Classic Terman (and Termen!)

[NewYorkDave]

Network Theory, Filters, and Equalizers, three large PDFs together in a 7Meg zip file. If theory intimidates you, do us both a favor and save my bandwidth :wink:

If you prefer lighter reading, here's a 1Meg zip that contains the following nuggets:

Note on a Cause of Residual Hum in Rectifier-Filter Systems
Some Possibilities for Low Loss Coils
Note on Variations in the Amplification Factor of Triodes

Enjoy

 

[bcarso]

Ah the days when men were men, and resistors had a lot more wiggles!

 

[PRR]

I think every EE student 1935 to 1975 owned a copy of Terman (usually also Millman and Seely). Whenever an old EE dies around here, I find a Terman in the box of books at the curb. Western Electric Library's copy of the 1955 is near my elbow.

Terman studied under Vannevar Bush and taught some guys named Hewlett and Packard. He also let some empty Stanford land in Palo Alto be used as an industrial park. H and P moved in, then Terman went after that guy Shockley. (Which says some about why semiconductors entered Terman's Radio Engineering book early and strongly.... he needed the rent.)

 

[NewYorkDave]

I pictured most everyone here looking at that subject line and saying, "Like, dude, who's Terman?" But I knew that you would know.

Radio Engineer's Handbook and Electronic and Radio Engineering occupy places of honor on my bookshelf.

 

[bcarso]

I have several editions :grin:, and some duplicates of some of those.

For a while I confused Fred Emmons with Louis M. Terman, the IQ man. Thanks to Google a conjecture is proven: Louis was Terman père: see http://www.tc.umn.edu/~jbshank/9_TermanStanford.html, for a fascinating short bio on the son.

 

[PRR]

Terman's -dad- wrote Genius and Stupidity. He didn't invent intelligence but improved intelligence testing, including promoting Sterns' notion that "normal = 100" which we call IQ. Before that Binet was using decimals. Yes, the Stanford-Binet test is Fred Terman's dad's work.

Apropos: last week I read Van Vogt's Supermind, publisher subtitle "Intelligence Quotient Ten Thousand!" IQ boosting is a recurring theme through what is really a very bad paste-up of three short stories published decades apart.

 

[bcarso]

[quote author="PRR"]Apropos: last week I read Van Vogt's Supermind, publisher subtitle "Intelligence Quotient Ten Thousand!" IQ boosting is a recurring theme through what is really a very bad paste-up of three short stories published decades apart.[/quote]

One of my absolute favorite sci fi stories is A(lfred) E(lton) van Vogt's Asylum, collected in the great anthology of Healy and McComas, Famous Science Fiction Stories, Adventures in Time and Space. I suspect that story is part of your pasteup?

My father virtually worshipped the concept of IQ and pushed me relentlessly, using some then-current ideas about the ticking time clock on brain growth and neural plasticity. Kind of screwed me up for a good many years, but he meant well. I am o.k. now (twitches).

 

[emrr]

No WAY I'm passing up a Terman subject line!

 

[PRR]

Asylum must be the part about vampires. That went pretty well, but reeked of the 1940s (the setting is a century in a future). I was baffled by random references to an Alpha Institute which did nothing, and why 1/3rd of the way through the book William Leigh reaches Oneness and vanishes. A truly minor character suddenly stars for the next 60 pages, working in a simultaneous future which is 25 years more modern than Leigh's. Then page 110 finds him sucking life force from 163 slackers and vanishing, and we follow Barbara instead. There's about one baste-stitch in each sub-story to justify printing it all together.

Supermind is a "fixup novel" produced by stitching together three short stories: "Asylum" (1942), "The Proxy Intelligence" (1968), and "Research Alpha" (1965). I'm told the novel contains no reference to these stories, and also drops the copyright credit to Schmitz {for "Research Alpha"}.

 

[bcarso]

[quote author="PRR"]Asylum must be the part about vampires. [/quote]

Yes. William Leigh is the man. "Dreegs" the hapless but determined vampires. I won't spoil it for those that have yet to read it for the first time.

It does sound like a clumsy pasteup though.

That collection is quite dated but the important sci-fi themes are mostly all there. The emphasis on "atomics" and glowing tubes, not to mention clicking relays (the Lewis Padgett story The Twonky as case in point), does rather give things away.

A few other stories in the collection: Asimov's Nightfall; Harry Bates' Farewell to the Master (inspiration for The Day the Earth Stood Still, although the movie mostly nothing like the story); Forgetfulness, Campbell writing as Don Stuart; By His Bootstraps, a flawed but exciting time travel paradox story by Heinlein, writing as Anson Macdonald.

And the inspiration for The Thing: Who Goes There, "Don Stuart" again. Amazingly chilling.

 

[PRR]

> clicking relays ...does rather give things away.

Well, and he has to plug-in his wrist radio to get a connection. The general newspaper culture, and the elegant hotel where he meets the scientist's daughter, is pure late-1930s baroque. Which is all fine, but the world her handyman traverses in the next 60 pages smells just as strong of the early 1960s. The future aint what it used to be.

I won't give away the solution to the vampire issue because frankly, I'm not sure what happened to them in the paste-up, except they have no part in the story of Barbara, junior typist at the Alpha Institute (ah-ha), who evolves 500,000 years in a week. (Apparently Darwin wuz wrong. Evolution is an internal force in the individual, not a result of external forces skewing individual survival and fruitfulness.)

 

[Guest]

I thought the thread is about another Terman, who working on security sensors invented a first electronic musical instrument...

[quote author="PRR"] (Apparently Darwin wuz wrong. Evolution is an internal force in the individual, not a result of external forces skewing individual survival and fruitfulness.)[/quote]

There was a "Black Book" version before Darwin was born; it says about 2 forces: creative and destructive. Darwin most probably was sick of Christian theory about a creative only force (his parents' family was extremely religious) so decided to prove that evolution can go without it at all.

 

[clintrubber]

[quote author="Wavebourn"]I thought the thread is about another Terman, who working on security sensors invented a first electronic musical instrument...[/quote]
Ahh, Leon Theremin, the whuuuu-whuuuu guy :wink:
That's what I thought at first as well - wasn't his 'real' name something like Lev Termen ?

 

[bcarso]

Yes---if the wiki is accurate: "The theremin was originally the product of Russian government-sponsored research into proximity sensors. The instrument was invented by a young Russian physicist named Lev Sergeivich Termen (known in the West as Léon Theremin)".

But wikis are often full of errors. I was shocked to find that Rusty Warren is credited with writing Bounce Your ****ies, a mistake that Ms. Warren doubtless makes no effort to dispel. In fact she did try to buy the rights from the actual composer, my friend Tupper Turner, but he refused, and continues to collect royalties to this day.

 

[thermionic]

Thanks, Dave! :guinness:

There's a DVD entitled 'Theremin - An Electronic Odyssey' - it's absolutely essential viewing for any synth geek and contains interviews with Bob Moog, citing Theremin as the godfather of synthesis.

Theremin was born at a time when it was cool to be a geek, and was a figure amongst high society. Similarly to Blumlein, we only know a fraction of what he achieved due to govt. machinations (he was repatriated from the US by the KGB with the use of force and disappeared until the documentary makers found him in the late eighties - he's also credited with making the world's first 'bug').

A couple of weeks back, I witnessed a demo of software that syncs video to music automatically, and imposes effects on the video according to movement in the music. I suggested to the coder that he could control his software with a midi Theremin... After a few minutes, he started asking me what I thought his software had to do with attracting members of the opposite sex... It turned out that he had no idea what a Theremin was, and thought I was suggesting some kind of surreal feature, whereby his software was linked to the dispersal of pheromones... Man, you have some strange conversations at trade shows...


Justin

 

[NewYorkDave]

Ahh, theremins... That was a subject of intense interest to me about ten years ago. I designed a tube theremin that worked pretty well. I still have the prototype in my closet.

 

[clintrubber]

[quote author="thermionic"]Thanks, Dave! :guinness:

There's a DVD entitled 'Theremin - An Electronic Odyssey' - it's absolutely essential viewing for any synth geek and contains interviews with Bob Moog, citing Theremin as the godfather of synthesis.[/quote]
Can second that, this must be the same documentary that I saw on TV. Interesting story.[/quote]

[quote author="NewYorkDave"]Ahh, theremins... That was a subject of intense interest to me about ten years ago. I designed a tube theremin that worked pretty well. I still have the prototype in my closet.[/quote]
A few things a man should have: a wav-editor & a theremin.
I built me a simple pitch-only solid-state once but hooking it up to my 8*10" bass-rig was impressive. Went down to 8 Hz (as verified with that wav-editor :wink: ), the lowest stuff my rig ever had to deal with.

Apart from all this whuuu-whuuu, thanks Dave for the scans :thumb:

 

[bcarso]

I thought I had posted about it in here but it doesn't turn up in a search. Oh wait I remember it was in Bourland's blog.

My late father spent about a year designing a tube theremin, funded by Richard Simonton, who was rich from his Muzak franchises IIRC.

The concept: put theremins packaged to be attractive pieces of furniture in homes everywhere, along the lines of the Hammond chord organs. The volume antenna was in the wooden case, and the pitch antenna was a vertical brass rod. A speaker was in the cabinet. A series of "stops" allowed selection of various timbres. It was not a theremin for purists. It had legs which were removable and could be stowed inside, making it somewhat portable.

The whole enterprise went nowhere, and was one of the activities George referred to as his "folly".

I had the prototype for years and occasionally played it in informal sessions with my jazzoid buddies. I began to tinker with it and added features, so the chassis got removed and put on a shelf at one point, while the case got lugged around when I moved and served as makeshift furniture. When the business of the time was going down the tubes I decided to abandon it to the auction, although I still have the schematic somewhere. Wish I had kept the thing now.

 

[jamesfei]

For the Terman enthusiasts: this was one of Theremin's Theremins, built during his late period in Moscow:

His lab at the Moscow Conservatory (before he was thrown out and everything was axed—literally):

The Rhythmicon:

"Harmonium":

 

[NewYorkDave]

See those two big-ass coils on the theremin? That's the secret--well, part of it anyway. Too many DIY theremins cheap out by eliminating the antenna coils and running the oscillators at too high of a frequency. Stability and playability suffer, although I suppose someone who's just after a sound-effects device would tend not to notice or care.