The modern clock; a study of time keeping mechanism (1905) | Hacker News Reader

The modern clock; a study of time keeping mechanism (1905)

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54 pointsTomte22 comments

I love the typesetting on old books like this.

I bought a truckload of old Radar and microwave engineering books, and they're remarkably useful even today (the fundamentals of information theory haven't change since 195-whatever for example). Obviously computers were out of reach, so lots of integration tricks and awful rules of thumb in places.

Huge long shot, but do you happened to have a copy of Radargrammatry by Daniel Levine?

By the looks of googling, all of mine are about 30 years older on average. They're mostly tripe, i.e. books that aren't classics for a reason, but sometimes it's nice to see engineering as done in the past (if I'm ever a billionaire I'm going to buy a jet fighter just to get access to the manuals and take it to bits)

My earliest maths book was an algebra problems book from the late 1800s but I gave it away to my maths teacher when I left for university as recompense for not turning up and generally being a shit student.

Just found a book on raytracing from 1951!

I wonder why there are no tables in places there could be one - like in the list of metal expansion coefficients or gravitational acceleration by location.

People had books for that stuff back then, so I imagine it wasn't worth the considerable effort typesetting them.

I also have a book of data from way back, and since its still fairly accurate, it's still alarmingly easier just to look something up than Google it i.e. there doesn't seem to be one repository for (say) resistivity coefficients in one place alongside magnetic moments.

WolframAlpha tends to be pretty good at looking up this kind of stuff.

Seems to struggle with asking for the second ionisation energy of copper, and takes a while.

The book is a better than the phone in this case. The only issue with that is that getting multiple pieces of data in machine readable form is annoying - even now you might have to OCR a graph from a PDF :(

There's a bit of a cult classic book, "Pocket Ref" by Thomas Glover, and its big brother "Desk Ref." They're just books that attempt to provide reference tables for most of the things you'd need to look up throughout a wide variety of technical fields, but especially mechanical trades. A random selection of the contents includes "Densities of Gases," "Plywood & Panel Grading," "Canada & Mexico Postal Abbreviations & Capitals," "Solid Figure Formulas," "Commonly Available Pumps," "Welding Electrode Amperages," etc. Sort of a monument to what's possible in a reference work, and cheap insurance to throw in your toolkit or vehicle if you do any kind of field work for when there's no cell coverage.

I also have a book of mathematical tables, mostly for historic interest, but I think there's also some value in working from trig or log tables as I find looking at the table a few times helps you develop an intuition for estimating the function a lot faster than the attempts some textbooks make.

The typesetting is gorgeous, but of course all the pages are yellow because of the terrible high acid paper trend of the 20th c.

There’s lots of good information about the Trinity College clock at http://trin-hosts.trin.cam.ac.uk/clock/main.php

The current clock dates from 1910 (a few years after this book) and it has a similar design to Big Ben’s clock in the Palace of Westminster.

While watchmaking has enjoyed great reneissance lately, I find it curious that full-sized clockmaking still seems pretty dead field, at least comparatively. There is no popular reimagings of grandfather clocks or other household timepieces like there are watches.

Harder to use the grandfather clock to signify your wealth when out and about

Ha. It'd certainly be amusing to watch someone try though!

A waterproof cuckoo clock mounted on a boxy vehicle like a Jeep might be entertaining. There have certainly been weirder aftermarket modifications for them.

Past few months should have been a boon for that then. Way harder to non-obviously flash your wrist into a Zoom call then carefully putting a grandfather clock just in frame in the background.

Though I would not call them "popular" or "household" clocks, there are still similar clocks being made. For a good quality example, check out Erwin Sattler [0]. I think one of those would fit in at home. Well, it might take new furniture to match it.

[0] <https://www.erwinsattler.com/> I have no financial interest in that.

If you would like to see this, check youtube for the 'clickspring' channel at https://www.youtube.com/c/Clickspring . He machines a much desktop mechanical clock from scratch over many episodes.

Also very interesting this NAVY manual on mechanical computers:

https://archive.org/details/mechanical-computer-technical-ma...

There is an old book on building analog computers at home, but I can't remember the title.

A few years too soon for the mention of the best of pendulum clocks, often noticed here... the Shortt-Synchronome Clock. A clock that once adjusted, was better than many low end quartz oscillators in terms of stability. (2.31 ppB)

Interesting target advertising at the end of the book: clocks and related tools and materials.

Kind of weird that in the chapter about mercurial pendulum they switch to metric system.

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