Before Any Engineering Vehicle Existed by tallpindo
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Description
Men began to work with metals they extracted from rock found in the ground in the Bronze Age and then the Iron Age. As the items produced had purposes greater than just an individual for tools or weapons there was a need for vehicles of conveyance. Wood was available and easier to harvest than breaking rocks or digging. Eventually, industrial factories larger than black smith forges were built to make plates and sheets of steel and molds were made of sand to cast things like wheels and cylinder assemblies. Often these sites were near rivers to provide water for cooling after the casting and forging as well as to power the hammers and cutting tools. By 1880 even a railroad could get together partially formed parts and raw materials to make its own engines. The calculation of relationships between pressure and temperature for a given volume of water in steam and liquid form provided a means to set regions of a machine in circuits and open flows and extract a proportion as useful work. This then established the profession of engineer as someone trained even educated by a university. Up in the Sierra Nevada mountains moving gold or in Puerto Rico harvesting sugar cane or earlier still on temporary tracks laid in forest to harvest timber locomotives could be light in relative terms. Line engines pulled heavy freights or moderate and fast express as well as very fast passenger trains. The image I have chosen is from a museum in Galveston that was inundated by hurricane Ivan but more recently restored again. My hope is you will see not an individual but a series produced item even if only in small quantities. This then is the continuum of the culture.
The End of the Line
The Santa Fe Railyard was at the end of the line for the way West. My father crated up my mother’s previous stove and sent it West from Michigan for $10.00. I had to drive my pickup to the railyard and wait for the attendant to calculate a tariff to bill me before I could haul it away. The man had an ancient Frieden comptometer with manual tabs at the top of each row to do carries in multiplying. He looked up his data then entered it and began to run the calculation flipping the tabs as required.
I worked in a department that sometimes was in Marketing and sometimes in Engineering as the organization shifted. Marketing had a lower overhead rate that was of advantage when making a proposal to do contract work. Engineering included major project overhead. Many projects were covered with new business funds that provided partial recovery of expenses if a project was never put under eventual contract due to cancellation or because it was assigned to a competitor. This image gathers up all the collegiality that was in Purdue University where one of our employees had been. Much later when the department Director got a new Electronic Slide Rule and This engineer got a Hewlett-Packard 9810 Calculator that could be connected to a plotter. I was provided with a Monroe Electronic calculator with trigonometric and inverse trig functions as well as an octal card punch and reader. I also could use a Hewlett-Packard 9830 Mini-computer that belonged to Weights Engineering. It had a CRT display and a more complicated plotter. When we were in Engineering we also had access to the Engineering stock room to obtain various drafting templates and special graphing papers. For many projects, I went out to the groups to prepare task statements for the total work and the estimates of labor hours and any computer time or special support elements. This type of overhead activity also extended to preparing capability descriptions for proposals that included resumes and descriptions of the computing facility and its associated machines and software.
A customer could contract for studies of new or expanded missions and any designs or system assemblies’ necessary to accomplish those missions. Because the customer was government the data to determine fitness for the mission was almost always in the possession of the customer. To anticipate a need that could require major lead time often our department would offer to collect and analyze data and issue a report to the responsible planning or requirements element of the government. The incentive to the customer was that we could provide confidential cost or pricing data estimates that would be used by the customer in his submissions to the Department of Defense where we had no direct access. No metal might exist for a system for several years as options and alternatives were explored.
Comments (6)
giulband
Beautiful image !!
eekdog
The wheels on the train go round and round.
Pure power.
Palaemon
Great work.
Osper
Now that's an "Iron Horse" The comptometer is definitely out of the "past" . Kind of akin to the latest computer gear the "floppy stringy" data storage device in the mid 70's. My maintenance officer worked up a program that did miraculous computations on data. The only problem was he forgot that the storage unit had no end and because it was a loop devise it simply rewrote more data over the other data.
tallpindo
Since I did mention the first effort at personal digital mathematics devices bought by the company I will characterize them. Electronic Sliderule- no ability to add or subtract, no paper tape. A metaphor of the bamboo rule kept in a leather holster on an engineers belt useful for scaling, for interpolating and for general multiplying and dividing as in constants and converting units of measure. The Frieden comptometer was a mechanical device with 100 keys on it's face in rows and columns of 10. It could add, subtract, multiply and in high level kinds divide. It had no paper tape and no recording ability other than eye to hand to paper notes. The Monroe electronic calculator could do all of those things plus it had trignonometric and inverse trigonometric functions which I had to get from tables prepared by the depression era WPA mathematics projects. It did have a tape and thus a record to check and edit as well as an octal card programming and reading ability to create algorithms and macros. Which leads us to the HP-9810. It was a desktop version of what was offered as a professional portable calculator sold by the company to employees which also had an associated plotter to make graphs of results or functions. Today's graphing calculators used by students descend directly from these devices adding the ability to do calculus in differential and integral form as well as imaginaries with full programming in machine language types. Accountants would be totally offended by such devices leading to COBOL and it's efficient use of 2 digit years and the Y2K problem many years later. Who ever heard of a COBOL calculator though as they went for central computing and shunned anything even with two processors as "distributed."
Richardphotos
I studied metallurgy in college. done metal fabrication drafting after college. figuring shipping weights of bridge steel I beam girders 12' high for spans of 100' plus was calculated with comptometers. we had adding machines, but the they did not have the capacity for such large numbers