Electrons At Work (1961)

This is a weird film, insofar as the existence of electrons had been discovered in the 19th century, and yet the narrator is making it sound like in the 1960s they were still learning what electrons were. Is this a case of the narrator being far less informed than he should have been?

Philip Stephens

Just love vacuum tubes. Sadly my working life began as they were being rapidly replaced by solid-state transistors. There is something magical about seeing a vacuum tube begin to glow :)

John Russell

Great film, thanks for rescuing, reminds me of High School, (I ran the projector) Give me a shout sometime.

Elliott Mule Deer

Great to see all them ‘lectrons workin’ fer a livin’ in that Electronic Computor! (sic) How many industrials have you collected?

Mike O'Dell

Thank you for that lovely little film. I think it may have been one of those 'I can't be bothered to teach so we're going to watch films today' films we had in public school. I also laughed at the doing addition on the computer portion of the demonstration. Yes it took the machine a fraction of a second to total the numbers, but it took an operator 20 minutes to enter in the data one line at a time on punch cards, and then you have to double and triple check that the correct values have been copied down. My first programing courses were all done on punch cards, running fortran. For a class of thirty students, we had two card punch keyboards and one card reader, which sent your program to the computer off site on another campus. Then you waited for your printout to come up to see what errors you had made. It took forever to trouble shoot a program!

David Fountain

So that's why cats keep coming around rubbing against my leg -- they're low on electrons!

Peter Knazko

Thanks for this Fran, That film has some great demos.

Pretty sure it would be a vacuum. In air you can use a corona discharge to move air.

Great demo of electrons having mass! That little wheel inside the glass tube being spun by electrons hitting its fins was really cute. I wonder what the current was. Was there any air in the tube or was there a vacuum?

Peter Knazko

“If we take some electrons from this cat”… This is why all those electron-less cats were running around in the 60s: science films.

Daniel Welsh

I'm loving these videos Fran, I appreciate anything you can turn out while you are busy moving FranLab and these are interesting.

Dr Andy Hill

Great video Fran. Thanks for your herculian efforts to preserve this and the many other things you keep from being lost.

William E Lee