The Computer History Museum has a copy of the Babbage Difference Engine built in London.
The machine does what its designer intended and it does it well.  This is beautiful machine, elegant and complex, it embodies one of my prime Steampunk aesthetics, that the workings of machines are beautiful as well as functional.
Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

The Babbage Engine at The Computer History Museum
Charles Babbage (1791-1871), computer pioneer, designed the first automatic computing engines. He invented computers but failed to build them. The first complete Babbage Engine was completed in London in 2002, 153 years after it was designed. Difference Engine No. 2, built faithfully to the original drawings, consists of 8,000 parts, weighs five tons, and measures 11 feet long.
We invite you to learn more about this extraordinary object, its designer Charles Babbage and the team of people who undertook to build it. Discover the wonder of a future already passed. A sight no Victorian ever saw.
An identical Engine completed in March 2008 is on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
Here is the engine in action.

I just started reading a fascinating book:
Nikola Tesla, My Inventions and other writings compiled by Samantha Hunt
This book is a collection of articles written by Tesla himself and published in the Electrical Experimenter Magazine starting in 1919.
I will be reviewing it more later, but the description of the hotel that Tesla lived in for the last ten years of his life is interesting:

He spent the last ten years of his life in the Hotel New Yorker.  When it opened in 1930 it was the tallest building in New York City, a monument to the ambition and decadence of the Jazz Age.  At forty three stories high, it had its own power generator. The kitchen was an entire acre. There were five restaurants, ten private dinning rooms, two ballrooms and an indoor ice skating rink. Conveyor belts whisked dirty dishes through secret passageways down to fully automated dishwashers. Four stories below ground, bedsheets and tableclothes were miraculously laundered, dried, ironed, and folded without ever touching a human hand. Everything about the hotel was efficient, futuristic. It was perfect for Tesla-- except by the time he arrived in New York in 1933, he was destitute.

Keep your sightglass full your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

New info on the Hindenburg disaster at the Smithsonian.
Thanks to my buddy Grant Zelych for spotting this one!
Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

The Lost Map of the Hindenburg

Following on from yesterdays video post of Mechanical Principles by Ralph Steiner.
This video has lots of interesting mechanism that could be useful for my Absinthium project.
In this case these mechanisms are used for computation in the fire control systems of US Navy Warships. An interesting solution to the continuous calculations necessary to target a moving ship!
Enjoy
Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

Mechanical Computers in the US Navy.
Lots of good information on how calculations are performed with gears and shafts

This video is a section from Mechanical Principles by Ralph Steiner done in 1930.
Lots of funky motions and mechanisms here.
Could be useful for my Absinthium project.
Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

The full version is here:Ralph Steiner Mechanical Principles 1930



From the YouTube page:
This is my favorite 4min selection of a larger work by Ralph Steiner. The original was silent, and the DVD had it set to classical music. I have swapped the audio for an electronica/industrial track by 3 Liquid Hz - Little Boy.

Favorite movements:
@ 1:16 - counter mechanism
@ 2:55 - normal gears, but cut to engage on diagonals
@ 3:37 - SQUARE GEARS!
@ 3:41 - variable speed transfer
@ 3:46 - rotary to linear action with a 4 tooth cog

Found this gem at The Virtual Typewriter Museum.
This site has lots of good information, history, technical detail, and photos of Typewriters.
The section on the Hansen Writing Ball is fascinating.
From Hansen writing ball of 1870

Several people may carry the title of inventor of the typewriter. Several typewriters may fight over the title of first production machine. Only two machines are regarded as 'the holy grail of typewriters'. The Hansen name is the only one to compete strongly in all three categories.

Although the Sholes & Glidden is generally regarded as the first production typewriter in history, the Hansen writing ball in fact beat the S&G by no less than four years. The reverend Rasmus Hans Malling Johan Hansen (1835-1890) worked as a teacher and as director of an institution for the deaf and dumb in Copenhagen. It was his desire to enable his pupils to 'speak with their fingers' that led him to develop his writing ball.

Typing and carriage return of the Hansen writing ball.

There are so many amazing aspects about this machine, that Hansen certainly deserves the title of 'inventor' as much as Sholes or Mitterhofer did. And finally, with an effective auction value of over 120,000 euros (april 2002), the Hansen claim to be the Holy Grail of Typewriters is no joke. And one look at the machine makes it clear that it is without a doubt the single most beautiful typewriter ever made.

Continued ...





Beautiful indeed!

Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

Sometimes looking back in History can be pretty scary.
If this analysis is correct this was a very  near miss?
There have been many extinction events in Earth's history, most are safely buried millions of years in the past, but this one was pretty close to our time!

Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your EYES ON THE SKIES!
KJ

Billion Tonne Comet May Have Missed Earth By A Few Hundred Kilometers in 1883
A re-analysis of historical observations suggest Earth narrowly avoided an extinction event just over a hundred years ago

10/17/2011
From: Technology Review at MIT

On 12th and 13th August 1883, an astronomer at a small observatory in Zacatecas in Mexico made an extraordinary observation. José Bonilla counted some 450 objects, each surrounded by a kind of mist, passing across the face of the Sun.

Bonilla published his account of this event in a French journal called L'Astronomie in 1886. Unable to account for the phenomenon, the editor of the journal suggested, rather incredulously, that it must have been caused by birds, insects or dust passing front of the Bonilla's telescope. (Since then, others have adopted Bonilla's observations as the first evidence of UFOs.)

Today, Hector Manterola at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, and a couple of pals, give a different interpretation. They think that Bonilla must have been seeing fragments of a comet that had recently broken up. This explains the 'misty' appearance of the pieces and why they were so close together.

But there's much more that Manterola and co have deduced. They point out that nobody else on the planet seems to have seen this comet passing in front of the Sun, even though the nearest observatories in those days were just a few hundred kilometres away.

That can be explained using parallax. If the fragments were close to Earth, parallax would have ensured that they would not have been in line with the Sun even for observers nearby. And since Mexico is at the same latitude as the Sahara, northern India and south-east Asia, it's not hard to imagine that nobody else was looking.

Manterola and pals have used this to place limits on how close the fragments must have been: between 600 km and 8000 km of Earth. That's just a hair's breadth.

What's more, Manterola and co estimate that these objects must have ranged in size from 50 to 800 metres across and that the parent comet must originally have tipped the scales at a billion tonnes or more, that's huge, approaching the size of Halley's comet.

That's an eye opening re-examination of the data. Astronomers have seen a number of other comets fragment. The image above shows the Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 comet which broke apart as it re-entered the inner Solar System in 2006. There's no reason why such fragments couldn't pass close by Earth.

One puzzle is why nobody else saw this comet. It must have been particularly dull to have escaped observation before and after its close approach. However, Manterola and co suggest that it may have been a comet called Pons-Brooks seen that same year by American astronomers.

Manterola and co end their paper by spelling out just how close Earth may have come to catastrophe that day. They point out that Bonilla observed these objects for about three and a half hours over two days. This implies an average of 131 objects per hour and a total of 3275 objects in the time between observations.

Each fragment was at least as big as the one thought to have hit Tunguska. Manterola and co end with this: "So if they had collided with Earth we would have had 3275 Tunguska events in two days, probably an extinction event."

A sobering thought.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1110.2798: Interpretation Of The Observations Made In 1883 In Zacatecas (Mexico): A Fragmented Comet That Nearly Hits The Earth