Totally unrelated to IT but related to explosions
My brother (sadly no longer with us) was a tinkerer. He would spend all his life taking things apart, putting them back together, and putting parts unrelated together to created Frankenstein machines. He seemed to know just how things worked before he had any formal training and this was well before the internet. He did win an inventors competition but making a remotely activated light up dog harness from some string and an old VHS recorder.
Where did this ability and curiosity start? I can't remember - he was always like it but one of the earliest examples was this...
The family were sat down to watch some TV - this would have been the early 80s. I would have been 12 and my brother 8. He was upstairs in his room tinkering as usual. After a while my Mum just mentioned that we'd not seen him for a while and as if on cue from behind the chair in the corner there was a loud, sudden phut! noise and a light as bright as the sun. Then the TV and all the house went dark.
My dad rushed to the chair to be met by my brother, in a bit of a daze and blind, holding a bulb from a torch in his hand to which he had soldered two wires, which he had plugged directly into the wall socket!. Thankfully the temporary blindness only lasted a couple of hours and he didn't actually manage to electrocute himself....
I do miss him so - the crazy fool.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
