Pre-20th Century Gadgetery

The Byelorussian Hatter writes "Wired, presumably bored to death of Cellphones, Zunes, MairBook Nacs and what-have-you, looks back at the elegant inventions of a less civilized age. 'The Turk was a chess player concealed in a table packed with cogs and gears, contrived to give the appearance of a mighty chess-playing machine. Atop the table, an articulated automaton would be seen to make the moves determined by the master within. One of the 18th and 19th century's many illustrious hoaxes, the Turk is perhaps the greatest gadget that wasn't.'"

Amazon's Mechanical Turk

[paulthomas]

In case anyone hasn't put two and two together*, Amazon's Mechanical Turk is named in reference to the chess playing Turk from the article. Amazon's FAQ [mturk.com] has more info.

* 5, for large values of two.

i don't know what journalism is

[circletimessquare]

but i do know what it is not

and what it is not is an hour spent clicking wikipedia links and writing a 6th grade level report

Re:The interesting stuff isn't there

[dajak]

TFA appears to be biased somewhat towards technological dead ends.

One thing that for instance popped up in my mind thinking of a pre-20th century gadget is the early 17th century gearbox of the mechanical fireplace spit fork in a castle near Amsterdam. At that time it was inhabited by a friend of scientist Christiaan Huygens (who invented a number of things involving the principle of transmission, including of course the pendulum clock). I have no idea whether it is unique or just rare for that era, and whether Huygens was personally involved, but I can imagine it was definitely considered an unusually clever piece of technology in those times. Differential transmissions only became a mainstream technology during the industrial revolution in the late 18th century.

The mechanical calculator and the computer are basically a development from location-based calculi that were mainstream in the middle ages but later, in educated circles, replaced by pen reckoning with arabic numerals which is completely different. The historical importance of jeton-based arithmetic to modern computer science is unfortunately underappreciated. On a logical level the operation of a computer is probably more obvious to a medieval clerk who was used to mechanically moving jetons around all day than to the modern computer illiterate person. On the other hand the mechanics of the calculator were obviously much more amazing then than now.

Al-Jazari

[Deus.1.01]

For shame that this article does not mention the father of enginering. He made robots, automatons that were highly complex. I wonder why non of his inventions is mentioned. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Jazari [wikipedia.org]

Re:"Ark of the Covenant"?

[Anonymous Coward]

You definitely missed the "geek-cool" factor. They were saying that the Bible stories about people getting zapped for touching or "steadying" the Ark might be attributed to the Ark containing a capacitor or something like it. The guys holding the wooden poles wouldn't get zapped, but touching the metal (without knowing how to discharge it first) would kill you. That's sneaky-geeky-cool.