Chapter Eight
In Alan’s Workshop
Tuesday, September 7, 2010, Brentwood
As the display of the digital clock on the wall above his bench changed to 2:07 AM, Alan labored over the guts of a 1932 Stewart-Warner table radio he had found recently at a yard sale. Frowning through a pair of high-powered magnifying glasses he’d gotten from a medical supply website, Alan concentrated on soldering a new ceramic capacitor in place of a charred paper one.
Capacitors, he thought. If there’s a problem, if a set isn’t working, you can bet that the orderly flow of electrons has been disrupted by a little capacitor that simply can’t take it anymore.
Alan’s workshop was full of old radios, each one meticulously restored to full working order by his own hand. To the computer scientist in him, an old vacu
