Electric Bong

I have always had an interest in science and math, but I don’t think I ever pictured myself as a scientist when I was younger.  In high school, I got decent grades in science and math classes. But, I wasn’t really sure why I kept taking them, math classes in particular. Once I took a calculus class, it clicked for me:  “Oh, that’s why we learned all that stuff.  Now I see where they were going with that quadratic equation and Pythagorean theorem crap. This is cool.” 

Once I graduated, I wasn’t particularly interested in going to college.  I had no idea what I wanted to do there.  Since I had to pay for it myself, it seemed too expensive for me to go and figure out what I wanted to do “on the fly”. (I still think it’s too expensive, but that’s neither here nor there.)  So I waited.

I’ve always had an interest in building things, too. Probably more so in taking them apart.  I sometimes still have to fight this urge.  Anyhow, my interest in figuring out how things work led me to hobbies that involve building things. But for the manual, I’d be lost, though much of figuring out how to make things is more or less intuitive to me.  I’ve built model rockets, guitar amplifiers and effects, furniture, mutant bicycles of various shades, and ventured into home repair and maintenance.  I’ve even come to be a decent auto mechanic. Currently, I run a custom furniture and cabinetry studio.  (I should have a website working for this in the next couple of weeks.)  I liked math, I was reasonably proficient design-wise; engineering seemed like a logical next-step.

I’m not sure that I would chalk my interest in science up to genetics or to environment. No one in my family is very mechanically inclined, nor are they all that interested in science.  I remember having to explain the difference between left- and right-hand threads to my dear father after he had stripped out the ones on his bike pedals.  At family gatherings, my relatives will ask what I’m studying in school and cringe when I tell them about it (What, you mean you don’t want to talk about differential equations and Laplace transforms?).  They usually ask where the beer is after they are done cringing.  After high school, I never found myself in an environment that I would say nurtured any sort of scientific growth, yet I managed, on my own, to use science to build a number of fun and reasonably useful things, like the 6-foot tall Tesla Coil, dubbed “The Electric Bong”.

This is where science gets fun. 

When I was about 24, I lived on one side of a duplex with a couple of friends.  On the other side of us lived some shady characters.  There were incidents of firearms discharged into the air during barbecues, drugs being dealt openly from the front stoop, weird dudes coming over at all hours looking for their cousins.  These weren’t kids acting like gangsters; they were kids who were actually gangsters.  There was always stuff happening over on their half of the house.

While I lived at this place, I built a 6-foot tall Tesla Coil, largely from recycled parts. (For the unfamiliar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_coil  Total non-stop science fair action!).  It could produce 5-6 foot long arcs and could light up most of the fluorescent lights in the house.  In retrospect, it probably could have really hurt someone.  And, yes, it looked like a pretty good candidate for a bong. 

One day, I came home to find that the neighbors were moving out in a really big hurry.  My roommates and I watched them stuff their station wagon with as much as it could hold, yelling at each other about hurrying and what to grab.  Then they were gone.  They left their front door wide open when they left.  It took a few days for it to sink in, but when it became clear that they weren’t coming back, we decided to look around in the other half.  There were clothes in the closets and food in the refrigerator.  It was just as they left it.  It was also both creepy and weird, so I didn’t stick around in there long.  We let the landlord know what had happened.

About a week and a half after the shady neighbors’ hasty departure, some friends and I were sitting around in our living room playing video games. There was a knock at the door and all of a sudden the door was being broken down and there were 5 or 6 cops with guns drawn coming into the living room.  My friends and I were being served with a search warrant.  The cops trashed the place, all the while rattling off names of the various drugs they expected to find.  There were also police trashing the other half, too. The warrant produced for us just listed the street address, but not the fact that there were two apartments.  I guess they just decided to search both. 

Eventually, I hear an officer frantically calling to his cronies, “ Guys! Guys! You hafta get in here and see the size of this water pipe!”  They found my Tesla coil.  As they were dragging it down the stairs, one of them quipped, “What is this, some kind of electric bong?  I’ve never seen a vaporizer this big before.”  We tried to explain that it was a Tesla coil that I built, but they confiscated it anyway.  I never saw it again.

My point with this story?  Science is neat.