Taking A Look Underneath The Battleship New Jersey

June 19, 2024 by Tom Nardi 40 Comments

By the time you read this the Iowa-class battleship USS New Jersey (BB-62) should be making its way along the Delaware River, heading back to its permanent mooring on the Camden waterfront after undergoing a twelve week maintenance and repair period at the nearby Philadelphia Navy Yard.

The 888 foot (270 meter) long ship won’t be running under its own power, but even under tow, it’s not often that you get to see one of the world’s last remaining battleships on the move. The New Jersey’s return home will be a day of celebration, with onlookers lining the banks of the Delaware, news helicopters in the air, and dignitaries and veterans waiting eagerly to greet her as she slides up to the pier.

But when I got the opportunity to tour the New Jersey a couple weeks ago and get a first-hand look at the incredible preservation work being done on this historic ship, it was a very different scene. There was plenty of activity within the cavernous Dry Dock #3 at the Navy Yard, the very same slip where the ship’s construction was completed back in 1942, but little fanfare. Staff from North Atlantic Ship Repair, the company that now operates the facility, were laboring feverishly over the weekend to get the ship ready.

While by no means an exhaustive account of the work that was done on the ship during its time in Dry Dock #3, this article will highlight some of the more interesting projects that were undertaken while it was out of the water. After seeing the thought and effort put into every aspect of the ship’s preservation by curator Ryan Szimanski and his team, there’s no doubt that not only is the USS New Jersey in exceptionally capable hands, but that it will continue to proudly serve as a museum and memorial for decades to come.

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An Enigma Machine Built In Meccano

June 15, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 5 Comments

As far as model construction sets go, LEGO is by far the most popular brand for building not only pre-planned models but whatever the builder can imagine. There are a few others out there though, some with some interesting features. Meccano (or Erector in North America) is a construction set based around parts that are largely metal including its fasteners, which allows for a different approach to building models than other systems including the easy addition of electricity. [Craig], a member of the London Meccano Club, is demonstrating his model Enigma machine using this system for all of its parts and adding some electricity to make the circuitry work as well.

The original Enigma machine was an electronic cypher used by the German military in World War 2 to send coded messages. For the time, its code was extremely hard to break, and led to the British development of the first programmable electronic digital computer to help decipher its coded messages. This model uses Meccano parts instead to recreate the function of the original machine, with a set of keys similar to a typewriter which, when pressed, advance a set of three wheels. The wheels all have wiring in them, and depending on their initial settings will light up a different character on a display.

There are a few modifications made to the design (besides the use of a completely different set of materials) but one of the main ones was eliminating the heavy leaf springs of the original for smaller and easier-to-manage coil springs, which are also part of the electrical system that creates the code. The final product recreates the original exceptionally faithfully, with plans to create a plugboard up next, and you can take a look at the inner workings of a complete original here.

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Mechanic Prince Of Tides

June 5, 2024 by Al Williams 2 Comments

Lord Kelvin’s name comes up anytime you start looking at the history of science and technology. In addition to working on transatlantic cables and thermodynamics, he also built an early computing device to predict tides. Kelvin, whose real name was William Thomson, became interested in tides in a roundabout way, as explained in a recent IEEE Spectrum article.

He’d made plenty of money on his patents related to the telegraph cable, but his wife died, so he decided to buy a yacht, the Lalla Rookh. He used it as a summer home. If you live on a boat, the tides are an important part of your day.

Today, you could just ask your favorite search engine or AI about the tides, but in 1870, that wasn’t possible. Also, in a day when sea power made or broke empires, tide charts were often top secret. Not that the tides were a total mystery. Newton explained what was happening back in 1687. Laplace realized they were tied to oscillations almost a century later. Thomson made a machine that could do the math Laplace envisioned.

We know today that the tides depend on hundreds of different motions, but many of them have relatively insignificant contributions, and we only track 37 of them, according to the post. Kelvin’s machine — an intricate mesh of gears and cranks — tracked only 10 components.

In operation, the user turned a crank, and a pen traced a curve on a roll of paper. A small mark showed the hour with a special mark for noon. You could process a year’s worth of tides in about 4 hours. While Kelvin received credit for the machine’s creation, he acknowledged the help of many others in his paper, from craftsmen to his brother.

We actually did a deep dive into tides, including Kelvin’s machine, a few years ago. He shows up a number of times in our posts.

Aiken’s Secret Computing Machines

June 3, 2024 by Elliot Williams 2 Comments

This neat video from the [Computer History Archives Project] documents the development of the Aiken Mark I through Mark IV computers. Partly shrouded in the secrecy of World War II and the Manhattan Project effort, the Mark I, “Harvard’s Robot Super Brain”, was built and donated by IBM, and marked their entry into what we would now call the computer industry.

Numerous computing luminaries used the Mark I, aside from its designer Howard Aiken. Grace Hopper, Richard Bloch, and even John von Neumann all used the machine. It was an electromechanical computer, using gears, punch tape, relays, and a five horsepower motor to keep it all running in sync. If you want to dig into how it actually worked, the deliciously named patent “Calculator” goes into some detail.

The video goes on to tell the story of Aiken’s various computers, the rift between Harvard and IBM, and the transition of computation from mechanical to electronic. If this is computer history that you don’t know, it’s well worth a watch. (And let us know if you also think that they’re using computer-generated speech to narrate it.)

If “modern” computer history is more your speed, check out this documentary about ENIAC.

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The Tragic Story Of The Ill-Fated Supergun

May 28, 2024 by Lewin Day 63 Comments

In the annals of ambitious engineering projects, few have captured the imagination and courted controversy quite like Gerald Bull’s Supergun. Bull, a Canadian artillery expert, envisioned a gun that could shoot payloads directly into orbit. In time, his ambition led him down a path that ended in both tragedy and unfinished business.

Depending on who you talk to, the Supergun was either a new and innovative space technology, or a weapon of war so dangerous, it couldn’t be allowed to exist. Ultimately, the powers that be intervened to ensure we would never find out either way.

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Rediscovering The Nile: The Ancient River That Was Once Overlooked By The Egyptian Pyramids

May 19, 2024 by Maya Posch 23 Comments

Although we usually imagine the conditions in Ancient Egypt to be much like the Egypt of today, back during the Holocene there was significantly more rain as a result of the African Humid Period (AHP). This translated in the river Nile stretching far beyond its current range, with many more branches. This knowledge led a team of researchers to test the hypothesis that the largest cluster of pyramids in the Nile Valley was sited along one of these now long since vanished branches. Their findings are described in an article published in Communications Earth & Environment, by [Eman Ghoneim] and colleagues.

The Ahramat Branch and pyramids along its trajectory. (Credit: Eman Ghoneim et al., 2024)

The CliffsNotes version can be found in the accompanying press release by the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Effectively, the researchers postulated that a branch of the Nile existed along these grouping of pyramids, with their accompanying temples originally positioned alongside this branch. The trick was to prove that a river branch once existed in that area many thousands of years ago.

What complicates this is that the main course of the Nile has shifted over the centuries, and anthropogenic activity has obscured much what remained, making life for researchers exceedingly difficult. Ultimately a combination of soil core samples, geophysical evidence, and remote sensing (e.g. satellite imagery) helped to cement the evidence for the existence what they termed the Ahramat Nile Branch, with ‘ahramat’ meaning ‘pyramids’ in Arabic.

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and high-resolution radar elevation data provided evidence for the Nile once having traveled right past this string of pyramids, also identifying the modern Bahr el-Libeini canal as one of the last remnants of the Ahramat Branch before the river’s course across the floodplain shifted towards the East, probably due to tectonic activity. Further research using Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) and Electromagnetic Tomography (EMT) along a 1.2 km section of the suspected former riverbed gave clear indications of a well-preserved river channel, with the expected silt and sediments.

Soil cores to a depth of 20 and 13 meters further confirmed this, showing not only the sediment, but also freshwater mussel shells at 6 meter depth. Shallow groundwater was indicated at these core sites, meaning that even today subsurface water still flows through this part of the floodplain.

These findings not only align with the string of pyramids and their causeways that would have provided direct access to the water’s edge, but also provided hints for a further discovery regarding the Bent Pyramid — as it’s commonly known — which is located deep inside the desert today. Although located far from the floodplain by about a kilometer, its approximately 700 meters long causeway terminates at what would have been a now extinct channel: the Dahshur Inlet, which might also have served the Red Pyramid and others, although evidence for this is shakier.

Altogether, these findings further illustrate an Ancient Egypt where the Old Kingdom was followed by a period of severe changes, with increasing drought caused by the end of the AHP, an eastwardly migrating floodplain and decreased flow in the Nile from its tributaries. By the time that European explorers laid eyes on the ancient wonders of the Ancient Egyptian pyramids, the civilization that had birthed them was no more, nor was the green and relatively lush environment that had once surrounded it.

How Italians Got Their Power

May 18, 2024 by Jenny List 28 Comments

We take for granted that electrical power standards are generally unified across countries and territories. Europe for instance has a standard at 230 volts AC, with a wide enough voltage acceptance band to accommodate places still running at 220 or 240 volts. Even the sockets maintain a level of compatibility across territories, with a few notable exceptions.

It was not always this way though, and to illustrate this we have [Sam], who’s provided us with a potted history of mains power in Italy. The complex twists and turns of power delivery in that country reflect the diversity of the power industry in the late 19th and early 20th century as the technology spread across the continent.

Starting with a table showing the impressive range of voltages found across the country from differing power countries, it delves into the taxation of power in Italy which led to two entirely different plug standards, and their 110/220 volt system. Nationalization may have ironed out some of the kinks and unified 220 volts across the country, but the two plugs remain.

Altogether it’s a fascinating read, and one which brings to mind that where this is being written you could still find a few years ago some houses with three sizes of the archaic British round-pin socket. Interested in the diversity of plugs? We have a link for that.