I'm always doing Wheatstone ... but Wheatstone doesn't always work!
Second piece in Ancestral Ciphers, following (out of historical sequence) from the M-209 disk cipher machine.


In these Ancestral sets I try to find the first machine or first prototype. For ciphering, Everybody's Magazine in 1917 had a good article on early pictorial and sequential codes, p1003 of the PDF. The article was centered on Kraut ciphers, but it was really a long historical overview of the subject.

The family tree of Enigma-type machines starts with the thread cipher, often used in underground or prison communications. Sender and receiver have matching templates, sometimes homemade and linear:



or sometimes a page from a book or newspaper. The locations of the 26 letters are marked, ideally not in alphabetical order, and even more ideally with several duplicates of frequent letters to foil freq-count deciphering. The above picture is definitely not ideal.

Sender takes a long thread and places one end on the place in the template where the first letter of the message occurs. He then stretches the thread to the place where the second letter of the message occurs, and marks this place on the thread with ink. (Ideally disappearing ink.) He then holds that point of the thread on the location of the second letter and spans the thread to the location of the third letter of the message, and so on.

The result is a long thread with random-looking marks, or ideally no visible marks. The thread can be included easily in all sorts of items, from the classic cake to a shirt or sweater.

Sequential letter-finding guarantees difficult decryption, because each interval is the distance between previous and current letter, not a constant correlate of current letter.

Aha! Sounds like the Breguet dial telegraph. Each letter counts pulses from previous letter, and the pulse count is never directly correlated to the letter itself. Relative, not absolute.

Was there a Breguet cryptograph? Turns out that there was a device that looked and worked like Breguet, but it was invented [or claimed]** by Wheatstone.

= = = = =

Everything I find interesting turns out to be Wheatstone, whether I know it or not.

The device is so much like the Breguet dial that I was able to reuse most of my Breguet model. I built it in a couple hours, versus a couple days for most gadgets.

Here's Polistra showing how it would have been used. Crank the main handle to input letters, and write down what the second hand shows as the ciphertext.



The inner circle was meant to be cardboard and temporary. The sender and receiver would be using the same randomized order for the inner circle.

Unfortunately it wouldn't have worked well. I'm pretty sure I've followed Wheatstone's description. The inner circle had one less space than the outer, and the inner hand was supposed to run slightly faster than the outer, so the phase angle between them gradually increased. After one outer circle, the inner hand should then be running 'one hour ahead' of the outer hand, then 'two hours ahead' after two outer circles, and so on.

In the first place, there's no need to have a smaller inner circle if you're going to step the inner hand forward. But more importantly, the inner hand OFTEN looks like this:



Ambiguous. Which letter do you pick? This ambiguity would be common no matter how the ratios of inner writing and inner hand are chosen.

In fact the real (and commercially successful) Breguet setup would have done the job BETTER. Breguet was stepwise and 'digital' on both sender and receiver, with clockwork ticks and escapements, so there was never any ambiguity. Choosing and sending and printing letters is an inherently digital task. With numerical measurements you can round up or down. 3.87 becomes 4. But you can't round up or down with arbitrary symbols. A.87 doesn't become B, it's just meaningless.



Breguet could become a cryptograph by adding a 'kicker' to the receiver, so the receiver's pointer would jump ahead by 'one hour' after each revolution.

Even without any encryption, Breguet would have been frustrating for an interceptor who didn't 'tune in' at the start of the session. It could have been made much harder, even without the 'kicker', if the sender and receiver agreed to start each message from a different reset point.

= = = = =

The Hagelin multi-disk cryptograph, and its Enigma descendants, simply repeat the Wheatstone principle through several stages, with each wheel shorter ratio than the previous, so the mapping steps forward at each stage.

Here's my M-209 model made semi-transparent to show the wheel steps.



Wheel 1 has 26 letters, then 25, 23, 21, 19, 17. Each ratio is prime, no nice 2s or 4s.

The thread cipher, and Wheatstone's mechanized version, are relative measurements, not absolute. Wheatstone is always about relative measurement. Like the nervous system, everything is differences and deltas.

Morse and Braille and Chappe are absolute codes. Each letter, or each defined combo of letters, always has the same audio or tactile or visual pattern, starting from the same ground point. These systems can be read reliably no matter when you 'tune in'.

Morse is thus more like speech.... Or is it?

In fact speech is more like Breguet. All perception is relative and delta-based. Each vowel and consonant is judged as a transition from the previous set of frequencies.

= = = = =

** Footnote: Biographers depict Wheatstone as the typical born inventor, pouring out ideas all the time, quickly losing interest in each new idea and moving on. Some of the ideas were brilliant and original and timeless, some were unoriginal and impractical. Fortunately his business partner Charles Cooke was steady and practical, able to filter out the useful ideas and make them commercially profitable.

Labels: Equipoise, Metrology, Patient things, Real World Math

  ¶ 2:34 PM

  Before Morse 1
The basic idea of mechanical signaling was well-known in Europe before electricity arrived. Mirror-based semaphore systems had been used for a century in France and England. So in 1820, when Oersted figured out that an electric current passing through a coil of wire could move an iron bar, the next step was obvious to many inventors and investors.

Charles Wheatstone, a 'shy sensitive boy' from a musical family, was one of many who picked up the notion. He had already made some mechanical gadgets to amplify and carry sound, working from his musical genes.

Given his acoustic nature, it's sort of surprising that his telegraphs were so thoroughly visual.... but maybe not. All the early telegraphs were visual, using keyboards for sending and dials, pens or printers for receiving. These were intended for personal use by untrained people. After Morse's pen-based system was established, the operators realized they could understand the patterns better by ear. (And that's not surprising, since our hearing mechanism is built for language.) This realization quickly led to a switch from personal use by untrained people to centralized use by professionals who mastered the Code. Keyboards, dials and printers quickly disappeared, and simple keys and sounders became universal. Visual telegraphy might have developed directly into something like today's computer networks, but the auditory Code took it in a different direction, more of a public service utility.

Wheatstone connected up with the more practical and business-oriented William Cooke in 1835, and a series of commercially usable telegraphs followed. The first type used electromagnetism directly and simply, with five compass needles responding in opposite directions to opposite currents. Two wet cells powered the sender. A center 'ground' made it possible to energize each of the 5 magnets in opposite directions.


The keyboard continued the two-sided logic. The front row of keys ran through a bar connected to the positive side of the batteries, and the back row ran through a negative-powered bar. When you pushed on one key, it connected either negative or positive voltage to a spring that fed one of the magnets. [Note: the unit I copied for this model had 6 buttons in each row; it appears that the 6th button is a dummy or perhaps drove an alarm of some sort.]


Each letter is indicated by two needles leading along the diamond patterns to a letter, requiring a two-key 'chord' on the keyboard.

Here we have E indicated by positive current to the 3rd magnet and negative current to the 1st magnet.


This is a wildly inefficient way of using the available parts. Five needles with three positions should create 243 patterns [from 3 * 3 * 3 * 3 * 3]. That would accommodate upper and lower case letters, numbers, and punctuation easily. But the diamond uses only 20 of the possible patterns, not even 26. Users must have developed a set of altered spellings to work around the missing letters. Apparently Wheatstone thought an easily read 'map' was critically important.

Note the six wires leading out the right side. Five active wires capable of carrying negative or positive voltage, and one ground. The receiving unit, identical to the sender, would pick up the combinations and show them on its needles.


This meant you'd need five wires for EACH individual pair of sender and receiver.


In modern terms this system used 'parallel data transfer'. Each letter could be formed and sent almost instantly, which seemed like an advantage in theory. But 'serial transfer' telegraphs won the game despite their comparative slowness. A serial system takes a finite time to form the pulse pattern for each letter, but it requires only one wire. In real life the materials and labor involved with running wires and selecting circuits made five-wire systems wildly expensive. (Five times the copper, five times as many insulators, five times as much space on each pole, five times as much overhead congestion in cities.... )

Polistra is unhappy with the keyboard for obvious reasons....


So she trained a pair of bees [who know something about magnetic signaling!] to perform an example phrase. The red-eyed bee takes care of the positive (front) keys, while the blue-eyed bee takes care of the negatives.


The five-needle telegraph was clearly meant to be home furniture rather than an industrial mechanism. Reminds me of the first generation of personal computers, with keyboard and screen in one unit.

Bilateral symmetry seems to have been a strong theme for Wheatstone. Later on, he was responsible for one HUGELY IMPORTANT idea that resonates through all electronic circuitry. He developed the idea of differential measurement, using symmetry to balance out imperfections in the tools and conditions.

It's an old idea in measuring weight. By putting a known weight in one pan of a balance scale and the unknown in the other pan, you eliminate everything but mass. Local gravity is the same for both, friction affects the single pivot point for both; wind and humidity affect both sides the same way. Though difference measurement is intuitive in that one case, it took some highly non-intuitive tricks to make it work with electricity. The 'Wheatstone bridge' isn't used much in its original form, but the notion of differential measurement spawned the Operational Amplifier, which now forms the core of most analog circuitry.

More broadly, any time you have a 'processing element' of any type, a balanced circuit eliminates non-linear effects. Push-pull amplifiers, the long-tailed pair, CMOS digital devices.

Finally, Nature had the idea first. Most of our neurons are built as comparators or balances, with excitatory inputs and inhibitory inputs.

Wheatstone's telegraph faded after a while, but his balanced-circuit idea is one of the grandest and deepest of all inventions, right up there with fire and the wheel.


= = = = =

Later artistic note for Poser types: I've released this model on my ShareCG page, along with the Breguet system and the Gray telautograph.

= = = = =

Returned to this theme much later with pre-electric semaphores.

Labels: Morsenet of Things

  ¶ 4:24 PM

  It's Wheatstone every time
Pretty much everything I find interesting was started by Wheatstone, even when I don't know it.

In looking for a new 'patient machine' project, I bumped into this:



The sidereal transit procedure that grabbed my attention in the Elgin Observatory was first proposed by Wheatstone in 1841, then implemented by an American named Bond. The name of Wheatstone was never mentioned in the material I'd been reading.
  ¶ 3:43 PM

  Before Morse 2
Following on this account of the Wheatstone five-needle telegraph.

After the first generation of simple compass-based telegraphs, the next wave was dial systems. Probably the most successful of this species was made by Breguet in France.


These devices look and act a lot like fine clocks, perhaps because Breguet was [and still is!] a fine clockmaker. In this setup, the frontmost gadget with the handle is the sender; the upper middle thing with the clock dial is the receiver; and the two things on the sides are bells and annunciators. Apparently each operator would leave a main switch connected to the bells most of the time. When a sender wanted to catch the attention of all other stations, he would turn the crank in a full circle, thus applying 26 dings to the appropriate bell at each station. The receiver would have one bell box for each station in the network; he'd see the annunciator in the appropriate box and connect his sender and receiver to that party.

Unlike Wheatstone's bilateral polarity and five-wire parallel data transfer, the Breguet uses nothing but a stream of pulses on a single wire.


There is no code as such, no distinction between dots and dashes, no unique count for each letter.


You simply rotate the dial clockwise until you reach the desired letter; then stop long enough for the recipient to notice the letter; then rotate clockwise until you reach the next desired letter.

The cross symbol at the top would presumably represent a space. (However, it might have been a sort of 'shift' indicator to change from letters to numbers and back. In that case a space might have been simply a longer pause...?)


The receiver rotates along with the sender, turn for turn and pause for pause. It has a matching dial, powered by a mainspring and ticked by the pulses from the sender. The hole in front is for winding; the button on top resets the dial to the 'cross' or space position at end of one session so the next message can begin from a consistent position.

Happystar sends a vaguely Christmassy message to show how the pulses are formed. A wiggly cam on the crank causes a switch to make and break contact, once for each letter on the way around. Each pulse goes down the wire to the receiver, where an electromagnet pulls an escapement, letting the receiving dial move one letter forward.



Clear advantage of Breguet: First, it only needs one wire and one polarity. Second, you don't need any skill. Just turn the crank clockwise, pausing at each letter or space you want to send. No need to learn any code, no need to trace the lines on the diamond. This would have been beautifully suited for a household telegraph system.

Clear disadvantage: Slower than the instant-action needle systems, but probably not much slower than a careful Morse sender.

= = = = =

Artistic note for Poser types: I've released this set on my ShareCG page, along with the Wheatstone and Gray Telautograph sets.

= = = = =

Much later footnote: The Wheatstone needle and the Breguet faded out as commercial telegraphs, but they didn't die. Both became integral parts of railroad signaling systems.

Labels: Morsenet of Things

  ¶ 1:52 PM

  Charge of the light Breguet
While trying to find a Breguet cryptograph I bumped into this device. This one machine connects up FOUR of my 'patient machine' sets. An amazingly cross-linked bridge, with a lesson for moderns. The important thing about this device is its HUMAN PURPOSE, not its mechanism.

Tracing the links:

Chappe's semaphore came first.

The 1793 revolutionaries picked up Chappe's visual system and built towers all across France. After the revolution morphed into Napoleon's neocon empire, the system expanded even more.

Around 1832 other countries started to experiment with electrical telegraphs of various forms. France didn't really need to get ahead of this trend, because the Chappe system was faster than the early electrics, and was already built and functioning smoothly. By 1845 the electrical systems had matured to the point where a switch was worth the trouble.

Wheatstone and Cooke offered to build a version of their system, but France rejected it. Wheatstone's setup was fast but delicate:



and above all it was English.

The Breguet dial telegraph was French, and it was especially suitable for unskilled operators.



Breguet was unsurprisingly clock-like. Turning the sender dial to the next character clicked a contactor back and forth, sending pulses to the receiver. When the receiver was pulsed, a solenoid opened an escapement and allowed the dial to turn forward by one letter.

France used Breguet for its railroads, which weren't already equipped with a functional signaling system and trained operators. The Breguet dial didn't require new learning.

To replace the Chappe visual system for their State Telegraph, France made a unique move.



They developed an electrical version of the mechanical Chappe system, based internally on the same principle as the Breguet dial.



The mechanical Chappe had two movable wings on a movable center wing. All three rotated to form 256 possible codes. As the system matured, most of those codes were used efficiently for phrases and words, so the sending was much faster than letter-by-letter.

From Lardner's 1855 book:

When the establishment of lines of electric telegraphs was proposed in France, the old aerial telegraph was, and had been for more than half a century, in operation, and formed a department in the public administration of considerable importance, employing an extensive body of agents, dispersed throughout the country, most of whom were specially instructed and qualified for the business. The commission appointed by the government required that the electro-telegraphic instruments should exhibit the same signals as had been already used in the case of the former telegraph.

This setup is generally known as the Foy-Breguet system.

The sender has two cranks just like Chappe, and the receiver is a miniature 'video display' of two wings just like Chappe.



You can see how the crank moved the contactor back and forth with a cam. The contactor looked like an SPDT switch, but it was actually a two-way SPST. Each side sent a single pulse through the long lines to the receiver, so one revolution sent 8 pulses.

In action, the operator turned the cranks to form each letter, always clockwise. The operator could see the result on her own receiver, or receive signals from other stations.



'Video' displays were common in railroad signal systems, like the splendid Train Describer used in both US and UK. This was a combination of Breguet sender and Wheatstonish display, somewhat like the Foy.

= = = = =

One of the British books on telegraphy has an intriguing picture of an all-in-one Foy-Breguet device, with no accompanying description.



This has the receiver screen, plus two separate pairs of senders, plus a single crank (probably a receive/send/both switch), plus a mysterious snowglobe and two whistles on top! I'll keep watching for more info on this one. It's pure steampunk.

= = = = =

Above all, the Foy-Breguet system PRESERVED SKILL-ESTATE. Foy RE-USED the skills acquired by the Chappe semaphore operators, so they wouldn't be obsolesced by the switch to electricity.

The cranks were similar to the Chappe cranks, and even the little mini-wings were similar to the real wings.



Since they were basically clock hands, they didn't need to be balanced levers pivoted at the center; but they were built that way, with a black 'visible' part and a white 'counterweight' part.

= = = = =

France learned a major lesson from the 1793 revolution. After the EXTREME dose of Innovative Disruption in every aspect of life, the French became the world's best PRESERVERS. They tried to maintain everyday objects and skills instead of discarding them. The tendency was still strong in the 1970s; I don't know if it's still strong now. Unions are certainly strong.

Wars and revolutions and depressions often induce this healthy immune response. America was in skill-preservation mode after the 1930s depression, thanks to FDR's emphasis on work and training and unions. We remained in skill-estate mode until the '70s when Nixon, then Reagan, then Clinton, cumulatively removed ALL the supporting framework and shipped ALL skills overseas.

There's already some indication that the current holocaust is inducing a healthy PRESERVATION impulse for money. Wolfstreet noted a decrease in credit card usage and increase in savings. Bloomberg sees "a new austerity, expressed through pantry stockpiling and delayed big-ticket purchases."

We also need to follow the French model of frugality in skills and knowledge. The long-term goal of globalism is to eliminate all skills and knowledge, and the current holocaust is an EXTREME FINAL step in this process. Jobs requiring skill are "non-essential", and all knowledge of science and logic and truth has been precisely and diametrically inverted and garbled and deleted.

We've got a partial start through Emerson justice. Public schools and major colleges have voluntarily committed suicide "because virus", thus eliminating the main purveyors of ANTI-SKILL education. The field is open for smart operators like DeVry. Will they step up and take advantage?

Probably not. We don't have FDR or Harding at the top to break the litigation and regulation obstacles. Instead we have Trump, Deepstate's most loyal and perfect servant. FDR locked down the banks to enrich the real economy. Trump locked down the real economy to enrich the banks.

The overriding perpetual purpose of the 'enlightenment', from 1776 to 1793 to now, is to obliterate PURPOSE from life. The focus on "rights" instead of duties started the breakdown. The focus on finance and abstraction instead of industry finished it.

Natural Law in its varied forms, whether the Sharia rules or the Soviet Constitution or FDR's four freedoms, always starts with PURPOSE AND WORK. Every aspect of the economy and culture is shaped to preserve PURPOSE for ordinary people. The 'enlightenment' starts with "rights" and "freedom", which means that psychopaths are free to dominate culture and economy, free to eliminate all PURPOSE from ordinary workers and families. The sole PURPOSE of a psychopath is to obliterate PURPOSE.


LIFE IS PURPOSE.


= = = = =

Literary footnote: The Lardner book is OUTSTANDING. Bear in mind that he was writing in 1855, when the telegraph and railroads were pretty much the only modern tech. The telephone and phonograph were 20 years in the future, and everything else at least 40 years away. He explains both the tech side and the business side with absolute clarity and completeness. Several times I've tried without luck to figure out how something was supposed to work, and Lardner clarified it totally.

Labels: From rights to duties, Make or break, Morsenet of Things, skill-estate, storage

  ¶ 3:45 PM

  What's most elegant?
Evocative question from Tesla skeptic Bachman:

What is the most elegant piece of engineering (hardware or software) you know of that is unknown by 99.99% of the population?

That's easy. Telegraphs before Morse. Beautifully elegant in UI/UX terms, usable by ordinary people for real communication. The Morse system reduced the mechanism to key and sounder, which simplified wiring and maintenance but required expert operators.

I've modeled four stages in this development.

(1) Wheatstone's needle.

(2) Breguet's dial.

(3) Gray's Telautograph.

(4) The astonishing Train Describer and related signaling systems, which mixed Wheatstone and Breguet.

Labels: Morsenet of Things

  ¶ 3:08 PM

  Why do they keep trying it?
BBC announced that it's abandoning expensive and audience-less 3D video.

Why in the hell do they keep trying 3D?

The concept was invented, needless to say, by Wheatstone in 1830. Every concept that has the slightest connection to symmetry or two-sided-ness was developed by Wheatstone in 1830.

Stereoscopic stills were hugely popular in the late 1800s, and the idea was applied to movies as soon as movies became somewhat commercial. It failed.

Repeat about a dozen times, through the 20th century with film and into the 21st century with digital video. Tried it, spent huge amounts of money, failed. Tried, spent, failed. Over and over.

The basic problem goes beyond technology, and I doubt it will ever be solved by technology.

When we move through the real world, our brain uses all sorts of cues and templates, immediate and remembered, to build a picture of our surroundings. The immediate focus of the eyes is just one element, and probably not the most important. The old stereoscope worked fairly well because the gadget forced you to focus on one fixed point and gave your eyes time to adjust. With a movie you don't have the real-world cues, you can't force the viewer to focus on a single point, and 1/24 second isn't enough time to adjust.

= = = = =

Historical sidenote: Modern tech types would do well to read this 1856 book on Stereoscopes by David Brewster. He understood the variability and limits of binocular vision in a strictly experimental way, and developed several simple solutions to the problem.
  ¶ 1:35 PM

  Wheatstone all the way down
As I learn about the astonishingly complex and creative computing system called Railroads, one DOMINANT concept appears over and over.

From the start, railroad circuitry and mechanisms were DIFFERENTIAL. Two-sided, like nervous systems. The hugely complex staff system was diff all the way.

On the electrical side, this was a British tendency, starting from Mr Diff himself, Wheatstone. Later British electronics carried on the principle of balance. A balance doesn't have an absolute zero, it only has DELTAS between two or more inputs. British culture and politics are also diffish. See Shadow Cabinet.

American electronics has tended more toward on/off, 1/0, again starting from Mr On-Off himself, Morse. An American system does have an absolute zero. Our politics and culture continue the On-Off tradition. See Impeachment.

Obviously both tendencies are needed in various situations, but railroads are a British invention and always retained the British preference for diffs and deltas.

The simplest mechanical expression of a diff is the switch.



Always this way vs that way, SPDT. Not this way vs no way, SPST. There are always two destinations, even when one of them is a short siding for a loading dock. You can't send REAL PHYSICAL OBJECTS into nowhere. You can send bits and bytes into nowhere. An economy devoted to bits and bytes, or a "store of value" consisting of bits and bytes, can be obliterated in an instant.

Switches have been part of the system for 170 years. There are an uncounted number of switches... probably millions? ... in the world. Each one moves back and forth by just a few inches, turning a vast load of REAL VALUE toward one path or the other, bearing millions of tons of weight, lasting many decades.

That's a SUCCESSFUL TECHNOLOGY.

Labels: Morsenet of Things, Natural law = Sharia law, Natural law = Soviet law, Patient things

  ¶ 2:34 AM

  Before Morse 3
This is the third and last in a series of old telegraphs. The title isn't really accurate, because the Gray Telautograph came well after Morse; but I want to make the series consistent. (See the Wheatstone five-needle telegraph and the Breguet dial telegraph.)

Elisha Gray just missed being the famous inventor of the telephone and the founder of a giant corporate empire. Gray and Bell were working against each other, and Bell had better access to money and lawyers. Gray got his revenge to some extent with the Telautograph, which is the spiritual ancestor of the mouse and tablet, AND the ancestor of the modern computer printer. It even looks a lot like a printer.

The Telautograph was commercially successful from 1890 to 1920; it went out of use when photoelectric tubes made the optical fax machine possible. Sending and receiving machines are similar in appearance but opposite in mechanism.



On the sender, you pick up the pencil and write on the paper [almost] normally. The shelf under the paper is sensitive to pressure and detects when the pencil is making a mark; the pencil is attached via two strings to pulleys that rotate, creating pulses on the wire as you pull or push.



You could draw or write anything within the limits of the sender, and it would be reproduced faithfully at the receiver.



Polistra anxiously awaits the first communication from her faithful silent companion Happystar. What are his innermost thoughts? What has he been pondering?



Oh. I guess we should have expected that.



For more technical detail, here's a closeup of the sending action with the top covers removed. Imagine your hand grasping the pencil.

Each wire passes through a 'threader', then across the polarity switcher, then reels up onto the commutator on its own side. As you move the pencil around, each commutator turns quickly, breaking a circuit to create pulses on the wire from its own side. When the direction of each wire reverses, the polarity switcher puts the negative or positive side of the battery into the circuit for that side.




On the receiving side, these two streams of negative and positive pulses are sent to something like a linear stepping motor or stepping solenoid on each side. (I haven't been able to figure out this mechanism from the patent drawings!)

= = = = =

Artistic note for Poser types: I've released all three of these telegraphs on my ShareCG page. See also the Wheatstone and Breguet sets.


= = = = =

Later note: This 1961 British Pathe newsreel about the insure-everything Lloyds agency shows a Telautograph in action, starting at 1:30. Looks very much the same as the 1880 version.

Labels: Morsenet of Things

  ¶ 6:17 AM

  Why haven't we returned to chordal writing?
We speak in chords, we hear in chords, we grammar in chords. Why don't we write or type in chords?

Expanded slightly:

Speech is chorded. The larynx is just a trigger for the complex and smooth modulation of harmonic patterns in vowels, shaped by the pharynx and tongue and lips.

Hearing is chorded. From the cochlea on up, the entire setup is harp-like, and the actual signals are parallel patterns of chords in parallel tone-based channels.

Grammar is chorded. English, the invading parasite, has lost some of the chordiness, but non-parasitic languages have complex and smooth patterns of harmony among morphemes on different words in the sentence, and harmony among vowels within and between words.

= = = = =

Some writing systems have their own internal harmony and continuo, but AFAIK no writing system tries to represent the harmony of speech or grammar.

So how come our language machines settled down into strictly monophonic and serial form? One keystroke adds one letter.

They didn't start that way.


Wheatstone's first telegraph had a chordal keyboard and a chordal readout. (Not surprising since Wheatstone came from a family that made accordions and concertinas!)

Other telegraphs were more piano-like.


This is a steno-telegraph designed by Michela. You hit two or three keys with each hand, and the result was printed as a symbol for a syllable or word. Michela's written symbols were quasi-phonetic like Korean:



Chordal machines survive in courtroom transcription, but again they're not trying to represent the chordal aspects of sound or grammar. They simply type a group of letters simultaneously, and the stenographer later visually translates the peculiar letter combinations into words.

In the digital world it's possible to restore Michela's concept. A regular keyboard won't do because it's strictly one output at a time, but it should be possible to connect a pressure-sensitive MIDI keyboard to produce not only phonic chords but grammar chords.

Labels: defensible cases

  ¶ 5:05 PM

  Constants and variables 46
WaPo article:

Britain has been a powerhouse of discovery since the age of science began. Newton, Darwin, Crick? They parted the curtain on gravity, evolution and DNA. Now comes Brexit, and to use a non-scientific term, the scientists in the country are freaking out.

Hmm. Newton, Darwin, Crick... and you could add Wheatstone, Watt, Faraday, Thomson, Stephenson, Brunel, Fleming_diode, Fleming_penicillin, Blumlein, Maskelyne, Baird, and hundreds of others.

When did all of those great British scientists and inventors work? BEFORE EU.

Here's a list of all the great British scientists DURING EU:











Nuff said.

Constants and variables, fuckhead.

Labels: Constants and Variables

  ¶ 2:29 AM

  Salute to Benjn Pike Jr part 2: Electrotherapy
Continuing from the intro.



The 1856 Pike catalog featured a Magnetic Machine For Medical Purposes on its cover. I've animated it, and added another unique item from the period. Both of these have a medical/magical flavor.

Here's the magnetic machine in use for electrotherapy. You can see that Happystar is getting a pulse once in each revolution of the big wheel:



The Magnetic Machine (left) is just an induction coil with a buzzer, the most common source of high voltage from Wheatstone to Marconi to the Ford T. The coil has a primary with less turns and a secondary with more turns, and the iron core (protruding on left) can be slid in and out for more or less coupling.

The Pike catalog gives $10 as the price of the machine itself, which is about $400 now.

This early version has a uniquely shaped buzzer:



A fine iron wire is pulled down when the magnets are energized, breaking the circuit to the magnets. When it springs back up, it closes the circuit again. This seems overly delicate, and most later buzzers had a more massive spring element, looking and acting more like a pendulum.

= = = = =

The big wheel in the middle is a Rheotome (flow-cutter), a long-forgotten source of timed pulses with controllable width. It was often used in electrotherapy to provide brief pulses that could be sync'd with the heart or other rhythms. It's driven via pulleys by the electric motor on the right. Speed varied with usage; apparently 10 RPM was typical.

This particular rheotome has two entirely separate timers, for different purposes. Each timer consists of a pair of sliding brushes mounted on the wheel. The wheel itself doesn't carry any electricity, and there's no connection between the two pairs of brushes. Each pair skates on the insulated turntable below the wheel, and each pair connects two sets of contacts mounted on or in the turntable, but only when it skates onto the contacts.



The outer pair of brushes has one needle and one brush for more precision. The needle is running over a 'compass rose' of precisely spaced metal contacts protruding from the insulating turntable. The outer brush is running over a continuous circle. When the needle passes over one of the precise compass points, current flows from the outer circle to the compass rose. These are tied internally to the binding posts on the right leg.



I've connected a simple series circuit with two drycells and a voltmeter, showing when the needle makes contact. (Not running the full circle here, because the rest would be repetitive.) These ticks could be used to activate a buzzer, but they would be more suitable as drivers for a time-marker pen on a chronograph.

= = = = =

The more interesting pair is the inner pair. Two brushes pass over a short pair of 'mesas' on the insulated turntable. The outer mesa (which is adjustable) leads to the outer binding post on the south leg, and the inner mesa to the inner binding post. When BOTH brushes are contacting BOTH mesas, current passes between the binding posts. Again I'm using a simple series arrangement so the voltmeter shows when the pulse is on.

The outer mesa can slide both ways to vary the pulse length. When it's more southward, the area of overlap is narrower, so the pulses are narrower. The difference isn't impressive, but this seems to be a realistic representation of the difference in the real rheotome.




The 1848 Pike catalog describes the use of the Magnetic Machine thusly:

It may be used agreeably, and with much effect, by the patient holding one of the conductors, and another person the other conductor, and with the other hand making passes over or around the diseased part. This is particularly useful about the head, and where the pain is under the hair it should be thoroughly wet, to have the effect pass through it. The best effects have followed from regular applications of a mild power, from five to fifteen minutes, twice or more a day. The machine may be used with confidence, no injury being known to result from its use.

And the machine was used with confidence! Happystar's waves are resync'd, back in resonance with the universe.

Sounds like the main effect was pulsed static charge, not current through the body. The hand of the healer has always been important in real healing. Modern "medicine" has forgotten it, and in 2020 prohibited all healing entirely.

Labels: Entertainment, Equipoise, Happy Ending

  ¶ 3:37 PM

  Can't be funny, McGee
Still wandering through old telegraph material and Wheatstone's wonderful experiments, and my mind is thoroughly involved in those subjects.

When I cooked my usual tomato-ey stuff this afternoon, I absent-mindedly started with too much water, so I had to leave a few spoonfuls in the bowl to avoid getting overfull. For some reason this led to a Fibber and Molly pun, and then to another thought. The pun wasn't worth writing here, but the next thought may be worth writing.

Next thought: In all the centuries we've been writing and printing and typing, we've never developed a way to represent real dialog on paper or screen. Far as I can tell, nobody has even tried! For instance, there's no visual way to show the interrupts and overlaps that make Fibber and Molly funny.

Interrupts and overlaps are easy for our ears to handle. We do it all the time. And we do it equally well with music or Morse code; an experienced operator can distinguish two simultaneous senders if they have distinct styles or if their carriers have different BFO notes. But we can't do it visually.

Technically speaking, interrupts and overlaps could be shown in hand writing or in photo-processed printing, but not in hot lead type or in conventional computer displays. An illuminated manuscript could do it, and an offset-style printing press could do it, and PhotoShop can do it:



Does it work? I doubt it.
  ¶ 5:22 PM

  Not old-fashioned 2
Branching from previous post on automotive history.

In the realm of nations and wars, the saying "History is written by the victors" is dangerously false because there is no such thing as One History. Each nation always writes its own history for the consumption of its residents and students. Winners make fatal errors when they ass-u-me that the loser has adopted the winner's history.

WW2 happened because Germany's history of WW1 was opposite to the Brit/US history. We ass-u-me-d that our delusional Wilsonian story about "democracy" was true. In fact the German version and the Middle Eastern version were closer to the truth, and today's conflicts continue to prove them correct. Since 1965 we've been creating a lot more history in the form of pointless wars, from Vietnam to Iraq to Yugoslavia to Afghanistan to Iraq again to Libya to Syria to Egypt to Ukraine and now back to Yugoslavia again. We're still running our infantile Wilsonian delusion about "democracy", and we're generating a whole lot more correct stories in the minds of the ethnic groups we destroy and starve and refugize. One million dead, ten million refugees. The dead don't know anything, but their relatives and friends do, and the refugees do. All of them have precisely accurate and highly detailed immediate memories about USA STRONG, and we still keep running our bizarre little Clutch Cargo animation about "democracy".

= = = = =

In the realm of industries and technology, "History is written by the victors" can be partly true because we do usually end up with One History of each subject. When the subject is strictly commercial, Victor simply means the sales winner.

GM has been able to write the story of auto technology and styling since 1935 because GM has been the winner in most years since 1935. So the '53 Plymouth was "old-fashioned" even though it was objectively more modern than any '53 GM product. Why? Because GM sales were waaaaay ahead of both Ford and Chrysler in '53, and because Harley Earl knew how to use publicity better than anyone else in the business. We also adopt GM's story of technology. We know that GM invented clashless shifting in 1929 even though the Ford T had always been clashless. We know that GM invented the auto trans in 1940 even though Sturtevant actually produced a car with an automatic in 1905. We know that GM has always been the style leader, even though its actual styling was generally 3 or 4 years behind the style leader. We know these things for sure because GM won the sales race in most years and thus GM gets to tell us what we know.

In the realm of personal computers, we've adopted Bill And Steve's Excellent Altair Adventure as the complete story, skipping the 100 years of Hollerith/IBM that came first, and more importantly skipping the 20 years of DEC's personal computers that came first.



Some technology stories are so simple that no rewriting is needed. Morse vs Wheatstone, Bell vs Gray, Edison vs Davy on lighting, Westinghouse vs Edison on power distribution, Marconi vs Fessenden, Armstrong vs DeForest. The winner had better resources and better connections, and was ready and able to turn the idea into a practical and salable product. Not really a conflict, no question of unfairness. You can sometimes say that the losing concept was technically superior, but that's only semi-relevant. If you can't make people want it, superiority doesn't exist.

Other tech histories are blatantly unfair. The transistor story has been hijacked by the Quantumites, who had no part in the actual development. The idea was 100 years old in 1947, solid-state diodes were 40 years old, and the patented solid-state triode was 20 years old. Bell Labs got there first because they had deep resources and no hurry. The transistor, and every solid-state development thereafter, resulted from improvements in metallurgy, materials and manufacturing. Materials science is unromantic and modest, not inclined to grab credit and write history. Quantumites are arrogant bullies who want to rewrite everything to fit their bizarre delusions.

QUANTUM STRONG = USA STRONG.

Labels: 20th century Dark Age, STRONG!

  ¶ 8:46 AM

  Why was the phonograph so late?
While waiting for the next paid project to start, I've been 'building' models of early pre-Morse telegraphs.

Animation of a Breguet dial system coming up tomorrow, then a Cooke-Wheatstone needle setup a few days later.

As I perused old patent drawings, trying to figure out how each system was really used, I began to sense that another invention was entirely out of place.

Edison invented the phonograph in 1877. Unlike most of his 'inventions' which were perfected commercial versions of existing ideas, this was an absolutely fresh concept. The only halfway similar predecessor was in 1857, and it was a 'visualizer' or oscillograph for sound, not a recorder and player.

We tend to think of the phonograph as part of the Electric Age, perhaps because of the Edison connection. But it was completely mechanical, and stayed that way until about 1920 when it inherited amplification from radio technology. In fact, mechanical phonos were still being made in the 1950s.

What strikes me as surpassingly odd: Every aspect of the phonograph could have been built by the Romans in 200 BC. Clockwork, wax cylinder, delicate diaphragm, needle. A non-clockwork version could have been made thousands of years earlier by any culture with stringed instruments and drums.



Medieval clockmakers and music-box makers were just one hour away from a phonograph. Take out the escapement so the cylinder moves fast, coat the cylinder with wax, glue a thorn to a drum, hold the drum so the thorn touches the wax, and talk into the drum.

Why didn't any of that happen? Why did it have to wait 300 years? It's a mystery.

Labels: 20th century Dark Age

  ¶ 7:34 PM

  The coherent brain
In 1902 Marconi and others were just starting to show the possibilities of radio. Tuning and detection were crude. The most common detector was a coherer, which was NOT the same thing as the rectifiers that later became standard. The coherer was a capsule filled with metal or carbon granules, which stuck together or cohered when a high-frequency wave was applied. When the particles cohered, they closed a circuit to a relay or meter, so the pulse could be detected by ear or eye or printer.

Rectifiers simply cut off half of the high-frequency AC, making it possible to filter the result and pull out the audio modulation.

A 1902 issue of Electrical Review contains an experiment that showed a coherer-like property in human and cat brains.

At that time the structure of the brain was well understood, and the visibly different types of neurons were categorized, but very little was known about the function of the neurons.

Now, of course, the structure of the brain is well understood, and the visibly different types of neurons are categorized, but very little is known about the function of the neurons.

From 1950 to 1990 we THOUGHT we knew everything about neurons, so we didn't bother to look. More recently we took off the theory goggles and started LOOKING again, and every new finding raises new questions.

Neurons are NOT discrete digital operators like binary logic gates. Each neuron has its own internal brain, and the glial cells are another brain that cooperates with the neurons, and the whole body thinks together via complete and balanced resonances.

From the 1902 journal:

Mr. A. Frederick Collins describes some remarkable experiments, which appear to demonstrate that the influence of lightning discharges on the brain may be as much beyond the control of the will as the effect of light on the eye.

Mr. Collins happened to be making experiments on a freshly-prepared human brain, with the view of showing that its substance acted as a coherer. Two isolated needle points had been inserted into the substance of the brain with the object of measuring the resistance between the points by a Wheatstone bridge. To his astonishment he found that he could not balance the bridge arms. After an approximate balance the needle suddenly swung to plus without any apparent cause, showing hundreds of ohms too much, and then made an immediate second deflection to the minus side, showing hundreds of ohms too little. This state continued a few minutes, when a peal of thunder revealed to him the cause of the puzzling behaviour of his galvanometer needle; it was due to the approach of a thunderstorm. As the storm approached the deflections grew more and more pronounced, so that there could be no doubt that the disturbance was due to it. To exclude the possibility that the deflections were due to the effect of the electric waves on the galvanometer system, a 1 ohm coil was measured, and in this no difficulty was encountered.

When the storm was at its height a telephone receiver was substituted for the testing set, and through it and the substance of the brain came sounds like the cooling of a piece of red -hot metal quickly submerged in water.

Clearly the brain was picking up the charges and discharges from the thunderstorm.

From Collins's account of the experiment itself:

First the coherer was inserted into one hemisphere of the cerebrum to a depth of 2 or 3 mm, so that contact was made with the gray matter only.

Slicing a horizontal portion from the upper part of the hemisphere, the coherer was next inserted in the mass of white matter forming the core. The sound of cohesion was less marked than in the previous test with the gray matter. Different portions of the white and gray matter were tried, but with similar results. The medulla oblongata did not yield results as satisfactory as the gray matter of the convolutions of the cerebrum. There was little difference between the calculations of the cerebrum, and the white and gray matter of the pons. The different layers of the cerebellum were next tried, and the rust-colored layer containing the granules produced the greatest coherer effect, while in the medulla, where the nerves center, the effect of the electric waves was less marked.

The granule cells of the cerebellum were the most sensitive to radio waves.

It turns out that the brain has an ANTENNA connected directly to those granule cells.

I was thinking about this subject two years ago, from a different angle.

= = = = = START REPRINT:

This week I'm working on a courseware chapter about the cerebellum. Making animations forces me to (partly!) learn what's going on. In the brainstem and cortex, we have a fairly good sense of how things work, partly because the cortex is divided into visible sections with specific functions. The cerebellum is more mysterious, partly because it's not neatly modular and partly because its function seems to depend on waves and resonance.

= = = = =

The cortex has folds on its surface that correspond closely to areas of function. You can see the sensory strip, the motor strip, the speech reception area, and so on, as hills or bumps.



= = = = =

The cerebellum just has uniform unmarked folds, called folia or pages. One folium is lined in green.



= = = = =

Here's a super-simplified piece of one folium:



The main players are the granule cells (blue) and the Purkinje cells (purple).

Granule cells (blue) are small, simple and NUMEROUS, making up 80% of ALL the neurons in the WHOLE brain. They are scattered densely through the interior of the cerebellum. Each granule cell picks up signals from the input mossy fibers (green). Most of the input is from the body via the spine; some is from eyes, ears, balance mechanisms, and cortex. The output of each granule cell splits into a T-shaped parallel fiber, which runs along the length of the folium. These parallel fibers are densely packed along the surface of the cerebellum.

Purkinje cells (purple) are the receivers. They're BIG and relatively sparse, and gridded in a tight layer underneath the parallel fibers. They pick up signals from the parallel fibers, do something with the signals, and send the processed or sorted signals back down to the spine to drive muscles.

= = = = =

Given that the granules are known to be resonant senders of modulated pulses, this image is irresistible:



Here the resonant dipole sending antenna (parallel fibers) is producing a tuned signal, and Polistra (Purkinje) is tuning her receiver to pick up this particular sender. In the real world, as in the real cerebellum, there are many sending antennas and many receivers, each seeking out its desired signal.

Pulling the metaphor to the breaking point: Since the transmitting parallel fibers are along the surface of the cerebellum, are they also transmitting externally to other brains? And past the breaking point, power of prayer? These neurons do a whole lot of monostable and astable multivibrator activity. When internal sync is gone, can external input resync?


= = = = = END REPRINT.

Can external input resync? There's the coherer.

Labels: Carver, Grand Blueprint, Trinity House

  ¶ 1:17 AM