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

I think it's more likely from a simple machine (not a "coder/decoder"
like an Enigma machine) that has to scatter sequential digits such that
the are not adjacent in the machine's operation. Don's suggestion of a
key-cutter might be close, but it would do the mapping because you
don't really want a key cut to pattern #4 to be close to a key cut to
#3 or #5 (replace "key" with whatever this thing does! I think
security/encryption is a bit of a red herring, it's probably something
more to do with mechanical tolerances and not cutting a strip of
something too thin or maybe something more like the utility of a hash
index in computing.)

I can't rule out it being from some sort of encryption device but the
mapping is so straightforward that it would provide zero real security
itself.

And the fact that there are twenty teeth on the cog and twenty digits
(two different colors) around the dial has to mean something, I just
don't know what! Going back to the "hash index" idea, maybe there are
ten useful doohinkeys in a machine, and they don't want to wear any out
in favor of others, so at each shift change they advance the dial one
and use that setting on the machine.

As to style, it's simplicity and lack of adornment suggests something
like a East European public telephone from the 50's. At the same time,
it looks like it was machined out of solid billet (aluminum? and really
thick housing!) and not cast as a mass-produced item would be.

As enigmatic as Gary Larson's "Cow Tools" :-).

http://www.salon.com/people/portfoli...on/older4.html

Tim.