Ma Nature DIDN'T invent the Hammond.. or did she?
Following up on the astonishing Hammond....

Most of our inventions are imitations of Nature's inventions. In many cases we didn't even know about Nature's version until quite recently, so we weren't infringing on Nature's patents.

Here's a device that recurs over and over in technology but doesn't seem to have a physical equivalent in Nature. There are several software equivalents in Nature.

A rotor that turns until it hits a selected item.

It was common in inventions of the 1800s.

Alarm clock, Breguet telegraph, Hammond typewriter, Brett printer, Strowger dial.

The start and end of the rotor's motion are defined variously.

On the most familiar Strowger/Bell rotary dial, the human user picks the starting point and the end is constant.

An analog alarm clock has a cam that you turn to set the alarm time. When the hour hand drops off the 'cliff' on the cam, a lever releases the bell or buzzer mechanism.

Hotel wakeup clocks, and clocks to control other devices, had a full circle of settable pins.

The Hammond typewriter and Brett printer closely resemble the hotel wakeup. The rotor is turning freely until it encounters a pin raised by the chosen key.

On Breguet, the start and stop are both arbitrary.

= = = = =

Nature has lots of free-turning or limited rotors. Leg joints on arthropods and vertebrates are limited rotors, the flagellum motor on bacteria is free-turning. I can't think of any that are used as selectors with physical pins to stop the motion.

I can think of two virtual or software implementations.

Leg joints are halted by feedback via the alpha and gamma sensors. The brain decides on the target position and gives the sensors a target stretch. When the sensors reach the assigned stretch, they issue a Stop command to the muscle.

In the location mapping section of the hippocampus, a "radar" beam rotates around the hippocampus until it encounters a matching resonance.

Our physical AND virtual inventions have abandoned the pin-stopped rotor. The mechanical devices I've listed above are all firmly obsolete. Servomechanisms are a literal implementation of the stretch sensor, but servos are rare now. We use stepping motors instead, which don't involve any direct feedback.

Our computer keyboards have never used the Hammond/Brett trick, though it would have been easy in software. They have always issued an immediate parallel or sequential code for each key.

Labels: Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 2:53 PM