Archive for the 'Design history' Category

Washington Sabatini’s impressive calculator

Here is one impressive calculating device: Washington Sabatini’s reinforced concrete calculator.

Washingtron Savbatini's H 39 reinforced concrete slide rule

This complicated circular slide rule is one of the largest items in my collection. It comprises ten concentric aluminum rings covered with complicated scales and pointers. The rings are all movable except for the second largest; that one is fixed to the body of the device, as is the celluloid cursor overhanging the largest ring. The movable rings are rotated around the center of the device by use of the prominent crank handle that spans its radius.

For full details, and a worked out example of how to calculate the dimensions of a concrete beam under specified parameters, see this article on my History of Computing site.

Enjoy!

Creeping featurism: SLR cameras, yesterday and today

Page from Kowa SE camera manual

The photographic camera is one of the great inventions of the 19th century, and is quite a simple idea: take  a light sensitive surface, put a lens in front of it, add the ability to control exposure time and aperture, and you’re all set. And for more than a century, that’s what cameras were all about. But not anymore.

During my life I’ve owned maybe a dozen cameras. The first (discounting a plastic Kodak Brownie I had as a child) was a Kowa SE SLR (Single Lens Reflex) I had in my teens. The latest is this Canon EOS 800D I recently bought. Both Japanese; both relatively inexpensive entry-level SLRs. But there the difference ends.

Both cameras have a light sensitive surface (film in the first, CCD in the latter), a lens, and controllable exposure time and aperture.

However:

  • The Kowa allowed you manage this setup with 8 physical controls (including the film advance lever), and its instruction manual was 26 pages long.
  • The Canon provides 27 physical controls and 14 screenfuls of menus (most of them with sub-menus), and its manual is 486 pages long.
  • The instruction manual of the Kowa devotes one page to focusing, where it says things like:

Image is focused by turning the lens barrel helicoid and looking in the focusing screen. For more precise and easier focusing, a split-image is provided in the center of the focusing screen. The lens is focused accurately when the two halves of the split-image are aligned.

  • The instruction manual of the Canon devotes 24 pages to focusing, and says things like:

In [7:Auto AF pt sel.:Color Tracking] under [4: Custom Functions (C.Fn)], you can set whether to perform AF by tracking colors. If [1:Disable] is set, focus is achieved based only on AF information (p.393).

Now, let me be clear: I am no luddite, and I realize that the modern camera has many advantages. Many of them are nice-to-haves, but some are significant, like shooting video and the vibration-cancelling lens, both unthinkable back in the day. And I’m sure today’s lenses, being computer-designed, are much better in terms of reducing optical aberrations. When I got this new camera I was full of admiration for the triumph of innovation and miniaturization it represents.

And then I started using it, and I realized that this triumph involves such a huge degree of overkill that the user experience is severely impacted.

Consider:

  • Having countless options leads to the “embarras de choix”, the mental information overload from too many choices.
  • A camera is for taking photos. Many of the features of this Canon camera are actually post-processing best left for Photoshop, where they can be done in the comfort of a large screen UI optimized for the task.
  • Most features in this camera will never be used by the average user (remember, it’s an entry level camera; someone who really needs to “disable AF by tracking colors” – and who is willing to flip to page 393 of a manual to figure this out – would buy a more expensive professional camera).

But most importantly: the experience of shooting with that Kowa SE was far superior, because although you could only control three parameters (focus, aperture and shutter speed), you  had direct control over them. You twisted the focus ring around the lens, and you had immediate feedback by seeing that split image come together into focus. You set your aperture and shutter speed, peeking at the light-meter needle in the viewfinder, and you knew exactly what effect that would have, because there weren’t dozens of other parameters being tweaked behind your back by algorithms in the camera’s “brain” – it had no brain, so you had to use yours. In fact you learned to use it well, because with a film camera any error would only be discovered days or weeks later when the prints were developed.

Incidentally, the Kowa SE was not my best SLR – in the 1980s I owned a Minolta X700 film camera. This had 17 physical controls  and a manual of 62 pages, and was at about the sweet spot in the features vs usability equation. It had added the automatic exposure mode that today’s cameras have, which was useful at times, but not being computerized, it was still a straightforward camera. And it had the split-image focusing screen that was effective and fun to use.

And then came Digital cameras, bless them, and the creeping featurism that today allows me to shoot images made to look like watercolor paintings, or like low-quality toy camera photographs. And a zillion other things (see pages 129–165, 311–337, and 426 – or whatever).

Oh well…

Slide rules for a new century

The Tavernier-Gravet company was France’s premier scientific instrument maker at the end of the 19th century, and it stayed abreast of the latest developments in slide rule design and production when it entered the 20th century. In this this new article on my History-of–Computing site I illustrate some of their problems and solutions as they transitioned into the new century.

Tavernier-Gravet Slide Rules

Genaille’s calculating rods

When my kids were at school they were taught addition with colored wooden rods. Well, a century earlier two innovative Frenchmen – Henri Genaille and Edouard Lucas – invented a system that does rapid multiplication and division using much more sophisticated rods, and I have in my collection a box of these ingenious calculation aids.

Genaille-Lucas rods

You can read all about them here!

Lalanne’s glass slide rule

So what do you do if you want to give a computer to every child, and the computers of your day are made of expensive boxwood? Why, you invent a cheap slide rule made of Glass!

Leon Lalanne did, in 1851.


Lalanne's glass slide rule

The Data Scaler Proportional Rule

The Gerber Variable Scale, described here, is a thing of beauty and elegance, admirable for its ingenuity and craftsmanship. It is also a “one of a kind” device, or so I thought until my unexpected sighting on eBay of the “Proportional Rule” made by the Data Scaler corporation of Westfield, Massachusetts.

The Datascaler Proportional Rule and the Gerber Variable Scale

This device is a clone — a direct knock-off — of Gerber’s elegant invention. Close inspection shows the small differences in design and manufacturing quality that usually accompany such cloning.

This article examines the details, and uncovers who made this device and under what circumstances.

Check it out!

Pretty as a picture

The circular slide rule developed around 1920 by Jules Arnault and Louis Paineau comes in a wooden frame, to give it durability and ease of use; but it is so pretty you can – and I did – hang it on your wall!

Arnault-Paineau slide rule

Aside from being pretty, this is an ingeniously designed and very well-made calculator. You can find all the details in this new article on my History-of–Computing site.

Enjoy!

Badalamenti’s Factorization slide rule

The Badalamenti factorization slide rule

One of the strangest slide rules in my collection, this ingenious Italian device from the 1950s allows you to factorize numbers into their prime factors in an instant. Just move the “Bull’s eye” cursor to the number you wish to examine and the crisscrossing lines and symbols line up to give you the answer.

Check it out on my History of Computing site!

Meet a Mathematical Inventor!

This is Jaen-Antoine Lafay’s Hélice a Calcul, a rather unusual logarithmic slide rule. But Lafay himself, its inventor, was just as unusual, not to say quirky… a fascinating lone innovator waging war on an indifferent world.

Lafay's Hélice a Calcul

To illustrate, here is a section from Lafay’s marketing brochure:

Oh, routine! What wrong do you not do, firstly to your devotees who, to avoid a little effort of adapting to innovative tools and processes, which would render them remarkable service, are unwilling to budge from their old deplorable habits,… and then to these poor Don Quixotes who, in believing they might overcome them, only bruise themselves against your incredible force of inertia? And yet, poor fool that I am, with the present brochure I resume a battle that I should have abandoned, moved again by the illusion that I may end up victorious.

See what I mean? And yet, he was an innovative entrepreneur, and you may enjoy the new article I devote to him on my History of Computing exhibition.

Enjoy!

 

Lieutenant Brenske’s Marsch-Zirkel

In the days before GPS, Google Maps and Waze, people used maps; and to figure how long it would take to get from A to B on a map, you could make excellent use of a Marsch-Zirkel, or march compasses… like the lovely device described in this new article on my History of Computing exhibition.

Lieutenant Brenske's Marsch-Zirkel

Dating back to the late 19th century, this ingenious little tool helps you figure the distance and the time to cover it – with infantry or cavalry.

Take a look!