According to Rich Grise :
On Thu, 19 Jan 2006 05:00:03 -0800, Tim Shoppa wrote:

R.H. wrote:

Some of the items in the unsolved
set may have been correctly answered previously but I
wasn't able to verify them so I've included them
in this new post.

My one piece of insight to share on #471 is that if you look at the red
numbers, they are different by 4 or 5 from the adjacent red numbers.
With the exception of 9 and 0 (which are either 1 or 9 apart, depending
on how you look at it.)

My gut feeling is that this dial is for remapping the 0-9 digits such
that adjacent digits do not come out near each other in the remap,
maybe something like a grey code. The 20-tooth cog and the
microswitch-style rider look like something out of a phone
pulse-switching system, although what kind of stepper switch they might
control I still do not fathom.


Maybe from an "Enigma" coder/decoder circa WWII. I'm almost sure I've
seen such a thing before - the 45 degree bevel on the back is a
dead giveaway that it stuck out from some console, but I can't remember
for the life of me where I've seen it.

Too simple to be an "enigma", which used several rotors, with
crossed wiring from contacts on one side to contacts on the other side,
and some subset of them were rotated with each new character entered.
There was a keyboard, which closed contacts, fed through all of the
rotors (I think that the general one was three rotor, and the submarine
force later got a four-rotor version), and the scrambled wiring
eventually lit a small lamp behind the character which stood for the
original one.

But it probably could be used for something like changing digits
in a key code book for cutting a key from the number on the lock. (They
would not want it to be too simple, but also not so difficult that a
locksmith could not make keys at need.

Enjoy,
DoN.
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