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Lessons from popular electronics magazines and books

Lessons from popular electronics magazines and books

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By Peter Clarke



In the 20th century there have been three main American publishers of popular electronics books and magazines. All were founded by individuals who published material that bridged the hobbyist-technician-engineer gap:

1. John F. Rider

2. Howard W. Sams

3. Hugo Gernsbach

I won’t recount the history of each here except to say that the first two published reverse-engineered consumer electronics circuit diagrams for radio-TV repair shops. These shops were plentiful in my youth (the 1960s) but have since gone away in the US (and presumably elsewhere) as low-cost Asian consumer electronics has dominated the marketplace. With throw-away electronics and surface-mount parts, repair is no longer in vogue. Gernsbach published Popular Electronics and other widely-circulated hobbyist and radio amateur electronics magazines in the US.

All three published paperback books on basic electronics theory that were intended for those interested in electronics over a wide range of skill levels, from hobbyists to technicians and even engineers. They were sometimes light (pre-technician) and were rarely deep into engineering (rarely invoking the s-domain). A wide range of people interested in electronics could pull something out of them. They were also artistically illustrated, and the illustrations drove the text rather than the other way around – a storyboard format that script-writers use. Perhaps a resurgence of these kinds of books is possible. Netherlands-based Elektor sells them in Europe. Sadly, interested youth would have a hard time today finding this kind of literature in the local neighborhood grocery stores. The last time I was in the United States (a decade ago) I found no electronics magazines on the racks. There was marketing-oriented user-level electronics for mass consumption but not technical material with circuit diagrams – not even Nuts and Volts.


The Web has replaced the magazine racks in the local stores. There is much superficial technical information on the Web and it takes some searching to find good websites. Few, if any, provide the quality and extent of content found in books or even single issues of some magazines. Books are also available through the Web, though it is difficult to gain any real appreciation over the Web for their content. America’s largest new and used technical bookstore, until its recent absorption into the main store, was Powell’s Technical Bookstore in Portland, Oregon, a convenient location for those in the Silicon Forest of Tektronix, ESI, Intel, Audio Precision, Mentor Graphics, OECO, and other electronics companies in the area.

Perusing the Web cannot match the experience of standing for hours among row after row of interesting engineering books, perusing them and occasionally becoming deeply absorbed in their pages. One might enter the store in bright daylight and eventually leave in the dark with a box of purchased and give-away books, wondering where the car was parked and whether it would have a parking ticket on it. The occasional trip to the bookstore would result in a great intellectual boost at modest financial impoverishment. Engineers have been known to spend hundreds of dollars per visit. The unmarried engineer who persists among the shelves too long might also incur the additional cost of dinner in town. The vast personal libraries of some engineers can even hamper their move to a different house.

After World War II, technician training literature of the U.S. Navy found its way into general circulation through John F. Rider, by 1955 a division of Hayden Publishing Company. Rider published a Basic Electronics series as used by Navy specialty schools. The nondescript author was a corporation: Van Valkenburgh, Nooger, and Neville Inc. Volume 4, for instance, covers transmitters, class-C amplifiers, frequency multipliers, transmission lines, antennas, and CW and AM modulation. The pages are about half text, half black-and-white illustrations, drawn navy-style. An example is shown below from Volume 4, No. 170-4, pages 4-68, 4-69.)


Rider also published a Basic Audio series by Norman H. Crowhurst, a prolific electronics author who later lived in Oregon. Volume 2, published in 1959, is nearly identical in style and size to the navy material; even the illustrations look like they came from the navy. Both BJTs and electron tubes appear in the 122-page book. While the content is not quite at an engineering level, it is hardly vacuous and makes for interesting perusal by engineers.

In 1962, Howard Sams (by then a Bobbs-Merrill company) published a “basic electronics series” on Transistor Circuits and also on Radio Circuits, both by a navy captain, Thomas M. Adams. Previous basic circuits books by him were based on electron tubes. These books did not have the navy style; they had more text than drawings, though the current flows on circuit diagrams were in color and were solid or dotted, to aid explanation. (See page 114 below, as an example, using the negative-current convention of the US Navy.) Although these books are also best suited for technicians, they are excellent examples of how to explain concepts clearly and simply, using good illustrations. Engineering authors could benefit from a perusal of these books when writing on electronics.


This genre of electronics books can be associated with the style of presentation of the 1950s or earlier, for it was near the end of that era, in 1961, that Tektronix published a hardback book 1.25 inches thick (with each chapter having its own page numbering) titled Typical Oscilloscope Circuitry. Boxes of these books lay dormant on filing cabinets near the fourth-floor elevator at the rear of Building 50, the Technical Center of the company, available to technical employees and kept under the presumed auspices of “the Reverend” Russ Fillinger, an earlier Tek manager who made many and varied contributions at Tek. I absconded with two or three copies, and I still have two – they are that noteworthy. I recall years ago in a discussion on this subject with Jim Williams of Linear Technology (to whom I might have given the third copy) that he had a high regard for this book. It is not what would be considered today an engineering book, though it is full of conceptually descriptive material about oscilloscope circuits that would interest engineers.


The circuit analysis was technician-level but the concepts were illustrated with actual ‘scope circuitry to such depth that an engineer could be drawn in by it. Perhaps the book was written in part by Tek founder and creative engineer, Howard Vollum; no authorship is ascribed to it. Example pages are shown below.

In the era of this book, Tek also published two series of paperback books with similar style, one on circuit concepts and the other on measurement concepts. These books looked like they were typed; the font was courier and the right margin was not justified. The drawings were neat but plain. The books I have of these series were published in the late 60s or early 70s. They are presently available in PDF for download from David DiGiacomo; Test Equipment and Electronics Information.

During this time and thereafter, a large number of quite useful paperback publications appeared from what were mainly semiconductor companies. Most prominent was the library of useful paperback volumes that came from National Semiconductor Co., not the least of which was the classic Linear Applications Handbook. My copy is the 1986 edition and it has 1222 pages full of useful circuit applications. Earlier, Signetics published a white hardback classic with a mix of circuit applications. For both books, ICs of the companies would figure prominently, of course. Linear Technology, Analog Devices, and TI continued this tradition of maintaining a well-informed customer base. These companies have made available far more engineering literature than was necessary to sell parts, and the electronics engineering world is enriched by them through it to an extent hard to quantify.

This newer generation of industrial electronics literature has replaced the Rider-Sams-Gernsbach era of electronics material, beginning perhaps with the GE Transistor Manual, a classic transitional example. (Predating it was the RCA Radiotron Designer’s Handbook, an electron-tube classic, downloadable from the Internet. With the ease of producing publication-quality script on an ordinary laptop computer, anyone who can write can become a self-publishing purveyor of electronics literature. Much of it has appeared on that great communications outlet of the current era, the Web, thereby replacing the magazine rack and even bookstores to an extent. Although material of varying quality has always appeared in the dominating media, today the Internet increases the scale to where greater effort must be paid in finding the better material.


For those of you who aspire to write a book (or even a stapled or “saddle-stitched” booklet) on electronics, the task can be made easier by self-publishing (if you have some language and page layout skills) through print-on-demand companies such as www.thebookpatch.com. The Book Patch and www.blurb.com even handle ordering for you so that you need only submit your PDF manuscript (observing some constraints required for book binding, such as the number of pages being divisible by 2 or 6). The Book Patch charges $25 or $50 US for ISBN book numbers and at Blurb, they are free. With printing technology that now allows small print runs at low cost, and with printing companies that also carry out order fulfillment, the role of the traditional publisher is being reduced to that of page layout and editing for the grammar-deficient writer, and marketing through the established book distribution wholesalers. Indeed, traditional book publishing might be headed the way of the blacksmith, though with the general American trend toward poorer language skills, it might be a long while before it becomes obsolete.

Dennis Feucht has his own laboratory, Innovatia, on a jungle hilltop in Belize, where he performs electronics research, technical writing, and helps others with product development. He has written a four-volume book-set on analog circuit design, has completed a book on transistor amplifier design and is working on a book on power electronics.

This article first appeared on EE Times’ Planet Analog website.

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Electronic slang for old and young

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