What Happened To Radioshack's Science Fair Kit? The Toy That Built America's Engineers

[LiberalArkie]

AI Audio, but... now we know that this is all fake. To believe that this is real means you have to accept that maybe the U.S. actually went to the moon.



It worked. You had no idea why but it worked. You were sitting on your bedroom floor with a wooden box and some colored wires and a booklet you barely understood, and the speaker made a sound, and you made that happen. Nobody helped you. You followed a diagram and clipped wires into metal springs and something came alive under your hands. That was a Science Fair kit from RadioShack.

Starting in the late 1960s, RadioShack sold a line of electronic project kits under the Science Fair brand. A wooden box the size of a board game, filled with resistors, transistors, diodes, and dozens of numbered spring connectors. You clipped color-coded wires between the springs following a diagram in the manual, and you built things. AM radios. Lie detectors. Burglar alarms. Sirens. Morse code oscillators. The kits came in sizes from 10-in-1 all the way up to 300-in-1, and they were sold exclusively at RadioShack's 8,000 stores.

The crystal radio was the one nobody forgot. A radio that worked with no batteries. No power source at all. Just a coil of wire, a germanium diode, and an earpiece clipped to a curtain rod. You heard a voice come through a device you built yourself from parts that had no electricity running through them. That was the moment a kid understood the invisible world was real.

Engineers, scientists, and programmers across America trace their careers back to these kits. They were STEM education before STEM was a word. Then RadioShack became a phone store. The kits disappeared from the shelves. Snap Circuits replaced spring connectors with plastic blocks that click together — safer, simpler, and far less educational. The last original-style kits went out of production. Today you can only find them on eBay.

If you had a Science Fair kit, tell me which one. If the crystal radio was your first build, tell me about hearing that voice. If you spent Christmas Day on your bedroom floor while the adults watched football, you already know exactly what this video is about.

[3Hotdogs]

1. I had a crystal radio kit, probably around 1950.

I recall getting only one of NYC's stations on it. Tuning was difficult.

[OldBaldy1701E]

2. So, I had pretty much every version from their catalog.

So time for a story.

In 1983, I still had the one that came out in 1980, or '81. I was eighteen now, and some friends and I were going to meet up with some other friends to go to 'the dam' and launch some simple fireworks for the Fourth of July. Now, fireworks are illegal in the state of N.C., so of course, everyone went to either Virginia or South Carolina to get them. (We were closer to VA.) They had gotten several good ones to launch and we were looking forward to it. Well, we got word that some of the gang had already gone to the dam ahead of us. We were miffed (not really) and decided to play a practical joke on them.

That circuit box could create a siren sound. My car had a CB radio (dating myself here) with a PA horn attached. So, I wired the box up to create the sound, we grabbed a few blinking lights that we could attach to the car, and we drove to the dam. We arrived and saw that they were out there firing off a few things. We waited for a minute, then suddenly floored the car and hit the lights and siren. We blasted onto the dam (which had a path for driving over it. It was an earthen dam, and it was more to create the lake than to dam up the creek) with the lights and siren blaring.

Well, the crew on the dam exploded in every direction. Our buddy Nick actually ran and dove into the lake to try and swim away! The others just scattered... at least for a moment. Then, they saw that the car coming was a 1978 Chevy Nova instead of a modern police cruiser. Of course, we pulled up and fell out of the car laughing. The crew that was on the dam also started laughing. The lone holdout was Nick, who was not happy that he had tried to escape into the water. We were all adamant that this was on him, as no one else tried to do that, or even thought to do that.

I miss those times.

[paleotn]

5. Back in the day. It's a wonder we lived through it.

The ubiquitous Chevy Nova. Everyone at least knew someone who had one.

[usonian]

17. Famous Chevy Nova. Named to appeal to Latinos. No Va. Doesn't Go.

How could they?

[paleotn]

3. Lots of stuff like that back in the day. Feels like there's less emphasis on such things today.

I remember "graduating" from tinker toys and lincoln logs to erector sets, Kenner girder and panel, and various and sundry science kits.

They were the mental birthplace of engineers and scientists not simply because we got the kit to work. Some of us wanted to know how and why it worked.

[Maninacan]

4. Makers

Lots of makers kits available. Way better than radio shack in the day.

[Celerity]

6. AI slop. Please edit your title to reflect this is AI slop, or better yet, pull the entire thing. TIA

[LiberalArkie]

7. It literally says AI Generated content right on the screen.

AI Means that the author created an outline for the text, and video. (In other words creates the idea for some of the text). The AI Generates the voice and video. In the past the creator would hire a speaker to record the audio that a ghost writer created. Then might hire a ghost graphics person to create the art work for the book..

[Celerity]

8. IMHO you should disclose that this is AI slop in your OP title.

[Prairie Gates]

9. Many kids and teens today build their own gaming rigs

There's also a whole kinda wild subculture of homemade keyboards that probably mimics the science of the science fair kit pretty closely.

Sure, much of it is plug and play, but kids do learn about computer components and shop for them and sometimes repair their computers when they're not working.

I'm actually not that worried about engineering knowledge among younger kids and teens. The loss of humanities sensibilities is going to be far more dire.

[usonian]

10. Some of us had a higher risk tolerance (just kidding)

Never had one. I was so jealous.

My first real kit. Lafayette KT-135 "Explor-Air". (not mine)



I miss "The Shack". (later Fry's Electronics) I was visiting my daughter's place when I found the heater constantly running. There was a loose wire in the thermostat, so I headed over to RS and grabbed the cheapest soldering iron and some solder and fixed it. I suppose that these days, you order a new thermostat online and have it delivered, or maybe a new apartment instead.

I don't recall one of those "do it all" kits, but I remember the Rocket Radio.



Crystal set inside, with a slug inside the tuning coil that you adjusted with the "nose cone".

Speaking of Radio Shack, I got this kit at Tandy Leather, pre Radio Shack?
Still have it. The slide rules have their own cases.


But this one fits the leather pencil case.


Tandy Leather and RadioShack survive online.

https://tandyleather.com/

https://www.radioshack.com/

Surviving Stores? (403)

https://www.store-locator.info/radio-shack/store-list

[hunter]

13. I have the transistor version of that tube radio.

The construction is almost identical. Rather than tubes it has metal-cased transistors, each in a little transistor socket.

It still works too.

[usonian]

14. I never saw one.

Having filaments for a 50C5, 35W4 and 12AT7 in series, straight out of the power line was scary stuff.

There were no self-reported fatalities that I know of. /s

Manual PDF (11MB)
http://www.radiomanual.eu/schemi/Surplus_Radioamateur/Lafayette_KT-135_Explor-air_assembly_manual.pdf

[Disaffected]

18. Yeah, it is curious that there were not more injuries.

I built a HealthKit, CRT, colour TV that had IIRC a 15KV power supply (and fiddled with it endlessly trying to get it to work properly).

[Disaffected]

16. Wow, that takes me back.

I still have the Heathkit version of that 3 tube, regenerative, multi-band radio, and, it still works.

As a teen I built several Heathkit and Lafayette kits including a colour TV, a couple of hi-fi amps, an oscilloscope, a multimeter and a RF/audio signal generator.

[MineralMan]

11. Radio Shack was far from the only company that made such kits.

In fact, it was a very late-comer to that type of product. I pre-date the Shack by many years. I started making electronics from kits at the age of 10, in 1955. Knight Kits. Kits from Allied Electronics. Heathkits. There were several companies who sold such things. All had some sort of progressive kit like those Science Fair Kits from Radio Shack, as well.

That is not to diminish the value of Radio Shack in its early years, but it didn't start that line of products. It just started retail stores that sold electronics supplies.

[xocetaceans]

12. Why do people keep hammering this site with AI slop? If it is not inaccurate, it is unethical on account of how it . . .

. . . was created through the theft of others' works in its training.

Is that what you want to support? The more you support these slop channels, the more they will grow.

Here's a prompt for you:

Create a story in which a member of a site that supports a certain set of values turns against those values because of thoughts of cuteness or convenience or whatever justification might be needed to allow such a behavior. Write it as a farce using the style of Neil Simon. Make it have one main character and portray the antagonist as unrealistic. Then, give the characters in the script the traits associated with the three main characters in Catch 22.

So, anyway, there is a lot of creativity needed to fulfill that prompt: none of it comes from 'AI'. The use of AI slop on this site is really no better than abetting theft.

[hunter]

15. I didn't watch the video. I rarely do.

I've got a few similar kits of my own. I was obsessed with radios and telephones when I was a kid. My children were not.

It's possible to start similar discussions on DU without the AI garbage.

I remember in grade school teachers telling us we had to use our own words -- that simply copying stuff out of the encyclopedia was unacceptable. Reposting AI slop is the modern day equivalent of copying stuff out of the encyclopedia.