"William Sommerwerck" wrote in message
...
"Jim Wilkins" wrote in message ...

When I ran a lab at Mitre an engineer kept asking me to buy him
more and more Polaroid film for his scope camera. I finally asked
him why and found that he was trying to discover the principles of
how a fuse blows. He looked really sheepish and subdued when I
handed him a Littelfuse pamphlet of current vs time curves.
http://www.littelfuse.com/~/media/fi...ofuseology.pdf

When I worked one Summer at Bell Labs, one of the engineers told me
he was trying to figure out how much detail the eye could see in
color. What he didn't know (and I'd forgotten that I knew) was that
this information was part of the design of the NTSC system.

As a chemistry student I was expected to learn a lot of practical
detail and hands-on procedure that I later noticed new electrical (and
some mechanical) engineers often lacked.
jsw