[time-nuts] Interesting Patent
David Forbes
dforbes at dakotacom.net
Tue May 16 18:32:45 UTC 2006
Brooke Clarke wrote:
> Hi:
>
> I came across a 1946 patent for a vacuum tube based counter circuit that
> will divide 60 Hz down to 1 Hz. It's interesting in that there's a
> discussion about the advantage of using binary instead of base 10 and
> also about using feedback to change the scale of the counter from 64 to
> 60 (or 50). See:
Brooke,
This appears to predate the old Berkeley and HP decade counter modules
by quite some years, although it is slightly different in that it
treats a single base-60 digit instead of two BCD digits.
Amusingly, by the time of color television in the fifties, RCA was
selling a low-cost color bar generator whose sync generator used the
phantastron divider instead of this binary divider. The phantastron
was also used in the HP counters for the reference clock divider; it
is a two-tube divide-by-N circuit that charges a capacitor with N
little pulses, then triggers and resets itself.
Also amusing is the patent application date of 1942 and the granting
date of 1946 - these times bracket ENIAC's protracted development and
building period. However, ENIAC did not use binary counters - it used
decimal up/down ring counters which were a faithful emulation of the
mechanical wheel accumulators used in adding machines of the day.
All in all, a nice bit of history.
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