One evening my parents were out for a walk. They passed by a house and couldn’t help noticing a living room window with the light flickering on and off. There were shadows of people on the closed drapes and those shadows were dancing wildly. It was one of those nifty gadgets of the early seventies -- the strobe light.
My mother’s first reaction was that it was a tool of the devil, but to my engineer father, it was a toy of science. It didn’t take long for Dad to order a strobe light kit from a science magazine. It didn’t arrive for several weeks, although when it did, my dad put it together almost immediately.
There was magic in the air as we got ready to test it. Until that time, we hadn’t seen a strobe light. Dad plugged it into the wall. He held the reflector in one hand while adjusting a knob on another box with the controls on it.
At first nothing happened. Then it began to flash every once in a while. My dad kept adjusting it until the flashing was fairly steady. Dad asked one of us to turn off the light. That’s when the strobe light won our hearts.
I like your way of describing the strobe light. I laughed at the "tool of the devil" part.
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