16 Feb
2008
16 Feb
'08
2:19 a.m.
I had looked at relays, and while there certainly
were relays in 1900, I
doubt they were very good in terms of bounce, actuation time etc. The
building where I work has an Otis made lift dating from 1980, done
completely with relays. It's fairly unreliable, and a lot of the relays
have to be fiddled with springs, copper disks, iron slugs etc. (Some of
them were designed that way, and some just needed it to make them work).
I've seen the stuff on the relay computer, and I suspect that simply
would not have worked in 1900, but works due to modern relays.
I think you are perhaps just seeing bad, unmaintained relays in your
elevator. A good, overengineered, maintained relay, even 100 years
old, just will not break. The railroads are full of them (well, 90
years old). Just do not expect any sort of speed - maybe 1 second
cycles.
A 1900-era relay computer would be big, expensive, suck juice like
crazy, and be stupidly slow, but I bet it would work. I can envision
setting up batch jobs, running them, then seeing how many cycles were
used, so between jobs workers could do preventative maintenance on the
relays if some number of cycles was reached.
--
Will