Memories of a mid-20th century electrical measurements laboratory and its instrumentation

Abstract

There was a time when undergraduate physics majors took a junior-level course in Electricity and Magnetism, accompanied by a semester of laboratory work, learning to make precision electrical measurements. This laboratory experience is long gone, replaced by coursework in digital and analog electronics. Even the latter has been downplayed in favor of a course in the use of digital computers to solve problems in physics. In this article, I will discuss the course that I took as an undergraduate at Amherst College in the late 1950s and then taught as a young faculty member at Kenyon College in the late sixties. I was a participant in the demise of the E&M laboratory and the rise of the ensuing vacuum tube and digital electronics course. I will concentrate on the precision apparatus, which is presently living out its life in the dusty back shelves of apparatus closets. This may help new faculty members to answer the perennial question: It is attractive, but what is it and how was it used?