They just put up a great article about the machines people used to lift and move heavy loads before the advent of steam power. Arguably the pinnacle of human-powered lifting technology were Sir William Fairbairn’s hand-cranked “Tubular Cranes,” one of which is shown above as illustrated in Fairbairn’s 1860 Useful Information for Engineers, Vol. 2:
Tea-staining is the standard darkening method, but Propnomicon’s trick for producing an ancient, time-worn ragged edge is simple, looks great, and is one I hadn’t heard of before.
TorrentMeter – A steampunk bandwidth meter. Skytee writes – Weeks after showing you TorrentMeter Mk.1 (video) and TorrentMeter Mk.2 Steampunk Edition (video), I finally get to document how it was made. I got inspired by reading Tom Igoe’s article in Make Magazine issue 11, about an antique gauge displaying air quality data from the web. […]
Retired Navy patternmaker and former shop teacher Charlie Kested was 71, in 2000, when he first fired up his scroll saw to start work on this project. He just finished. In the intervening decade, Kersted has survived and recovered from a stroke that left him without feeling in one hand.
Apart from all the human interest angles on Charlie himself–senior citizen, veteran, patriot, teacher, craftsman, stroke survivor–the piece itself seems a truly remarkable artifact. Each word is carefully cut from dark walnut, right down to the last flourish and detail of the script, and affixed to a light-colored baltic birch “page.” Hopefully there’ll be some nice higher-resolution photos available online soon. [via Boing Boing]
A comment on this morning’s cometarium post reminded me of this famous axiom in the history of science: “No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.” Stigler’s Law is named for University of Chicago statistician Stephen Stigler, who attributes it to sociologist Robert K. Merton. [Thanks, Rahere!]
This mechanical model of a comet’s orbit, based on the action of elliptical gears, is dated to 1766, and is housed at Harvard’s Putnam Gallery. From which:
This apparatus was designed to demonstrate how the speed of a comet varies in its orbit according to Kepler’s law of equal areas. The comet Benjamin Martin chose for this instrument is Halley’s Comet, which goes around the Sun every 75 1/2 years. Martin began producing cometaria before Halley’s Comet made its predicted return, and so was betting that Halley would prove correct in his theory.
Interestingly, the device turns out to be not an entirely accurate demonstration of Kepler’s second law. Physicist Martin Beech of the University of Regina has studied the history and mechanics of cometaria at great length. His clearinghouse page is an excellent source of detailed information.
A “whiffletree” is a mechanical digital-to-analog converter. Brilliant science-and-technology documentarian Bill Hammack, professor of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering at the University of Illinois, has produced this fascinating video anatomy of IBM’s classic Selectric typewriter, in which a 7-bit whiffletree is employed to convert keypresses (digital) to precisely coordinated tugs (analog) on the control cables that rotate and tilt the type ball. Doubly awesome is the fact that the video features an appendix (yes, a video appendix) which focuses exclusively on the whiffletree itself, closely illustrating its operation with a simple 2-bit case.
