3 ms·

Babbage went down the wrong rabbit hole. The technology of the 1860s was sufficient to make an automatic programmable computer. If you can make (or salvage) w

by retrac 2y ago

Babbage went down the wrong rabbit hole. The technology of the 1860s was sufficient to make an automatic programmable computer. If you can make (or salvage) wire, and make simple sheet metal parts (brass will do) then you can make electromagnets, which means you can make relays. And there you go. No multimedia streaming, but automatic control and communication at a distance, yes.

nine_k 2y ago
You would need plenty of electricity though. BTW one of my favorite crazy ideas is that by the times of the Middle Kingdom, ancient Egypt had all the material resources needed to build a phone system, or at least a telegraph system, very useful in a large country. Zinc and silver to create batteries. Plentiful copper, gold, and silver to create any kinds of wires, and techniques to finely process it. Some amounts of magnetic ferrous alloys from meteorites, and likely access to iron ores to produce more. Only very small amounts are needed for kernels of electromagnets and membranes. Paper and resin-based glues could be used to produce wire insulation. Very certainly they were able to work any available materials with good precision and sophistication. What they lacked was a good theory required to connect the pieces into a working phone system, like that of late 19th century. I sometimes think about what we are currently oblivious of, because certainly we have a plethora of resources to work with. (See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel))
- roughly 2y ago
  I’m actually curious about the linguistics of something like a telegraph for ancient Egypt - I’m not particularly familiar with the Egyptian writing system from that era, but a strongly pictographic language, and one in which they seemed to regularly intersperse actual pictures and do things like manipulate symbol size to convey information doesn’t seem to immediately suggest translation to an encoding like Morse like phonetic written languages do. In other words, if the ancient Egyptians had found themselves with the technology to create something like a telegraph, I wonder what they would have done with it - what possibilities suggest themselves given the visual representation of the Egyptian language. (I could actually see something like the Incan quipu being a much easier translation, if we’re talking premodern “written” languages)
  - andrehacker 2y ago
    - Make a list of the most common (spoken) words - Sort them by usage frequency (most used words on top) - Associate a unique sequence of 0 and 1 (dot and dash) - Use shorter sequences for common words, longer ones for the words below - As you don't transit letters but words the transfer rate is much higher than in "modern" telegraph systems - profit ?
    - dekhn 2y ago
      So basically a prefix-free code with a symbol table of words.
  - retrac 2y ago
    Getting off topic here but, the Ancient Egyptian writing system was only marginally pictographic. The fully-developed system is essentially phonetic, using about ~40 symbols to represent sounds, and a couple hundred pictograms (often interchanged with the full spelling). Closest analogy is probably the Japanese writing system, but with many fewer kanji. Carved hieroglyphs were highly formalized and ceremonial in nature, but ultimately, the quail chick means "u" and a foot means "b". (We inherit the letter "b" from the shape of that foot hieroglyph.) Have a look at the handwritten form, as would be used for papyrus books or official letters: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/A_page_from_the_Ebers_Papyrus%2C_written_circa_1500_B.C._Wellcome_M0008455.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/A_page_f...
    - roughly 2y ago
      Interesting, I didn’t know that!
  - jf 2y ago
    I highly recommend that you read the book “Hieroglyphs: A Very Short Introduction” which I expect you will enjoy as much as I did: https://academic.oup.com/book/470 https://academic.oup.com/book/470 In short: Hieroglyphics were phonetic, but they eluded translation for centuries because only a small number of people could read and write them, and (importantly) the directions that the pictographs faced determined the direction that you’d read in. My favorite fact from this book is that the hieroglyphic word for “cat” is the combination of the sounds for “me” and “ew”
klyrs 2y ago
And here I've always thought that Babbage's big mistake was using decimal instead of binary.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
lcouturi 2y ago
But Babbage started in the 1830s, not the 1860s.

by retrac 2y ago

nine_k 2y ago

You would need plenty of electricity though. BTW one of my favorite crazy ideas is that by the times of the Middle Kingdom, ancient Egypt had all the material resources needed to build a phone system, or at least a telegraph system, very useful in a large country. Zinc and silver to create batteries. Plentiful copper, gold, and silver to create any kinds of wires, and techniques to finely process it. Some amounts of magnetic ferrous alloys from meteorites, and likely access to iron ores to produce more. Only very small amounts are needed for kernels of electromagnets and membranes. Paper and resin-based glues could be used to produce wire insulation. Very certainly they were able to work any available materials with good precision and sophistication. What they lacked was a good theory required to connect the pieces into a working phone system, like that of late 19th century. I sometimes think about what we are currently oblivious of, because certainly we have a plethora of resources to work with. (See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel))

roughly 2y ago
I’m actually curious about the linguistics of something like a telegraph for ancient Egypt - I’m not particularly familiar with the Egyptian writing system from that era, but a strongly pictographic language, and one in which they seemed to regularly intersperse actual pictures and do things like manipulate symbol size to convey information doesn’t seem to immediately suggest translation to an encoding like Morse like phonetic written languages do. In other words, if the ancient Egyptians had found themselves with the technology to create something like a telegraph, I wonder what they would have done with it - what possibilities suggest themselves given the visual representation of the Egyptian language. (I could actually see something like the Incan quipu being a much easier translation, if we’re talking premodern “written” languages)
- andrehacker 2y ago
  - Make a list of the most common (spoken) words - Sort them by usage frequency (most used words on top) - Associate a unique sequence of 0 and 1 (dot and dash) - Use shorter sequences for common words, longer ones for the words below - As you don't transit letters but words the transfer rate is much higher than in "modern" telegraph systems - profit ?
  - dekhn 2y ago
    So basically a prefix-free code with a symbol table of words.
- retrac 2y ago
  Getting off topic here but, the Ancient Egyptian writing system was only marginally pictographic. The fully-developed system is essentially phonetic, using about ~40 symbols to represent sounds, and a couple hundred pictograms (often interchanged with the full spelling). Closest analogy is probably the Japanese writing system, but with many fewer kanji. Carved hieroglyphs were highly formalized and ceremonial in nature, but ultimately, the quail chick means "u" and a foot means "b". (We inherit the letter "b" from the shape of that foot hieroglyph.) Have a look at the handwritten form, as would be used for papyrus books or official letters: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/A_page_from_the_Ebers_Papyrus%2C_written_circa_1500_B.C._Wellcome_M0008455.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/A_page_f...
  - roughly 2y ago
    Interesting, I didn’t know that!
- jf 2y ago
  I highly recommend that you read the book “Hieroglyphs: A Very Short Introduction” which I expect you will enjoy as much as I did: https://academic.oup.com/book/470 https://academic.oup.com/book/470 In short: Hieroglyphics were phonetic, but they eluded translation for centuries because only a small number of people could read and write them, and (importantly) the directions that the pictographs faced determined the direction that you’d read in. My favorite fact from this book is that the hieroglyphic word for “cat” is the combination of the sounds for “me” and “ew”

klyrs 2y ago

And here I've always thought that Babbage's big mistake was using decimal instead of binary.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

lcouturi 2y ago

But Babbage started in the 1830s, not the 1860s.