David Durlach was a child when he discovered electromagnets. But not until he was in high school did it strike him like a poem that each winding of a wire coil increases the strength of its magnetic field. At that point, he remembers, he started winding electromagnets until his wrists got tired. Once, when a coil grew to the size of an acorn squash and the weight of a bowling ball, he lugged it over to a wall socket and plugged it in. By some miracle the fuses held, but lights throughout the house grew dim. My parents asked me not to plug it in in the evenings when they were trying to read, he recalls.
In 1977, Durlach went to Princeton and tried studying physics, math, and electrical engineering, but he was unhappy. Academic science was too dry for his tastes, and he had little in common with students in traditional liberal arts courses. After four years, he left without taking a degree, moved back to his native Massachusetts, and spent several years in a succession of odd jobs--volleyball coach, math tutor, stand-up comedian--but otherwise rarely left his apartment. Soon he was running out of the small inheritance he had been living on. He needed an income, he needed more human contact, and he had a vague sense that he could turn his hobby--electromagnets--into something he could present to the outside world. He joined a support group for entrepreneurs.
We spent half the time giving each other therapy and the other half business advice, he says. It was then, at the age of 26, that his tinkering with electromagnets took a serious turn. One day he brought the group a tray of iron filings, with a few small electromagnets wired underneath. He had also rigged up a computer to control the amount of electricity in each coil--and thus the strength of its magnetic field--and had programmed the computer to make patterns form and shift in the filings. The support group loved it.
