The Weird Story Of Electromechanical Memory - 40 bits of the stuff!
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- čas přidán 2. 12. 2022
- The Electromechanical Regenerator
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#science #electronics #diy - Věda a technologie
THe mind blowing realization is that the first pulse would trigger the first solenoid at your local exchange to spin around once for each pulse, connecting you to either another local solenoid or a remote one, and then each additional set of pulses would cascade to another solenoid which would connect to somewhere else, until your wires were PHYSICALLY CONNECTED to the wires of the phone you were calling. People used to the Internet and packet routing may not realize that the whole crazy phone exchange was all about making one loop of very long wire between you and your destination.
And that this was true of international calls as well. You would physically link a wire across oceans and continents. This was, of course, also the largest problem as resistances and loss would accumulate rather quickly and calls would get quiet and noise filled.
Thus giving rise to fanciful phone pheaking devices like the "Urine Box" which was designed to send a high voltage pulse through the remote operator's handset.
Yep. Very complicated, extremely high reliability needed, massive physical infrastructure. That was what was required, so that is what they built.
This wasn't literally the case for most long distance calls. It is more economical to multiplex several calls to share the same physical wires, so the audio and signalling were separated and heterodyned up and down in frequency. The first multiplex route was installed in 1918.
@@Barnaclebeard and yet it was only a hoax
I love that you go through the original built purpose in great detail but then totally take it to the next level.
cheers jeff! i have wanted to do this vid for a good few months, running through it on walks talking it to myself, but could only do it when i finally figured out how to make the machine! relieved
Your content is honestly helping me stay distracted in a most positive way from a hard spot in life. Most sincere thanks.
@@Seaverhamlin take care jeff hope all is ok
The rotary memory is a shame it was hidden away for so long buried away in some telco bunker away from being appreciated. That's a beautiful piece of art in motion...Thanks again to expose those amazing mechanisms we just took for granted when siting on the phone waiting to call the other side...
You know... just connecting several of those "slow relays" together in loops and nested loops should get you some interesting chaotic behavior.
Wow. Thanks, Sam. You beautifully illustrate the insane level of engineering it took to power the humble telephone back in the old days. Your content just gets more and more interesting.
I remember sneaking the house phone to call friends, when the dial spun back after selecting the number it was the loudest thing known to man. You've brought back a load of happy memories. Also why was 999 the emergency number when it took so long to dial 🤷♂
Its quite hard to misdial 999 on a rotary phone
@@DaveLaneGC True, I would argue its as equally difficult to misdial 888 or 777....etc. They would be quicker to dial
@@roblow8126 They would be quicker indeed but not so easy to do in the dark.
@@evetrue2615 I agree with you. It really should have been 000 or 111. The start or the end of the dial
As I understand, on the old system dialing “0” called the operator, 111 was considered but too risky being dialled by mistake tapping the hang up cradle clearing the line… so 999 was chosen as you could locate the silver stop bar past 0 in the dark, by placing your middle finger in the 0 your index finger automatically dropped into the 9 and could then be used reliably to dial the 9 three times! 😊
I hope that made sense?
I'm so glad you haven't clawed your way back out of the classic telephony rabbit hole yet. Those old phone exchanges sure contained a lot of brilliant electromechanical engineering 😀
I remember making international phone calls from isolated Perth Western Australia to the UK, and the background sounds lent quite an "atmospheric" quality to people's voices. Now I can see what a marvellous setup it was to be able to speak over 12,000 miles of wires, solenoids, repeaters and capacitors without a single soldered joint, spring, gear wheel, electric motor or selector breaking down.
Your descriptions, sequences, historical facts, musical creativity, videography and demonstrations are equally mind boggling.
A wonderful video, and great followup to *"The History Guy"* video about NOAA "Old Brass Brains" analogue _tidal calculating computer_ which operated for decades until digital computers finally took over.
Wow they used to call that the "Click and Bang" system. And he turned it into Tangerine Dream. Good Job! Big thumbs up!
You sir, are a mad musical genius. Love this channel and cheers mate!
cheers james!
My old man was a telephone engineer, took me to a strowger based exchange when I was a kid, the noise was deafening. Before he retired got to see the later computer system which was just a couple of boxes in the corner
I love how what was curiosity has turned you into an authority figure on the subject. And I love this topic!
Were you ever a teacher? That was a great explanation of how this works. Such a cool idea to make it an instrument. You keep one-upping yourself.
Absolutely brilliant. I am 54 but when I was your age I played with all this stuff. Any bit of electronics I could lay my hand on I would hook it up. I got my mum to type a message on a computer in the garden , hooked up with phone wire via the rs232 port to another computer in my bedroom and I sent a message back. She couldn’t see the point. This was before the internet . Keep up the great work. I love the organ build. You are a guy who can do anything with this stuff.
Those sounds ring a bell. In the 70s by uncle worked for the GPO (BT) and took us to see a working phone exchange. It was huge room full of machines making sounds like that. There was a backup diesel generator and another room sized lead acid battery for backup. You wouldn't want to fall in the vat of acid.
A long time ago you could run into a phone that had a blank plate instead of a rotary dial that was supposed to be meant for “incoming calls only”…
Would blow peoples’ minds when you would just tap out the phone number on the actual hook and make an outgoing call heh.
haha hackerman over here! nice
I was going to make a similar comment. My parents got a phone lock for the rotary phone but it didn't take long to work out you could tap out numbers on the hook, so didn't stop the crank calls we used to make :)
I learn to do that after watching Anthony Hopkins do it on Silence of the Lambs, it still works here in my country.,
I remember using an answering machine remote control on these phones, to make a call
Kevin Mitnick did this on the prison phones to make outgoing calls before the judge said he could use that to start WW3
The random "NOISES" in the middle of demonstrating it kind of sums up the whole draw I have to your work. Childlike wonder at the unplanned awesomeness of industrial machinery music. The two-tone warble of two turbine generators almost in sync. How the tones change as you match speed then go a bit further to hear that sound again.
I've been working with Simon Magpie to use microcontrollers in his pedal that uses the old rotary phone dials. I had made something earlier with an arduino that listened to a rotary phone dial to get numbers. I was sort of surprised when the ones he had had such similar timing to mine. But now that makes total sense. I'm so used to thinking that memory is always available that I never considered the challenges involved in detecting a number back in the day. Really cool!
I remember, as a lad, opening the phone and squeezing that governor to make the phone dial faster.....can't recall why, but it did work! Great vid, Sam!!
OMG! I was in the last apprenticeship group that learnt to maintain step-by-step equipment in Australia.
I haven't heard the sound of a bi-motional selector in over 30 years, super cool, thankyou.
Its really cool how much of this equipment you've tracked down and gotten running (to whatever degree it still can)
Especially with this stuff going the way of the dodo, I had no idea about most of it
Super cool and educational
I love the telephone series. The ingenuity of infrastructure engineers in the pre-semiconductor age was simply phenomenal.
Also if you’re ever in Seattle, check out the Telephone museum in Georgetown. You’d love it!
Holy god, this is my kind of nerdery. This is glorious. About 20 years ago I took a tour of a telephone exchange here in the northeastern US, and it was an enormous building just filled with thousands of those selector switches (what we see at the 2:00 mark in the video). The sound was so loud and awe-inspiring, that I actually got choked up... it was the sound of human ingenuity just ticking along -- the physical manifestation of people communicating. Most people in their homes were oblivious to how it all worked, and I suppose they had no real reason to know, other than it being cool to know how stuff works.
(The Dead Milkmen's most recent Big Questions video sent me here!)
I love this so much! Makes me think this is the language/soundtrack of the telephone system that's playing secretly across the phone lines whenever we make a call. Amazing.
As an ex Strowger telephone exchange engineer, the simple explanation of how those switches work was “A op’s (operates) B, op’s CD… and the rest is automatic”.
Those pulse-rediallers were commonly used on long distance trunk lines here in the U.K. where there could be a delay in establishing the link with the far end (could be a few seconds) before the end to end link was established so the digits could be received at the far end and the call routed.
You can route the output back to the input, and this will just self repeat (up to 40 pulses) so you can make a Christmas tree light flasher/sequencer with multiple pulse repeaters in parallel.
Great video as always.
cheers ian, yeah good idea on the christmas tree, i did run it around into itself but i had to think a lot about the pattern to make sure it wouldnt just go back to the simplest pattern, im trying to find another one or so to build a few of these circuits to get them to talk in a circle haha
Thank you a lot, finally explaining easy enough how the slow and fast relays see when you hung up the call, that's so interesting
As a ye olde 2-wire kellogg magneto+3V phone enthusiast, I wish I could thumbs up this video over and over. Excellent explanation! It also really gives you some appreciation for the early "RF" transmission line design since a lot of this technology could work at very low voltages (3-6V) over many, many miles even with resistive losses.
Sir, you're mental and amazing and fun to watch and knowledgeable and a bit of a genius. Thanks for the show and tell. I've spent enough time fiddling with old cameras, so on some level this is pretty close to my heart. Greetings from Germany, keep it up.
good old memories seeing that, we all used that tech in Deutsche Telekom even into the early 1990s when i was there learning communication eletronics, think Sam learned more about the old telephone exchange stuff in short time than we at telekom in a year.
When you mentioned dialing using the hook switch, it reminded me of the university where I studied telecommunications. None of the PBX extensions contained a zero as it was reserved for dialing out into the public network. Only a few select phones had the ability to dial a zero (others either had their dial's travel lijited or for those with keys, the zero was removed), the idea being that students shouldn't be allowed to dial out as it was expensive... After learning how phones worked, it didn't take long to figure out that one could dial a zero from any phone just by tapping the hook switch ten times at the right speed!
electro mechanics is a fantastic world, really a shame that its no longer in use... luckly some people are preserving these amasing inventions and tell other people about them, and use it for other amasing things than what they where designed for.
Thanks for taking the time to make the video and share it.
17:10 ok, it's been 9 monts now, and I still listen to this. I just LOVE how it's sounds. I feel like it's resonating with my emotions and stuff.
14:24 Man watching old mechanical switches and devices is just fascinating. To think someone or several people came up with these is just nuts, compared to the simplified electrical chips of today.
it's amazing the phone system ever worked at all with all those mechanical pieces being involved.
HOLY SHIT I LOVE THIS THING, I'm glad i dont have disposable income since if i did I would spend whatever it would take to make this thing. As simple as it is compared to some of your bigger projects, its unique sound(especially when you record the mechanics of it to, I love that metallic clinking before you hear the synth. Ah! I love it!
These old electro-mechanical devices are just so fiendishly amazing. Back in the 80's I used to skive off college to the reference section of my local library and discovered Atkinson's telephony books. I used to pore over them for hours on end. This was around the time "System X" was being rolled out and I was the first subscriber to have DTMF dialing (bit of a thing when you're war dialling remote systems to see what answered in an interesting way - before War Games). Interesting times.
EM gear is and always will be astounding!
I just found 2 of these electromechanical regenerators in a loft of a house I bought, I was finding it very hard to find info on them not knowing what they were other than likely GPO related (found other GPO paperwork), until this video! Awesome work.
if anyone has any of these regenerators sitting in a box in there garage! please do get in touch as on the hunt for a few more for a funky project! if you have no use and would like to see em do something funky get in touch on my site contact form lookmumnocomputer.com :)
As an ex Strowger exchange engineer you may have some work on your hands. When the exchange where I worked was being scrapped the metal dealers loved those repeaters as “pound for pound” (weight/space for money) they represented some of the best value as scrap. So sad really, but how many people “recycle” todays no longer used tech and how will our descendants view this approach in 50 years time?
@@theonlywoody2shoes you are not wrong! tough to find, i mean all of it is tough to find, but these exceptionally so.
Interesting note : the adverts deemed worthy of this video are : Yve st Laurent Handbags, Velvetine Hot Chocolate AND McCain bag of chips !! At least in my area (Uk). Greetings from Cornwall, home of Pasties and clotted cream.
Its crazy how old stuff required so much thought and ingenuity to create a solution to a problem and now its pretty much just circuit boards and code.
I was at the Science Museum of Minnesota (USA,) decades ago, and they showed selector hardware operationally. Was very cool to see how it worked back in the day.
The ambient music that your play at the end of the video is wonderful stuff. I could listen to it for hours on end. Clever stuff!
I can see the song at the end being used as some kind of sci-fi alien language. I love it
Absolutely in love with how the selectors operate, its just so cool!
funky they are indeed
You used to get big advertising board things in public places. They'd have a phone on one side and individual buttons to ring local businesses like taxis and restaurants. Anyway, it turns out you could ring any number using the 'flick the hangup switch and count' trick. It was pretty useful, I don't know why they got rid of them.
The sound of this is really haunting. Reminds me of stuf Delia Derbyshire did for BBC science programmes
That reminds me of my childhood. I spent every afternoon the Mountain Bell offices in Jackson hole Wyoming growing up. My father was a serviceman in the main facility. I hated it when they did their modernization. The new equipment was borring, just sitting there making fan noises. The old equipment was so alive with activity. The silence was disturbing.
Just fudging ace Sam! Mental. The biggest puzzle of all is how you fit all this stuff into the same number of hours as we all have to work with?! Cheers man. Lee
The motor- driven pulse generator made me think of the Hammond organ tonewheel system.
I don't recall any videos of Look Mum No Computer discussing the Hammond, seems right up his alley.
Briefly, two of the most interesting qualities of the Hammond 1) ability to proportion individual harmonics 2) unique unequal temperment (because gears and tonewheels have integer tooth counts, harmonic frequencies end up being a collection of sharp and flat, making the sound much richer, in my opinion)
Many Hammond organs also included an ingenious vibrato system (different than rotary speaker) wherein a spinning multi-section air gap plate capacitor picks off the signal progressively from an L-C phase shifting line. Brilliant.
Yeah! The ringing machines from exchanges are what the Hammond tonewheel was based on apparently. Search it up. As for a vid on Hammond I do videos on what I can get hold of. Hence none on a Hammond organ like that! Not happenned upon one to dismantle
I frickn' LOVE this channel! I recently watched a feature on a 1960s era wurlitzer jukebox.all click and bang. at its heart was a component called the "selection accumulator" essentially a memory to save selections made while one record was playing. electro-mechanical engineering at its fiinest!
Your content has been brilliant lately! Keep at it!
I can’t imagine anyone looking at this without documentation and figuring out what it is or what you were trying to do. You’ve built a lot of crazy stuff but I think This takes the cake for the most incomprehensible contraption in your arsenal. WELL DONE I LOVE IT
This shows the absolute beauty of electro-mechanical engineering and how there were lots of genius solutions that seem really simple in concept and execution but took a lot of time and thought to come to in the first place. I wonder, would you be able to use that memory unit in a jukebox for disk selection?
That regenerator is a work of art, and your explanation of it was excellent. I have a lot of respect for the engineers who designed the old telephone equipment, and the technicians who maintained it.
This is an amazing video. Aside from the really interesting knowledge you're sharing, the lighting and camera work are top tier. Great job!
Every time I watch one of your videos, it amazes me how much you know, but it's even more amazing that someone invented it in the first place.
I'm just regurgitating facts the people that made this are the smart ones! Like you say!
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER But to retain the facts and implement them is quite a feat.
@@agomodern I agree with that. He underestimates his intelligence! I would be lying if I said I REALLY understood half of the content he puts out!!
Very educational with a lot of well focused close up shots of the mechanisms, this is premium quality! And there are nice Hainbach vibes at the end :)
Pure brilliance - what would those who designed these electromechanical items back in the day have thought? They could not fail to be impressed I am sure!
As nuts as ever! It never ceases to amaze me what can be done and has been done with relays.
the amount of ingenuity that wass put into theses phones to preform a hand full of tasks, communicating being one of them, is hard to grasp when we use silicon and precious metals. the limitations they had to design somethiing that we take for granted is so cool
Music you’ve made with this thing is mesmerising and charming. Well done!
I think Tommy Flowers (True British Hero) would enjoy what you have created and continue to create!
You clearly work so incredibly hard. You mustn't stop.
It was great to visit the museum this summer, I'd love to come again but it's a fair way from Manchester!
This was a great episode. Loved the obscure electomech, explanation, and sounds.
This is far above and beyond amazing. Brings back so many memories for me of the "good ole days" when engineers truly made the world go round, and how much we take for granted the things that just work. Amazing sir :)
Fabulous ! Takes me back to the old days working in Strowger exchanges in the 70s! Thanks, Sam!
Amazing simpel and effective device.
A 40 impulse FIFO looping stack memory.
And since it has the same dial speed and only adds one impulse sequence delay,
it can effectively transmit a infinite number of impulse sequences. Genius.
The elegance in the design of that repeater is startling. And I love the use you put it to.
Looks like the machine ET used to call home - but cool.
Love it!
The human ingenuity never ceases to amaze me. This is some crazy electromechanical monster! Also your ingenuity and willingness to fiddle with this stuff, learning and then sharing with us what you learned about this fine specimen is truly remarkable.
Turning this then into a steampunk music machine is the topping and absolute genius!
Thank you for doing this. Seriously considering sponsoring you on Patreon.
Sam you seem to know exactly what you're doing and I feel really fortunate to be along for the ride
You should do a video of the "Close Encounters of the 3rd kind" tone sequence on this thing as a Short.
Absolutely great, and I love the sounds the machine makes.
Every time I watch "Terminator 2" I have a good chuckle at young John Connor's redhead friend that he goes to the arcade with. He reminds me of you.
Im always amazed that someone was able to figure these things out.
Thank you, Sam, for showing them to us.
This is amazing. Gotta admire the ingenuity of these electromechanical devices. And it is so pleasing to literally see them tick.
saw the insides of a gas/petrol pump today while it was getting serviced - thought of you. It was gnarly!
Really puts a new (or old) spin on the term "ring buffer"
I have a push-button dialer that works on the same principle as your regenerator. it is purely mechanical, but it has the little pins. It was used in telephone exchanges so that operators could dial numbers more quickly. You should try to get one for your museum. (you can't have mine! 😁😁😁) BTW Your videos are great!
Another time but from the time I grew up when it was the last days of picking up the phone, getting and operator and requesting that they connect you to their party with their patchboard! Well done Sam and making music at the end, intriguing piece with a real sense of ghost in the machine!
I really wasn't expecting to hear "Atkinson Volume 2" being mentioned on CZcams today! Maybe my copy is still in an attic somewhere 😉
It's amazing how close the action resembles one of those multi switch "useless machines".
Sam, this video and your channel are simply amazing. You take relay logic to a whole new level with such an elegant hint of wild genius. The explanation of what was clearly a technology to marvel at in its heyday (and again now) really was excellent, although I perhaps only grasped 50% on first viewing input comprehension not output problem ;-). Nicely done Sir.
This is actually a 100 % accurate mechanical representation of the "ring buffer" concept in computing!
The regenerator stores something at its "head" position and chases that with its "tail" position.
yeah its cool ent it FIFO
Wow... a mechanical ring buffer. Interesing concept!
Very impressive, never before heard of these diallers restoring the dial pulse timing but very interesting. You mentioned all the signals going over the two wires but you didn't mention the 60 Volt AC bell signal that goes over the same wires. Probably not as relevant to the dialler explanation but still an additional signal over the same wires.
mesmerizing , the mechanical inginuity is awsome, and to get it all connected into a system is serious cudos. Inspired by your cabinets to buy my dad a lable printer for christmas. Cheers. Bizzarely was just watching a video about a regenerator, in a thermal pump.
Love this musical steam-punk Edison, a true educator of pre-Digital history putting the lights on truly fascinating bits with fun remaining primary!
Great bit o' kit there! Retro-future-steampunk thing going there. Awesome.
There's something surreal about the sudden motions of the programming arm pushing the pins. It's so precise and so quick that the eye can barely track it. Also: is this machine a risk of mangled fingers when powered?
Very entertaining. I very much like the lights you used.
Always wondered how that works... thank you for explaining!
I used to work on these regens, No1 problem was if any oil got on the pins they had a tendency to fire out and the whole thing would get confused. They were replaced with an electronic plug in replacement that was more reliable and less susceptible to temperature changes. If I remember it was a 1 week course to learn how to adjust them but I never got sent on that course.
It was a 4 day (1/2 day Monday & Friday to allow for travel) course at the Training Centre in Stone here in the U.K. I applied each year, but never got selected during my Strowger maintenance days 🙁
I also worked on regents. I was lucky to go on a course, not at “sunny” Stone but a regional training centre in Leicester. As usual I had been working on these for some time, so it wasn’t to difficult. However 1 person did fail the course, seemed to remember if you couldn’t get it to receive a pulse then send a pulse on all 40 pins, then fail. Bent pins seemed to be the main fault with these. Happy days.
@@willsgrandad bent pins! blimey i bet that took a bit of force, im trying to track down some more to get a loop of the auto auto circuits running, only manated to track down this one and one that has some bits removed. on the hunt! fascinating little things, apparently also they could lock up and become a fire hazard??? is that the case?
@@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER
All exchange equipment had fuses, so fuse blows before overheating. However can’t remember ever having a hot coil on these. Correct adjustment is paramount .
The motor drive uniselectors, which you have shown before,however, where prone to blowing fuses. They put fuses in the test jacks instead of metal links. Can smell burnt coils now!
If you go to Bletchley Park, to the computer museum, they have a model of the machine that cracked the enigma code. It is made up of Strowger equipment.
That is such a beautiful sound, it makes me happy!
An excellent illustration and well done for the ingenuity in working it out. I'd been meaning to find out how this happened. Now I know! Thank you.
When subscriber trunk dialling (long distance) came about every town had a standard code (e.g. Loughborough 0509). So the local exchange would need to store the first 4 digits and then work out the dial code for the path to the Loughborough exchange, the path being different depending where the local exchange was in the country. Maybe a future video on how this was done :)
Unbelievably cool this, brilliant!
ok, This is seriously the coolest device you've shown on the channel
Loving this stuff!
I love this fusion of telecom and music making so much!