“Perpetuum mobile”. The Appalachian Museum (dedicated to the history of colonization by the colonists of this region)
If the mechanisms have a soul, then the old ones are time-tested. You will pull out such an ancient device from the box, sweep the dust, turn it on, and it shines with lights, rattles, rustles cheerfully, like yesterday’s hands collected by a master.
Mechanisms with the soul do not die after the expiry date, The time of this does not overshadow the life of breakdowns. They operate without fail the entire period, measured by it, but after it they do not retire. They work until they are changed to something new. But even those stored in the basement and dismantled on the part of the devices are waiting for when in many years they will again be collected and switched on to the network.
There are not many active devices in the world that survived their creators. Behind the fate of each of them lies an amazing story, and some you will learn more today.
A century-old lightbulb
A beautiful but incorrect name, because the longest burning electric lamp has been working continuously from 1901 to the present. In the fire department of the city of Livermore (California, USA), where the lamp is installed, it is claimed that it continuously burns for at least 116 years and has been turned off only a few times for a short period of time.
The lamp was manufactured by hand by Shelby Electric Company in the late 1890s, according to the drawings of the chief engineer Adolph Shaye, competitor Thomas Edison. As an incandescent element in the device is a carbon filament, which is 8 times thicker than the filament of modern lamps.
The lamp now only illuminates itself – it operates at a power of 4 watts, although in the early days of the light it was no less than 30 watts. Since a special committee oversees the lamp, special conditions have been created for it: there are no voltage surges and a permanent connection to the power supply is ensured.
The lamp is dedicated to its own official website where you can look at it at any time of the day through the camera.
A battery that has been working since 1840
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Right now, there is a battery in the world that has been operating for more than 175 years.
The Oxford electric bell is one of the oldest experiments in the world. In the Clarendon Laboratory of Oxford University there is a bell that rings without a break for almost two hundred years. The sound is quiet, because the device is in a two-layered glass bell. The bell is powered by one battery installed in 1840.
The call can not be heard, but you can see the process of work
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The device consists of two high-voltage batteries of galvanic cells, the so-called pillars of Giuseppe Zamboni, invented in the early 1800s. Zamboni’s posts are distinguished by the use of small discharge currents, high internal resistance of the element and complete leakage from the environment provided by pouring into the sulfur layer.
Under the batteries there are brass cups-bells, fixed on the axes of the halves of the battery. Between the bells, a 4 mm ball oscillates, suspended on strings, colliding with bells with a frequency of 2 Hz. When the ball hits one of the bells, the corresponding pole emits a small charge (about 1 nanoampere), electrostatically repelling the ball, causing it to be attracted to the opposite bell.
Bellflowers The calls fluctuate constantly and quickly – over 10 billion fluctuations have been made for the entire time of work.
How long the experiment will last, scientists do not know, because it is not exactly known what exactly the batteries are made of. It is assumed that there are probably several hundreds of alternating layers of tin foil and paper impregnated with zinc sulphate and coated with manganese dioxide on one side.
A battery from Oxford University is not the only long-lived one. There is an unconfirmed opinion that in Bucharest since 1950 there is a thermoelectric battery, which was created by the famous Romanian physicist Nicolae Vasilecu-Carpene.
The hours of Beverly are counting the minutes since 1864
Since we are talking about experiments, we will remember another long scientific experience, Related to the operation of the mechanism. Watch Beverly at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, continue to tick from 1864 to this day. The mechanism, created by watchmaker Arthur Beverly, is set in motion due to fluctuations in ambient temperature and changes in atmospheric pressure. Temperature fluctuations are most important for the functioning of the clock, since they stop if during the day the temperature changes less than 6 ° C.
The air in a sealed box of 28 liters expands or contracts, pushing the diaphragm. When the temperature changes during the day, sufficient pressure is created to keep the clock working. The principle of operation of such a mechanism was developed by the Dutch inventor Cornelius Drebbel (1572-1633).
Since 1864, the clock still stopped several times, but for reasons not related to the imperfection of their mechanism. For example, when the clock needed to be cleaned. Despite this, Beverly watches are considered one of the longest experiments in the world, and the mechanism closest in efficiency to a nonexistent “perpetuum mobile”.
If, however, Talk about the usual hours, requiring constant care and “plant”, then the oldest instance can be called those located in the Salisbury Cathedral in the south of England. They have been working (intermittently) since about 1386.
With massive iron wheels and long ropes, they are more like the engine of the industrial era than the usual hours. They do not have arrows, and you can not find out by these clocks how many minutes are left till the next hour. These watches can not be “looked at,” but they can be heard – once an hour they make a bell ringing, signaling that it’s time to go to church or, maybe, is.
The oldest operating computers
The server from Stratus Technologies has been running for 24 consecutive years under the operating system, which was last updated in Early 2000’s. The server has never been disconnected and has never been malfunctioned. Many elements of this fault-tolerant system are duplicated, in due course some of them have been replaced, but the preservation of the original structure is about 80%. Each logical processor of the server is created from 4 physical processors, which are arranged in the form of two pairs of sets.
For more than 30 years, the Commodore Amiga computer, purchased in the early 1980s, operates in the school district of Grand Rapids (Michigan, USA). Commodore Amiga controlled and continues to monitor heating and air conditioning systems in 19 schools.
A computer equipped with a 1200 bps modem works with software written in the early 80’s by a high school student who still lives in the area and supports the system during the last 30 years.
Throughout his life, Commodore has replaced two monitors and one mouse – and this is all the costs that the county incurred (not counting the salaries of the staff). A more modern system that could replace a computer would cost $ 1.5 to $ 2 million.
The oldest computer still processing the oldest programs is exhibited at the National Computerization Museum in the English county of Buckinghamshire. Harwell’s 2,5-ton computer was launched in 1951 to work at the Center for Atomic Energy Research, where it was operated for 80 hours per week.
In 1957, new computers were replaced by it and Harwell was transferred to the local technical College of Wolverhampton and Staffordshire Technical College, now the University of Wolverhampton. With his help began to train future programmers. The computer was given the new name “WITCH”, short for Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computation from Harwell, that is, “Wolverhampton Tool for Learning Computing from Harwell.”
In 1973 WITCH was presented to the Birmingham Museum of Science and Industry, where he and Was for 24 years. In 1997 the museum was closed, the computer was disassembled into components and sent to the warehouse. He was discovered by chance only in 2009. It took another three years to restore WITCH to its original state and turn it on. Moreover, it launched some original computer programs of the 1950s. To see it in action, see the video below. WITCH is a very simple computer that Reads data from punched tape, saves it in volatile memory, and then uses the relay to perform calculations on stored values. The data is output either by an electromechanical writing machine (a teleprinter) or a band-hole puncher. The most interesting thing about WITCH is the memory created on the basis of decathrons, large vacuum tubes used to store numerical values. The computer uses a decimal rather than a binary number system.
In addition to WITCH, today in the world there are still some models of operating old computers. And it’s not just about museum exhibits, like the 1958 FACOM 128B computer, which is in working order in Ikeda Memorial Hall (Japan). The onboard computers installed in the family of American land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles LGM-30 Minuteman have been serving in the US Air Force since 1970 and are currently in service.
The longest-lived solar battery
In 2010, a solar battery was found in the UK that was in the box for 60 years – and it turned out that it was still working.
A battery made in the form of a glass bowl was created in 1950. Under direct sunlight, the device can generate 1.5 volts. Light-sensitive selenium is used to convert light into electricity. Even a relatively small amount of selenium significantly increases the efficiency of light absorption. Selenium, as well as silicon, releases electrons when sunlight hits, creating an electric current.
In fact, in the age of technology, which we are accustomed to associate with the 21st century, nothing is surprising. In 1883, Charles Fritz covered a silicon semiconductor with a very thin layer of gold and received a solar battery whose efficiency was no more than 1%. Russian physicist Alexander Stoletov developed this concept in 1888 and built the first solar cell based on the external photoelectric effect.
And what is the oldest operating device you have?
