1840s, actually. The patent was granted to a Scottish man named Alexander Bain.

First thing’s first, the telegraph. An electric circuit which can be energized or not energized at the push of a button called a telegraph key. At the other end is a solenoid which is spring loaded up, and an electromagnet on the circuit pulls down when the line is energized. Originally this was supposed to cut into paper tape to “print” the morse code message, but telegraphers quickly learned how to hear the letters in the clicks, a good telegrapher just…hears words. So they did away with the tape.

Morse code telegraphs require a single circuit to transmit an on/off keying message, the following aparatus uses five:

If I understand this right, the message would be written on non-conductive paper with conductive ink, and then wound around a cylinder that featured a whole bunch of insulated conductive pins, each kind of forming a “pixel.” A mechanical probe would check each one of those pins in turn, each pin in a row, and then shifting to the next row at the end. if it was conductive it meant there was ink there so click. So it would perform a raster scan. At the other end was paper that was coated with an electrosensitive material that would darken with the application of current, so at each pixel if the conductive ink on the original completed a circuit, current would be applied at that pixel on the copy, producing a low quality probably unusable copy. It was difficult to get them truly in sync plus it would have been hilariously low resolution. But it did somewhat function.

There are a few different ones by that point.

Forever establishing American expectations when traveling overseas.

isn’t english just the crab language that spontaneously comes into existence if given enough time?

But instead, the device turns on (nearly) instantly. Because the wire isn’t actually what causes the device to turn on

That’s not exactly true. In this case, the energy transmission would go like this: (change of electric field in the little bit of wire next to the power source) -> (change of magnetic field in the air between the wires) -> (change of electric field in the wire next to the load). This limits the amount of energy transmitted significantly and incurs a lot of losses, meaning if you had something like a lamp plugged in it would start glowing extremely dimly at first (think about how some cheap LED lights keep glowing even with the switch off - it’s similar, albeit it happens due to inter-wire capacitance and not induction). It would then slowly ramp up to full power over a course of a year.

Here’s a video from the same person about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Vrhk5OjBP8 (although I haven’t watched this yet)

Edit: after watching the video, I think I was actually wrong in a couple of my assumptions. First of all, it looks like the reason for the initial energy transmission is wire capacitance and not induction, so (electric field in wire) -> (electric field in air) -> (electric field in wire, in the “opposite direction”, but because the wire goes back and forth it’s the same current direction). This means that my LED example is even more potent. And the second one is that because it’s capacitance and not induction, this means that there’s no slow ramp-up, it just makes the light glow very dimly all the way until the electric field makes it through the wire, and then it ramps up very quickly.

Can you help me understand why the distance between the power source and the load impacts how long it would take to turn on? I remember a video a while back (veritasium maybe?) that explained it like metaphorically pushing/pulling a chain inside the wire, but why would distance to the source impact this?

wait so if you have another person travel to the other end of the wire, and do a time sync with consideration of time dilation to tell them to cut the wire 1hr after you turn on the power, will the device turn off after 1 year since it wouldn’t “know” the wire is cut until a year has passed?

This isn’t due to the blind spot, but it is still pretty weird to experience! Here’s some more info if you are curious: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averted_vision

So, here’s a lesson from the flight physiology chapter of the private pilot syllabus:

Your vision is a lot worse than you think it is. You probably conceptualize your eye as similar to a digital camera, there’s a lens that focuses light on a sensor made up of an array of light sensitive cells, and that the edge of that array is as densely packed as the center. This is the case for a camera, but not for your eye.

Each of your eyes has over 30 million photoreceptors called rods and cones.

Rod cells come in one variety and are only really good for detecting presence or absence of light. They work well, or can work well, in very dim light, and they form the basis of your night vision. This is why in very dim conditions you might experience your vision in black and white.

Cone cells are less sensitive to light requiring relatively bright light to function, and come in three varieties that respond the strongest to low, middle and high wavelengths of light, what we know as red, green and blue. By comparing the relative intensities of these wavelengths, we can derive color vision. They don’t work well in low light conditions.

The sensor array in the back of your eye that contains these photosensitive cells, called the retina, is sparsely populated toward the edges and doesn’t have very good resolution. Try reading this sentence looking at it through the corner of your eye. It gets denser and denser, and the ratio of cones to rods increases, until you reach a tiny pit in the very center called the fovea.

This is difficult to put into words but unless you’ve been blind since birth you’ll understand what I mean: You use your whole retina to “see.” You use your fovea to “look.” The detailed center of your vision, the spot where you are “looking” is drawn from the fovea through the center of the lens out into the world. When you are looking at something, you are pointing your fovea(s) at it.

There are no rod cells in your fovea, only cones. So you have very high resolution color day vision, but next to no night vision, with your fovea.

This is why things like dim stars in the night sky can be more easily seen with your peripheral vision than your central vision. Your central vision does not have the cells to see well in the dark. It’s not in the anatomy.

We teach this to pilots because distant lights the pilot is using to navigate by, avoiding collisions with obstacles or other aircraft, might be dim enough that the night adjusted eye can’t actually see it with the center vision but can with peripheral vision.

The same chapter teaches about the “hole” through which the optic nerve passes and how that blind spot is capable of hiding something like another airplane from you, which is why you look around and don’t just stare out the windshield. It’s not often a problem because most of the time one eye can see into the other’s blind spot, but it’s useful to know that about your vision.

Each cell will detect some light, undergo a chemical process that fires an adjacent neuron, and then take a very brief moment to reset to be ready to do it again. Each cell is doing this independently, so your eyes don’t have a “frame rate” the way a camera does, but a flickering light begins to look continuous to humans at a rate of about 18 cycles per second and no flicker can be detected somewhere around 40.

Your occipital lobe takes in this choppy inconsistent resolution broken up mess of visual information passed to it via your optic nerves, does some RTX DLSS 4k HDR10 shit to it and outputs the continuous and smooth color 3D picture you consciousness experiences as “vision.”

AND THEN ON TOP OF THAT your brain does optical everything recognition. You can look at millions of different objects - the letters of the alphabet, tools, toys, people, individual people’s faces, leaves, flowers, creatures, stars, planets, moons, your own hands, and recognize what they are with astonishing speed and accuracy.

It’s what scientists call the hellawhack shiznit that happens inside your brizzle.

Another fun fact: through that hole there’s also vasculature and capillaries coming through and you can actually see them by looking at a well lit white surface and creating a tiny pinhole with your hand right in front of your eye and wiggling it. Better explained here at around 5:30

U got bugs in ur poop.

youre mostly bacterial dna

It’s DNA from bacteria that live inside you.

There’s a LOT of e. coli up your ass.

Put more delicately, you are a great big multicellular eukaryote, each of your cells has (or had, in the case of red blood cells) an inner chamber called the nucleus, and you’re full of mitochondria and other organelles. Your body is covered and filled with other organisms, many of them simple, tiny little single cell prokaryotes which make a living helping their gigantic, complicated host function. Like all the bacteria in your intestines that help you digest food. Their cells outnumber yours by a wide margin.

we all know what you do when you visit the zoo.
were those giraffes looking thirsty, hmmm?

Your gut flora

It’s explained on his Wikipedia page. He was an Army captain in the Kosovo War, when a NATO commander (Wesley Clark, who later ran for President) ordered his unit to secure Pristina Airport, which Russian troops had already occupied. Blunt refused to engage them, long enough for the British general get involved to countermand the order, on the grounds that he didn’t want his men to start WW3.

Sorry, dark humor is the only kind I have left.

Pretty sure the one on Venus is dead.

Due to its high latitude and being in the middle of a continent, it is a contender for the most extreme winters in the contiguous United States.

Two square miles & 54 residents in North Bumblefuck, separated from the rest of the US by 60 miles. It’s an affront to reason.

All borders are weird

I’m not sure where these numbers are from, but my guess is that you mean the Observable Universe, which is just the part of the universe that we can see.

We don’t know how big the full universe is, it could be infinite with an infinite number of stars.

What the fuck, who changed that? Seems like a horrible idea.