Why Ed works at night

Allseeingjoey

From the text from the image, this is why Ed works at night so he obviosly uses radio waves.

poughkeepsieblue

Yes, ed obviously uses radio waves. The evidence can be seen on his tool room wall.

Here's an image I found just googling, and the entire center of this board is variable capacitors or tuning capacitors. From the looks of it, there appears to be an incomplete base for another, an extra rotor for another... misc parts... And I can't tell, but they look like the bases are homemade, perhaps ed disassembled some old radios, looking for the right frequencies, and assembling his own tuners for what he needed. To me, they look like they were crafted, by ed for a specific purpose, almost lovingly.
Heres a close up of one that i grabbed from the net.

In Orval Irwin's book, he mentions ed's antennas running all over, so noticeably, that the FIB came to visit him. There are probably a few of these left over that management hung up on the wall, because they don't have any visible copper inside them to turn in for scrap. When ed died, his place was looted by opportunists, probably looking for ed's 'treasure', or whatever was of value. Of course, turning in scrap metal for money is not a new practice, and during WW2 time, handing in a multitude of different materials for 'national defense', was an extremely common practice. So, you find a lot of extremely heavy and cheap iron and steel left over at CC, because they simply weren't worth carrying out. Including a bunch of primitive tools, and iron wire wrapped bottles, etc.
But all the really good stuff is gone. Copper is worth good money, and worth carrying away. All ed's coils, his pmh's, his alternators and dynamos, and anything with a lick of value was stripped clean like bones. I mean, rock gate has openings with no doors, for a place with such high, heavy walls, it's lacking proper security. I'm convinced ed's 'getting beat up by thugs' story, is not exactly the whole truth. And ed lived in rock gate for 15 years, where anyone could walk in the walled grounds, after getting assaulted at ed's place, prompting him to move... That doesn't exactly make sense. And if korallu pils is correct, than I presume ed didn't worry about the openings because he owned a gun, or 2. And if he really was assaulted, than that would make it even more likely. And because ed lived like a homesteader, and grew and traded a lot of his own food, I also presume he hunted or trapped what he could as well.
Anyway, I tend to wander very far off topic.
I have a collection of various radio receivers from the 40's, around ed's time, and these variable capacitors can be seen in every one.
In fact, heres one inside an old 'Olympic' receiver I was given by a friend a few weeks ago. He only gave me the guts, as the cabinet was rotted out and stunk like an old man's smoking pipe lounge chair.

I'm still learning about radio, so I won't bother to speculate on how ed used them, because I don't really know much about them myself. From what I understand they go in between the antenna and ground. What I do know, is that ed told me that AG makes EZ. And I just recently peered onto the back of this particular receiver and noticed the antenna hookup for AM.

So what was ed doing with the radio? Broadcasting or receiving? Working at night to escape the sun's heat? Or the magnets interfering with his radio work? I have scoffed the 'black box' on ed's tripod talk, but how right are those folks? And how wrong am I for going on about AG and silver, when perhaps ed means antenna/ground? Or likely both...

royalblue

TT Brown - the man whose life cannot be told - tells you why:

>>> Certain granitic and basaltic rocks likewise generate an internal self-potential which can be conducted away by suitably placed electrodes and leads so as to be utilized. In most natural high-resistance materials the polarity remains fixed with time, but it has been found that, in some materials, the polarity occasionally reverses due to some external influence not as yet clearly identified.

and also,

>>> Finally after many years of tedious work and with refinement of methods we succeeded in observing the gravitational variations produced by the moon and sun and much smaller variations produced by the different planets. It is a curious fact that the effects are most pronounced when the affecting body is in the alignment of the differently charged elements and least pronounced when it is at right angles.

Cheers.