Surveillance and the history of 19th-century wearable tech | Hacker News Reader

Surveillance and the history of 19th-century wearable tech

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

56 pointslapetitejort13 comments

"Another story in the Railway and Engineering Review included a similar hack attempt by a Portland night watchman. Having previously been caught mechanically rigging the button-pushing work of his nightly rounds, the watchman was given a pedometer to ensure that he was manually completing his work. Although this use of quantum media — media that count, quantify, or enumerate — to more closely monitor the watchman’s activities seemed to work for several nights, he was eventually found sleeping in the engine room, having attached the pedometer to a piston rod"

Having worked briefly in security - I found it hilarious. Nowdays it works by scanning RFID chips on the guarded areas with a smartphone, so cheating here is way harder (I considered it of course), it would have included hacking the work smartphone and the surveillance software.

Either way - the other nightguards there complained a lot because of their recent high raise in workload - which now meant patrolling by car and foot for 2 hours, instead of 1 - then you checked in all the points - and could sleep or play consoles for the next 10 hours (or in my case programming on my projects), as long as you could wake up if an actual alarm happened. So not that much stress ..

Unarmed security always seemed like a great gig to use as a means to get other stuff done if you were trying to get to the next station in life. A couple patrols and you could spend the remainder of the time studying or upskilling or whatever. Unarmed implicitly means you're guarding things people are less likely to want to steal or mess with, and even if they choose to, being unarmed you're less likely to get hurt proactively.

I used to work a night shift job over the summer in college and it was great having my mornings free (I'd sleep in the afternoon/evening before going in) but the work itself was just busy enough where I couldn't really do anything else on a shift.

Well, since I live in germany, only very rare guard jobs involve guns. Like money transports, weapon manufacturing and guarding military areas.

The company I worked for did guard sort of higher value targets, like state museums containing art, but fortunately with no weapons required.

So in general, yes, it is a good job on the way up - if you manage to avoid the energy of the people who settled as guards with the purpose of doing as little as possible for the rest of their lifes. That was actually the stressful part for me, despite interactions with coworkers happened rarely.

The article mentions that carriages had odometers, which I found just as surprising as pedometers existing in that era. I'd love to see more tech that we consider beginning in the 20th century that is actually older.

The loom and invention of punch cards come to mind

That genuinely blows my mind. Weavers were programming. Just astounding.

They programmed fabric, not bits :)

and now we program the fabric of society ;)

Transcontinental (US) telegraphy preceded the transcontinental railroad by a decade.

Both preceded the Civil War.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchclock

I found the pre-electronic way of having a portable audit clock that had keys attached to buildings with numbers that would stamp the clock rather fascinating.

It's weird that the Wiki article doesn't have an image of the actual clocks, only of the stations.

It appears to be rather unchanged since the earlier devices.

http://www.centraltimeclock.com/security/watchclock.php (the brochure and manuals are interesting)

And an old one ( https://youtu.be/xwkIzphNFZY - annoying music)

Clock with a rotating piece of paper in it. When the key is turned, it alters (cuts / stamps) the paper.

The modern ones are modern made, but the design remains rather unchanged.

“This increase in the electronic systems led the largest U.S. manufacturer of watchclocks, Detex, to discontinue all of their mechanical watchclocks on December 31, 2011”

That’s a later date than I would have assumed

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