Dear Big Max 1935:

The PIPE Here again-and I could be wrong, but perhaps you're a fellow KNOBBY transmitter user from "further back" than yours truly, during the days, possibly, of Orbit's old REED radios??? Sounded like it from the "6-12" name of that rig...please forgive me for thinking that way if I got it wrong...!

In 1948 the very first "bipolar" transistor was made at Bell Labs from GERMANIUM...and it pre-dates SILICON by, I think, nearly a decade (perhaps less) as a material (actually a CHEMICAL ELEMENT you'd find on those "periodic tables", with the symbol "Ge") for solid state electronic devices.

The typical GERMANIUM transistor has a voltage drop behavior across one of its "emitter-base junctions" that's a bit LOWER in voltage value than a silicon transistor has-say, about 0.4 to 0.5 volts for germanium, rather than nearly 1.0 volt for silicon-which, by coinicidence, makes it PERFECT for the sort of duty we RCers could put it to, in dropping a 2 volt lead acid battery's output to JUST the right 1.5 VDC voltage figure to give a glowplug a good LIGHTHOUSE effect without burning it out!

My so-called "German-ium Secret Glowplug Weapon" is STILL lighting up my four stroke model engines some TWENTY YEARS after I first built it in the early 1980s! I keep the Hawker 2 volt lead acid battery in it charged up with one of my FMA SuperNova chargers, and there's even an analog METER movement in it to let me know of plug "flooding" or even a BLOWN one, if it should ever happen!

ONE of these days, if I can ever find the time, I'll get a website of mine up to show how to make one of these-or perhaps it MIGHT be a good RC/CL/FF "across-the-boundaries" construction article to do up for the AMA magazine...they MIGHT just like it a whole LOT...!

Yours Sincerely,

The PIPE!

[Just waitin' for the "MUGGIES" to leave New England-summer's hottest weather just plain HATES me!!!]