Electricity: The Energy Of Electrons

Good call!

Michael S Wilhelm

going by the toyota with the 20R engine in the beginning I'd say 1975 to 80 going closer to 80 because of that bunch of vacuum lines near the carb.

Aaron Nadler

Despite considerable awkwardness in the editing, and the faded blue, I really enjoyed this one. One. I kept expecting to cringe from some oversimplified nonsense, but it was really all pretty well explained, and I thought the kids all did a great job.

Jeffrey R. Broido

Well, an ammeter is just a voltmeter across a resistor after all.

Jeffrey R. Broido

Of all things, that large lantern battery really took me back. Before I figured out how to get 115V from the wall outlet to some sort of transformer or power supply, I went through countless lantern batteries. They were expensive (well, to me as a kid) but nowhere near as expensive as those disco clothes! The racks of test equipment, essentially doing nothing, seem a lot older than this film. And the strange way she positions her hands on the table, and methodically drones on about conductivity, just clashes with all that stuff in the background. This would have been a big laugh if it were played in my high school science class. It's the sort of film you hope will break and the teacher has to try awkwardly to thread the remaining film through the projector. By 1984, they replaced the film projectors with VHS VCRs that most teachers had no idea how to use. "Channel 3? What? How does this go in there?" The VCRs were large enough to survive re-entry into the earth's atmosphere and leave a crater. It was just before normal people could afford to buy an entry-level VCR. It was amazing how the blurry quality of the 16mm films were better than the large CRT TV on the VHS video cart. We went from a wall of fuzzy images, splices and jumps that you could at least read down to a VCR that played on a much smaller area than the film. And the VHS tapes always had spots where the tape jammed in some prior showing and the creases and damage would distort the TV image. They should have stuck with the film projectors until the technology could at least project an image on the same size pull-down screen. But to watch stuff like this? I thought their animations were well-done for the time and the kids did a good job of reading the teleprompter, which would be the big monitor to the left when that start with the live-type intro. Great film!

Matt Wietlispach

Found a citation which lists this one as 1979.

Mike Stubbs

Oh yeah - also blame Starsky and Hutch for the hair.

Ymir the Frost Giant

I'd put this in between those two years - 1977/78 (when I was 14). Punk and New Wave seems to have been mainstream back then but it was anything but, and I remember flares at school right up to thenabouts. Plus those hairstyles were also everywhere at school around '77 too. I think it was possibly due to Grease the movie. It's also interesting to hear the different local accents in this - for example with the word' current'. Sometimes you can have a swim in the way the U is sounded; other times it sounds like a third R. And isn't that gril Patty(?) the splitting image of Barry Manilow! Where music and fashion are always the passion. And electrons.

Ymir the Frost Giant

Bit confusing measuring current on a volt meter though!

Dr Andy Hill

Good film despite the colour shift. That siren belling off during the atom electron was immensly annoying though!

Dr Andy Hill

lol ..... quite good actually. Stayed away from Bohr's orbits which is surprising for the time this was made as they were still teaching it incorrectly 50 years after it was obsoleted. Would have been mega impressed if they had covered photonic emission, perhaps the most important function of the electron :-)

Color like this is why, back when I was a semi-pro film photographer, I always included ColorChecker shots with each shoot. Not just to manage age, but also to manage lousy processing and print vendors. Be sure to replace your ColorCheckers every year! The pigments and base material slowly oxidize with use, even when stored in an air-tight container (freezer bags for me). There certainly are other alternatives, but none manage metamerism as well as the ColorChecker, since only ColorCheckers provide full spectral curves for their pigments, not just RGB values, allowing correction of the full color pipeline from the light source, to the object, to the sensor, to the print. Edit: ColorChecker use also saved me when I had to use multiple film sources in a single shoot. Not just between brands of otherwise similar film (say, ASA100 from Fuji vs. Kodak), but also between regular film, slide film and movie film.

BobC