{"id":1809,"date":"2011-03-11T10:48:08","date_gmt":"2011-03-11T18:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/?p=1809"},"modified":"2011-03-11T10:48:08","modified_gmt":"2011-03-11T18:48:08","slug":"why-audio-connectors-are-called-jacks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/?p=1809","title":{"rendered":"Why audio connectors are called &#8220;jacks&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Make-Electronics-Discovery-Charles-Platt\/dp\/0596153740\">Make: Electronics<\/a> by Charles Platt is one of my current favorite books.  I&#8217;m working my way through it, experiment by experiment, and learning tons about circuits, components, soldering, schematics, and more along the way.  Recently I was working with switches and relays and learned an interesting bit of etymology.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/gretachristina.typepad.com\/.a\/6a00d8341bf68b53ef0120a594d455970c-800wi\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=floatRight width=200 alt=\"Switchboard operators\" src=\"http:\/\/gretachristina.typepad.com\/.a\/6a00d8341bf68b53ef0120a594d455970c-800wi\" title=\"Switchboard operators\"  \/><\/a>Switches permit the controlled connection, or disconnection, of a circuit.  We&#8217;re all familiar with light switches, doorbells, computer on\/off switches, etc.  Less familiar (now) is the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Telephone_switchboard\">telephone switchboard<\/a>, for which an operator had to be able to selectively connect together pairs of the thousands of possibilities, as quickly as possible.  <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/profiles.incredible-people.com\/charles-ezra-scribner\/\">Charles E. Scribner<\/a>, a man of great ingenuity, developed the &#8220;jack-knife switch&#8221; to make fast switching possible.  This was a plug with a jackknife-like handle (hence the name) that could be inserted into a socket to activate the switch.  Two such plugs at either ends of a cord allowed the connection of any two sockets, yielding an active telephone connection.  <\/p>\n<p>Although switchboards are no longer used today, the same jack-knife switch design was used to design audio connectors &#8212; which is why we refer to those plugs as &#8220;jacks&#8221;, even though no knife handle remains.  I had never thought to wonder why they were called that!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Make: Electronics by Charles Platt is one of my current favorite books. I&#8217;m working my way through it, experiment by experiment, and learning tons about circuits, components, soldering, schematics, and more along the way. Recently I was working with switches and relays and learned an interesting bit of etymology. Switches permit the controlled connection, or [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[59,8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1809"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1809"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1809\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1816,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1809\/revisions\/1816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}