Tuesday, March 17, 2020
The not-so-astonishing Sholes
In the story of the Astonishing Hammond I mentioned that the Sholes-Glidden typewriter was already in production in 1880, and as with most tech stories, the dominant product was not the best product.
After making and animating the original Sholes patent, I'll double down on that statement.
This is crude and impractical, and could never have worked.
The personalities are perpetually familiar. Sholes was the unworldly idea man. Glidden was the practical engineer. Densmore was the dynamic salesman.
Densmore managed to sell this crude thing to Remington, which was chiefly making sewing machines at the time. Remington basically reinvented it as a sewing machine.
Here's the original:
This was meant as 'proof of concept', but it didn't even qualify there. It had 21 keys, weights and strings hanging all over, and the keys couldn't have made a good impression.
The carriage was just a frame, pulled along by a dangling weight. This scanned the paper across the typehead for each line, sort of like the early Xerox machines.
The paper was advanced line by line with a separate frame riding on top of the carriage frame. In this animation I've made the paper transparent so you can see how the hammers were arranged.
A tight little circle under the paper held 21 hammers radially. Each short hammer pivoted at its own angle, coming around and hitting the paper from below, pushing it up against the ribbon onto a backstop. The letters would have appeared on top of the paper. The short hammers couldn't have developed any momentum, so they were inevitably weak; and the type itself was hitting the back of the paper instead of the front.
How did the keys move the hammers? Supposedly through stiff wires, but I can't see how that would have worked, so I didn't even try to show it! The key and the hammer are moving by magic.
Sholes and Glidden were not taking advantage of existing knowledge and devices. Hammond took the typewheel and hammer from the Brett printing telegraph, and Hammond used the principles of physics correctly and elegantly.
Elon is the modern equivalent of S and G. Ignoring previous experience, ignoring the laws of physics, making crude shit that can't possibly work, and getting paid billions for it.
= = = = =
Continued here with the first Remington.
This was meant as 'proof of concept', but it didn't even qualify there. It had 21 keys, weights and strings hanging all over, and the keys couldn't have made a good impression.
The carriage was just a frame, pulled along by a dangling weight. This scanned the paper across the typehead for each line, sort of like the early Xerox machines.
The paper was advanced line by line with a separate frame riding on top of the carriage frame. In this animation I've made the paper transparent so you can see how the hammers were arranged.
A tight little circle under the paper held 21 hammers radially. Each short hammer pivoted at its own angle, coming around and hitting the paper from below, pushing it up against the ribbon onto a backstop. The letters would have appeared on top of the paper. The short hammers couldn't have developed any momentum, so they were inevitably weak; and the type itself was hitting the back of the paper instead of the front.
How did the keys move the hammers? Supposedly through stiff wires, but I can't see how that would have worked, so I didn't even try to show it! The key and the hammer are moving by magic.
Sholes and Glidden were not taking advantage of existing knowledge and devices. Hammond took the typewheel and hammer from the Brett printing telegraph, and Hammond used the principles of physics correctly and elegantly.
Elon is the modern equivalent of S and G. Ignoring previous experience, ignoring the laws of physics, making crude shit that can't possibly work, and getting paid billions for it.
= = = = =
Continued here with the first Remington.Labels: Entertainment
¶ 10:26 AM
