I had occasion to look up some fairly simple, but extremely important, information over the weekend. Basically, I thought it would be a good idea to double-check the correct way to add an outlet to a household circuit before actually performing said wiring task.
The fun thing is, I have two sources of information at my disposal. One of them is a thin series of Popular Mechanics encyclopediae, the other is a single hefty Reader’s Digest Do-It-Yourself tome. And, fortunately, they both agreed that they way that I had in mind to do it was, in fact, correct.
But the really kind of amusing part has to do with the ages of the books. The Reader’s Digest tome is of fairly recent vintage – maybe two or three years old. The Popular Mechanics texts date back to some time in the mid 60’s. Possibly before. And where the RD book is all about home improvement, Pop Mech has pages and pages of projects, ranging from building your own AM radio transmitter to installing a boat-winch powered stair climbing elevator for the elderly.
The older text, strangely enough, has easier to follow illustrations. In some ways the modern book is hampered by the color pictures. In the Pop Mech books, there are clean and simple black & white line drawings of crew-cut 50’s kids cheerfully weilding soldering irons as they construct a simple Morse Code telegraph set out of a mass of wires and transistors. In RD’s Tome, drawings are “enhanced” by color coding different lines and sections. If there’s a chance that the illustration could be unclear, another color is added, along with a legend indicating what each color means.
In some ways, it’s an interesting contrast in design philosphy and the limitations of the available technology. If all you’ve got is one ink color, you’re going to have to keep your illustrations clear and simple. If you’ve got a rainbow to work with, the temptation is to make things complex.
Unsurprisingly, the simpler illustrations get the point across better.