Guest Blog: Romance in the Electronics Age

(Guest blog by Mark Miller.)

In 2001 I was an EECS major at Berkeley, and I was trying to put together something cute for my girlfriend. The idea was that I'd click a button on an X10 remote control, and a bunch of candles would light up-it would be dorky, possibly romantic, but mostly just a fun project. The only problem was my focus on the software side of my major rather than on EE, so I was left with about 110 volts AC and only the crudest ideas about how to light something on fire.

I went to the hardware store on University looking for a likely piece of candle-lighting handiness, but came up short. I finally tried to talk to a salesperson about my project, but given the national climate at the time (a few months after September 11th) I had a hard time explaining that (a) I was not a terrorist and (b) I did, in fact, have a girlfriend, despite a slightly skewed idea of what might constitute romance. I left the store with thirty feet of insulated copper wire and a few suspicious looks.

The final product was the wire connected in series with a short segment of steel wool filament (the "resistor") which was wrapped around the wick of the candle (and the whole resistor was dusted liberally with powdered match heads). I think I had about three or four candles in the series.

And the whole thing worked! Mostly. About half the time I could get it to light on cue. About 30% of the time, I'd trip the circuit breaker and my whole apartment would go dark. And the remaining 20% of the time the filament would sort of explode, throwing small threads of molten steel around the room and in one case into the skin of my elbow (the scar is fading).

In the end I decided I couldn't rely on the mechanism to stand on its own, but I wanted to show my girlfriend anyway-I wrapped us both up in a down comforter (fire retardant), put a clear glass punch bowl in front of her face (I had racquetball goggles for myself) and pressed the button-I think one candle lit, and then the rest of the resistors blew in a nice little shower of sparks. My girlfriend removed the bowl from her face, turned to me with a smile and asked, "And how much time did you spend on this?"