lime

i got this brainwave yesterday that there may be a dual use in these to stabilise the cardinal grammeters. if the oscillations can be spread out over a larger area than just the catheter, and be finely controlled, maybe such a device can run at the resonant frequency of the field... much to think about.

here's a modern (non-functional) replica:

sadly the ivory commutator was missing from the original, and reverse-engineering one from a single photo with no look at the inside of the compensator coupling is basically impossible.

History lesson: Before the discovery of electrochemical 2:3-resonance in 1927, there was no way to drive the encabulation process automatically, and therefore no way to easily tune the asymptote. Because of that, the field was basically entirely theoretical, until the Sachri Reticulator.

Named after a Jean-Baptiste Sachri, a friend (some say lover) of the inventor, the Reticulator allows the operator to finely control the speed of a metal cylinder, in which is carved a groove that, if played in a phonograph, would produce two sine waves rising from 1Hz to 50kHz irregularly, varying in phase shift as they did so. The cylinder was instead "read" by three needles placed diagonally across the groove so that the distance between the outermost needles were 2/3rds of a wavelength out-of-phase with each other. The vibrations were then transferred into three irregularly-shaped plates inside the coupling seen on the image. The plates were then coupled to a 50cm long piece of ivory (the commutator), which held on its other end a seismograph-like drawing needle on a roll of paper. The plates' shapes had to be specially tuned to the composition of the ivory. By running through the frequencies on the cylinder, the operator could, by observing the line on the seismograph paper, find the point where the three vibrations cancelled out, and that is where the local asymptote is.

The Reticulator took the science of encabulation into the real world for the first time. The name of the inventor has been lost to time, but naming such an important device after his dear friend is surely the greatest act of love.

It's interesting how much of this stuff is just out in the open when you look for it. The big yellow thing is a float, i remember the team working on it had dragged it out of the water with a truck. This pump assembly was on the bottom. I thought it was some king of water quality tester but then i saw the modulator. From the oxidation it's taken quite a beating, i'm guessing they were using the lake water as cooling for some sort of despin resonance operation. You don't want that sort of thing unmodulated on an autonomous platform.

There are actually manholes in this thing. and manual controls. They were sending men in there while this thing was powered. Scary.

took this while getting a demo, i obviously don't have a gantry crane at home (i wish).

This is always good to have around, even though some of these are a bit outdated. remember to cross-check with newer charts whenever impedence drops below a couple of million S.