Posted on 09/19/2015 5:51:43 AM PDT by 1010RD
I have something in common with Ahmed Mohamed: as a youngster, I was also an electronics enthusiast. At his age and even earlier, I frequently took apart electronic devices – anything from my own toys, to broken things around the house, and even that dirty garbage-picked black and white TV my parents dragged home that they knew I’d have a blast playing with (I did.) I’d try and troubleshoot, repair, or sometimes just disassemble things and salvage components for future projects. I’d try and imagine how all those bits and pieces, lengths of wires, mazes of conductive circuit board traces all came together to produce an image, or a sound, or some other useful function. I wanted to know how it all worked.
Without dating myself – fast forward a bunch of years, and I’m the same way. I’ve even picked up an engineering degree over the course of those years. I don’t have to only imagine how things work anymore, I have a pretty good understanding now. When shopping for electronic devices, my first instinct is to see if there’s a way to build one myself (and, I frequently do!) When something of mine breaks, I don’t send it back, I take it as a personal challenge to get it working again. If I fail, I still salvage useful parts – they might come in handy to fix something else later. This aspect of myself – being both methodical, and curious – hasn’t changed a bit over the years.
So, this story about a 14 year old boy in Texas that was arrested on suspicion of creating a bomb hoax (who, apparently just wanted to show off his latest electronics project to his teachers) that has blown up (no pun intended) all over the news and social media, caught my attention immediately. Not because of his race, or his religion, the seeming absurdity of the situation, the emotionally charged photo of a young boy in a NASA t-shirt being led off in hand cuffs, the hash tags, the presidential response… no, none of that. I’m an electronics geek. I was interested in the clock! I wanted to figure out what he had come up with.
I found the highest resolution photograph of the clock I could. Instantly, I was disappointed. Somewhere in all of this – there has indeed been a hoax. Ahmed Mohamed didn’t invent his own alarm clock. He didn’t even build a clock. Now, before I go on and get accused of attacking a 14 year old kid who’s already been through enough, let me explain my purpose. I don’t want to just dissect the clock. I want to dissect our reaction as a society to the situation. Part of that is the knee-jerk responses we’re all so quick to make without facts. So, before you scroll down and leave me angry comments, please continue to the end (or not – prove my point, and miss the point, entirely!)
For starters, one glance at the printed circuit board in the photo, and I knew we were looking at mid-to-late 1970s vintage electronics. Surely you’ve seen a modern circuit board, with metallic traces leading all over to the various components like an electronic spider’s web. You’ll notice right away the highly accurate spacing, straightness of the lines, consistency of the patterns. That’s because we design things on computers nowadays, and computers assist in routing these lines. Take a look at the board in Ahmed’s clock. It almost looks hand-drawn, right? That’s because it probably was. Computer aided design was in its infancy in the 70s. This is how simple, low cost items (like an alarm clock) were designed. Today, even a budding beginner is going to get some computer aided assistance – in fact they’ll probably start there, learning by simulating designs before building them. You can even simulate or lay out a board with free apps on your phone or tablet. A modern hobbyist usually wouldn’t be bothered with the outdated design techniques. There’s also silk screening on the board. An “M” logo, “C-94” (probably, a part number – C might even stand for “clock”), and what looks like an American flag. More about that in a minute. Point for now being, a hobbyist wouldn’t silk screen logos and part numbers on their home made creation. It’s pretty safe to say already we’re looking at ’70s tech, mass produced in a factory.
So I turned to eBay, searching for vintage alarm clocks. It only took a minute to locate Ahmed’s clock. See this eBay listing, up at the time of this writing. Amhed’s clock was invented, and built, by Micronta, a Radio Shack subsidary. Catalog number 63 756.
The shape and design is a dead give away. The large screen. The buttons on the front laid out horizontally would have been on a separate board – a large snooze button, four control buttons, and two switches to turn the alarm on and off, and choose two brightness levels. A second board inside would have contained the actual “brains” of the unit. The clock features a 9v battery back-up, and a switch on the rear allows the owner to choose between 12 and 24 hour time. (Features like a battery back-up, and a 24 hour time selection seems awful superfluous for a hobby project, don’t you think?) Oh, and about that “M” logo on the circuit board mentioned above? Micronta.
For one last bit of confirmation, I located the pencil box Ahmed used for his project. During this video interview he again claims it was his “invention” and that he “made” the device – but the important thing at the moment, at 1:13, we see him showing the pencil box on his computer screen. Here it is on Amazon, where it’s clearly labeled as being 8.25 inches wide. Our eBay seller also conveniently took a photo of the clock next to a ruler to show it’s scale – about 8 inches wide. The dimensions all line up perfectly.
So there you have it folks, Ahmed Mohamad did not invent, nor build a clock. He took apart an existing clock, and transplanted the guts into a pencil box, and claimed it was his own creation. It all seems really fishy to me.
If we accept the story about “inventing” an alarm clock is made up, as I think I’ve made a pretty good case for, it’s fair to wonder what other parts of the story might be made up, not reported factually by the media, or at least, exaggerated.
I refer back again to this YouTube video interview with Ahmed. He explains that he closed up the box with a piece of cord because he didn’t want it to look suspicious. I’m curious, why would “looking suspicious” have even crossed his mind before this whole event unfolded, if he was truly showing off a hobby project, something so innocuous as an alarm clock. Why did he choose a pencil box, one that looks like a miniature briefcase no less, as an enclosure for a clock? It’s awful hard to see the clock with the case closed. On the other hand, with the case open, it’s awful dangerous to have an exposed power transformer sitting near the snooze button (unless, perhaps his invention was to stop serial-snooze-button pressers by giving them a dangerous electrical shock!)
So again, I’m pointing all this out – about the specifics of the clock – not to pick on the poor kid. I’m picking on us, our culture, and our media. I don’t even care about the clock itself at this point.
If we stop and think – was it really such a ridiculous reaction from the teacher and the police in the first place? How many school shootings and incidents of violence have we had, where we hear afterwards “this could have been prevented, if only we paid more attention to the signs!” Teachers are taught to be suspicious and vigilant. Ahmed wasn’t accused of making a bomb – he was accused of making a look-alike, a hoax. And be honest with yourself, a big red digital display with a bunch of loose wires in a brief-case looking box is awful like a Hollywood-style representation of a bomb. Everyone jumped to play the race and religion cards and try and paint the teachers and police as idiots and bigots, but in my mind, they were probably acting responsibly and erring on the side of caution to protect the rest of their students, just in case. “This wouldn’t have happened if Ahmed were white,” they say. We’re supposed to be sensitive to school violence, but apparently religious and racial sensitivity trumps that. At least we have another clue about how the sensitivity and moral outrage pecking order lies.
Because, is it possible, that maybe, just maybe, this was actually a hoax bomb? A silly prank that was taken the wrong way? That the media then ran with, and everyone else got carried away? Maybe there wasn’t even any racial or religious bias on the parts of the teachers and police.
I don’t know any of these things. But I’m intellectually mature enough to admit I don’t know, and to also be OK with that. I don’t feel a need to take the first exist to conclusionville. But I do like to find facts where I can, and prefer to let them lead me to conclusions, rather than a knee jerk judgement based on a headline or sound bite.
I think the whole event – and our collective response, with everybody up to the President chiming in, says a whole lot about us. We don’t care that none of us were there and knows what happened, we jump to conclusions and assume we’re experts. We care about the story, but we don’t care about the actual facts. Headlines and click-bait are far more interesting than thinking for ourselves. We like to point out other any bit of perceived injustice or discrimination we can find – it’s practically a new national past-time. We like playing victim, and we like talking about victims – so much so we sometimes find victims where none really existed. We also like to find somebody to blame, even when there’s nobody at fault. We like to play social justice warrior on our Facebooks and Twitters, posting memes and headlines without digging in behind the sensationalism, winning bonus sensitivity points in the forms of likes and re-tweets. Once group-think kicks in, we rally around hash tags and start shouting moral outrage in a deafeningly loud national chorus. The media plays us like a fiddle, and we don’t even notice we’ve all been had.
As for me, I’m glad to apply the lessons I’ve learned as an electronics enthusiast to other aspects of life. There’s no emotion in troubleshooting a circuit, electricity doesn’t have morals. There’s just physics, and logic, and methodology. I think we could all benefit from applying a little more of that sort of thinking to these situations.
* Correction: A reader and commenter, Joe Donaldson, tracked down the clock in a Radio Shack catalog dated 1986. It’s likely that my guess of mid-to-late 70s was off by a bit, and it’s now obvious it was a model that was for sale in the mid 80s. Though it doesn’t really change the point, I want to post this correction here for accuracy sake and thank Joe for the heads up. (See the comment here, with link to the catalog page.)
I noticed the ribbon cable and the battery backup right off, too.
I had my doubts as to him “building” it and this article shows that and the video backs it up.
I took a couple clocks apart after they failed, but never came up wit the idea of putting one in a case and taking it to school.
Bizarre.
More like America: Kiss the a$$ of the immigrant. Why is this POS here in the US?
I will add...
Either he doesn’t know what a patent is or what invent means, or he’s a bald faced liar.
Being that he is 14 years old, I’m going with liar. He and the president have that in common.
This is amazing & a great post. Good for you and great that you took the time to do this...bet you had fun too. Glaringly obvious the lack of common sense in MSN and liberal society. You really should send your article to media...this information needs to be reported in MHO. I didn’t have a clue when this story broke, not engineering minded like yourself. I have parts left over when I mess with stuff and have no idea why or where. :p
But I do feel I have a healthy dose of commom sense. My first thought was why put a clock in a brief case? That doesn’t make any sense. Just sayin’.
I already said as much here in a recent post two days ago. As soon as I saw the circuit board I knew that this kid had not created anything. I suspected Exactly what this article has proved and I stated it.
http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/catalogs/1986_small/
Page 149.
I believe the Author of the article transposed a couple a numbers and the real RS part number is 63-765
A big thanks to Anthony for writing this article. We at FR have very educated and experienced people with many skills in many areas.
To have them take the time to explain how things work is a blessing for those of us who don’t know electronics, etc.
I wonder how many newspapers and TV/radio stations/networks are going to find, read and present to their readers and listeners what he has written.
Right now I’m thinking about ZERO, even most of the conservative ones whose news gathering/dissecting abilities seem to be on a summer’s mental hold.
I had a long discussion on FR concerning how Trump should have replied to the man in the New Hampshire audience who said that Obama was a Muslim, etc.
My position was that if the man had made the statement as his opinion, things would have been fine, but he made a declarative statement as though he knew what he was saying was the “truth”, not his opinion. That is where the danger lies for conservative candidates and even elected officials.
You will be sandbagged from all sides and you need to be ready to sink those unannounced opinion statements at the start.
In the case of little Achmed Mohammed, serious conservative writers should consult electronics experts such as Anthony to get some real background on the device in question, before making declarative or unsubstantiated characterizations of the boy and the device. Their reputation for accuracy rests on this type of professionalism.
The first rule of journalism is to always wait 24 hours to allow the smoke of an event to clear but making statements that will come back to bite you in the ass.
Long-time Communist sympathizer writer Mark Lane’s book “Rush to Judgment” on the JFK assassination, got away with his wildly off target claims about a conspiracy to kill the president, because people needed a lot of time to read the Warren Commission Report/Summary, which debunked Lane’s fantasies.
We cannot allow that kind of “rush to judgment” mentally cloud our thinking and investigative reporting.
“Accuracy” is what will help us win in the present and in the future. Make one major mistake (or even a minor one), and the leftist media will crucify you like ISIS does to Christians they capture.
So, thank you Anthony. You have put sanity, knowledge and the need for a clear look at events back into the question of how the media reacts to events, how the President is such a leftist media vulture, and how gullible too many Americans are on all sides of the political spectrum.
If Leonard Nimoy, “Mr. Spock”, were still alive, he would say about Anthony’s article, “That is Logical”.
Just because it was listed in a 1986 catalog does not mean that the kit was first created in 1986. It could still be inventory that was produced in the late 70s.
Growing up as a kid in the early 70s, I saw plenty of model kits at K-Mart that were from the mid-60s.
Do kids even wear wristwatches these days? I thought they all had cellphones (which have built in clocks).
All of the kid’s defenders should try bringing similar ‘clocks’ onto airplanes and see what TSA thinks of their engineering designs. < /sarcasm >
Mr. Obama knows all about the Emperor's New Clothes.
I think you are right about the guy in Trumps audience saying it was his opinion.
But I also think he could of said “Obama is not a Muslim ....he just plays one on TV.”
most assertions if couched in qualifiers become more easily acceptable....
For anyone who wants to try it here’s an identify which is a bomb and which is not thread. I’d like to see if some of the freepers who say the teacher was stupid to see if they can pass it.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3338996/posts
Countdown clock to Yom Kippur...
True. And to your point why does mo Ham Head need a very ungainly time piece that he carries around in a container the size of a lunchbox when he probably has a cellphone? And why plug it in while in English class?
Did he ask for a seatbelt extender and if he could change seats as well?
Obama is not a Muslim. He just plays one on the World Stage.
From the same cloth.
Did you build that in the kitchen of your mom?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.