Young Experimenter

Young Designer and Experimenter

When I was young I preferred to play with a soldering iron, radio tubes and flying models instead of playing soccer or ice hockey like most of my friends. In my early teens I built a spark transmitter, a crystal radio set, a telephone system to chat with friends in the neighborhood, a number of small model airplanes and an even greater number of homemade guns which are called "tussari" in Finnish. Those things were very dangerous and sometimes exploded, but luckily no one was hurt. There are no photos of this early creativity but things changed when I got interested in photography and started to develop negatives and photos by myself. I first got a very cheap 6x9 box camera, then a 6x6 Zeiss which I soon changed to a 36 mm Kodak Retina. By then I was about 16 and my designs started to take a more serious shape.

1. Radios 1950-1958. The fifties were radio tube time with high DC voltages, such as 250 V. I built two tape recorders and many receivers, supers as they were called. Some of them included a transmitter, and a few times I sent pop music to my friends. Of course, it was an illegal "pirate radio". Years later I mentioned it to my ham radio friends. "Oh it was you, we were very close to catching you!"
When transistors came onto the market I built a car radio and a telephone amplifier for my parents, who still had an antique telephone system in the countryside.

2. Enlarging machines 1952 and 1957: Finland was a poor country after the war, and for a schoolboy an enlarging machine was an expensive thing. So I designed and built one for 35 mm film. It looks like it is welded, but it is actually of soldered construction (you can solder in a living room). Later, both of my younger brothers used it for tens of years and finally my daughter Minna used it 40 years after I had made it. The enlarger could be used as a projector as well . The small box in the foreground (middle photo) is another of my creations, a small radio set with miniature tubes.
The second enlarger I built for 16 mm film long before Kodak brought 16 mm mini cameras onto the market. I bought a rare Italian Gami 16 mm precision camera for which I used 12 DIN (or 12 ASA) film for the best possible resolution. Both enlargers still work today.