Thanks for looking, Chuck. I finally recalled the name of the small
firm that designed and built the nozzle control system. It was
Hanson-Gorrill-Brian, Inc., of Glen Cove, NY. A google search turns up
some patents that they received in the early 50s. It just proves that
people with technical smarts and ingenuity can provide products that may
just outlive the company that made them!
My first exposure to anything beyond data reduction computers was a
PDP-8 that was provided as a part of a fuel control system for a jet
engine test. After the original test was completed, a few of our
engineers figured out other uses for the computer. Coupled with small
black and white monitors, it provided a real-time Mach number display,
from pressure measurements and a non-linear equation. We eventually
added a temperature measurement and calculated Reynolds Number as well.
For the first time, operators could actually see the parameters they
were trying to hold constant, rather than refer to tables. More
automation followed.
Jim Nichols
Tullahoma, TN USA
On 12/14/2013 7:06 PM, Chuck Norcutt wrote:
> A pretty impressive piece of gear. Being younger than you, my
> introduction to memory when I started working at IBM (1965) was of a
> more technologically advanced device. For a while I worked on a
> manufacturing machine controller that did wire wrapping. It had a
> little core memory that was about 4"x4" and stored 256 bits. Pretty
> primitive now but I'll bet you'd have been willing to pay a lot for a
> device like that in the early 50s. :-)
>
> Chuck Norcutt
>
>
> On 12/12/2013 5:19 PM, Jim Nichols wrote:
>> As a young engineer, my first assignment was to calculate the nozzle
>> plate shapes for a flexible plate nozzle for the AEDC 16-Ft Transonic
>> Wind Tunnel, then under construction. The shapes had to vary from a
>> simple contraction to a Mach 1.6 contour, and the process had to be done
>> by 16 pairs of jacks, without over stressing the steel plates. And,
>> other than the basic supersonic shapes calculated by folks at Cal-Tech,
>> it was all done on Friden and Marchant desk calculators.
>>
>> To move the jacks from contour to contour, a series of steps were chosen
>> that stayed within stress limits, as determined from curvature
>> calculations. These steps were then stored in L-shaped pegs on a
>> mechanical memory drum, with the shapes transferred to cam-driven
>> readers and fed to vacuum-tube amplifiers which supplied the driving
>> signals to the ball-bearing screw jacks.
>>
>> Bear in mind that this was all done in the early 1950s.
>>
>> This photo, taken from my technical report, shows the mechanical memory
>> drum and the console which contained the drum drive system, the transfer
>> plate, and the individual jack amplifiers. The console and system were
>> designed to our specs and provided by an engineering company whose name
>> does not come to mind after 60 years.
>>
>> http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/OldNick/Mechanical+Memory+Drum.jpg.html
>>
>> Memory has come a long way since then. :-)
>>
--
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