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Another magnetic story

This anecdote is not about magnetic wine gadgets but an example of remarkable properties in magnetic materials. (Connection to wine at the end.)

As a teenager curious about stuff I explored and sometimes learned (not always what I wanted). One example that went badly wrong, making mercaptans (for pure knowledge's sake, it goes without saying) is in a 1991 thread on ethanethiol, butyric acid, and CS gas (also revisited here on AFW, 2004) which I saved at the time in 1991.* (Summary: A little chemical learning is a dangerous thing. Modified Sorcerer's-Apprentice tale wherein apprentice releases noxious genie from a bottle before learning command to "go back.")

Another, more benign experience entailed magnetic materials. The new technology of printed magnetic stripes had appeared. We see them everywhere now, on driving licenses, credit cards, etc. But they were unusual at first, and my friends and I were curious about the information in them. We had a few examples of them on hand, but no gadgetry to read the magnetized information.

I did have some notions of ferromagnetism, which turned out to work. Proceeding from "scratch," a common ferromagnetic mineral with promising mechanical properties (I omit details) could be made to spread delicately onto a printed magnetic stripe and align itself sympathetically to the magnetized pattern. We then plainly saw the data (and even transferred it to paper, which was more convenient). This was satisfying. We had no clue what the data actually meant -- it looked fairly random. But even so, it was visible, which helped demystify the technology. (And made me remember ferromagnetics.)

Back to wine: Ferromagnetism, from ferrum (iron -- one of the bioactive minerals prominent in berry juices) is a magnetic-interaction property like others I cited earlier. Experience (some of it reported above) taught me that more "learning" there is about subtleties like these, the more respect develops for the risks of answering a technical claim (even if ultimately wrong) with too-simple theory.

Cheers -- Max

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Reply to
Max Hauser
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You had a more productive idea than I did, Max. I was very intrigued by the first example of a printed magnetic stripe that I saw, on the back of the tickets used by SF's then new subway system, BART. Since I had access to magnetic tape readers at the Lawrence Hall of science in Berkeley, I had the bright idea of trying to splice the excised magnetic stripe onto an existing magtape and put it through a standard magtape reader. Alas, two insurmountable technical problems brought this idea to a dead halt:

  1. I found no practical method for removing the magnetic stripe from the paper backing of the card such that it would be the appropriate thickness for a magtape reader.
  2. Upon closer examination, I realized that the width of the magnetic stripe (8 mm) on the ticket didn't match any of the magtape widths I had access to. (Alas, before the democratization of the Internet, information about magtape readers, etc was harder to come by).

Thanks for the reminiscence! Mark Lipton

Reply to
Mark Lipton

Those BART tickets were pretty interesting at the time, weren't they? As a young electronics enthusiast, I figured I could probably get something useful if I took a tape head from a reel-to-reel tape deck (back in the mid-1970s, they were commonly available at yard sales and the like), unmount the head and extend the connection with a piece of shielded audio cable. I could then swipe the tape head over the magnetic stripe. Lo and behold, I heard a series of beeps in a fixed pattern. My parents were worried that the BART police would come take away a 13-yo boy for messing around with used tickets, so they talked me out of further experimentation with them.

On a related topic (though not related to wine), I remember the one perfect summer day where a few of my summer-school friends (that's back when we had really good elective summer-school in CA) decided to take a day off and go to San Francisco on BART. We got on in Pleasant Hill and pushed our bikes out into daylight at Powell and Market. I can't remember what all we did, probably went to record stores, but we all got home that afternoon and my parents were none the wiser. Of course, it's a sobering thought that my _youngest_ is almost 13, the same age I was then... :-)

Dana

Reply to
Dana H. Myers

You folks had much better equipment than we, alas, did. But our "low tech" improvise revealed the data very clearly. (Not to mention incidentally teaching about magnetic materials.)

The larger topic of insight, and inspiration especially, from little enterprises to do something (not always completely benign ;-) has engaged a few friends of mine lately, who made serious careers in science or technology and in each case had experiences in their youth such as I'm describing.

One person I don't know, but who fit this pattern and spoke publicly about it, was Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel. I put notes from his talk (and a follow-up from one of those friends) on sci.electronics.design at the time (late 2005). Here's a current archive link if you're interested:

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Reply to
Max Hauser

Max,

I just applied your technique from the 4th paragraph, and combined your knowledge from paragraph 5. I did this with a bottle of Caymus SS '94, and LO! there was a message formed. "Drink Now!" was what it said. I repeated the experiment with a J. Phelps Insignia '01 and it revealed "Hold - Do Not Drink Yet!" Kinda' like a Little Orphan Annie decoder ring.

Hunt

Reply to
Hunt

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