Posted on 04/29/2003 6:10:50 PM PDT by mhking
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By ERIC FRY
JUNEAU EMPIRE © 2003
Touch anything, just walk past anything in Dick and Peggie Garrison's Highland Avenue home, and it's likely to move if it isn't in motion already.
Dick Garrison, a musician and former businessman and movie sound man, is fascinated by electronics and mechanics.
"He was born that way and will probably die that way," said Peggie, who still retains a lilt in her voice from her native Ireland. "We have push-button drapes and a push-button fireplace."
Stay long enough with the hospitable Garrisons and you'll see little toy cars spinning around a plastic plate on the kitchen table (there's a big magnet built into the table), hear a toy monkey chatter or watch home-made lightning cause unplugged fluorescent bulbs to glow (don't even ask).
"This is an electronic nuthouse," Garrison, 79, said. "Everything is radio-controlled."
Well, not everything. Just ask, and Garrison will pick up his trombone, turn on his music system and play along with the jazz - the floor-to-ceiling speaker reverberating and emanating colored lights.
Garrison, who came to Juneau from Seattle in 1941 with the Army Signal Corps, helped install a faster IBM teletype communication system here and in Adak. At that time, the only contact with the outside world was through teletype - typewriters that receive radio signals.
About 6,000 people lived in Juneau in 1941. Another 25,000 to 30,000 troops were camped in the Mendenhall Valley, then mostly farmland, Garrison said.
Garrison, a music graduate of the University of Washington, played the trombone five nights a week at the USO dance hall, once rehearsing with the little-known Debbie Reynolds and Brenda Lee.
In college, he thought he might make a career out of music. "But boy it's good I didn't, because I would have starved," he said, thinking of the competition. He was, however, one of the original musicians in the Juneau Symphony and played in nightclubs here.
"See these two trombones there?" Garrison said in a recent interview. "I tell people I play in stereo."
Garrison was born a tinkerer. While in Adak in the Aleutians, he cashed in on his talents by fixing several hundred watches from the Third Fleet. It paid for his first house in Juneau, he said.
Garrison has owned a number of businesses here, including a music shop.
As a sideline, "I bought a whole bunch of jukeboxes, and I put them in 11 cathouses," at a time when prostitution was legal in Alaska. "Sometimes they had a customer, and I had to go in the back door."
Garrison also owned a furniture store, bars, apartments and land. He retired at age 44 and hasn't had a problem with boredom. He and Peggie travel on cruise ships, so they can dance in ballroom contests.
Dick and Peggie have been married for 42 years.
"He was a patient, I was a nurse," Peggie said. "And we met and got married and lived happily ever after like a cheap melodrama."
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he served as a sound man for Chuck Keen, a local businessman and filmmaker. Keen and Garrison sometimes hosted in Juneau the stars they worked with, such as Tab Hunter and Cesar Romero. They worked with John Wayne on a documentary about communism.
Garrison said he didn't make money working with Keen, "but I tell everybody I got a million-dollar education and experience I wouldn't trade for all the tea in China."
Garrison has two workshops on the ground floor of his house. One is a small room lined with tools and materials. About 170 boxes are marked with items such as "ballast transformers" and "pressure relief valves." There are drawers of jewelry parts. A thousand clock hands fill a cigar box. Eight tape dispensers are lined up on a metal chest of drawers. Jars are nailed by their lids to the door frame.
"How'd you like to take inventory here? In this place here I can do anything. I never have to go to a hardware store or electric store," he said.
The other work room holds the toy robots, clocks and half-million-volt Tesla coil lightning machine. "Something you very seldom see," he said, perhaps unnecessarily.
Turned on, the machine emits little, crackling lightning bolts, and a nearby row of unplugged fluorescent bulbs lights up.
Walk into one of the garages and mechanical, caged birds sing, colored globes twirl and a red laser light draws ropes on the wall. It's all triggered by a motion detector.
Garrison said he has two patents - for a blinking flashlight and an oyster knife - from which he's never made a nickel.
It's not that the light from the flashlight's bulb blinked - what's the use of that? It was the body of the flashlight that blinked, so you could find it in the dark.
Eric Fry can be reached at efry@juneauempire.com.
Don't let the Druids see that during fertility rites.
Yeah, but not many of us have 750,000 volt power lines coming into our homes. Since we are limited to 250 volts, we'd need 3000 amps.
1 MV = 1,000,000 volts. That ain't what I call very low voltage!!
a background noise that you couldn't hear (hard to explain it) and just the feeling that something very big was hovering overhead.
I would think that 1MV to 25.5MV would cause a "hum" that you could "feel".
A few years ago there was a thread here on Free Republic about Tesla. Apparently, the Tesla part of the Smithsonian was going to be dismantled and closed. (Un-freaking-believable, no?)
Anyways, my older boy was looking for a subject for his grad project and I suggested Tesla. He did all the research and produced an incredible VHS biography about Tesla. He also ended up getting the highest possible grade for his graduation project.
That "Tesla" is not a household name boggles the mind.
Oh my jlogajan.....
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Well, he called me down, then gave me a 2nd chance but I had to keep on with the Voltz or volts or votes.
Who art thou, who is so wise in the ways of science?
Baghdad Bob
Van de Graff generators -- you can make them at home too. First you need a big sphere. Your maximum surface-to-air breakdown voltage is determined by diameter -- about 35,000 volts per inch of diameter. So to reach a million volts you need about a 30 inch sphere.
Next, since surface-to-surface breakdown voltage is about 20,000 volts per inch, you need your sphere up on an insulated post at least 50 inches above preferably flat or smoothly curved base surfaces.
A PVC pipe would make a good pole. Big spheres could be foil covered styrofoam -- whatever. It doesn't have to be strong, just have a conducting surface.
Finally inside the pole you need a rotating belt to carry the charge. The belt is non-conducting rubber, like neopreme. At the base you spray charge onto the belt with a small comb or tuft of wire. You can boost this with a high voltage source -- but smaller units just use a non-conducting pulley and the action between the pulley and the belt causes the tuft of wire which is hooked to ground, to spray a charge on the belt.
Up at the top, the pulley is typically metal. The tuft of wire is hooked to the sphere surface. Charges always seek the surface, so when the charge on the belt approaches the tuft or comb, it jumps to the comb and flows to the surface.
The belt will keep transporting charge to the sphere until the breakdown voltage is reached or leakage on the sphere matches the rate of current delivered.
Since sphere size and smoothness determine breakdown voltage and leakage, it is the sphere physical dimension that determines the ultimate voltage it can store -- the belt system only determines how fast it can reach that voltage.
They all come out of the same wire anyway.
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