The Annotated Build-It-Yourself Science Laboratory

The comment section contains a small but useful related bibliography.

"Like a lot of engineers, I spent a lot of time in libraries when I was a kid. There were certain books you’d check out over and over again. One of those was [Raymond Barrett’s] Build-It-Yourself Science Laboratory. That book really captured my imagination with plans for things as simple as a funnel to as complex as an arc furnace (I actually built that one; see diagram above), a cloud chamber, and an analog computer (see below). That book was from 1963 and that did present a few unique challenges when I read it in the 1970’s. It presents even more difficulty if you try to reproduce some of the projects in it today."

http://hackaday.com/2016/07/29/books-you-should-read-the-annotated-build-it-yourself-science-laboratory/