Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

Obsolete advanced technology fascinates me. For example, in the Victorian era, before the petroleum and internal combustion engine disaster period, steam power ruled. Not only were vehicles and factories and even motorcycles and power lawnmowers driven by steam, but in major cities like London, high pressure water lines snaked the city like power cables do today — instead of using electric motors, elevators were moved by hydraulic pressure, driven by steam pumps. The world of the past wasn't more primitive techologically than our own — it just had different technologies built around different sciences, and a much smaller palette of sciences to choose from.

Another example is acoustic “radar” — remember, RADAR as in detecting objects from far away using radio wave reflections didn't start to become viable until the mid 30s, and wasn't a mature technology until the well into WWII. However, Europe (and Japan and others) had been facing situations — like bombers approaching British shores — for longer than that: thus acoustic location technologies. Some of you may have seen the acoustic locater walls around England for example:

These structures are “tuned” to the shape of distant soundwaves of a certain location and frequency. When sound occurs in that distant location, these curved structures “focus” and amplify that sound locally, thus letting you know that a fleet of airplanes was thirty miles away, giving you time to prepare. Every second counted, and some regions literally carved these into beach cliffs and mounted microphones in them, sending their accoustic signal back to base.

A related piece of technology involved listening horns — literally like an old fashioned horn for those hard of hearing, but much larger, mounted on a tiltable base, and spread far apart. The end effect of this was a steerable acoustic telescope that could not only hear sounds at create distances, but due to stereo effects (the sound being louder on one side than the other), could also directionally locate the sound. By using four horns (two axis) and other multi-axis configurations, full-sky search ability was gained.

The left one is British and the right ones are Japanense. Anyway, it's worth reading about and maybe even experimenting a little bit. After all, if you take one of those pan-and-tilt webcams and used wire clothes hangers to build an armature to hold microphones, there wouldn't be much to programming a PIC (or a PC) to have the camera automatically follow whoever in the room is talking.

Well, I'm going to fiddle with these FTP functions a little more now. I'm hoping to have them running fully by the middle of next week.

PS. Douglas Self deserves an award for The Museum of RetroTech