In eighth grade, my English teacher, Mr. Zappala, discovered my then budding interest in electronics and asked me if I could please build a one-transistor radio as a present he could give to his son. He would pay me for the project, so I undertook the task.
Using my then highly refined skills which I had developed a'la Transistor Topics by Lou Garner in Popular Electronics, I put a receiver together and it worked fine. Its one transistor was a Raytheon CK722.
In that time, the CK722 was sold as a really nice looking blue-colored device with block lettering that proclaimed the type number. I happened to have two of them and thus I ran into my first business ethics issue.
One CK722 was really pretty. The white lettering was crisply readable and beautifully set off by the blue case color. The other CK722 had suffered some cosmetic decline, a wearing off of its lettering, sort of like the one shown here. It was still readable, but that transistor was nowhere near as visually attractive as the other.
The problem was that the less appealing transistor had higher gain than the pretty one, so which one of these two was I going to include in the delivered product???
I decided that since I wanted to please my customer as best I could, I used the higher gain but less attractive transistor. I wanted the radio to work as best it could and I figured that Mr. Zappala's son wouldn't know, or even care if he had known, that I'd chosen the less cosmetically attractive CK722.
I put the project together as best I could and delivered it. I got paid. Everyone was happy.
Well, at least I hope so.
Hi John,
One of my old bosses said
a Train runs better with more shine
on the Whistle's and Bell's.
Posted by: Don Humphrey | February 22, 2013 at 08:15 PM