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fair. The teachers recognized something different about me immediately; some of them even started calling me Science Whiz because I had all these great projects in the science fairs. And probably as a result of that, by sixth grade I was doing electronics projects few people in high school could even understand yet. Those kinds of acknowledgments and those kinds of achievements made me want to keep working at those tilings until they would be my things in the world.
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My first science competition was in third grade, and I won. But the project was pretty simple, really. Basically I put together this little contraption with a light and a couple of batteries and a little wire—all mounted on a piece of wood. It was a working flashlight! A lot of people were surprised by that, and I won. No big deal, it turns out, because I felt inside it wasn't really that impressive, and I knew I would do even better the next time.
It was in the fourth grade that I did the first project that really taught me about things I would need later—physics, electronics, and the project materials. It was an experiment to see what would happen if you dipped these two carbon rods into any liquid of your choice. The carbon rods were connected by a wire to a lightbulb and an AC plug. By dipping the carbon rods into the liquid, the liquid in effect became one of the "wires." It could either act as a good wire or a bad wire—that is, it could conduct
electricity well or it could conduct electricity poorly. If the light- bulb glowed, brightly or dimly, you could see how well the liquid could conduct electricity.
I used every liquid I could get my hands on—water, Coca-Cola, iced tea, juice, beer. Which liquid conducts electricity best? (The answer turned out to be salt water.) This is an extremely important thing to know if you want to understand, for instance, hydroelectric machinery or even just plain old batteries.
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But the next experiment, man, that was a big one. What I did was build this giant real-life electronic model representing what each of the ninety-two atoms in the periodic table looks like in terms of its electrons.
In case you don't remember, electrons orbit the center of an atom in much the same way planets orbit the sun. The Earth, for instance, has a different orbit than, say, Neptune.
My project aimed to demonstrate, with the click of a switch, how many electrons orbit each atom in the periodic table, and which orbit around the nucleus they should be in. For instance, if I hit the switch for hydrogen, one light would turn on A in the orbit nearest the center of the hole, which represented the nucleus.
To pull off this project, I had to drill ninety-two holes in a big aluminum sheet. The holes were located toward the bottom; each one would hold one switch corresponding to each element. One switch would be for hydrogen, one for gold, one for helium, and so on.
Now, I painted a very large picture resembling a bull's-eye target—concentric circles in different colors, with a tiny target in the middle to represent the center of the atom, which is the nucleus. And I had to drill ninety-two holes into the big orbit picture, several in each orbit, corresponding to where the electrons could be in an atom.
The end result was this. Ask me to show you the electrons for any of the ninety-two natural elements. Let's say oxygen. I would hit the oxygen switch, and the eight lights representing the eight electrons that rotate around the oxygen atom would turn on, all in the proper orbits.
I knew what the proper orbits were because I'd used this big reference book called The Handbook for Chemistry and Physics.
This project ended up getting terribly complicated, because by the time I was dealing with all ninety-two elements I was stuck with dealing with ninety-two different sets of switches.
That got so tough I finally had to use the information my dad taught me about the diode, which is the first electronics part I ever learned about,