1770 lightning conductor

[bruce d]

This paper describes and illustrates a lightning conductor of 1770

 

Ships lightning conductor illustrated 1770.pdf

[Keith Black]

Bruce, thank you for posting. I thought I was reading a foreign language till I figured out that some words with a "s" were replaced with an "f". Anyone know why that was done? Fhortage of "s" type?

[druxey]

To Ben Franklin, no less!

[druxey]

Keith: The letter you refer to was in common ufe (sorry, use) until about 200 or so years ago. It was known as the 'long s'. If you read many 17th and 18th century texts, you get used to the convention and read  it as 's', not 'f'. If you look carefully the crossbar is only to the right of the upright; it does not cross it like the letter 'f'.

[bruce d]

1 minute ago, Keith Black said:

Fhortage of "s" type?

 

Well, fort of. The old 'S' was very much like the 'F' and it was phased out (I believe) in the late part of the 18th century. Good thing too, fome folkf could flip up on fimple fentancef.

And don't get me ftarted on 'ye'.

[wefalck]

Well, in German 'Fraktur' (=broken, vs. round) print this was used well into the 1950s, when it was gradually replaced by antiqua-type fonts in which before only foreign language texts were type-set.

 

The long-s was only used inside words, not at the end.

 

I was exposed to this kind kind of print since my early youth, as probably the majority of books in the parental library was printed in that way. Between about 1905 and 1942 schoolchildren were taught a cursive hand called 'Sütterlin' (after its inventor). The reasons for this are complex, but it is rather difficult to read, if you are not used to it - for instance the 'e' looks like an 'n' and also has the long and short 's'. We were briefly taught this in the second year of school, so that we would be able to read letters from older relatives

 

The greek alphabet also uses two 's', depending, where you are in the word, btw.

[druxey]

And, of course, the double-s at the end of words like 'exprefs'. In English typesetting the long 's' was used at the beginning of word. One unfortunate example I came across referred to brake pumps as 'sucking pumps', except that the first 's' looked like an 'f'!

Edited January 12, 2021 by druxey

[allanyed]

It is bad enough when reading in typeset, but when in long hand, oh my goodness, it is a chore to transcribe.  It has literally taken hours for me to transcribe a single page of some contracts.  Others are a breeze, mostly  depends on the scribe.   Oh, and don't forget the use of capital letters for all nouns, spelling compared to today,  and then not always as consistent as one would think from scribe to scribe.  And a number of contracts I have gone through have multiple scribes as it easy to see the different handwriting on different pages.   Below is a small example.  I cannot show more as there are personal use agreements for the  contract as a whole which is 9 pages long.

 

Allan

 

 

Edited January 13, 2021 by allanyed

[wefalck]

Don't forget ligatures in print, of which there used to be many.

[Keith Black]

Back to the original subject for a moment, lighting conductors. Is this something that should be incorporated in builds after 1800? 

Edited January 14, 2021 by Keith Black

[wefalck]

I think 'archofo' has them represented in his model of LA CREOLE (1827).

[bruce d]

From the NMM:

https://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/68419.html

https://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/86585.html

https://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/86587.html

https://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/86586.html

https://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/86591.html

https://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/86588.html

 

These are 19th century.

HTH

Bruce

[druxey]

For anyone interested in learning to read old 'hands' such as the sample posted by Allan, there is an excellent free self-tutorial course from the British National Archives. Start here!

 

https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/reading-old-documents/

 

The perfect way to educate yourself while waiting for the pandemic to pass....

[shipman]

Just when the English stabilized English; Americans began tearing it apart again. 💩

[allanyed]

Druxey, 

Mark Porter steered me to that site and I found it to be extremely helpful.  I would recommend it as a good read for anyone wanting to get into transcribing the old contracts.    It's all part of the fun of the research we do before making any sawdust.

 

Edited January 13, 2021 by allanyed

[dafi]

Back to the conductors 🙂

 

We had a good discussion about the theme in our german forum:

https://www.segelschiffsmodellbau.com/t1912f643-Blitzableiter-an-Schiffen.html

 

 

Also NMM has nice exhibits 🙂

http://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/63401.html

REL0295 Main royal masthead from French flagship 'L'Orient' which exploded during the battle of the Nile. Lord Minto mentions it on display at Nelson's house at Merton in 1802. Pine mast with an iron fitting, which contains a sheave to take the signal halyard. A brass lightning conductor inscribed 'L'Orient' is attached to the top, bent in a loop. The whole is fixed to a square stand. [It is probably more accurate to date it to 'circa 1795', since the ship was under construction in 1793 (when the British failed to burn her on the stocks at Toulon) and it was certainly made and fitted before the Battle of the Nile when it was taken up from the sea after 'L' Orient' exploded. PvdM 2/13] Date made    circa 1798

 

Also the museum in Amsterdam has a nice model equipped with one:

 

 

 

XXXDAn

Edited January 14, 2021 by dafi

[druxey]

Was the pigtail of L'Orient's conductor bent by the explosion?

[mtaylor]

10 hours ago, druxey said:

Was the pigtail of L'Orient's conductor bent by the explosion?

I'm wondering the same thing but it looks like it was made that way.  Seems hard to comprehend that it would go more then 360 degrees in a explosion.

[druxey]

Sometimes explosive effects are very strange.

[dafi]

My guess would be that if bent not by explosion but by the fall. But as the lower part is perfectly straight I would guess it is by design.

 

XXXDAn

Edited January 15, 2021 by dafi

[Louie da fly]

On 1/13/2021 at 7:15 AM, allanyed said:

It is bad enough when reading in typeset, but when in long hand, oh my goodness, it is a chore to transcribe.

 

 

Try it in Old English - this is the first page of Beowulf - 11th century AD.

 

 

It says

HWAET WE GARDE

na in gear dagum theod cyninga

thrym ge frunon hutha aethelingas eller

fremedon. Oft scyld scefing sceathe

thraetum monegu maegthum meodo fetla

of teah egfode eorl sythan aerest . . . etc etc

 

You can see the "long s" in the words I've put in bold. It goes back a lo-o-o-ong way . . .

 

Note also the way they had not one, but two distinct individual letters  and  - each of which stands for the sound we now write as "th".

 

Oh, and "w" is written  

 

Back to your scheduled programming . . .

 

 

Edited January 15, 2021 by Louie da fly

[druxey]

Ah yes, the good old (literally) 'thorn' that looks like a 'y' ( as in ye olde). I suppose, Steven, that the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf is your bed-time reading? I like Seamus Heaney's translation, although I hear that a new really good version has just been published. But I digress!

[trippwj]

As my significantly better half (to refer to her as the Admiral would be a demotion of sorts) has noted, effective transcriptionating is as much as arte as a science. In some of her endeavors she has found that the same writer in the same paragraph can offer multiple spellings for the same word. The most pleasurable items to transcribe are those copied into a letterbook by clerks or scribes - they tended to have much cleaner script and few ink smears or scratchouts!

 

As but one example, here is a page from Joshua Humphreys workbook - likely NOT written by a scribe but possibly by Humphreys.

 

 

 

And here is one from the War Department Letterbook, copied into the book by a clerk.

 

[Louie da fly]

16 hours ago, druxey said:

I suppose, Steven, that the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf is your bed-time reading?

 

I'm not that fluent! But I do have it in OE with a word-by-word translation, plus another full Modern English translation. I occasionally open it and struggle along for awhile before I give up in case my brain explodes.

 

But I was very pleased with myself when I recognised without being told that the passage I was looking at in the "Teach Yourself OE" text was the opening of the parable of the prodigal son. And at one point I could recite the Lord's Prayer in OE - forgotten it now.

 

And though it's even more difficult when not only the language but the letter forms have changed so much over the centuries, I managed to translate from a short passage in OE (in the original script) that it dealt with Lot , who it described as Abraham's "broor sunu" (brother's son - i.e. nephew). Of course apart from historical records such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, much of the text available to us is from the Bible, because that's what clerks (a word which was originally clerics) concerned themselves with and wrote down.

 

But I think that's enough from me - I really don't want to be derailing the thread.

 

Steven

Edited January 16, 2021 by Louie da fly

[bruce d]

Odd that it is exactly a year since the last post in this thread and I just found this in the MIT museum images:

 

[dafi]

Nice, thank you!

 

Is this another view of #16?

Origin http://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/63401.html

 

 

XXXDAn

[Keith Black]

 Dan, it's the same view as it's the same link. 

 

 

 

 

Edited January 16, 2022 by Keith Black

[bluenose2]

Fascinating. I am building the Endeavour and the Beagle. Would these ships have been fitted with these devices?