Websites to Spend Countless Hours On: Five Hundred And Seven Mechanical Movements

About a year ago my girlfriend took me to an event she had read about in her university’s Facebook group: an antiquarian bookshop was being dissolved and was giving away all the books they had in store. So the next weekend we arrived at a block of flats, rather than a bookshop as we had expected. Only a small sign pointed us towards the cellar, where the antiquarian had rented a couple of rooms. The owner was an elderly man and it seemed very clear that he was more of a collector who enjoyed gathering books, rather than a salesman. But he was getting too old and the money he made by selling books every now and then didn’t cover the costs of renting the space anymore, so he had to shut it down. And it seemed like he didn’t mind giving the books away for free — he was happy for every book that ended up in the hands of someone who might get some joy from it. The antiquarian specialized in art books and musical scores and we spent an hour or so roaming through the dark rooms with low ceilings, where every wall (and much of the space in-between) was covered with shelves. The collection was truly impressive: I was left in awe by the mountains of leather-bound books set in lead type (mostly in Blackletter) and musical scores from the 1800s, though most of them were so old as to be barely readable.

My girlfriend took home a pile of large format art catalogs, while I only picked two books. One was a small encyclopedia of jazz, the other one was a huge book, bound in linen. Its title is “Uhren und Messinstrumente des 15. bis 19. Jahrhunderts” ​, written by Samuel Guye and Michel Henrik, published in 1970 — the title roughly translates to “Clocks and Measurement Instruments of the 15th to 19th Century”. It still hits me with the smell of old paper every time I open it up. Though most of the book is focused on the artistic side and the intricate ornamentation of the clocks, as well as their socio-historic context, my favorite parts are the ones that focus on mechanical inventions and breakthroughs. I love looking at the schematic drawings of watches and trying to “read them”, figuring out how the different parts interact, and how the movement is put forth from one part to the next.

I have a soft spot for this kind of engineering. As someone who creates digital products, I have a firm understanding of how computers work and all the layers of abstraction and the complexities involved in that. But I find it fascinating to imagine the way backward, from digital computers to analog electronic computers to mechanical computers. Consider the ancient greek Antikythera mechanism, estimated to have been built around 100 BC, that was used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses, via a set of gears put into motion by turning a hand crank. Or the amazingly complex tide-predicting machines of the 19th century. There were people observing natural phenomena, creating mathematical models, then using the properties of mechanical machines to “implement” the models and suddenly be able to speed up time and predict the future, how can one not love that?

There is a certain immediacy in mechanical movements that leaves me in awe. I always imagine them as little riddles: You have this motion, you want that motion — how can you hook something up that makes it work? And while it is a rather concrete domain, there still seems to be such a great level of abstraction involved: Each movement is a closed “circuit”, for lack of a better word, that does its job or transformation without side effects. And when you hook up many of them together incredible machines can be formed. That’s not too different from the way complex programs are created by chaining pure functions!

I guess that’s why I love Henry T. Brown’s book: It’s a collection of little recipes, each independent of the others. It’s an encyclopedia of mechanical movements — “Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements” is the kind of book you would want to take with you in case of an apocalypse.

My favorite movements §

These are some of the movements that I found the most fascinating. The collection however lives from its comprehensiveness, so I strongly suggest browsing through a few more!

• 63: Jumping or intermittent rotary motion, used for meters and revolution-counters.
• 89: An eccentric generally used on the crank-shaft for communicating the reciprocating rectilinear motion to the valves of steam engines, and sometimes used for pumping (animated).
• 185: Link-motion valve-gear of a locomotive (animated).
• 212: What is called the “Geneva-stop,” used in Swiss watches to limit the number of revolutions in winding-up (animated).
• 320: Endless chain, maintaining power on going-barrel, to keep a clock going while winding, during which operation the action of the weight or main-spring is taken off the barrel.

The website §

Five Hundred And Seven Mechanical Movements — an online edition of the classic technical reference Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements by Henry T. Brown. ​

The series §

In my series “Websites to Spend Countless Hours On” I write about my favorite wholesome websites. I focus on those that are slow-growing, personal, opinionated, or fastidiously comprehensive. They are like the websites that first drew me into the web: Quaint personal spaces by real people.