From 1790 to 1880, the U.S. Patent Office required that patent applications for a new inventions must have a model accompanying them. When the requirement was abolished, there were around 200,000 such models. Some went to the Smithsonian, while most were bought by Sir Henry Wellcome. After Wellcome’s death, the collection was split and many were obtained by Alan Rothschild, who founded the Rothschild Petersen Patent Model Museum.
But before you look through the tiny treasures at the museum’s website, take a little quiz and see if you can guess what the machines represented by the patent models do. You will no doubt score better than I did -I only got seven out of twenty right! -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Rothschild Peterson Patent Museum)
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Others are in Cuba and Eastern Europe.
Every now and then a mic is left on and you can hear the chit-chat in the native tongue in the background.
Done to death in Monitoring Times and Pop Communications.
I remember there was a small kerfluffle on the internet just a few months ago when UVB-76 went silent for the first time in many years because of its supposed part in a dead hand system.
The Conet Project is a compelation of quite a number of numbers station recordings. Some odd and easy listening for when you're surfing the web.
Free for listening at archive.org
http://www.archive.org/details/ird059
It's known to be a manual station (basically a microphone held up to whatever the hell makes that terrifying noise) that's constantly manned, so even though they probably have backup generators and everything, if all the operations of the station take place in one area it's possible that there was a catastrophic malfunction or a massive human error. Or maybe the people staffing it hated the sound as much as any normal person would >_>
Sort of a dupe article. I knew I had read this before.
Exactly what I was thinking, lol
Why does the post headline have "Mysterious Numerical Radio Stations"? The link properly calls them numbers stations. Would be nice if article leads weren't made up of BS. There's no logical reason for doing so.