ScienceMakers Toolkit Manual - The History Makers

Carl Spight - Video Clip Transcription
Clip 1 - Tearing up Old Radios: I came up in a ghetto, essentially, a poor, very poor community, where people
had TVs and radios but when they get broken, they couldn’t afford to get them repaired, at least not quickly.
And most of the time, what was wrong, because this was the era of the vacuum tube, where you had these fi lament
heated devices which now have been totally replaced by integrated circuitry and so on, you don’t even
see what is the active part. There, you could at least look into the box and see the glass-encased devices, some
of them glowy and some not. So on fi rst pass you could say to yourself, well, this radio or TV doesn’t work
because this tube is defective in some form or fashion, at least the cathode, this heated element, was not displaying
in the way that it normally would. So you take it out and you literally as you say, as we were sharing,
carry it down to the corner or whatever, drugstore, neighborhood grocery story, and they would have a device in
there and you plug the thing in and it would give you a reading as to whether the fi lament, the thing that heats
up the cathode that would glow and you would be able to observe that it was functioning, if it was functioning.
It would test the fi lament but it would also test other electronic aspects which was that next layer, I mean,
there’s one thing to establish as to whether it was blown out, as a vacuum tube element ‘cause you could all but
determine that visually. It was another thing to say, whereas it may not be blown up, but it has some absence
of functionality and wasn’t performing in a way that allowed the radio or TV to function in terms of either
the video display or the audio and so on. So, it turns out there are a couple of layers of expertise. A lot of my
buddies got the kind of hang of it, especially when I got a little fi fty cent here and a dollar there for being Mr.
Radio, got the kind of hang of carrying the tube down to the corner store. But it was another thing to fi gure out
that there might be other things that might be wrong, that there are other things inside the radio, like capacitors
and you know, and other little boxes and cylindrical devices and so on, resistors that might be burnt out and to
know what to do when that was true essentially came from tearing it apart, just literally tearing apart discarded
radios and TVs and messing around and probably getting shocked electrically and just destroying a few things
here and there. But that was my laboratory.
Clip 2 - Living Close to School: So I would literally read encyclopedias, there’s no mistaking that I actually
did read encyclopedias, I mean if there was nothing else to do, I’d get to school early because I lived right
across the street, and my mother was the school crossing guard. So she had to be out there before school starts,
right. She had to be out of the house, my father was at work, as I told you, he worked several days a week going
very early in the morning, seven days a week, literally, never took a vacation, and I have no idea what the
mentality of that all was but it was something that he did religiously. So anyway, so she would go to school so
we had to go to school, too. So I got to school early, you know, we had to be out of the house because she was
out of the house and so what am I to do? I got to school early, I’m the Mr. Wizard and the encyclopedia is there,
so I literally would kind of open them up and spend a half an hour or so just looking at them and found it vastly
fascinating, you know, just another world.
Clip 3 – Friends: You can be interested in things, ideas, in science for example, and literature, in knowing
and learning. You can be interested in that. The thing that you can’t do while being so interested is to think of
yourself as therefore better than, of higher than, of having something over, of being raised up, you know, lifted
up above those who are not interested in that. You can’t carry yourself in certain kinds of ways and be accepted.
But I never had the sense of being, like I said, I was Mr. Radio, Mr. Wizard, Whiz Kid, clearly the guy who was
in the courses that no blacks even thought about taking. But I had friends, and they never talked to me about
why are you doing that, I mean that’s uncool, that’s not black, or any other such thing. If anything, they took
some pride, I think.
Clip 4 – Purdue: My father didn’t have any money to send me to Purdue, that’s for sure. I ended up getting
a General Motors Scholarship that paid a lot of the freight…it was about $1,000 a year, then that was a lot of
money, a whole lot of money then. Far more money than my family could provide, that’s for sure. So I ended up
going to Purdue in engineering out of Arsenal Technical High School, not because they were giving any
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