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 Nikola Tesla - The Forgotten Wizard. This is a unique, 10-minute
treatise on the political and personal battles Nikola Tesla fought in his lifetime.
It brings out some some of his ideas that I had never heard of.
4-21-2008
 Fire from salt water? Erie,
PA, radio technician
John Kanzius serendipitously discovered that his radio frequency
generator could release the oxygen and hydrogen from saltwater and create an incredibly
intense flame. His finding came as a result of experiments he was performing for
a revolutionary cancer treatment that nonintrusively zaps cancer cell with RF energy.
4-28-2008
 IEEE-USA held an Online Engineering Video Scholarship Competition
for Undergraduates, with $6,000 in scholarship awards. Here is the #1 winning video
from two dudes at Louisiana Tech University - it is pretty good.
3-17-2008
 The Falkirk Wheel (U.K.) is a one-of-a-kind
canal lock implementation that uses a balanced, rotating arm to simultaneously raise
and lower vessels travelling in opposite directions in the canal. 15,000 bolts were
matched with 45,000 bolt holes, and each bolt was hand tightened due to stress factors.
3-24-2008
 EE Time's 'Teardown TV' performs a
 teardown
of an HP35s Calculator. This is a resurrection of the engineering school
stalwart of the 1970s and 1980s, the HP35.
2-20-2008
 It's a Hit!
An SM-3 missile was fired from the USS Lake Erie in the Pacific at about 7:26
PST and collided with the crippled satellite about 130 miles above the ocean, travelling
at 17,000 mph. We have intercepted and destroyed an ICBM equivalent object as it
entered the upper atmosphere - on the first shot! ...and some thought the Strategic
Defense Initiative (Star Wars) concept would never be realized.
2-21-2008
 The GFS Projects Limited Unmanned Aerial vehicle (UAV) GFS13A is
able to take off and land vertically; it can hover at heights up to eighty feet.
The GFS UAV uses the Coanda principle to create lift, it has very little downwash
and is aerodynamically stable.
5-7-2008
 It's all the
rage lately - wireless transfer of energy. Like most new technology concepts, the
idea is great, but practical implementation is the challenge. Magazine articles
have heralded it as The Next Big Thing for powering everything in your house and
office - finally eliminating cords and batteries the same way cordless phones and
wireless modems eliminated cables. In this case, going from the lab to the marketplace
will take redefining physics, or glow-in-the-dark houses spewing kW of power to
get a AA battery's worth of power to an electric razor.
4-3-2008
 The
Purdue Society
of Professional Engineers team took 1st place in the 2008 national
Rube Goldberg Contest. The task for this year? - A Hamburger Making
Machine. The contraptions needed to assemble a hamburger consisting of no less
than one precooked meat patty, two vegetables and two condiments, sandwiched between
two bun halves. Sponsors included some big names like BAE, Daimler-Chrysler, GE,
Lockheed Martin, Omega Engineering, and Rockwell Collins.
4-10-2008
 This
1939 docudrama, "Radio Hams, " is a short film produced by Pete Smith for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Jimmy Mulligan uses Ma Mulligan's egg beater to wind coils for his radio set. Listen
in on the dramas as they unfold. (Thanks to Cornel for this)
2-29-2008
 A synthetic seed crystal is placed
in a tank filled with a metric ton of supersaturated potassium dihydrogen phosphate
(KDP). As it rotates on a turntable for two months, the square crystal grows to
be as large as 800 pounds. It is the used in the National Ignition Facility to process
laser beams on their way to the target chamber. Notice the part about measuring
the crystal where the guy pulls out a Wal-Mart quality tape rule to measure it.
3-7-2008
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This archive links to the many video and audio
files that have been featured on RF Cafe.