Reminiscing When I was a kid I loved chemistry sets, building sets and even magic sets. Looking back on those days I realize how innocent I was. I had no worries compared to the worries we get as adults. The things I thought were important I have grown beyond. Life has changed too since I was young and I notice it more than younger people because it is so much more different now than it was when I was young. Much of the stuff we have today didn’t even exist when I was a kid. The types of places which fascinated me when I was young were places where you could buy things scientific or electrical. When I became a teenager, I made sure I had a subscription to Popular Electronics. Popular Electronics went from the most popular electronics magazine to going out of business in 1999. The world had changed and I suspect a lot of those people who subscribed to the magazine had gone over to computers. I say this because I noticed computer magazines became very popular, especially those which included a disk with free programs on it. I liked those magazines very much for a while, but found after time, they didn’t have much to offer anymore. Many magazines were put out of business by the internet because people were able to find out what they wanted to know for free there. I used to also like catalogs. Certain catalogs fascinated me more than others. I loved the catalog from Edmond’s Scientific Company. Once I purchased a heavy wallpaper with a photo of the Columbia space shuttle on it and it still adorns one entire wall in my den. I also had bought many odds and ends from that company. I was really into astronomy for many years and subscribed to Sky and Telescope magazine along with Astronomy magazine. I had a couple of small telescopes as a kid and as I got older, I purchased a 6 inch reflecting telescope which just wetted my appetite for something bigger. One day I took the bull by the horns when I was in my 30s and had a custom scope built by professionals and I built a shed with a removable roof in my yard for the scope. It took a full year for them to build my scope, but I enjoyed it for many years. It was a 12.5 inch reflector. It weighed several hundred pounds but was on wheels. After about 20 years I sold it to someone who had come up from the south to buy it. By that time there were telescopes actually online which you could use. Another catalog I liked was from a kit company. When I was a teenager there were kit companies which sold televisions, you could build. Today that would be laughed at. The selling point was they were rated very highly. There was a problem however, and that was most people would fail assembling them. One of the problems was soldering the wires and board. While a connection might look correct, it would not always be soldered correctly. Another problem was from time to time some of the capacitors and resistors were defective and the builders of the kit never suspected this. The people who put the kits out would fix the problems but it would cost you and wasn’t cheap. That is why these kits made no sense. Today televisions are different and most circuit boards. When I was younger, I loved chemistry sets and when I think about them, I realize today much of the stuff in them would not be allowed. First of all, some of the ingredients were probably poison. Fire was needed for some of the experiments. When chemistry sets first came out they had things in them like sodium cyanide and some even had uranium dust, can you believe it? Some of the sets could produce explosions and fires. Chemistry sets for children became popular in the late 1800s. That was at a time when people didn’t realize the danger in medicines and such. Some medicines became known as snake oil, meaning they had unknown ingredients in them yet people would take it. I loved the Erector Set. That toy had come out in 1911 at the New York City toy fair. You could build so many cool things with it. After the introduction, motors started to appear which could be attached to your creations. You could build elevators and cranes, or anything else you might think of that needed a motor such as an electric car. Of course, you were limited by the length of the wire since the early motors required you to plug them into a wall socket. Today some sets come with a battery pack and high torque motor giving your creations a lot more mobility. There were places which looked like large warehouses which sold every electrical part imaginable in the old days and it is amazing to me even today how the parts clerk knew all the parts. This was before printed circuits, and in the days of tubes. Some people actually had tube testers at home like my uncle and when something would stop working that had tubes like a television or radio, he would take the tubes out one at a time and test them and if he found a bad one, he would go to that huge parts warehouse and purchase a new tube. It is kind of strange today that some people feel the sound is better from a tube amplifier than a solid state one. When I think about the magic sets, they were really cheesy. There was usually the coin trick where you would put a penny into a thin wooden box and it would disappear, but really it was just pushed to the side by a slide. You also usually had cups and balls with instructions, a wand and a few tricks with paper. You could buy a cheap magic set in those days for a dollar, but that dollar was worth ten or more today. No matter how cheesy the sets were, the kids always loved them and one of the most popular components was the deck of cards which might have been marked. Today kids are not into this stuff the way they were in my day. We can thank the computer games for that. It seems to me we need more brain activity than just senselessly killing things all day long. I know not all games are like this, but many of them are and one has to wonder if this is desensitizing our children?
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