Steve Jobs Nearly Blew Up His Third Grade Teacher

From Isaacson's book:

[T]hey convinced some kids to tell them the combination numbers for their bike locks. "Then we went outside and switched all of the locks, and nobody could get their bikes. It took them until late that night to straighten things out."

"One time we set off an explosive under the chair of our teacher, Mrs. Thurman. We gave her a nervous twitch."

From the book:

At one point he wired his house with speakers. But since speakers can also be used as microphones, he built a control room in his closet, where he could listen in on what was happening in other rooms. One night, when he had his headphones on and was listening in on his parents’ bedroom, his father caught him and angrily demanded that he dismantle the system.

"In twelfth grade he built an electronic metronome—one of those tick-tick-tick devices that keep time in music class—and realized it sounded like a bomb. So he took the labels off some big batteries, taped them together, and put it in a school locker; he rigged it to start ticking faster when the locker opened. Later that day he got called to the principal’s office. He thought it was because he had won, yet again, the school’s top math prize. Instead he was confronted by the police. The principal had been summoned when the device was found, [and he] bravely ran onto the football field clutching it to his chest, and pulled the wires off."

"After arriving at [the University of] Colorado in the fall of 1969, [Wozniak] spent so much time playing pranks, such as producing reams of printouts saying 'F--- Nixon,' that he failed a couple of his courses and was put on probation."

Jobs and Wozniak once glued a gold-painted toilet seat onto a flower planter belonging to their high school.

"On a big bed sheet [mutual friend Allen] Baum had tie-dyed with the school’s green and white colors, they painted a huge hand flipping the middle-finger salute ... They devised a system of ropes and pulleys so that it could be dramatically lowered as the graduating class marched past the balcony, and they signed it 'SWAB JOB,' the initials of Wozniak and Baum combined with part of Jobs’s name."

Jobs said that the banner prank was the thing that sealed his friendship with Wozniak.

"Wozniak built [a pocket device] that could emit TV signals. He would take it to a room where a group of people were watching TV, such as in a dorm, and secretly press the button so that the screen would get fuzzy with static. When someone got up and whacked the set, Wozniak would let go of the button and the picture would clear up ... Eventually he would make people think they had to hold the antenna while standing on one foot or touching the top of the set."

While they were building "blue boxes," electronic devices that enabled you to make long distance phone calls for free and otherwise stunt the telephone system, Wozniak called the Vatican and pretended to be Henry Kissinger.

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