Castle Aching

[Caley Jim]

And to prove the cyclical theory of thread evolution proposed a page or three back, there's that horse drawn bus again.

That building behind the bus looks like a grandiose version of St Enoch Subway station building!

 

Jim

[Donw]

i'd rather meet those lady computers than the re-enacting almshouse residents we saw earlier.

With my mother around there was no need for an adding machine. She got 100 and 99 for maths and arithmetic at Matriculation and then during the war for a while worked in a bank.

My wife's first job was as a computer programmer with Heinz, Punched cards, handed to the computer department to be run, where they would often be dropped and shuffled, leading to a long garbage printout next morning. The "experts" running the computer - mainframe of course - never seemed to grasp that they were wasting everyone's time.

I did a short course in Fortran at university, and I think I once saw into the computer suite where "George" lived. But I never used it.

Our first family computer was an Amstrad 44 complete with cassette drive for loading programs. But it had my first train simulation program, the route from London to Brighton with wireframe buildings etc.

The rest, as they say, is history. Now they have even invaded our modelling.

Jonathan

 

We always tried to be helpful but I could imagine seeing the same program fail night afternight someone in a strop suffling the cards muttering lets see if that is better! Probably because the cards have become dogeared and upset the card reader.

 

Don

[corneliuslundie]

i remember a member of Thorn Lighting staff who i used to know telling me that the first work mobile phone he had filled most of the boot of his car. About the same period as the computers we have been taking about I think. And now we can use them to control our trains or we don't lose them because they are so small - if we are using DCC of course. Possibly not suitable for Edwardian layouts, where we ought to have manual signalling or men with flags.

Jonathan

[Nearholmer]

Don

 

If you really want to see an early sub-sea telegraph cable, there are several examples in the Science Museum.

 

K

[Donw]

Well now I cannot be sure but I think Telegraph Circuits were point to point fixed circuits. In those days it was simpler to resend a message on rather than come up with a switching system. So I would expect major cities might have a dedicated circuit to say France or the US. I certainly expect there was an International Telegraph office in London where they could send a message straight through. However somewhere like Kings Lynn (dangerously close to WNR territory here) would probably send it to an international centre where it would be sent on. I doubt too whether there would be any amplification on the cables so the wires would likely be a reasonable size at least 10 or 20 lb per mile.  However with the arrival of the telephone this was no good you wouldn't want to phone you mum only to have to talk through several internediaries and you want to talk to lots of people not the same one all the time so switching became vital. Originally done by operators using plugs on cords. When Mr Strowager developed his automatic exchange it was a great relief to the telephone companies.

 

Later international cables did include amplification the GPO had to develop super reliable transistors and became leaders in Silicon technology.  The development of the Frequency Division carrier technology enable a lot of circuits to be sent down one pair of wires. These were generally coaxial pairs. It was much later that Time Division multiplexi using digital techniques came into play although they could carry more channels they were a lot more fussy about the coax circuits. We upgraded the Shrewsbury Wolverhampton No 3 to take TDM although it had been working sucessfully for years with FDM we had to remake nearly all the joints to ensure they were near perfect otherwise they were causing echos to bounces back at any slight change in impeadance. A couple of years later we were installing Fibre Optic they had similar problems when testing and acused us of bad jointing. Eventually it was found that it was the cable. The inner core of Fibre is surrounded by an outer layer the light gets reflected at the boundary keeping it within the inner core. However in maufacture they had not been able to keep the diameter of the inner core constant. If you took a piece, cut it then joined the two ends it was fine but in practice we we joining ends from different cables. It was like trying to butt joint two different sized hoses.  

 

When setting up trunk circuits these had four wires two for sending and two for receiving but were arranged as a loop with the connection  to the local 2 wire cicuit  at the join between up and down. When setting the amplifiers circuits were either set for an overall 3db loss or best possible  which was generally 0.5db otherwise it could go unstable and start to howl as the slightest noise would keep growing. For Private Circuits ( commonly computer links) we would use an add on circuit to adjust the response over a range of frequencies to achieve as even a response as possible.

 

Life can be even odder with Digital such things as Alternate Mark inversion Digit interleaving and High Density Bipolar 3 add to the complexity.

 

Now heres a thought using fibre optics you could send the signals digitally then by using different colours add frequency division too. Perhaps they have tried that too.

 

Don

[phil_sutters]

Nowadays there are complaints about the lack of women in computing!

 

Leaping forward a few decades, the novelist Nevil Shute worked for the Vickers company in charge of stress analysis for the R100 airship (the one that worked and didn't crash).  He had a similar collection of Computers to perform the calculations.

 

Anyhow, Airships are definitively Steampunk and fit into the pre-grouping ethos.....

This is from one of my mother's family's albums. I think it shows some of her aunts in the office of the family's men's outfitters business. The office equipment will have been state of the art as the Pritchard's of Hereford were great technophiles - cars, motorcycles, balloons using town gas, radio etc. It certainly seems to have more keys than a typewriter.

 

 

Edited December 6, 2018 by phil_sutters

[brack]

The 1858 cable was 107lb per nautical mile, which lord Kelvin objected to. After wildman Whitehouse had broken the first cable (annoyed that his equipment wasn't sensitive enough to detect the signals, but Kelvin's mirror galvanometer could, he tried sending 2000v through it and broke the cable).

Kelvin's specifications were adopted for the 1865 cable, using seven stranded 300lb/nautical mile high purity copper.

The most remarkable thing about the 1865 cable was that it broke a thousand miles out into the atlantic, so the Great Eastern went back to port, they raised enough money for a new batch of cable, laid that all the way, then went back a year later, navigated to the right spot and fished the broken end out with a grappling hook (in water 2.5 miles deep), spliced it and finished a second functioning line. A Tremendous feat of navigation without any of our modern equipment.

 

Given it took hours to send a message (8 words a minute on the 1865 cable) I suspect there was ample time to note down the message and destination and retransmit it. If you hadn't done so you'd presumably be occupying the higher speed land based lines for a huge length of time unnecessarily as it'd make them slow down to the speed of the undersea cable if they were connected?

[Caley Jim]

Well now I cannot be sure but I think Telegraph Circuits were point to point fixed circuits. In those days it was simpler to resend a message on rather than come up with a switching system..................

 

...............Now heres a thought using fibre optics you could send the signals digitally then by using different colours add frequency division too. Perhaps they have tried that too.

From a retired dentist of little brain when it comes to electronics  'que?'

 

Jim

[Tom Burnham]

In, I think, 1962 I met a BBC technical employee who showed his BBC - issue pocket calculator- we all had ones which added up /subtracted and multiplied/ divided costing about £20 I think.

 

The BBC calculator (Can't remember the maker, might have been Texas) did the whole gamut of calculations.. I was particularly impressed with it's ability to find Square Root !  I was told that the RRP at that time was £400!

When I was being taught statistics in the late '60s, we mostly used Brunsviga hand-cranked calculators, which were then getting to be regarded as rather old hat.  If you were good you were allowed some time on an electro-mechanical job.  The first electronic calculator I came across was about the size and weight of a portable typewriter (remember them?) and used nixie tubes for its display.  I was told (warned, rather) that it cost £400.  I was particularly impressed by the eerie silence in which it went about its work...

[Compound2632]

Going back to the steampunk picture, that's one impressive Crampton! Linking into the transatlantic cable discussion, the airship does look rather like an upside-down Great Eastern...

 

After the first transatlantic cable broke during laying, there was a re-design. The successful cable was supported on the outside by a twisted braid of high-tensile steel wire made by the firm of Webster and Horsfall, a Birmingham firm that is still in existence as a speciality wire manufacturer. At around the same period, they dominated the market for piano wire - the rise of the romantic style of piano playing epitomised by Franz Liszt was only made possible by Webster's development of an effective process for the consistent manufacture of high-tensile wire. There's a very readable book on the firm, though out of print: John Horsfall, The Ironmasters of Penns (Roundwood Press, 1971).

 

Horse buses - I think it was shown quite recently that you can wait ages for one, then three come along at once.

[Hroth]

This is from one of my mother's family's albums. I think it shows some of her aunts in the office of the family's men's outfitters business. The office equipment will have been stat of the art as the Pritchard's of Hereford were great technophiles - cars, motorcycles, balloons using town gas, radio etc. It certainly seems to have more keys than a typewriter.

 

 

In the office with an accounting machine perhaps.jpg

Its an accounting machine, probably used for making ledger entries.  The keyboard is typical of Comptometer type calculators and it looks similar to this

 

 

though it doesn't have the typewriter expansion pack for making annotations to entries.

 

Dead hi tech!

 

There's probably something in Harmsworths Self Educator on how they were used.  I've also got an old textbook on office machines which describes how to use a Brunsviga calculator and might have something about accounting engines....

 

I saw my first Electronic Calculator in about 1970, it was a desktop device with Nixie tubes and hummed like a swarm of bees!

 

My first "mobile phone" was a PYE unit that my uncle had in his Jag in the early 60's.

That is, the first "mobile phone" I saw.  Of course, it was more a "radio telephone" because it worked on different principles, but you could make phone calls on it.

Edited December 5, 2018 by Hroth

[St Enodoc]

Leaping forward a few decades, the novelist Nevil Shute worked for the Vickers company in charge of stress analysis for the R100 airship (the one that worked and didn't crash).  He had a similar collection of Computers to perform the calculations.

 

Hence the plot of No Highway, presumably?

 

 

Shute was an experienced aeronautical engineer and as well as assisting Barnes Wallis on the design of the R100, had previously been involved in early incarnations of De Havilland (I think!) and was also involved in the formation of Airspeed, who produced some pretty twin engined monoplanes in the mid-30s

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevil_Shute

 

Regarding No Highway, published in 1948, its a pity that the De Havilland designers hadn't read the book before choosing square cabin windows for the Comet...

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Highway

Nevil Shute was, in my opinion, one of the best storytellers of the 20th century (even more so than Ransome - that'll stir things up a bit!).

 

His autobiography "Slide Rule" is a fascinating insight into the development of aviation and includes a number of references to how his experiences inspired plots and characters in his novels.

 

I'm in the middle of reading/re-reading his complete works, having picked up a uniform edition for about $5 each at a local bookshop a few months ago.

[Nearholmer]

DonW

 

Yep, it’s called WDM https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength-division_multiplexing

 

Phil

 

You sure that photo is an accounting office? It could so easily be the local folk musicians, tuning up some kind of instruments, in the bar of the Corner Cutters’ Arms, preparatory to a dance.

Edited December 5, 2018 by Nearholmer

[Compound2632]

You sure that photo is an accounting office? It could so easily be the local folk musicians, tuning up some kind of instruments, in the bar of the Corner Cutters’ Arms, preparatory to a dance.

 

O, when I was one-and-twenty

I programmed FORTRAN plenty;

but now I'm fifty-three,

Python's beyond me...

 

Or similar in generalised folk idiom.

[Hroth]

Nevil Shute was, in my opinion, one of the best storytellers of the 20th century (even more so than Ransome - that'll stir things up a bit!).

 

His autobiography "Slide Rule" is a fascinating insight into the development of aviation and includes a number of references to how his experiences inspired plots and characters in his novels.

 

I'm in the middle of reading/re-reading his complete works, having picked up a uniform edition for about $5 each at a local bookshop a few months ago.

Slide Rule!  I couldn't remember the title.

 

My Pan paperback copy, with Shute on the front cover with his pipe and R100 in the background is still around somewhere.   I've a fair selection of his other works too.  We'll just ignore that bit of stirring about Ransome!

[Guy Rixon]

Now heres a thought using fibre optics you could send the signals digitally then by using different colours add frequency division too. Perhaps they have tried that too.

 

Quite. When renting fibre capacity nowadays, one generally rents a frequency band rather than an entire fibre. My department has a rented fibre connection to Edinburgh, bypassing JANET, and, allegedly, we've got "a wavelength" which is the smallest marketable unit.

[uax6]

Funnily enough on an email group I am a member of, there has been a discussion on how the telegraph actually worked. When I get a minute I'll cut and paste the relevant bits to this thread...

 

Andy G

[Nearholmer]

Well, it so happens that my old friend Mr C Sharp-Minor has just collected this very rare accounting folk song, during his travels in the County of Middlesex.

 

John, Barley, and Korn LLP (Accountants) 

 

There were three boys came out of the east, accountants to become
And these three boys made a solemn vow
Double entering would be done
They've scratched, they've scribbled, they've added-up twice
Each bought a business suit
And these three boys made a solemn vow
They'd be accepted by the Institute

 

They've studied hard for a very long time, 'til the colour had gone from their cheeks

And having done that they studied some more, in fact for several weeks
They've studied on through night and day 'til they looked both pale and wan
And each of them grew a great long beard and so become a man
They've found some girls with adding machines to help them at their toil

They've got themselves a ledger large, all edged with thick gold foil
They've hired men with their shoulders hunched who've articled as clerks
And the Chairman of the Institute has told them that 
Their books are masterworks.

 

They've wandered around and around the town and each has worked so hard

And everywhere that they have been they've given out a business card

They've found an office with desks and stools within the old square mile

And the room out the back is better than that 

For there's plenty of space to file.

 

And now they all have come to be most properly Chartered men

And the Institute has given to each of them a scroll signed with a pen

The taxicab-man he can charge what he likes and so loudly blow his horn

But he'll always get a tip from one of Messrs John, Barley, or Korn.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Hroth]

 

Well, it so happens that my old friend Mr C Sharp-Minor has just collected this very rare accounting folk song, during his travels in the County of Middlesex.

 

John, Barley, and Korn LLP (Accountants) 

 

There were three boys came out of the east, accountants to become

And these three boys made a solemn vow

Double entering would be done

They've scratched, they've scribbled, they've added-up twice

Each bought a business suit

And these three boys made a solemn vow

They'd be accepted by the Institute

 

...

You don't often hear that one.

Its accompaniment was scored for penny whistle and bullroarer by his mate Ralph y'know.

 

Very moving....

[Nearholmer]

Yes, thats true that is; people would always move when that song started-up. Mostly away, of course .......

[TheQ]

I can remember being taught to use a mechanical calculator at school. You had to work out the majority of the sum on paper, then you walk to the front of the class where there were 3 mechanical calculators, you slid some bars around then wound the handle to get the result. We were also taught slide rules, and logarithmic tables... About 3 years later I bought my first electronic calculator. a fully scientific Rockwell.

 

We were also taught every home would have it's own mini nuclear power station So electricity would be practically free..  Now what happend to that?

 

I can also remember the first car parking sensors being designed at Marconi, again the first versions filled the boot of the car...

Edited December 6, 2018 by TheQ

[Hroth]

I can remember being taught to use a mechanical calculater at school. You had to work out the majority of the sum on paper, then you walk to the front of the class where there were 3 mechanical calculators, you slid some bars around then wound the handle to get the result. We were also taught slide rules, and logarithmic tables... About 3 years later I bought my first electronic calculator. a fully scientific Rockwell.

 

We were also taught every home would have it's own mini nuclear power station So electricity would be practically free..  Now what happend to that?

 

I can also remember the first car parking sensors being designed at Marconi, again the first versions filled the boot of the car...

 

We escaped the hand-wound calculators but learned about log tables early and then moved onto slide rules.  The school taught on British Thornton slide rules, I still have mine!  As for home-made cheap nuclear energy, I suppose that dates from the ZETA fusion reactor debacle.....

[Caley Jim]

Ay school in the early 1960's the technical department let us use slide rules, but the science department insisted we used log tables. Since we were sometimes covering the same things, forces, stresses etc. we often had to think what subject we were in before doing a calculation!

[corneliuslundie]

Ah yes, seven figure logs. Real fun.

Back briefly on the telephone system, Subscriber Trunk Dialling is interesting. i assume that it still works as it did 50 years ago, with the "computer" looking up a route based on the code. When I was in college we had fun working out the routing codes as we knew how to avoid the charging bit of the circuit. I don't think I ever used it in anger, but it was fun putting in a series of numbers and seeing where the person who answered lived.

Related to railways - sorry, a mistake obviously on this thread - the GWR had an extensive set of codes - not just things like Siphon, Morel, Mink etc  but for whole messages -  to reduce the length of messages. Did other companies? 

Jonathan

[Annie]

In High School during my last two years before being sent out into the horrors of the real world we were permitted to use slide rules.  I discovered there was such a thing as a circular slide rule and I became an enthusiastic user.  Easy to carry as I could just slip it into my blazer pocket and bring it out quickly whenever I needed it.  While cleaning up around the place a couple of years ago I found my old circular slide rule and my now adult electronics age children were both much intrigued by it.  An artifact from another age when the notion of a computer in the home was the stuff of science fiction and the internet was a mythical concept. (This was New Zealand remember so we were still in a timewarp a decade behind Britain).