and his its own Web site. It works this way: A parish’s quilters (we have several) make small quilts about 30″ by 40″. At each corner of the quilt squares is a knot with two threads about 3″ long left free. Before the quilt is presented to its recipient (often while they’re still in the hospital) it is placed at the rear of the church or in the parish hall, and people tie a knot in one of the pairs of threads while saying a prayer for the recipient. There’s enough thread so multiple knots can be tied at any given corner, and thus the quilt is never “full.”
It’s a sign to people who are in the hospital that the parish is thinking of them and that they are not alone. Carol was not in the hospital all that long, but she was touched by the gesture, and later that afternoon while she rested on our bed, she put the quilt over her. The Pack stood guard, and vowed to shred any squirrel that dared attack her. (Aero is actually in the photo, but he went undercover to Carol’s right, so as to surprise any squirrel who managed to get past the others.)
In the corner of the quilt is an insignia with Carol’s name and the date the quilt was presented.
Religion as a concept is taking a lot of flak these days for various reasons, but few recognize the force for healing and comfort that religion can be when it remains true to its purpose. Small as it is, our parish does all sorts of things that might be listed under “aid and comfort,” including a food pantry that was recognized last year as the best in the Colorado Diocese. Nobody talks it up, nobody brags. They just do it.
Carol puts the quilt over herself every night, and I suspect she will long after her illness is just a memory. Whether or not you believe in God, I think it’s always possible to believe that helping others is the highest good that we can aspire to, and an awful lot of that happens where nobody but those involved ever notice.
Odd Lots
- I’m still pretty sore from lingering shingles pain on my back, and a little grouchy in consequence, though I’m trying manfully not to show it. On the good news end, Carol is much better, and we both had cheese ravioli last night. I think it was the first meal worthy of the name that she’s had in almost two weeks.
- Anger really does make you lose: Sony has condemned “No Pressure” and completely disassociated itself from 10:10.
- From the Terms-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: milk float, a small delivery vehicle (often electric) used to deliver milk in urban England. Some photos here.
- And another from that department: steamdevil, a small vortex of condensed water vapor rising into cold air from a warm body of water like a lake or a river. This is the time of year you tend to see them, and Spaceweather posted a nice example from Wisconsin.
- I’ve always suspected that grains aren’t good for me, but here’s some analysis as to why. Your Body May Vary, but a lot of this sure sounds familiar. Note well the caution on soybeans, which give both Carol and me a lot of trouble.
- Napa’s cool summer has winemakers biting their nails: They may lose much (and perhaps all) of their harvest if a freeze comes before the grapes mature, but if they can walk the tightrope to harvest without falling, this year’s late-harvest wines (my favorite kind) could be spectacular. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- The Colorado Springs marijuana industry has made the New York Times , and has injected new life into local newspapers. I like The Independent, our quirky little free paper (its offices are in an old church with interesting architecture) and every issue I flip through down at the Black Bear Coffeehouse has another page of MMD ads. The latest issue had a 48-page pull-out supplement, devoted entirely to You Know What. The world is clearly crazier than we can imagine.
- Mars may have had not only oceans, but (c’mon, this is obvious!) also icebergs. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- Australia is about to get its first native-born Roman Catholic saint: Sister Mary Helen MacKillop, who in 1870 got a child-abuser priest removed from his position. In retaliation, friends of the priest orchestrated her excommunication, but she was exonerated in 1872. She will be canonized later this month, and I’d say she now stands fair to become the patron saint of whistleblowers.
Anger Makes You Lose
When the emails started coming in a couple of days ago, I thought it was an urban legend. I really did. (I get a lot of those here.) I went to Snopes automatically, as I always do when someone sends me an email telling me to “forward this to everyone in your address book!” Appallingly, as a single Google search showed, this time the topic was true: Well-known British director Richard Curtis (Love, Actually; Four Weddings and a Funeral) and a global warming group of some significance have created a short film showing True AGW Believers murdering those who disagree with them…including a couple of grade-school children.
The organization is 10:10. The film is “No Pressure.” I won’t post a link to the film itself here because it has been withdrawn from its original location and reposted in lots of other places. I also hesitate because if you have anything like respect for human life you will find it hideously disturbing. Seek it out at risk of nightmares, and don’t say you weren’t warned.
Quick representative summary of a scene from the film: Smug teacher is indoctrinating a group of grade schoolers about the dangers of global warming. A couple of them refuse to buy in. Teacher then pushes a button, and the dissenting kids explode into a realistic cloud of blood and guts, splattering on the walls and on their classmates.
You think I’m kidding? Then grab your barf bag and go find the movie. You won’t have to look far. (It’s on YouTube as I write this.)
No pressure. Right. Disagree with us and we’ll kill you.
This entry is not about global warming, which I’m still researching and will discuss when I’m ready. This entry is about a theme I’ve touched on here again and again over the years: Anger makes you stupid. The level of anger-driven stupidity in this case boggles the mind. To science’s sorrow, anger is now the driving force in the global warming debate. The stupidity comes in when your anger compels you to hand a cudgel to your opponents, which they will then gleefully use to bash your head in again and again and again…forever.
This is galactic-class stupidity. The film will never go away. It will become a legend, and “no pressure” will become a meme for “wanting to kill people who disagree with you.” The Right will broaden the film’s scope and cite it repeatedly as evidence that the environmentalist left is a sort of Stalinist religion that hates humanity and advocates violence against its opponents. The whole thing will inflate far past absurdity. It will tip elections and put more Republicans in power. It will reverse years of gains on environmental issues, and will make it even more difficult to entertain rational debate on any environmental topic at all.
Small price to pay for a piece of delicious tribal poo-flinging, eh?
Bottom line: Anger makes you stupid. And when you get stupid enough, you do things that make you lose.
Geiger Counter Articles from the Uranium Rush
I ran across a couple of Geiger counter circuits while preparing the Carl & Jerry books a few years back, but it wasn’t until I went looking in Google Books for other articles that I got a sense for the time period 1950-1960, when there was a certain Uranium madness in the air. At first it was about prospecting, but later on as the 50s drew to a close, it was mostly about fallout.
There were articles not only on building Geiger counters, but also reviews of commercial units and practical tips on how to search for the minerals. Sometimes it was a cover story (as with Popular Electronics for July 1955; scroll down) but mostly it was just a part of the electronics hobbyist zeitgeist in that era. There was a certain grim exuberance about it all: The evil Soviet Union was breathing gamma rays in the faces of our collective cultural consciousness, and we were ready to respond with our archetypal American can-do spirit. Some of us understood that the unspoken clause after “duck and cover” was “and die.” Most, I think, did not. (Especially naturally optimistic 11-year-olds like me who just wanted to build a cool gadget with a Geiger tube he already had.)
So below is a list of the construction articles I’ve discovered for Geiger counters in the 1950-1960 era. Many are on Google Books, and I’ve posted the circuits from a couple of the others. If you have any more not listed here, please pass along links or scans so I can add them. I’m considering a standalone Web article for my Junkbox site on building “legacy” Geiger counters based on my current experience, so whatever you have that might be relevant, please share.
- Popular Mechanics, February 1949: “How to Build a Geiger-Muller Uranium Survey Meter“. Brute force power supply consisting of three 300V batteries in series! Uses K-EX GM tube in series with headphones. No audio amp.
- Popular Mechanics, July 1950: “Uranium Survey Meter With Audio Amplifier.” Much like February 1949 PM item, plus an audio amplifier. Uses CK-1021 GM tube (others are suggested as usable) and a 3V4 battery miniature tube for audio, which requires a 1.5V filament supply and a 45V plate supply.
- Popular Science, April 1955: “Prospecting with a Geiger Counter.” Uses a CK-1026 GM tube, with HV generated by a pushbutton interrupter. 3S4 tube audio amplifier. Basically the same circuit as in Alfred Morgan’s Boys’ Second Book of Radio and Electronics.
- Popular Science, May 1955: “Super Geiger Counter You Can Build.” Ambitious circuit with six (!) GM tubes in parallel plus a 2-tube audio amplifier, and a vibrator high-voltage supply. The GM tubes are all Anton 310 units. Has an averaging count meter.
- Popular Electronics, July 1955: “Home-Built 700V Geiger Counter”. Two circuits, both using batteries (300V + 67.5V) in a simple voltage doubler. (No sparks!) One circuit has no audio amplifier, and the “deluxe” circuit has a 3S4 tube audio amp and an averaging count meter. Both use the Victoreen 75NB3 GM tube.
- Popular Electronics, June 1956: “Simple Transistorized Geiger Counters”. Calls out either a CK1026 or a Victoreen 1B85 GM tube. Three circuits: two using 300V batteries, and a third with a pushbutton interrupter for HV. Tube audio amps are replaced by transistor amps, using general-purpose devices (2N35, CK722) that are not critical.
- Popular Mechanics, March 1957: “Prospector’s Partner.” A combination 4-tube battery superhet AM radio (with canonical 1R5/1U4/1U5/3V4 lineup) using a 1B85 GM tube patched into the grid of the first audio stage. Uses a pushbutton interrupter HV supply for the GM tube; 67 1/2 V battery for the radio.
- Popular Electronics, July 1957: “Geiger Gun”. Compact gun-shaped hand-held counter counter using a CK1026 GM tube, pushbutton interruptor, and 2N107 transistor audio amp. Article is not online, but there are images of the counter as built in a junction box by someone here. (Scroll down.) Circuit is here.
- Popular Mechanics, August 1961: “Treasure Finder’s Pal.” A combination metal detector and geiger counter. Uses a CK-1026 GM tube and a CK-722 transistor oscillator into a universal output transformer to generate HV. GM tube output is patched into a transistor radio for audio amplification.
Odd Lots
- The base for the Geiger-Muller tubes used in all of the early Cold War era Victoreen counters (including both tubes now on my bench) is called a standard Peewee 3-pin, JEDEC A3-1. Many thanks to Jonathan O’Neal for sending along this link to a detailed spec sheet (PDF) for one of the tubes. Now I can wire up the counter I’m building for initial tests.
- A couple of people have suggested using a Leyden jar instead of ordinary capacitors to collect charge for my (supposedly) steampunk Geiger counter. I imagine that a Leyden jar would be more period, and it’s certainly a good excuse to build something that I saw in every single one of the kid books on electricity I read back in the early 60s. Not real portable, though.
- There is indeed an organization that helps to keep Latin functional, 2000-odd years from its original coalescence as a major world language. No psychic powers points for guessing that the organization is…the Roman Catholic Church. (Thanks to Michael Covington for the link, which, I must say ahead of things, is in…Latin.)
- And Finland just racked up a huge mess of cool points with me for being the only country in the world that broadcasts the news in Latin. (Thanks to Aki Peltonen for the link.)
- Jim Furstenberg put me on to photos of a round dozen Victorian submarines. The site looks to be a marvelously engaging time-waster, er, experience broadener. (Have done much of both in recent hours.)
- Google just announced its own URL shortener, which will do some reasonable screening against malware. I have avoided using URL shorteners for that reason until now.
- Furthermore, the new Google URL shortener will generate a QR code for you if you tack a .qr onto the end of the shortened URL.
- Amazon is creating an Android app store. Peculiar? Not if the next (or next after that) Kindle generation is more than just an ebook reader.
- I’m proud to say that my good sister Gretchen long ago declared that she is raising free-range kids. I wasn’t quite sure what she meant (Carol and I have none of our own) until I read this. Bravo! Now, can we make zero-tolerance policies in schools a felony? (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- The other day I mentioned to Carol that, with “Drumlin Circus” taking on a certain steampunk flavor (it’s certainly nothing like “Drumlin Boiler”) I would probably have to buy a top hat. Her reply: “Um…you already have a top hat.” I looked on the high shelf in the closet, and shore ’nuff! I bought it for the 1999 Coriolis Millennium Christmas Party at the Biltmore Hotel in Scottsdale. I wore it exactly once, and then forgot about it. So what’s next? Spats? Or my seriously ahead-of-the-curve Chester A. Arthur facial hair?
Daywander
I got my light-brown Clarks Natureveldts back from Resole America today, and although I may have talked about this here before, it’s worth saying again: Shoes that fit well are worth keeping, and the soles will invariably wear out before the uppers. I’ve been wearing Natureveldts as my casual everyday shoes since 1987, and they fit my fairly wide feet a lot better than anything else I’ve tried. They also wear like iron, at least if they were made before Clarks moved production to China sometime in the early oughts. I still have two pairs that go back to 1994 or so, and have replaced the soles several times, each time through Resole America. Turnaround time is about ten days, and cost is $75. Quality of the rework is superb.
I have a pair of Chinese Natureveldts on which the leather on the uppers has begun wearing through after about four years. They’re basically disposable shoes now, though not cheap ones. The fit is still good, but as with so much else, quality is no longer a choice we’re offered.
We’re also not offered the choice of buying dry-roasted peanuts without MSG in them. Safeway has five different brands, all heavily laced with neurotoxins. Oh ye who can actually eat that crap without consequences (I cannot) answer me this: Does it really make the peanuts taste better?
It’s a little disconcerting to look out your office window and see a toothy 200-pound omnivore walking down the sidewalk in front of your house. I snatched my camera out of the dock and ran out the front door, which may sound nutty, but I felt a little nutty, and followed the booger down the street, taking video as I went. He didn’t hurry and didn’t even turn around to look at me, and whereas I pondered jumping up and down and yelling “Roogie! Roogie! Whoosh!” with a Thurber accent, that would have been a little too nutty. Mostly I was happy that garbage day was yesterday.
I looked and did not find an answer to this question: When a concept exists today that did not exist in ancient Rome, are there Latin fanatics somewhere who create a Latin-ish word for it? (The French are masters at this.)
Carol’s better, the Pack is home from Jimi’s, and although my back still hurts, the weather has gone from mostly pleasant to extremely pleasant. I still need a basing diagram for the 6993 Geiger-Muller tube, but if that’s as bad as it gets, I’d call today a serious winner.
Steampunk Geiger Counter, Part 5
Size matters. Last night I swapped a different step-up transformer into my very anemic Geiger counter high voltage generator: a five-pound brick of an aviation power transformer from the early 1960s, with a 465V secondary. I put the interrupted DC into the 5V rectifier filament winding for maximum turns ratio, and then started pumping the buttom.
Way better! Thirty or forty presses got spark every time, and took the voltage across the accumulator capacitor (.5 MFD @ 600V) up to about 620V. That’s not the 700V called out for the Geiger tubes I have, but I think it’ll be plenty to detect the occasional hapless gamma. One problem I knew I would have is that the capacitor leaks charge far too quickly: In about six seconds, the voltage goes down to 300V. Without more stored charge, I’d be pumping the button (or spinning the rotary interrupter, assuming it works) pretty much constantly.
I ducked over to OEM Parts on my Monday errands wander to peruse their capacitor collection, and picked up a couple of new 1.5 MFD @ 630V caps. Two in parallel provide 3 MFD, which keeps its charge long enough to be useful, assuming the Geiger tube will still conduct with only 400 volts on it. I also turned one of the spark gap electrodes around (see macro shot above) so that the gap is between a point and a flat face. The gap became reliably unidirectional after that, and there were no more sparks on make, but only on break.
Next I tried lashing up the full Geiger counter circuit, with the signal from the tube going into a 2-stage tube speaker amp that I built fifteen years ago. Problems came up immediately:
- My 525V DC supply (which I haven’t powered up in almost 20 years) has a bad filter cap, so if there are detector pulses, they’re drowned in the AC buzz. No huge problem, as I can now run the Geiger tube off the pure DC in the larger accumulator cap. (That’s tomorrow night’s project.)
- I don’t have a reliable pinout for the Geiger tube. Weirdly, none of the articles in the old magazines show a basing diagram, which is three pins in an odd arrangement on a 5/8″ base. One of the three pins goes to the metal shell, as determined via ohmmeter. I’m assuming that the center electrode is the “lonely” pin, and the third pin goes to the conductive inner surface of the tube. Interestingly, in the junkbox socket I found, the two “close” pins were wired together. I sense some cut-and-try in my immediate future.
- I may or may not have a radioactive sample to test it with. I dug my grandfather’s 1953 gold retirement watch out of the curio cabinet, only to find (in defiance of memory) that it did not have a radium dial. My other possible sample is an 0A2WA gas regulator tube, which is salted with .03 microcurie of Krypton-85 to ensure immediate startup. Sounds great–except that the half-life of Kr-85 is 10.7 years. The tube was manufactured in 1962, which is 4.5 half lives ago. Unless I’m doing the math wrong, that means that only 4% or so of the Kr-85 is still in there throwing particles.
Of course, I can pull one of the smoke detectors off the ceiling and try that, but there’s a more intriguing possibility: WWII aircraft equipment meter faces often had radium markings, which are still radioactive even if they no longer glow in the dark. I have three or four old military panel meters from that era, and if I can find them, they may still be active enough to come up out of the background noise.
Assuming that at least one of my two Geiger tubes is good, I’d say we’re getting close.
Steampunk Geiger Counter, Part 4
Sparks. Let’s talk about sparks. Last night I finally got things lashed up sufficiently to see whether I could translate three volts–a pair of C cells–to the neighborhood of 600 volts, using an old 25,000 ohm : 3.2 ohm output transformer and a spark gap. Got sparks. Didn’t get 600V. (Got about 350 at best) Drained the batteries pretty quickly.
Nonetheless, it was a fascinating experiment, in a technological backwater I’ve never really messed with before. In summary: Put a pulse of current through the low-impedence winding of an output transformer, and a pulse of high voltage (compared to the input voltage) will appear across the transformer’s high-impedence winding. Rectify the pulses, and you can accumulate voltage in a good, high-value low-leakage capacitor.
One way to rectify the pulses is to send them through a spark gap. The air gap breaks down against sufficiently high voltage and current passes one way across the gap. Put a cap in series with the spark gap and it will store a certain amount of charge each time the spark jumps.
At least, that’s how it works in theory. In practice, with a very high resistance voltmeter across the capacitor, I saw two phenomena I wasn’t expecting:
- About half the time, I get sparks on both a make pulse and a break pulse. (Ordinarily you only expect a spark on the break pulse.) If both make and break generate a spark, a pulse jumps the gap in the opposite direction as the pulse that preceded it. This means that the charge placed across the capacitor is then of the opposite polarity, which drains the cap by about as much energy as the previous pulse placed in it. Tinkering with the gap spacing didn’t help, though the effect happened more often with a higher voltage (>6VDC) into the transformer.
- Eventually, the spark refuses to jump. It looks to me like accumulating a certain voltage on the cap bucks the spark gap and makes it harder to jump with the same pulse from the output transformer. And of course, once the spark ceases to jump, voltage on the capacitor ceases to rise.
With my lashup, once voltage got to about 320, there were no more sparks, with about .003″ across the gap. Putting a stronger current source across the input didn’t help. I was eventually pulsing 12.6VDC from my 30 amp linear bench supply, which heated up the poor transformer pretty badly but didn’t give me any more voltage across the cap. Now, 320V may be enough to get conduction through a Geiger tube (I’ll find out shortly) but the articles I’ve read suggest 600-900V, and seem to think that this can be had from a couple of C cells and a spark gap.
I did better placing a husky 1000 PIV 1N5408 silicon rectifier diode across the spark gap. The charge went up and only up (because current reliably passes only one way through a rectifier diode) but it still topped out at about 350V. I suspect that that limit may be inherent in the relatively small output transformer I’m using, and when time allows I’m going to troll the collection for the largest one I have and swap it in.
Now, a steampunk mad scientist never runs out of #40 copper wire and thinks nothing of winding his own transformers, so if that’s the secret, a steampunk Geiger counter remains a possibility. However, I’m beginning to wonder how well I can achieve the steampunk ideal (no active devices) with only what I have lying around. Winding my own step-up transformer is just on the other side of what I’m willing to do.
The next step is making sure my two Geiger tubes are good by lashing them up to my 525V DC supply and exposing them to a (mildly) radioactive gas rectifier tube. Don’t know yet when I’ll be able to do that (real work has been piling up this week with the two of us trying to recuperate) but I’ll continue the series here as time permits.
