[GreenKeys] [Boatanchors] Lots of WECO stuff

[Douglas W. Jones]

On May 1, 2009, at 10:58 AM, Roy Morgan wrote:

> This wire price situation may be a case of "whatever  the market will
> bear". ...                                           ... I do not
> expect that a normal teletype loop circuit or telephone connection
> would need anything but normal wire.  I do understand why someone
> would want to have and use wire of the right covering and colors as
> the original.

And that may well be the issue.  Classic cloth-covered wire is getting
progressively harder and harder to find.  So is gutta-percha insulated
wire.  Nowdays, it's all various flavors of vinyl.

If you're trying to do a museum-quality recreation of an antique, you
want authentic wire, not modern polychrome plastic insulation.

The folks who built the replica of Atasanoff's calculator at Iowa State
University mentioned the problems they had getting proper 1930's wire
for the machine.  It's not that it wouldn't work just fine with modern
wire, but they wanted to build exactly the machine Atasanoff built.

A week ago, I spoke with one of the curators at the NSA museum about
their Enigma -- He let me play with it, with one exception.  They no-
longer let people even touch the patchboard that sets part of the key
because the jumper wires are fragile (rather, the insulation is fragile)
and they can't find replacement wire for them.

		Doug Jones
		jones at cs.uiowa.edu