Vintage technology terminology

[Ancient Geek]

Footway, meaning footpath, has been in use in British English at least since the mid-nineteenth century.

"At the third stroke it will be three thirty seven and 45 seconds".

The speaking clock is in 10 second increments.

[emeritus]

I have a facsimile copy of a mid-Victorian English book on road construction where much of the terminology is very much what we now think of as American. Railways are "railroads", "pavement" is a type of road surface (stone paving stones or setts as opposed to the then-more usual gravel or broken stone) and not the part of the carriageway used by pedestrians: that is called the "sidewalk", and so on. "Remarkable" is used in the sense of something worthy of note, rather than something of unusually exceptional importance.

[M0FYA Andy]

Are you certain it wasn't an American book also published in England?

[ms660]

British Newspaper Archives search can be a good place for word usage verification.

Lawrence.

[emeritus]

Definitely an English book by an English Civil Engineer. It has a review of all the trunk roads radiating from London and only deals briefly with American practice. I can't lay my hands on it at present: we are having some work done on the house and a lot of my books have been packed away.

[pmmunro]

The term "footway" is still used in British road/ highway engineering.

It was especially apt in this area until recently when many footways were given a hard surface for the first time. These were at one time covered in compacted furnace ash but had not been maintained since the local gas works and similar sites with boilers stoped using solid fuel. After years of neglect they had turned to mud in winter and dust in summer.

PMM

[Station X]

When I worked for the GPO we always referred to footway boxes and carriageway boxes to describe shallow cable jointing chambers.

You don't see many carriages on carriageways these days and coaches are seldom drawn by horses.

[SiriusHardware]

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

It always perplexed me why anyone would want to reverse the sensible and logical order of 'stating the largest part first' when telling the time. We don't say "a quarter and three miles" when giving distance so why did we ever put the minutes before the hours for time?

That may have its origins in the early days when clocks commonly -only- had hour hands - there are plenty of examples of these in, and on, the various National Trust properties we visit.

So, with the clock only showing you roughly how far you were through the hour (and in particular, whether you were less than or more than half way through the hour) it would be natural to look at the nearest whole hour and then to consider (and state) how far past, or how near to, the nearest whole hour the actual time was.

[ms660]

First heard this when staying in digs for a while in Devon yonks ago, asked the landlady what time is was...."Five and twenty past"

Lawrence.

[G6Tanuki]

Originally Posted by SiriusHardware

That may have its origins in the early days when clocks commonly -only- had hour hands - there are plenty of examples of these in, and on, the various National Trust properties we visit.

So, with the clock only showing you roughly how far you were through the hour (and in particular, whether you were less than or more than half way through the hour) it would be natural to look at the nearest whole hour and then to consider (and state) how far past, or how near to, the nearest whole hour the actual time was.

That had honestly never occurred to me as a possible explanation; I can see where you're coming from though, and how people would have adapted their ways of expressing the time to the way it was personally experienced by them with the technology-of-the-day.

Still doesn't explain things like people in old literature expressing their age as "four and twenty years" though.

[barrymagrec]

That could possibly be a simpler method of expressing higher numbers for the many who would have had little or no education, adding up more basic numbers to get the result.

just a guess.

[russell_w_b]

We have ten fingers. So we use these ten fingers to do the basic counting manipulation from one to ten. They're there, right at the ends of our, er, fingertips, so they're handy.

When we count a number greater than ten, we put it to one side in memory, or maybe assign a toe, or something. But we know that the toe, or whatever we put aside, is 'ten' of whatever we were doing and so continue with the basic active digits. Then, when we're done, we add up all the fingers we're using, then add them on to the tens we have accumulated.

Isn't that how an abacus works? Then sometime in the past it was deemed easier in the western world to do 'tens and units', starting at the largest first. So 'four and twenty' became twenty-four.

[G8HQP Dave]

Originally Posted by rambo1152

I was discussing an obsolete radio related term in another discussion group a few weeks ago. Google does have a few references, but has anyone heard of it, or can even define it without recourse to a search engine?

Its "Tonic train".

I'm going to guess that this is an ancient name for a sine wave.

Originally Posted by Refugee

Disassembling must have come from the film Short Circuit surely.

I was going to say that. "No disassemble Johnny 5!"

Originally Posted by robinshack

I always thought of only quartz crystals being associated with overtones.

Almost anything which resonates will have overtones, usually near integer multiples of the fundamental.

[G8HQP Dave]

Speaking of numbers, I know this is an English-language site but why do the French not have a word for eighty?

I remember my Mum would say things like "five and twenty past four".

[barretter]

There are, in fact, three ways of saying 80 in French: quatre-vingts, huitante or octante but the French-French prefer the first way, whereas the Belgians and French-Swiss use the second word. There are similar divergences in the Francophone world over how to say 70 and 90.

[Radio Wrangler]

"Tonic Train" dates from the days of spark transmitters where the RF and the sparking frequency were not related, giving a foul-sounding note. Tonic Train described attempts to get the rings from subsequent sparks to phase-up and approach a sine (with periodic amplitude sawtooth). A valve transmitter with a continuous sine output of steady amplitude was the real answer to smooth RF creation.

David

[Graham G3ZVT]

My understanding is different, but I am in no way saying that you are wrong.

I understood it dated from a period where mechanical rotary generators were replacing spark transmitters. These were capable of producing pure RF, but if it was keyed the receiving end would have to use something, such as a BFO to make the signal audible. This might have been impractical with the simple receivers of the day, which may have been little more than a crystal set.

What was needed was a continuous carrier with an audio tone impressed upon it. we would call it MCW, but it was done by mechanical means.
They called it ICW Interrupted Continuous Wave and also Tonic Train.
It was implemented with a device not unlike Hammond would use some years later to produce organ sounds, the Wikipedia definition of Tonewheel gives a tantalising reference to radio telegraphy, but not precisely this.

Perhaps ICW was seen as a contradiction in terms, so a new term was coined, I feel that Tonic was used in its musical sense.

[G8HQP Dave]

Originally Posted by barretter

There are, in fact, three ways of saying 80 in French: quatre-vingts, huitante or octante but the French-French prefer the first way, whereas the Belgians and French-Swiss use the second word. There are similar divergences in the Francophone world over how to say 70 and 90.

Thanks. This site is very educational! I would have expected huitante so quatre-vingts always puzzled me.

[emeritus]

I think the "four and twenty" usage must come from anglo-saxon: modern German expresses numbers from 21 to 99 in this way, so 24 is "vierundzwanzig" ( four and twenty).