Retrotechtacular: The Ferguson System

September 24, 2025 by Jenny List 37 Comments

Of the many great technological leaps made in the middle of the 20th century, one of the ones with perhaps the greatest impact on our modern life takes a back seat behind the more glamorous worlds of electronics, aeronautics, or computing. But the ancestor of the modern tractor has arguably had more of an impact on the human condition in 2025 than that of the modern computer, and if you’d been down on the farm in the 1940s you might have seen one.

The Ferguson system refers to the three-point implement linkage you’ll find on all modern tractors, the brainchild of the Irish engineer Harry Ferguson. The film below the break is a marketing production for American farmers, and it features the Ford-built American version of the tractor known to Brits and Europeans as the Ferguson TE20.

The evolution of the tractor started as a mechanisation of horse-drawn agriculture, using either horse-drawn implements or ones derived from them. While the basic shape of a modern tractor as a four wheel machine with large driving wheels at the rear evolved during this period, other types of tractor could be found such as rein-operated machines intended to directly replace the horse, or two-wheeled machines with their own ecosystem of attachments.

As the four-wheeled machines grew in size and their implements moved beyond the size of their horse-drawn originals, they started to encounter a new set of problems which the film below demonstrates in detail. In short, a plough simply dragged by a tractor exerts a turning force on the machine, giving the front a tendency to lift and the rear a lack of traction. The farmers of the 1920s and 1930s attempted to counter this by loading their tractors with extra weights, at the expense of encumbering them and compromising their usefulness. Ferguson solved this problem by rigidly attaching the plough to the tractor through his three-point linkage while still allowing for flexibility in its height. The film demonstrates this in great detail, showing the hydraulic control and the feedback provided through a valve connected to the centre linkage spring. Continue reading “Retrotechtacular: The Ferguson System” →

Retrotechtacular: The Noisy Home Computer From 1967

September 8, 2025 by Al Williams 22 Comments

[Rex Malik] didn’t need an alarm clock. That’s because he had one of two “home computer terminals” next to his bed and, as you can see in the video below, it made quite a racket. The terminal looks like an ASR33 with some modifications. In 1967, it was quite a novelty and, of course, it didn’t have any real processing power. It connected to an “invisible brain” ten miles away.

What do you do with a computer in 1967? Well, it looks like you could trade stocks. It also apparently managed his shopping list and calendar. His young son also learned some letters and numbers. We’d love to hear from the young [Mr. Malik] today to find out what kind of computer he’s using now.

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Retrotechtacular: Exploring The Moon On Surveyor 1

September 7, 2025 by Dan Maloney 13 Comments

Aside from a few stand-out programs — looking at you, Star Trek — by the late 1960s, TV had already become the “vast wasteland” predicted almost a decade earlier by Newton Minnow. But for the technically inclined, the period offered no end of engaging content in the form of wall-to-wall coverage of anything and everything to do with the run-up to the Apollo moon landings. It was the best thing on TV, and even the endless press conferences beat watching a rerun of Gilligan’s Island.

At the time, most of the attention landed on the manned missions, with the photogenic and courageous astronauts of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs very much in the limelight. But for our money, it was the unmanned missions where the real heroics were on display, starring the less-photogenic but arguably vastly more important engineers and scientists who made it all possible. It probably didn’t do much for the general public, but it sure inspired a generation of future scientists and engineers.

With that in mind, we were pleased to see this Surveyor 1 documentary from Retro Space HD pop up in our feed the other day. It appears to be a compilation of news coverage and documentaries about the mission, which took place in the summer of 1966 and became the first lunar lander to set down softly on the Moon’s surface. The rationale of the mission boiled down to one simple fact: we had no idea what the properties of the lunar surface were. The Surveyor program was designed to take the lay of the land, and Surveyor 1 in particular was tasked with exploring the mechanical properties of the lunar regolith, primarily to make sure that the Apollo astronauts wouldn’t be swallowed whole when they eventually made the trip President Kennedy had mandated back in 1961.

The video below really captures the spirit of these early missions, a time when there were far more unknowns than knowns, and disaster always seemed to be right around the corner. Even the launch system for Surveyor, the Atlas-Centaur booster, was a wild card, having only recently emerged from an accelerated testing program that was rife with spectacular failures. The other thing the film captures well is the spacecraft’s nail-biting descent and landing, attended not only by the short-sleeved and skinny-tied engineers but by a large number of obvious civilians, including a few lucky children. They were all there to witness history and see the first grainy but glorious pictures from the Moon, captured by a craft that seemed to have only just barely gotten there in one piece.

The film is loaded with vintage tech gems, of course, along with classic examples of the animations used at the time to illustrate the abstract concepts of spaceflight to the general public. These sequences really bring back the excitement of the time, at least for those of us whose imaginations were captured by the space program and the deeds of these nervous men and women.

NASA wants to return to the moon. They also want you to help. Turns out making a good landing on the moon is harder than you might think.

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Retrotechtacular: 1970s Radio

June 21, 2025 by Al Williams 10 Comments

Before YouTube, you had to watch your educational videos on film. In the 1970s, if you studied radio, you might have seen the video from Universal Education and Visual Arts, titled Understanding Electronics Basic Radio Circuitry. The video’s been restored, and it appears on the [CHAP] YouTube channel.

The video starts with a good history lesson that even covers Fessenden, which you rarely hear about. The video is full of old components that you may or may not remember, depending on your age. There’s a classic crystal radio at the start and it quickly moves to active receivers. There’s probably nothing in here you don’t already know. On the other hand, radios work about the same today as they did in the 1970s, unless you count software-defined varieties.

We expect this was produced for the “trade school” market or, maybe, a super advanced high school shop class. There were more in the series, apparently, including ones on vacuum tubes, the transistor, and the principles of television.

We were sad that the credits don’t mention the narrator. He sounded familiar. Maybe Robert Vaughn? Maybe not. A little research indicates the company was a division of Universal Studios, although the Library of Congress says it was actually produced by Moreland-Latchford Productions in Toronto.

Maybe these videos were the next step in becoming a child radio engineer. If you like old radio videos, this one is even older.

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Retrotechtacular: Arthur C. Clarke Predicts The Future

June 16, 2025 by Al Williams 24 Comments

Predicting the future is a dangerous occupation. Few people can claim as much success as Arthur C. Clarke, the famous science and science fiction author. Thanks to the BBC and the Australian Broadcasting Company, we can see what Sir Arthur thought about the future in 1964 and then ten years later in 1974.

Perhaps his best-known prediction was that of communication satellites, but he called quite a few other things, too. Like all prognosticators, he didn’t bat a thousand, and he missed a wrinkle or two, but overall, he has a very impressive track record.

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Retrotechtacular: Better Living Through Nuclear Chemistry

March 8, 2025 by Dan Maloney 11 Comments

The late 1950s were such an optimistic time in America. World War II had been over for less than a decade, the economy boomed thanks to pent-up demand after years of privation, and everyone was having babies — so many babies. The sky was the limit, especially with new technologies that promised a future filled with miracles, including abundant nuclear power that would be “too cheap to meter.”

It didn’t quite turn out that way, of course, but the whole “Atoms for Peace” thing did provide the foundation for a lot of innovations that we still benefit from to this day. This 1958 film on “The Armour Research Reactor” details the construction and operation of the world’s first privately owned research reactor. Built at the Illinois Institute of Technology by Atomics International, the reactor was a 50,000-watt aqueous-homogenous design using a solution of uranyl sulfate in distilled water as its fuel. The core is tiny, about a foot in diameter, and assembled by hand right in front of the camera. The stainless steel sphere is filled with 90 feet (27 meters) of stainless tubing to circulate cooling water through the core. Machined graphite reflector blocks surrounded the core and its fuel overflow tank (!) before the reactor was installed in “biological shielding” made from super-dense iron ore concrete with walls 5 feet (1.5 m) thick — just a few of the many advanced safety precautions taken “to ensure completely safe operation in densely populated areas.”

While the reactor design is interesting enough, the control panels and instrumentation are what really caught our eye. The Fallout vibe is strong, including the fact that the controls are all right in the room with the reactor. This allows technicians equipped with their Cutie Pie meters to insert samples into irradiation tubes, some of which penetrate directly into the heart of the core, where neutron flux is highest. Experiments included the creation of radioactive organic compounds for polymer research, radiation hardening of those new-fangled transistors, and manufacturing radionuclides for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases.

This mid-century technological gem might look a little sketchy to modern eyes, but the Armour Research Reactor had a long career. It was in operation until 1967 and decommissioned in 1972, and similar reactors were installed in universities and private facilities all over the world. Most of them are gone now, though, with only five aqueous-homogenous reactors left operating today.

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Retrotechtacular: Yamming CRT Yokes

February 19, 2025 by Dan Maloney 28 Comments

Those of us who worked in TV repair shops, back when there was such a thing, will likely remember the cardinal rule of TV repair: Never touch the yoke if you can help it. The complex arrangement of copper wire coils and ferrite beads wrapped around a plastic cone attached to the neck of the CRT was critical to picture quality, and it took very little effort to completely screw things up. Fixing it would be a time-consuming and frustrating battle with the cams, screws, and spacers that kept the coils in the right orientation, both between themselves and relative to the picture tube. It was best to leave it the way the factory set it and to look elsewhere for solutions to picture problems.

But how exactly did the factory set up a deflection yoke? We had no idea at the time, only learning just recently about the wonders of automated deflection yoke yamming. The video below was made by Thomson Consumer Electronics, once a major supplier of CRTs to the television and computer monitor industry, and appears directed to its customers as a way of showing off their automated processes. They never really define yamming, but from the context of the video, it seems to be an industry term for the initial alignment of a deflection yoke during manufacturing. The manual process would require a skilled technician to manipulate the yoke while watching a series of test patterns on the CRT, slowly tweaking the coils to bring everything into perfect alignment.

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