Tag: Patient things
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TVA, part 4 of 4
The book on TVA architecture featured a picture and plan of a model gas station. The building itself was photographed but I think the rest of the plan was skipped. I went ahead and tributed the whole thing. The station was in the median of a boulevard, with entrances from both lanes. Floor plan of…
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Electrotyping, part 1 of 3
[Redated and slightly revised after I decided to continue the subject. This was originally a single free-standing item.] = = = = = Electrochemistry was the first practical use of electricity. The first attempted telegraphs used electrolytic bubbles in water as the indicator. Stereotyping was already mature in 1840, as an industrial process involving papier-mache…
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Electrotyping, part 2 of 3
Part 1 showed the essential process of electrotyping in a small-scale experimental setup. Real factories like Kellogg’s Patent Insides used bigger machines in mass production. Here again is the Kellogg building in KC, placed in my down-home scene. Most of the Kellogg building was devoted to electrotyping, with hot-lead composition and the writers and researchers…
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Electrotyping, part 3 of 3
After the type is set into a form, suitable for ordinary printing, the electrotype process begins by smashing the form into a thin layer of wax on a metal plate. The metal plate will become the negative electrode in the plating vat. The form is placed face down on the wax layer forming a sandwich.…
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Salute to cafes
(Redated and reposted after some additions) Last week I noticed a picture of an old workingman’s cafe in Enid. The picture was self-explanatory. Why did little cafes do a good business? Because they were right next to downtown apartments and rooms where most people lacked kitchens. Decided to do a proper salute to cafes and…
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Reprint on computing history
Linked in previous. Also, this 2012 item continues to draw occasional readers or bots, so maybe it’s worthwhile at least to bots. = = = = = START REPRINT: Via uCatholic.com: The computer was originally invented to do just that: compute. Numerical calculations were its sole intended purpose, and words were never in the realm…
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Better choices
Today is Ada Lovelace Day. Look, if you really want to honor ancient women in technology, Ada is getting tired. She didn’t invent anything, she was just a writer who explained Babbage’s invention and saw some of its potential. Babbage wasn’t the main source of modern computing anyway. Calculators with decimal dials were widespread a…
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The Hughes Typograph
Found in Tangible Typography, or how the blind read, published in England in 1853. The Typograph was invented in 1851 by William Hughes, head of the Blind Institution at Manchester. It was demonstrated at one of the Crystal Palace exhibitions of new inventions, and was produced and used in small quantities. Several of the earliest…
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Bootstrapping a language
Okie blogger K. Latham posted an interesting brief feature on the Cherokee Advocate, a weekly paper in Tahlequah that was first founded in 1844. I had noticed several early tribal newspapers in the Ayer newspaper lists but hadn’t stopped to think about the alphabet and fonts. I asked some questions about the source of the…
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Bachelor stoves
Ran across this while reading up on the Pratt typewriter. This is described as a bachelor’s stove. It was supposedly invented by James Watt himself. One specimen was donated to a museum by a Watt descendant in 1863. The relative claimed this was the same teapot Watt was using when he was inspired to make…
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Pratt’s Pterotype, 1 of 3
First a story about John Pratt and his invention. This was found in a 1927 issue of Typewriter Trade Journal. = = = = = START QUOTE: Mrs Worl recently gave to the Wenatchee Daily World of Wenatchee, Washington, the following story of the invention of the Pratt typewriters, one of the earliest writing machines.…
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Pratt’s Pterotype 2 of 3
Pratt’s US patent, issued in 1868, is titled Mechanical Typographer but he normally called his machine the Pterotype for unknown reasons. It wasn’t notably wingy. Here’s how it looked in operation: Each key had a long lever pivoted in the middle of the machine, and each lever activated three separate horizontal bars. All letters were…
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Pratt’s Pterotype 3 of 3
Returning to both Sholes and Hammond. Sholes and Glidden didn’t use Pratt’s keyboard at first. Like most early typewriters they followed the piano model. They also used an entirely different way of getting each letter to the paper, with individual hammers bearing each letter. Oddity: Glidden and Sholes sold their idea to gunmaker Remington, but…
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Zenith set released
I’m done with the expanded Zenith topic. Here’s the set at ShareCG as usual. ShareCG wouldn’t let me upload the set titled as ‘Zenith expanded’. I finally figured out that their algorithm is tuned to reject small variations. I changed the title to ‘Wincharger’ and it uploaded properly. = = = = = List of…
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Zenith + Wallace, part 1 of 3.
I decided to continue having fun with Zenith, since it seems to bring out the best in my craft. So far all the Zenith items I’ve ‘drawn’ have turned out nicely, above the standard of other recent output. Write what you know. Write what you love. Randomly looking through old radio journals for more material,…
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