It’s Harry Houdini‘s birthday today. In his honour let’s talk about locks. As a famous escape artist, lock picking was his bread and butter.

First, let’s understand how a lock works. I’ll only be talking about the common pin-tumbler lock. (usually called a Yale lock, after its inventor in 1860) This is the sort you likely have on your front door, with a key having a series of mountains and valleys of different heights. While your key may slide into other locks, the height of those bumps determines whether or not it will turn.

Brass pins stop the lock cylinder from turning and un-latching the door. Each pin is in two parts, and it must be lined up precisely for the cut in the pin to align with the edge of the turning cylinder. If even one of those pins (most locks have five) is too high or too low the pin will bind and prevent turning.

The proper key corresponds to the cuts in the pins to set everything in alignment. If you’ve ever dealt with an old lock, or a poorly cut key, you may have had to jiggle the key to get the lock to work. That’s actually very similar to the process of picking a Yale lock.

Essentially, to pick a lock you randomly move the pins up and down until you get them to the right height. However, if they move freely up and down it seems unlikely that you’ll suddenly find them all aligned at once. Even if you did, you would never know if you didn’t turn the lock at that moment. So, step one of picking a lock is to apply some torque.

You turn the cylinder of the lock, twisting it with a small screwdriver, so that the pins are squeezed against the chamber walls. Now, with friction the pins will not slide freely up and down, but they can be moved by tapping gently with your lock pick. (a professional lock pick will have a small steel spring attached so you can “twang” it and create a subtle tapping motion) In a poorly made lock that has lots of give you may feel the moment when the first pin aligns. The torque should hold that in place as you move in to the second pin, and so on.

For any modern day Houdini a standard Yale lock is not too big a challenge, which is why many apartment buildings and offices employ more complex locks (such as Medeco brand). These require precise pin rotation in addition to height.

• Source: Due to my interest in magic, this is just stuff I have in my brain.
• Disclaimer: this information is provided for entertainment and protection purposes only.

All radio and TV broadcasts are assigned a “call sign“, a sequence of three or four letters such as WKRP in Cincinnati. I got curious as to how these came about and why.

When my parents grew up, in a rural area, you and all your neighbours shared the same wired phone line. That means the phone would ring in all the houses at the same time. To stop everybody from picking up you would be assigned a number of rings. If the phone rings once, it’s meant for the first house, two rings signal the second house to pick up. (However, nothing stopped nosy neighbours from listening in to your conversations)

Telegraph operators had a similar solution. A message would begin with a “code” of sorts to announce the intended recipient down the line.

This practice was borrowed in the early days of radio communication. At the time, in the early 1900s, the primary use of radio was communicating between ships and harbours. In order to get a message to the right person, each station, be it land-based or ocean-going, could choose its own call sign letters. However, this quickly proved a problem as multiple ships would claim the same sign. It was a regulator’s dream!

In 1912 some folks met up in London to start organizing radio call signs. Assuming three-letter signed, they began divvying up the alphabet, giving the F’s to France, the B’s to Great Britain, the W’s and (most of) K’s to the United States, and so on. From there, it’s up to the countries themselves hand them out.

In the USA, radio station on the eastern coast tend to start with W, while the western stations (coast, not genre) begin with K. That was only for stations on land. Ships were assigned just the opposite… K on the east coast and W in the west. (though that plan became obsolete with the Panama Canal)

While some call signs are randomly assigned, many stations have applied for “vanity” call signs. CFCF in Montreal stands for “Canada’s First, Canada’s Finest”. In Chicago, WLS is for “World’s Largest Store” as the radio station was first owned by Sears, Roebuck Co. (and for my younger readers… Sears used to be a big deal)

Now, technically, the call signs serve no modern purpose other than licensing paperwork, as broadcast stations are no longer in the business of communicating. In most of the world they have been left to gather dust but US law still requires, for example, that a TV station identifies its call sign once an hour.

You’ve been reading LSNED. Over and out.

• Source: 3-Letter Call Signs – Early Radio History

On the seventh day of Christmas we get swimming swans. Mute Swans (the classic white ones with the orange beak) are the largest flying bird, but that’s all I’m going to say about that. I’m done with writing about birds this week. Rather, I’ll ask you this question: Who was the first person to have his house lit by electric lightbulbs?

Sir Joseph Swan, Britain’s inventor of the lightbulb. What about Thomas Edison? Didn’t he invent the lightbulb? Well, frankly, no.

Joseph Swan held British patent number 8 for a carbon paper filament inside a glass bulb to create incandescent light. This was 1878, while Edison didn’t get into the lightbulb game until the next year (when he bought a lightbulb patent from a couple Canadians). In 1880 Swan got a second patent for his new practical lightbulb and went into business, starting with his own house and London’s famous Savoy Theatre. Providing over a thousand bulbs for the theatre proved a huge success. No more smelly, hot, burning gas lamps tht led to an uncomfortably stuffy theatre. The world was scrambling for electric light.

Across the pond in America, Edison wasn’t happy. He also got patents for his bulbs (pretty much the same as Swan’s) and started advertising himself as the true inventor. Swan, being a proper English gentleman, was happy to let Edison be the official lightbulb man of America, while he retained right in Britain. Eventually, after a few more scuffles by Edison, the two partnered up to go into business.

While the lightbulb is certainly what Joseph Swan is most rememberd for, his advancements to the process of developing photographic paper was significant. Also, as he was working on fiber filaments made from cellulose for his lightbulbs, he also invented the process that eventually brought us Rayon. By that, you could say he practically invented the era of disco fashion.

That’s all I have to say about my favourite Swan. Now to come up with some topic for “Eight Maids a’Milking”.

• Source: Joseph Swan – Wikipedia

Yesterday the thought occurred to me that I don’t really know how a battery works. Whatever goes on inside that little cylinder is a mystery to me. Now that I know the secret, it seems even more amazing!

First , let me get the words right. A battery is actually defined as a set of individual things that work in unison. So when we say “battery”, we’re talking about a collection of Galvanic cells. (also called Voltaic cells) Let’s examine a single cell to see what’s really going on in there.

The goal of a cell is to create a flow of electricity. Looking at this from the atomic perspective, imagine the individual atoms all lined up in a length of wire. When the electricity flows, it’s not the atoms that are traveling, but the electrons (the tiny bits that orbit around the nucleus) that are getting passed from one atom to the next like a hot potato. This is called electron flow, and it’s what makes your lights turn on.

A galvanic cell controls the electron flow to create direct current, where the electrons move in a single direction from one side of the battery to another. However, the secret of the “stored energy” inside a battery is that the electrons cannot flow until it’s hooked up to a complete circuit. Otherwise any battery would drain itself before it could be used.

To understand the individual parts of a cell, let’s have a look at the simplest battery I know; a lemon. Stick a galvanized (zinc coated) nail in one end, and a copper penny in the other side. Combined with the citric acid playing the role of an electrolyte, you’ve got yourself a functioning battery capable of providing about 1 volt of electricity.

At the nail end, the zinc is oxidized (or more commonly; “rusted”) by the acid which creates a bunch of negatively charged electrons. Those electrons really want to zip over to the penny to balance things out, but they cannot flow through the lemon. Only when the nail is connected to the penny by a wire will the electrons be able to move across. Along the way they will provide electricity to any little lightbulb in its path.

We all know batteries have a limited lifespan. That is a limitation of the chemical changes going on. Eventually the nail cannot be oxidized anymore, and the electrons are happy in their balanced state… so no more flow.

A rechargeable battery can reverse the chemical process when power is supplied to the cell, actually de-oxidizing the metal, and setting things up to happen all over again.

• Source: Galvanic cell – Wikipedia

Should I find myself at a fancy dinner party I cannot resist the urge to wet my finger and slide it around the rim of my wine glass. At least I would have trouble resisting the urge, if I were ever invited to such fancy dinner parties. The sound of a resonating wine glass is rather unique. If you could gather your friends around, each glass with varying amounts of liquid would produce different tones, resulting in an impromptu wine chorus. Again, I have to assume this would be a dinner party faux pas. However, at one time it was all the rage.

In 1761 the restless mind of Benjamin Franklin was attending a London concert featuring a wine glass soloist. The musician would have a large table of glasses in front of him arranged from low (empty) to high notes (nearly full of water). Franklin was an amateur musician himself (and in fact, believed full time professional musicians to be a parasite on society) so he put his engineering mind to work on solving the many practical problems of this wine glass arrangement.

First was the problem of tuning. As water evaporated, the notes from each glass would change. So he replaced the water glasses with crystal bowls. They would be permanently tuned like bells by their size and thickness. Next he collapsed the expansive table full of glass to something much more compact. All the crystal bowls were threaded on a long pole, the smaller bowls nesting inside the larger (not quite touching) to create an icicle-like arrangement.

Now the whole stack of bowls was made to rotate much like an antique foot-powered sewing machine. If a moistened finger were to rest along the edge of a bowl, the lovely tone would ease its way out with hardly any effort. It allowed for the uniquely soothing sound of the crystal glasses, with the practicality of a harpsichord keyboard. In fact, that’s what it was first called… the glassychord.

Soon after in his letters, Benjamin Franklin officially dubbed his creation the armonica, borrowing from the Italian word for harmony, and it is that name that stuck. (sometimes anglicised as “glass harmonica“)

There was nothing else that sounded like the armonica. It caught the fancy of Amadeus Mozart, who composed multiple pieces for the instrument. Alas, the only reason the armonica was largely lost to history was the matter of volume. As concert halls replaced parlours, instrument builders had to squeeze out more volume. Harpsichords became pianos, lutes turned into guitars, but the armonica could not get any louder.

According to the author of my source, there are only about a dozen armonica players in the world today. He should know. He’s one of them.

Bonus non-fact: I don’t know if it still counts as new-age hokum when we’re talking 18th century, but the sound of the glass armonica was (still is?) believed to have healing powers. One account tells how Franklin was able to cure a Polish Princess (she had “melancholia”… a.k.a. “grumpy pants”) simply by hearing him play the armonica. Of course, modern doctors would probably prescribe the banjo.

• Source: The website of William Zietler – GlassArmonica.com – to see and hear the armonica in action be sure to check out his page of videos

Pop Rocks combine candy with explosions in your mouth. Obviously a genius idea. It first popped up in 1975 and as soon as it caught on the urban legend evolved that eating Pop Rocks and drinking soda at the same time would cause death-by-stomach-explosion.

The rumour was so widespread that the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) in the USA (United States of America) set up a special hotline to assure concerned parents there was no danger.

The ingredients of Pop Rocks are identical to any other hard candy like lemon drops or lollipops. The magic comes with the addition of carbon dioxide. When the candy is in syrup form (heated to about 150 degrees Celsius) it is injected with pressurized carbon dioxide that bubbles through the syrup. It is then cooled so the syrup hardens trapping these bubbles, still at high pressure.

When the mixing chamber is de-pressurized, the candy shatters into small pieces and crumbs as the high-pressure bubbles try (and mostly succeed) to escape their candy confines. However, many micro-bubbles of carbon dioxide remain securely encapsulated in the candy.

These bubbles are still pressurized at 600 PSI. (pounds per square inch) For the sake of comparison, your car tire is about 32 PSI, a bike tire is 65 PSI, and the boiler of a steam locomotive is 300 PSI. The explosion is caused when you bite down on the candy and let the 600 PSI carbon dioxide escape. That’s two tiny steam engines blowing up… in your mouth!

When the process was invented and patented in 1956 the goal was to create a tablet that could instantly carbonate a drink. That didn’t work so well, but it did make for a great candy!

• Source: Pop Rocks – Wikipedia

Speaking of hamburgers, which I was (specifically, hucking them across continents), are you aware just how close we came to going out for “tartars and fries”?

The Tartars (or Tatars) are an ethnic group found around Russia, descendants of Mongolians, who were once at the leading edge of finely chopped meat. The legacy remains in the modern day steak tartare, which is basically a mound of raw ground beef, though the fancy French restaurants make it sound more… how do you say… edible.

While the recipe of ground beef, minced onions, and seasoning stayed much the same, after making it to the port town of Hamburg, Germany they started to cook it. It was from here that the Hamburg steak, as it came to be known, spread across the world in the 1800s.

Side note: the Salisbury steak is pretty much identical to a Hamburg steak, but named after Dr. James Salisbury who promoted eating meat three times a day, and limiting vegetables, fruits and starchy foods.

A little earlier, mid 1700s, it was John Montagu, the Earl of Sandwich, asked for some meat tucked between two pieces of bread. He just wanted to be able to eat conveniently while working or playing cards. As such, the sandwich was born.

The two met up on American soil but the exact location is hotly contested. Grasping for any claim to fame there are three US states that have legislation to decree the birth of the hamburger, or more accurately, the Hamburg steak sandwich, happened inside their borders.

The two oldest claims date to 1885, and both share the story of a food vendor at a county fair. In one case a meatball vendor squashed his product flat and served it in bread so it became more portable. It was a hit. The other story is about running out of pork for sausage patty sandwiches on a busy day, and improvising a new recipe using ground beef. That too was a hit.

The second guy also claimed to have created the word “hamburger” not based on the Hamburg steak but rather that the fateful day occurred at the fair in Hamburg, New York. To me, that sounds a little too convenient.

The meatball guy dished up his sandwiches every year and came to be known as Hamburger Charlie. He even had a song and dance routine:

Hamburgers, hamburgers, hamburgers hot; onions in the middle, pickle on top. Makes your lips go flippity flop.

Another story argues the technicality that those both put a Hamburg steak between slices of bread, but the true hamburger was born when it was first placed on a bun. If you buy that, then credit is due to Grandpa Oscar Bilby of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The way his family tells the story of his first annual July 4th BBQ you’d think the man came down from the mountain with his holy grill.

Of course, Texas has its own version of the hamburger creation story, too. It probably wasn’t the first, but it did have the biggest effect when Fletch David took his sandwich on the road. The hamburger hit the big time as a favourite dish at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri. And we lived fattily ever after.

• Source:  What’s Cooking in America – History of the Hamburger