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Comment by venti | Hacker News Reader

As far as I can tell, it should have worked like this: The devices would turn on at approx. 3 am and then draw a current from the power outlet. Someone at the power plant would then look at the Watt meter and from the reading they would know what the outcome was.

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Yup, that seems to be exactly what it is.

I'm consistently amazed at how "high-tech" things from the past worked. Today, nobody would think about drawing off-peak power as a way to cast votes - wasted energy, environmental impact, easier to do it by internet/telephone, etc, would all be good reasons to not do that. But back then, some of those didn't exist (internet, automated telephone polling) and others weren't understood (environmental impact) or didn't have as big of an impact (wasted energy/cost) as they do now.

What we managed to come up with when the technology was so primitive is just amazing. And in a hundred years, future generates will say the same about what we currently think of as amazing.

One interesting aspect of this is how it implicitly assumes that radios are not portable.

I'd wager that most radio listeners these days listen on devices that don't draw from mains power (e.g. car radios), and so this wouldn't work at all, even if it was somehow a good idea otherwise to implement this system now (which it clearly is not).

That's another great point. The world was a different place back then and things that made sense in one era don't make sense today, just as things that make sense today probably won't make sense tomorrow.

It also occurs to me that this technique is fundamentally the same as more modern methods for sending data over power lines, such as X10, various telemetry schemes used for monitoring the power company's stuff, or the constant attempts to provide broadband internet over power lines.

The difference is that it 1) uses an analog coding scheme that allows data from multiple transmitters to be combined automatically and 2) it operates at an extremely low frequency which avoids interference, passes easily through transformers and the like, and can be received using cheap equipment.

I'm also reminded of side channel attacks on power consumption, whereby a computer basically transmits data using the same basic scheme as used here, but much faster, and not intentionally: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_analysis

All in all this is a crazy scheme, but it's interesting to consider what it's similar to.

Is there actually any reason to assume the pace of technological progress from the early 20th century til now, will remain the same in the next 100 years?

I find it more likely that technological progress ended around 1980 and what we are doing now is coasting on old ideas that weren't implemented in the 1960's because computing power wasn't ready yet. Once those run out, it's just going to be rehashes and efficiencies. Why is that? All this recent progress was driven by WWI, WWII and the cold war and space race. We haven't had another one of any of those, and we'd better all be hoping we don't have another one!

On the other hand, maybe technological progress will keep pace. But there's actually just no reason to assume that it absolutely will. Do not forget that the 20th century was actually a very unusual and unprecedented century for progress in a history where humanity has gone many many centuries without inventing ANYTHING new at all.

My believe is that even if you implement it as is today, it wouldn't have work. Because there's no off-peak time in today's city, at least not significant enough that you can be sure that such power drain are really from the vote.

1. Make sure devices are calibrated to a few seconds with a radio wave (easy).

2. Give each like a specific t0 and a transmitting period for well-defined pulses.

3. Draw current.

4. Correlate.

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