Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Model 15 machines have such a long life. I've restored two of those, plus three Model 14 machines, an earlier 1920s design. My machines have been to about a dozen steampunk conventions.[1] People send in their messages by texting, and they're printed on the Model 15, then delivered by a messenger. The video shows two acting students running our steampunk telegraph office. They're great at it. Web site: [2]

For smaller conventions, we have a semi-portable, a Model 14 tape printer in a road case made to fit. The tape is pasted down on telegram blanks, just like real telegrams up to the mid-1950s.

I normally run these off EeePC subnotebooks that run XUbuntu Linux. Those subnotebooks are about $30 on eBay, so I bought some of them for small projects. It's like having a Raspberry PI with a keyboard, screen, battery, and power supply all in a convenient clamshell case. I could run them as a Linux terminal, but I usually run them with a Python program that performs the telegraph office functions.

The lack of lower case is less of a problem in this application than the lack of emoji. I put the entire dictionary of emoji names into the program, and it spells out the emoji as (happy face), etc. That's amused some people who sent emoji-heavy messages.

The Right To Repair people would love those machines. Every part is individually replaceable. The price of this is a huge number of adjustments, plus annual oiling and cleaning. Few people today would put up with that much periodic maintenance in an office machine. It does let them be restored a century after they were built.

[1] https://vimeo.com/124065314

[2] http://www.aether.ltd

That's the thing about tech of that era, a moderately equipped machine shop can build almost any of it.

If there was a big crisis, We could retreat back to 1930 level of technology with relative ease in fact, maybe even later. That gives us radio, telephones, telegraphy, et al. All that tech can be made in small workshops.

That's, to me, the amazing thing about machining: pretty much any invention from the dawn of civilization up until the vacuum tube can be made in "a moderately equipped machine shop." Because, if a part requires a custom tool to build, it's very likely there's a version of that tool you can build with just the same 1930s tech you use to build anything else, in about four hours.

A good chunk of hobbyist-machinist YouTube is essentially just people bootstrapping themselves into a complete shop's worth of tools starting from three or four primitives, and it's kind of wonderful to watch.

(I'm always kind of disappointed whenever one of these hobbyist folks get a CNC mill or something, because it throws off that bootstrapping feeling. I know it was never their goal, but they were coincidentally pulling it off until that point.)

Do you have a link to one of those videos? Would love to see one. Also reminds me of Factorio

Including the vacuum tube, you just need glassblowing equipment and a good vacuum pump, and some other specialized tools. That said, the first voice transmissions used either alternators or high speed rotary spark gap transmitters.

Another thing is audio amplification can be done without tubes or transistors, you can use a mechanical amplifier which is literally a transducer that is mechanically coupled to a carbon microphone, and a local power source (battery) making it possible to build analog phone lines that run several hundred miles without tube type amps.

See https://www.youtube.com/user/glasslinger

Sure, I mostly brought up vacuum tubes as an endpoint because constructing the specialized tools to make one is no longer a four-hour job. You run into a wall where, to get to the point where you can do the glassblowing, you have to first bootstrap an entirely-separate set of primitives (kiln, quench, anvil, grinding/polishing stones, etc.) that you may not have needed up until that point if you’d just been working with scrap stock.

(And then the same is true of everything after that, because transistors require photolithography, and photolithography requires good lenses.)

Of course, if you’re unlocking your tech-tree in a breadth-first direction, you’ll already have the glassworking primitives around due to them being common prerequisites for refining metal ore :)

Speaking of vacuum tubes, this gentleman makes them by hand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzyXMEpq4qw

Anyone who is interested in this sort of thing may wish to take a look at the seven-book Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap series by the late David Gingery. While intended as a guide for the hobbyist, the series could easily serve as a blueprint for how to go from scraps of metal, wood and earth to a fully functioning machine shop in a post-apocalyptic scenario. And if you add in Herbert and Lou Hoover's excellent translation of De Re Metallica you're well on your way to having a blueprint for rebuilding humanity's pre-WWII tech base from scratch.

Thanks, first time I've heard of them, will be going through those (they seem to be available at archive.org [0]) soon!

I'd like to point out another interesting 18-part series of videos about prototyping (in his words "a short course on how to build stuff" :)), by engineer/inventor/professor Dan Gelbart: [1]

[0] https://archive.org/details/GingeryMetalWorkingShop/mode/2up

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMP_AfiNlX4

Er, no. Making a Teletype machine required a sizable plant. Morkrum had over 200 employees before they shipped their first production machine.

Those machines required a large number of precision stampings and small machined parts. Lots of custom tools and dies. Tooling up to make all those was a big job. Once they had all the tooling and plant, the Model 15 was cheap to make, despite its complexity. Teletype tried making a cheaper, simpler Model 26, but it cost more to make than the Model 15 because the manufacturing process for the heavy-duty machine was working so well.

From the beginning, most Teletypes were rented, not sold, and came with maintenance included. So the machines had to be reliable. The Model 15 seems way overdesigned. Flat parts were both hardened and Parkerized, a caustic process that deposits a rust-resistant oxide and turns metal grey. (Sometimes used for guns.) Fine-thread screws. Lock washers on every screw. Insulation that won't age or crack. Plus, the keyboard, typing unit, and motor are all very easily replaceable; they even disconnect electrically and slide out. The screws and round parts are all custom. They must have had a huge number of automatic screw machines turning them out. All round parts fit precisely.

This was not made in a small workshop. More like a factory that covered a city block in Chicago.

That's all true, but it's only true if you're making thousands of them a year, not hundreds. Much of what was stamped could be machined instead, you use stamping for economy and labor savings.

WE Hawthorne Works in Chicago was similarly large, and to build in quantity you'd need it to be just as large now, but to build a couple hundred strowger switches a month? Not as large.

The hardest part of bootstrapping to 1930 is making copper wire - doubly so for wire suitable for electrical coils.

Reminds me of this article on the complexities at different levels of abstraction (sorta). http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

You mean, like, using 2000's CNC to manufacture 1930's teletype parts?

or manually operated mills too, the technology need not be advanced.

Why would you make a 1930s machine using 1930s processes? Use a CNC machine, metal injection molding, and change the design to be able to use off the shelf screws and bolts where ever possible. Forgot all the brass, looks nice but it will add to the build.

I should also point out a friend's project, Teletweety, a Model 28: http://www.teletweety.com/

That video is amazing. My love of tech and history coming together.

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