Fable

Born on a farm in Texas without electricity and attending  a one-room schoolhouse, a boy came to the attention of a recruiter for the band  at the Southern Methodist University who recognised the boy’s skill with the French horn. At the university he studied electrical engineering  and, as an engineer, he invented this: It became the foundation stone for a ...

54 years ago, a new category of chip product was invented by this gentleman   who, at the 1971 ISSCC, presented the first example of the new product category pictured below:  

Both these gentlemen were born over 150 years ago but their names are household words today: Moral: Christen a car

Here’s a strange contraption which doesn’t give much of a clue about what it was built to do: But it did it. Moral: Looks Aren’t Everything

Tomorrow the US House of Representatives  votes on the release of the Epstein Files. President Trump has been anti the release but this week said on  Truth Social: “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide.” 57% of U.S. adults disapproved of Trump’s handling of the  Epstein affair, while 22% said they approved ...

122 years ago, after 15 years of experimentation, an aviation pioneer prepared to demonstrate the world’s the first manned flight. A wire snagged on the launch mechanism and the aeroplane crashed into the Potomac. The pioneer was ridiculed in the press and US Congress with one congressman saying that the government should not fund attempts at manned flights and scorning ...

Dubbed the King of Inventors in Japan he trained as a carpenter and started a weaving business before expanding into many industries. He developed the ‘Five Whys’ approach to problem solving – ask Why a problem arose five times and you’ll close in on the solution. Moral: Cool calm deliberation untangles every knot.    

There was once a genius who was a professor at Stanford University. When addressing some students at the  university he was heckled by a group who called him a Nazi. One of the group had a megaphone which broke down. The genius told the student to hand him the megaphone whereupon he fixed the defective wiring and handed the working ...

This is a replica of a contraption which made history on March 10th 1876. Moral: Version 1.0 Rarely Looks Pretty

67 years ago a company was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts to make JFETS. The company still supplies JFETs to this day though it was taken over by Teledyne in 1963 and sold to investors in 1992. The company is selling low-noise, high-input impedance JFETS for analogue front ends. It also sells  MOSFETS, bipolar transistors, diodes, op amps and components for ...