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Against the Hydraulic Analogy
Let that sink in: the most popular tool for teaching electronics makes the trade harder to learn.
It is a reimagining of electronic circuits as a series of tubes; in this model, electricity is akin to water, batteries are pumps, and switches behave like valves. It gets worse; presented without comment is a well-publicized reinvention of a bipolar junction transistor (BJT) as a pull-chain toilet with a bucket instead of a handle: The problem with these models isn’t that they aren’t intuitive: it’s that the analogy is fundamentally incorrect and can’t be fixed by tacking improbable plumbing fixtures on top.
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