
Wheatstone System - vermilingua
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheatstone_system
======
robotmay
Charles Wheatstone was an interesting character. Obviously an extremely
intelligent person, but it's a little unclear how many things he directly
invented and how many were from his employees. The wide variety of his
inventions is quite interesting, and the three I can think of off the top of
my head; telegraph machines, railway points, the English concertina; are
pretty diverse!

My knowledge is more in the concertina area of that, where I believe that
Louis Lachenal is actually the source of a lot of the developments at
Wheatstone before he left and set up a competing company (Lachenal). Sources
are hard/impossible to come by on the internet for that, as most of the people
who are experts in this are rather old by this point. I suspect that CW was a
bit of a serial inventor whose attention wasn't held for long :)

FWIW I have a 1930 Wheatstone Maccann Duet concertina that I play regularly,
and it is rather beautifully made.

EDIT: I was sure he was involved in the invention of railway point systems but
I now can't find any references, annoyingly.

~~~
salty_biscuits
The most famous thing I know about that is named after him is the Wheatstone
Bridge, which was invented by Samuel Hunter Christie...

------
jbattle
Seems like it would have been easier to just take the paper tape and punch
either circles (dots) or ovals (dashes) and have conductors pushed up against
the tape. Whenever the conductors touch (through cut-out gaps in the paper),
they transmit tone.

No need for compound levers, just some springs. And a mechanism to pull the
paper at a fixed rate

------
Razengan
I would have loved for us to have at least one era of widespread mechanical
computing. The World Wars jolted and sped us up too much to have some
steampunk. :(

~~~
dragontamer
The cat whisker radio was invented in 1906, 10-years prior to WW1, which is
what eventually led to the transistor-revolution.

It took a few decades before people used non-linear electronics to create
negative-feedback circuits (leading to modern electrical circuits), but the
groundwork to discover modern electronics as really all ready before WW1.

Apparently, the the vacuum tube diode was 1904. Not yet an amplifier, but the
age of electronics is nigh. True, the 1940s made amplifiers cheaper with
semiconductor circuits, but everything you do with semiconductors you could do
with vacuum tubes (albeit at much higher prices, more waste-electricty, and
lower reliability).

\------

WW1 did speed things up a bit. Light-cavalry messengers were still deployed in
WW1 despite the invention of cars and radios... the war made it obvious that
light-cavalry was finally obsolete.

Horse-based transport required ~30% of all deliveries to be horsefeed, while
oil delivered by trucks is far more efficient. Horses require a period of
training: where the riders and the horses learn to work together... if a horse
(or rider) died, it would be months before a new rider would be proficient and
back to delivering messages.

------
sgt101
Charles Wheatstone entered into a joint partnership with William Cooke and
this led to the foundation of the English Telegraph Company which eventually
became the GPO.

The money he got was used to fund Ada Lovelace (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace#First_computer_pr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace#First_computer_program))
to translate the notes on Babbage's lectures into English and to create the
notes that included the first computer program.

Subsequently the GPO funded the development of the Colossus computer by Tommy
Flowers according to the work of Max Newman
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Flowers#World_War_II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Flowers#World_War_II))

~~~
tingletech
What is the GPO. Not the US Government Printing Office I presume. Not the
British General Post Office, as that seems to have been founded before the
telegraph?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Post_Office](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Post_Office)

~~~
sgt101
The british one! It was founded for letters, but subsumed the private
telegraph companies and telephony as it evolved.

