coll. - Electronics Calculations Data Handbook

Before getting into the technical stuff, we might wish to ask ourselves what electricity is. My first recollection of thinking about it (though I did not know that I was) is of being a child and dismantling a prized radio to find out that no one was inside; just a mind-boggling collection of small coloured objects which evidently were not sweets, though some looked like them. My first direct experience of electricity was more sudden; an electric shock from a bar fire while trying to melt some plastic on it. I knew it was hot, but hadnt expected that! Later I came across the manual for a record player and amplifier in the house, which was old-fashioned enough to come with a circuit diagram. I was fascinated by it. It meant something to someone, but these hieroglyphics were like no language that I could figure out.

Later I took a technicians course, and a confusing set of concepts was presented to me as explanation for this unseen and magical force. Electricity, I had now realised, is used in a huge range of ways; recording sound, reproducing pictures, lighting our darkness and a lot else besides. All this was, they told me, due to unseen little balls which whiz around in some materials, creating equally unseen lines which can cause little balls in other places to whiz around as well. And this the mental territory of staid, rational looking people who would probably claim that they dont believe in magic.

I have to confess that, some years later, I have still not seen the little balls or the lines which they fling about, and Im not very sure that I really understand them. But I have managed a reasonable career as a technician and an engineer, and I believe that I would have a fair chance of fixing my cassette machine, TV or house wiring should they misfunction. On the whole, I have not thought about the antics of little balls very much (though I suppose that it helps to know that they are there). Electricity looks, in my mind, more like water, wires like pipes, resistors like very thin pipes, capacitors like pairs of half-filled balloons which squash against each other, and inductors like well something else. (I never said that the analogy was complete or accurate.)

I say all this as, I hope, a source of comfort to the new student of the subject who may be suffering the same pangs of insecurity about atoms, electrons and so on that I went through. Unless you feel strongly to do otherwise, let them live their own strange lives. You can be a very competent and effective user of the principles of electricity and electronics without needing to know much about them (though the same might not be said of completing your college course). Leave it to the physicists. What helps a great deal is having a good and clear grasp of the laws of electricity, and being able, as much as is possible, to prove them to yourself.