THE CLAPPER

I’m sure you have all come across those times when we wake up at night and stumble our way across the room to the switch board, to turn on the lights. The number of times I stubbed my toe against the leg of the bed! Ouch!!  I wished there existed an easier way to turn on the lights.

Once while I was watching a movie I saw something very interesting. The actor in the movie would clap his hands once and the lights would come ON, he’d clap twice and they’d go OFF.

It was like a dream come true!!

I wondered how the mechanism worked and thought it would be very complicated. I read up about it and it wasn’t so complicated after all.

The clapper has two outlets in which you can plug an electrical appliance. It has a microphone inside it which receives sound from the surrounding and converts it into an electrical signal. This is then passed to a filter. The filter filters the sound and detects “claps”. Meaning, it accepts only those signals within a particular frequency  range and rejects all others. Once a clap is detected, the filter passes the electical singal to one of two switches to which the outlets are connected. The switches turn on only if they receive a certain number of signals from the filter.

 The most common clapper is the one in which the first outlet responds to two claps and the second, to three claps. In order to turn off the appliance, clap the same number of times you clapped  to turn it on.

To put it in a few words, the clapper is a very convenient electronic device which has made people, all the more lazy….But has also prevented a lot of toes from getting stubbed in the dark!

Kimberly Dsouza...