The Cat's Whisker

It's that time in my own life, when things are happening that are far beyond my capabilities to control. Not that I really am able to control anything except the choices I make, but I think we all hope to be able to exercise SOME control in situations that affect our hearts, our families, our own sense of what is right and wrong.  I have been turning to my crystals quite often, to help me steady my emotions, gain some strength and clarity, and channel my own energies towards the positive when so much around me is negative.  

I made my Dad a string of healing and energy stones, and an amulet bag for Christmas. He asked my sister, if she believed in that stuff.  I think, he thinks I'm a little "out there"; his leather pouch and string of crystals and stones remains in the tin on the table by his recliner.  I wish he would get it out and just hold it, I think he would feel the vibrations and know the energies that are contained in that string of beads. In my heart, I KNOW he understands there is a power to the crystals, because he told me about his early use of crystals to receive radio waves and listen to the Grand Ole Opry! 

Daddy was always a 'mechanical engineer'.  He told stories of his early life in Bedford, Pennsylvania. A child of the 1920's, growing up in the Great Depression and in a family of little means, using one's intelligence and mechanical abilities helped make life a little better. They had no money for things like radios, but Daddy was always, it seemed, influenced by music. So he fabricated a receiver from crystals and wire, to pick up radio frequencies without benefit of a radio.  This early form of receiver, was called the "Cat's Whisker". So, Dad ... this 'thing' I have about crystals, energy & life forces --- it's really all your fault  ♥

from Wikipedia, "From the earliest wireless telegraphy days of radio, well into the age of commercial AM broadcasting, unamplified radio receivers were powered only by the radio energy they picked up through their antennas. The crystal radio was the most widely used of these. Manufactured and homemade by the millions, it helped introduce radio to the public, contributing to the development of radio from an experimental hobby to an entertainment medium around 1920. After about 1920, receivers using crystal detectors were largely superseded by the first amplifying receivers, which used vacuum tubes. These did not require the fussy adjustments that crystals required, were more sensitive, and also were powerful enough to drive loudspeakers. Nevertheless, the expense of the early vacuum tubes and the batteries needed to run them meant that the crystal detector remained in commercial and military use for almost a decade more. However, by the late 1920s, radios using crystal detectors were relegated to use by hobbyists and youth groups and have been used by them as educational devices to the present day.

The point-contact semiconductor detector was subsequently resurrected around World War II because of the military requirement for microwaveradar detectors. Vacuum-tube detectors do not work at microwave frequencies. The small area of the point contact minimized minority carrierstorage and capacitance, making these diodes fast enough to function at radar frequencies. Silicon and germanium point-contact diodes were developed. Wartime research on p-n junctions in crystals paved the way for the invention of the point-contact transistor in 1947.

The germanium diodes that became widely available after the war proved to be as sensitive as galena and did not require any adjustment, so they replaced cat's whisker detectors in the few crystal radios still being made, largely putting an end to the manufacture of this antique radio component. Although cat's whisker detectors are obsolete, modern point-contact silicon detectors are still commercially produced.^[ Thus, the point-contact method used to make these first semiconductor diodes 100 years ago is still being used today."