Obsolete Machines Trivia Quiz

Answer: IBM Selectric

The two most distinctive aspects of the Selectric were its type element (also known as a golf ball) which would move across the page and its lack of a moving carriage. The "golf ball" would roll across the page, and when the typist would hit "Return", the ball and not the platen, which was stationary, would return to the beginning of the page. One advantage of this arrangement is that typefaces could be easily changed by replacing the type element. The original Selectric came out in 1961. In 1973, IBM introduced the Correcting Selectric II, which used a Correctible Film ribbon. An adhesive correction tape would easily remove the typing made by the Correctible Film. Users could also use a Cover-Up tape for typing made with an ordinary ribbon. IBM continued to add innovative features to its Selectric until 1984, when it was replaced with the Wheelwriter, which used a daisy-wheel element. The invention of the word processor eventually made the Selectric obsolete.

Speaking of computers, Selectrics were so fast that their mechanism was used an output devices for computers, the IBM 2741 terminal, replacing the older Teletypes and similar machines. In fact, computer manufacturers like DEC went out of their way to make their machines compatible with IBM 2741 and other Selectric-based terminals. Of course, they were made obsolete when video output devices became affordable!

Answer: Comptometer

Dor E. Felt patented the comptometer in 1887. They originally were adding machines that used 9's complement technique for subtraction. If you don't know what that is, suffice it to say that it is the same way many modern computers perform operations. What made the comptometer last for over 100 years is its unique layout and mechanical operation. On a comptometer, all 10 digits are laid out in several columns, and the operator enters numbers by pressing a key in each column.

A number could be entered by pressing all the keys in the relevant columns at the same time, however, so an especially skillful operator could enter numbers and perform computations faster than on electric calculators or computer keypads.

Another reason for the longevity is that comptometers were made for specific applications and had keys for very specific kinds of calculations, such as currency or measurement conversions. Comptometers continued to be manufactured and improved over the decades, and eventually became electro-mechanical in the 1960s (having an electronic calculator engine).

It took the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and the dominance of the personal computer in the 1990s, in particular the astronomical increase in RAM and a flood of innovative software to chomp those cycles, to render the comptometer obsolete.

Answer: Spirit duplicator -- Spirograph

Spirograph is a toy that lets a child draw roulette curves from interlocking gears and rings. Spirit duplicators used alcohol in the "inks" on the spirit masters, which had a sheet atop a purple wax sheet. When writing on the first sheet you transferred the color in a mirror image to its backside, and it was then fastened to a drum. They were called Ditto machines in North America and Bando machines in the UK, and they were popular for school handouts, church bulletins, and club newsletters.

Mimeographs forced ink through a stencil cut by hand or by using a typewriter to displace wax on mulberry paper. In the 1980s, people might use dot-matrix printers to create a stencil when they needed to produce a lot of copies in a hurry! Invented in 1869, hectographs, also called jellygraphs, used a master created with special aniline dye on a gelatin pad that was pressed against paper. A Ditto master could also be used, but you had to write on backside of the purple paper to create a non-mirror image. The Communists in China used a hectograph for postage stamps in 1948, and Stephen King and his brother used it for their newspaper when they were boys.

U.S. President Thomas Jefferson used the polygraph in the White House. These others were products of the Second Industrial Revolution that began near the end of the 19th century. The duplicating machines on display were largely replaced by the 21st century with copiers using a xerographic process invented by Chester Carlson in 1938 (but not available commercially until the 1960s), and also by computer laser printers.

Answer: Counterbalanced by the downhill car, filled with water and pulled by gravity

Generally speaking, the driver at the uphill station would determine the number of passengers boarding the downhill station. He would then fill the car with 80 liters of water per passenger. Then he would release the brakes and the upper car would descend, powered by nothing but gravity, and it pulled the bottom car up the hill.

At the bottom, the driver would empty the reservoir and the process would be reversed. Generally speaking, most systems worldwide that once use this form of "water-power" (really gravity-power), have "upgraded" to gasoline/petrol engines.

In the UK, however, the Lynton & Lynmouth in North Devon was still operating by the early 21st century as it had been since 1890. One major drawback to this system is that it is not operational in freezing temperatures!

Answer: Rope transmission (endless rope drive)

Although electricity eventually won the battle, over distances of a few kilometers the endless rope drive was in fact superior. Whereas electrical, hydraulic, and other forms of transmission must convert one form of energy to another, an endless rope drive transmits power directly from source to machine. The basic apparatus was simply two wheels wrapped in a continuous ("endless") rope. As distance increased, supporting pulleys were added. Replacing hemp ropes with wire or metallic ropes was a huge improvement as wire ropes keep their strength when wet, they don't stretch or shrink with the weather, and they permit longer distances.

Transmission by rope was an extension of the earlier millwork technology. Millwork simply means transferring work in a circular motion from a prime mover -- windmill, watermill, steam turbine -- to individual machines using shafts, belts, gears, and pulleys.

Millwork was terribly inefficient, losing an average of 25%-50% power in machine shops, and it could not effectively transfer power very far, and it was hard to maintain. It also had to be protected from the elements; therefore it was indoors only. Endless rope drives eliminated all those problems. However, the invention of high-tension wire and the use of alternating current afforded extremely long distances--rendering these other forms of power transfer obsolete as industry became increasingly electrified through the early twentieth century.

Answer: Ease of accessibility from land

A floating mill is also called a ship mill or a boat mill. Many boat mills had two hulls with a wheel in between, which gave better stability and permitted larger wheels than one hull with two waterwheels on either side. Because a boat mill floats, it rises and falls with the water, keeping the wheels well underwater enough to always derive sufficient power from the flowing stream to turn without an overshot (water from an above source). Of course, transferring goods, such as grain to be milled, to and from the floating mill could be a little more complicated than from a fixed mill on a bank; if the mill was midstream it was accessible only by boat. Boat mills existed as far back as ancient Roman times! Floating mills were widespread in Europe between the 15th and 19th centuries.

As building technology improved, the use of bridge mills and eventually hydropower dams supplanted the floating mill. The big difference environmentally is that whereas the floating mill adapted to the stream conditions, the hydropower dam adapted the stream to the water wheel.

Answer: To wring water and to press wrinkles from clothes and linens

The first hand-cranked wringer-mangle was added to old-time washing machines in 1843 in a machine patented by John E. Turmbull of St. John, New Brunswick. Our gas-heated model was produced by the Steel Roll Mangle Co. of Franklin Street, Chicago. There was once an occupation, "mangle women", specifically for using these these machines, because they tended to be expensive and very taxing to use.

When the modern washing machine with its spin dry action was invented, mangles were quickly discarded by North American households, rich and poor alike.

By the early 21st century, electric-powered mangles were still used, however, in large-scale industrial laundries because they are more efficient than irons for pressing bedsheets, tablecloths, and other flat items.

Answer: Self-propelled combine harvester

I shall have to speak to the conservator about this one! A combine harvester is so called because it combines reaping, threshing, and winnowing of grain--usually wheat, oats, rye, barley, corn (maize), soy, or flax. In the 19th century combines were drawn by mules or horses, then later by tractors; self-propulsion using gasoline (petrol) or diesel engines didn't appear until the twentieth century.

Grain shovels were wooden because farmers in the early nineteenth century feared that metal would bruise the seed. The Scotch harrow tilled and smoothed the soil to prepare for plowing and planting. By the turn of the twentieth century the disk harrow had supplanted the iron-spiked harrow. The oxen yoke was simply a curved bar with u-shaped wood bows slid under each ox's neck. Horses eventually replaced oxen as the favored work animal before plowing and harvesting became completely mechanized in the twentieth century.

Answer: CRT

The vacuum tube in question is called the cathode-ray tube (CRT). Cathode rays are the beams of electrons emitted from the cathode, that is the positive electrode in a vacuum tube, in this case the picture tube. The image on a CRT television or computer monitor is drawn in a line-by-line scanning called a raster, in which the beam sweeps horizontally, left-to-right, then blanks and moves back to the left. The scanning pattern is actually a sawtooth wave, so the picture is always ever so slightly distorted. Interestingly, dot-matrix and laser printers use raster scanning as well.

The scanning pattern was basically a sawtooth wave, so in fact the picture is always slightly distorted.

Several electronic visual display technologies have supplanted the CRT on televisions and computers, including the plasma display panel (PDP), which uses photoluminescence, or the absorption and re-radiation of photons, and the liquid crystal display (LCD), which relies on modulation rather than emission of light. Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) or fluorescent lights are used to backlight LCD screens. CRT monitors are much bulkier and heavier than either LCD or PDP screens, and they draw much more power. Consequently, high-end manufacturing of CRTs had virtually ceased by 2010 worldwide; in North America even low-end production had already dropped off by 2007.

Answer: Sextant

Although Sir Isaac Newton conceptualized a reflective navigational instrument called an octant, the first sextant was built by John Bird. (The difference between the two has to do with the length of the arc: an octant is 1/8 of a circle and a sextant is 1/6). The navigational sextant uses two mirrors to reflect light from the sun (or another star or the moon) into the eyepiece. You simply read the angle from the scale, and you don't need a steady aim, or electricity, or anything else human-dependent (unlike GPS or radar systems). Celestial navigation was supplemented with an increasing system of lighthouses, buoys, foghorns and lightships for navigation during cloudy weather in the 19th and 20th centuries. Much of these support systems have been dismantled or have fallen in disrepair since the adoption first of radar and then of Global Positioning System satellites (which were originally designed for bombs). Kris De Decker of "Low-Tech Magazine" commented: "Relying on one centrally controlled system for all navigation could be very dangerous. Should anything go wrong with the GPS-satellites, deliberately or by accident, all ships, planes, cars, submarines, backpackers and precision bombs would lose their way. In the field of navigation, we would be catapulted back in time: not to the eighteenth century, but to antiquity."

That concludes our tour of the Museum of Obsolete Machines. Please step through to the gift shop. Show your Fun Trivia membership card for fantastic discounts!