tingilinde

an archaic signaling system

The very manual, and nearly steampunk, signaling system of the New York subway system.

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About 85 percent of New York City’s subway system still operates with this analog signal system. The outdated equipment is no longer manufactured and has to be manually operated, around the clock.

It’s no surprise then that the system is a leading cause of delays. Over the past 15 months, it has led to an average of nearly 4,000 train delays a month, according to data from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that runs the city’s transit system.

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They even do relay repair

 

the ugliest mobile phone ever?

I came across a link for the Mobile Phone Museum.  One section highlights 'ugly' phones.  The Nokia 7600 from 2003 is a good candidate, 

It raises an interesting question: would life be better if this represented the pinnacle of mobile phone technology?  Do we really need to level of personal wireless connection we have today?

 

train cars and a robber baron's utopia

A nice piece on George Pullman's town and enterprise.

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Pullman got his start jacking up buildings and moving them to new locations; in 1861, his company put 5,000 screws under Chicago's tallest hotel, and, with the help of 1,200 workers, slowly raised the structure—even while chambermaids were making up beds in the rooms above—before putting the Tremont House on rails to move it to a new location, away from the low-lying swampland where it had first been built. Continuing with the theme of mobile hotels, Pullman fitted out two Chicago & Alton Railroad coaches with upper and lower sleeping berths. When these proved popular, he built the luxurious Pioneer (all Pullman coaches bore names), which featured 12 compartments and clerestory windows. Alas, it cost $20,000 to build, four times more than a regular coach, so no railroad could afford to purchase it. Pullman came up with the idea of leasing his coaches to railroads, who would attach them to their trains; the Pullman Company also provided the staff. In addition to his sleepers, Pullman offered "hotel cars"—the first was named Delmonico, after New York's legendary white-tablecloth eatery—with their own kitchens and table service, and built "mansions on wheels," private cars for the uber-rich, some of which cost a cool half million dollars. Jay Gould's private train pulled four Pullman coaches, one of which carried a cow whose milk was perfectly suited to the railroad baron's special digestive needs.

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on building jet engines

The pressure to improve and the economics. 

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Civilization's toughest technical challenges are those that require extraordinary (and constantly improving) performance to be delivered at a low cost. High levels of performance often require complex, difficult-to-produce technology operating close to the limits of what’s possible. Any contractor could put up a five-story building using off-the-shelf building technology, but a 500-story building would be far more difficult to achieve and would require pushing the boundaries of building technology forward to even be possible.

Trying to make something cheap while you’re pushing the boundaries of performance makes things even more difficult. You need to worry about things like minimizing maintenance costs, eliminating expensive materials or components, and having a design that can be manufactured inexpensively and minimizes costly expert labor. (And if you do require expensive components or labor, you need to spread it as thinly as possible.)

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restoring pinball machines

electro-mechanical devices require constant maintenance and debugging problems can be interesting.

 

 

 

women drivers

A fascinating discussion between Jessica Brockmole and Anne Helen Peterson

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In the first two decades of the century, automakers advertised widely in newspapers and magazines, to both men and to women, as they tried to find the ideal markets for their cars. Early automotive ads drew on imagery of the Gibson Girl and the New Woman, showing driving as being an activity for the healthy, outdoorsy, and free-spirited woman, and they offered positive messages about the enjoyment and independence women could find behind the wheel.

But that, of course, changed as time went on. By the late 1910s and early 1920s, automakers had a better idea of what sold and how to efficiently build those models. Automakers had to become more targeted in their advertising, selling their brand rather than selling their particular piece of automotive engineering. Curtis Publishing Company, one of the largest magazine publishers in the country, dove into researching automotive consumers and users in order to attract the auto industry’s lucrative advertising dollars. When they noticed very little auto advertising on the pages of their Ladies’ Home Journal, they began to specifically study women and their car purchases.

Despite all this research, however, the conversation between the auto industry and their female consumers remained relatively one-sided. These market researchers tended to interview the male automotive dealers that the women patronized rather than the female buyers themselves. When the researchers did occasionally question women, they cherry-picked the answers for their final reports that conformed to acceptable ideas about women and cars.

Despite interviewees talking about economy, reliability, mechanical prowess, and ease of driving, Curtis seized upon scant mentions of style and appearance and they highlighted these in their reports of the studies. These carefully curated results confirmed what market researchers, and the American population as a whole, already assumed about women and their preferences—that women might tremble at the thought of being responsible for such a powerful machine but might be persuaded to purchase one at the sight of a pretty body style.

No matter that women themselves said they appreciated mechanical innovations under the hood. Men were skeptical, and interviews with car dealers—who considered women in the showroom as flighty and clueless but nonetheless bossy and influential—validated that skepticism. This supposed confirmation, under the guise of research, reassured those Americans who had been anxious about women gaining ground in technology use. If all that women were after was an attractive car to be seen in, they would not really encroach in the masculine domain of technological knowledge.

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stationary locomotives

In the steam era it was necessary to "break-in" new as well as refurbished locomotives (poor manufacturing tolerances). How they did this came as a surprise .

 

 

 

 

when computers got framed

One of IBM's early innovations. 

a tip of the hat to Ken

 

the parcae project

The first time I heard about this cold war spy satellite program.

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Even the mere existence of the satellites, which would be built by a band of veteran engineers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, D.C., would remain officially secret until July 2023. That’s when the National Reconnaissance Office declassified a one-page acknowledgment about Parcae. Since its establishment in 1961, the NRO has directed and overseen the nation’s spy-satellite programs, including ones for photoreconnaissance, communications interception, signals intelligence, and radar. With this scant declassification, the Parcae program could at least be celebrated by name and its overall mission revealed during the NRL’s centennial celebration that year.

Aspects of the Parcae program had been unofficially outed over the years by a few enterprising journalists in such venues as Aviation Week & Space Technology and The Space Review, by historians like Day, and even by a Russian military advisor in a Ministry of Defense journal. This article is based on these sources, along with additional interviews and written input from Navy engineers who designed, built, operated, and managed Parcae and its precursor satellite systems. They confirm a commonly held but nevertheless profound understanding about the United States during that era. Simply put, there was nothing quite like the paranoia and high stakes of the Cold War to spur engineers into creative frenzies that rapidly produced brilliant national-security technologies, including surveillance systems like Parcae.

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on early road maps

Greg notes a fun post.

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But that’s only one kind of distance, and it’s not the way that I think about distance when I move around in my everyday life. I think, “OK, I’m going to bike to work today. Where are the hills, where’s the dangerous intersections?” Mapping throughout time and in different cultures has approached the question of getting around in so many ways, but we’ve become so used to thinking about mapping in this one way.

We’ve had this idea about accuracy that goes along with math as universally and completely objective. I wanted to say, it’s not objective. A lot of the maps in this exhibit are hyperlocal, and they need to be seen in their contexts to understand what they’re trying to accomplish. I wasn’t interested in the global worldview; it’s really about communication between the mapmaker and the map user. What I found in the process of curating the exhibit was a beautiful variety of ways of doing that.

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