If you were popped out of the timestream and found yourself suddenly in the distant past, how much of our modern technology could you re-create? I've often thought that I could climb back to the vacuum tube era of the 1920s or so.

Author H. P. Friedrichs has realized this thought experiment and gone a step further by re-creating the transistor as well. You can read detailed descriptions of these adventures in technology in his book Instruments of Amplification.

Instruments of Amplification, written and illustrated by H. P. Friedrichs, is jam-packed with nearly 300 pages of history, science background, basic theory, and hard-to-find hands-on details pertaining to the construction of an amazing array of homebrew amplifying devices.

Rooted in the same "build-it-from-scratch" philosophy that made his first book, The Voice of the Crystal, a success, Instruments of Amplification reduces complex devices to their essential elements and then shows how they can be constructed from commonly available materials.

Instruments of Amplification is available from my favourite bookseller, Lindsay Books.

I met Johnny Payphone on the Brass Goggles Forum in it's early days.  He would drop by periodically and lob thought-bombs into our midst that touched off fire-storms of discussion on the core nature of Steampunk and just how much 'Punk' there was in it.

Here is a wonderful interview of Johnny from the Experiment section of the Romanian online zine EgoPhobia that makes it abundantly clear that yes, there is Punk in Steampunk.

Continuing the tale of my long and busy weekend . . .

So a crew from PBS's new show Make:TV spent the weekend with me in the shop filming me at work.  I re-created a couple of projects and made a coach lamp for the car, start to finish.  That turned out to be really hard as I was creating from scrap brass and found objects a whole new piece that needed to be completed while the crew was still there.

When Make:TV was blocking out the schedule for their visit to Boston they asked me if there were more 'steampunk' people in the area doing big projects.  I pointed them in the direction of M@ (Matt) and Holly and HUMANWINE.

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