Thoughts on degaussing

By Todd Stadler · Thursday, January 4, 2001 6:59pm

Did you know you can degauss your monitor? Many monitors have a button or menu option for doing so. When you press the button, the picture on the screen shakes and makes nice vibrating colors and then calms down after a while. It is often accompanied by The Degaussing Noise. It is, for some odd reason, fun. Like cleaning your fingernails is fun. "There, I've done that now!" or something.

I don't know exactly what degaussing does, but remembering only the slightest amount of basic physics, I'd venture that it has to do with removing accumulated magnetic charge somehow built up in the monitor. This is not surprising, given the number of electrons flying around inside that thing. As you may remember, electrons are non-trivially related to the concept of electric charge, which is non-trivially related to the concept of magnetic charge; oh isn't it all so fun?

Anyhow, I became enamored of degaussing at Fondren library. I'd be sitting there, writing some program, and I'd press the degauss button. It was a good thing to do when pondering some error, or while completely spacing out. I felt like I'd at the very least degaussed my monitor. It gave me the strength to go on.

But you can't degauss too often as the charge doesn't have enough time to build up again to make an appreciable Degaussing Noise. It quickly became apparent that I was not making any forward progress in my computer-aided studying when I found myself pressing the degauss button to receive the hoped-for Degaussing Noise, but instead received nothing. When I pressed the button more often than allowed for a significant amount of charge to build up, I was sunk. I needed to go home.

And that's how the West was won. Or whatever the point of this story was.