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Comment by retrac | Hacker News Reader

Babbage went down the wrong rabbit hole. The technology of the 1860s was sufficient to make an automatic programmable computer. If you can make (or salvage) wire, and make simple sheet metal parts (brass will do) then you can make electromagnets, which means you can make relays. And there you go. No multimedia streaming, but automatic control and communication at a distance, yes.

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You would need plenty of electricity though.

BTW one of my favorite crazy ideas is that by the times of the Middle Kingdom, ancient Egypt had all the material resources needed to build a phone system, or at least a telegraph system, very useful in a large country. Zinc and silver to create batteries. Plentiful copper, gold, and silver to create any kinds of wires, and techniques to finely process it. Some amounts of magnetic ferrous alloys from meteorites, and likely access to iron ores to produce more. Only very small amounts are needed for kernels of electromagnets and membranes. Paper and resin-based glues could be used to produce wire insulation. Very certainly they were able to work any available materials with good precision and sophistication.

What they lacked was a good theory required to connect the pieces into a working phone system, like that of late 19th century.

I sometimes think about what we are currently oblivious of, because certainly we have a plethora of resources to work with. (See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel))

I’m actually curious about the linguistics of something like a telegraph for ancient Egypt - I’m not particularly familiar with the Egyptian writing system from that era, but a strongly pictographic language, and one in which they seemed to regularly intersperse actual pictures and do things like manipulate symbol size to convey information doesn’t seem to immediately suggest translation to an encoding like Morse like phonetic written languages do.

In other words, if the ancient Egyptians had found themselves with the technology to create something like a telegraph, I wonder what they would have done with it - what possibilities suggest themselves given the visual representation of the Egyptian language.

(I could actually see something like the Incan quipu being a much easier translation, if we’re talking premodern “written” languages)

- Make a list of the most common (spoken) words - Sort them by usage frequency (most used words on top) - Associate a unique sequence of 0 and 1 (dot and dash) - Use shorter sequences for common words, longer ones for the words below - As you don't transit letters but words the transfer rate is much higher than in "modern" telegraph systems - profit ?

So basically a prefix-free code with a symbol table of words.

Getting off topic here but, the Ancient Egyptian writing system was only marginally pictographic. The fully-developed system is essentially phonetic, using about ~40 symbols to represent sounds, and a couple hundred pictograms (often interchanged with the full spelling). Closest analogy is probably the Japanese writing system, but with many fewer kanji. Carved hieroglyphs were highly formalized and ceremonial in nature, but ultimately, the quail chick means "u" and a foot means "b". (We inherit the letter "b" from the shape of that foot hieroglyph.)

Have a look at the handwritten form, as would be used for papyrus books or official letters: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/A_page_f...

Interesting, I didn’t know that!

I highly recommend that you read the book “Hieroglyphs: A Very Short Introduction” which I expect you will enjoy as much as I did: https://academic.oup.com/book/470

In short: Hieroglyphics were phonetic, but they eluded translation for centuries because only a small number of people could read and write them, and (importantly) the directions that the pictographs faced determined the direction that you’d read in.

My favorite fact from this book is that the hieroglyphic word for “cat” is the combination of the sounds for “me” and “ew”

The Very Short Introduction series is fantastic - they really do a great job of distilling the core of a subject to give a lay person the conceptual framework to appreciate the topic. I’ve enjoyed every one I’ve read.

> My favorite fact from this book is that the hieroglyphic word for “cat” is the combination of the sounds for “me” and “ew”

Chinese is similar - the word for “cat” is “mao”!

The Information Super-Nile. I like it. Perhaps elements of language used in cognitive expressions would begin to mirror through metaphor geographical terms used for proximity of major Nile features to the capital. Messages would become rafts. System operational periods, seasons. Fog of war would become a stagnant pond, or stilled flow. Riparian plants, ever-present information service providers such as scribes and couriers. Riparian birds with fleeting habits, commercial traders waiting to pounce in to action based on on news from afar.

The pyramids were original covered in polished white limestone casement, which was highly reflective and visible hundreds of miles away. I wonder if you could exploit this to send pictograms by selectively covering parts of the casement with dark covers.

And here I've always thought that Babbage's big mistake was using decimal instead of binary.

But Babbage started in the 1830s, not the 1860s.

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