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This paper describes and illustrates a lightning conductor of 1770

 

Ships lightning conductor illustrated 1770.pdf

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A model shipwright and an amateur historian are heads & tails of the same coin

current builds:

HMS Berwick 1775, 1/192 scratchbuild; a Slade 74 in the Navy Board style

Mediator sloop, 1/48 - an 18th century transport scratchbuild 

French longboat - CAF - 1/48, on hold

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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?

Current Builds: 1880s Floating Steam Donkey Pile Driver 

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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'.

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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'.

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STAY SAFE

 

A model shipwright and an amateur historian are heads & tails of the same coin

current builds:

HMS Berwick 1775, 1/192 scratchbuild; a Slade 74 in the Navy Board style

Mediator sloop, 1/48 - an 18th century transport scratchbuild 

French longboat - CAF - 1/48, on hold

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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.

wefalck

 

panta rhei - Everything is in flux

 

 

M-et-M-72.jpg  Banner-AKHS-72.jpg  Banner-AAMM-72.jpg  ImagoOrbis-72.jpg
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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 by druxey

Be sure to sign up for an epic Nelson/Trafalgar project if you would like to see it made into a TV series  http://trafalgar.tv

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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

1309480533_Contractsample.thumb.jpg.d4ac5cf305adbc269cc59635f432fbf9.jpg

 

 

Edited by allanyed

PLEASE take 30 SECONDS and sign up for the epic Nelson/Trafalgar project if you would like to see it made into a TV series.   Click on http://trafalgar.tv   There is no cost other than the 30 seconds of your time.  THANK YOU

 

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

Edited by Keith Black

Current Builds: 1880s Floating Steam Donkey Pile Driver 

                             Wood Hull Screw Frigate USS Tennessee

                             Decorative Carrack Warship Restoration, the Amelia

 

Completed: Early Swift 1805 Model Restoration

 

 

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STAY SAFE

 

A model shipwright and an amateur historian are heads & tails of the same coin

current builds:

HMS Berwick 1775, 1/192 scratchbuild; a Slade 74 in the Navy Board style

Mediator sloop, 1/48 - an 18th century transport scratchbuild 

French longboat - CAF - 1/48, on hold

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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....

Be sure to sign up for an epic Nelson/Trafalgar project if you would like to see it made into a TV series  http://trafalgar.tv

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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 by allanyed

PLEASE take 30 SECONDS and sign up for the epic Nelson/Trafalgar project if you would like to see it made into a TV series.   Click on http://trafalgar.tv   There is no cost other than the 30 seconds of your time.  THANK YOU

 

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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
large.jpg
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:

 

f643t1912p159759n12_bUqmLPew.jpg

 

 


XXXDAn

Edited by dafi

To victory and beyond! http://modelshipworld.com/index.php?/topic/76-hms-victory-by-dafi-to-victory-and-beyond/

See also our german forum for Sailing Ship Modeling and History: http://www.segelschiffsmodellbau.com/

Finest etch parts for HMS Victory 1:100 (Heller Kit), USS Constitution 1:96 (Revell) and other useful bits.

http://dafinismus.de/index_en.html

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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.

Mark
"The shipwright is slow, but the wood is patient." - me

Current Build:                                                                                             
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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 by dafi

To victory and beyond! http://modelshipworld.com/index.php?/topic/76-hms-victory-by-dafi-to-victory-and-beyond/

See also our german forum for Sailing Ship Modeling and History: http://www.segelschiffsmodellbau.com/

Finest etch parts for HMS Victory 1:100 (Heller Kit), USS Constitution 1:96 (Revell) and other useful bits.

http://dafinismus.de/index_en.html

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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.

 

image.png.87f0ce1099597608bbe2ed330aa33ba1.png

 

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 image.png.c400ff5840b004a5ea16ad61e70f9fed.png and image.png.3ecf6c18558d404dbf645051dbb02a2e.png - each of which stands for the sound we now write as "th".

 

Oh, and "w" is written image.png.df6ed350519c3694f62877509520feae.png 

 

Back to your scheduled programming . . .

 

 

Edited by Louie da fly
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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!

Be sure to sign up for an epic Nelson/Trafalgar project if you would like to see it made into a TV series  http://trafalgar.tv

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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.

 

011.thumb.jpg.415ed44d303682055c093e47671ede20.jpg

 

 

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

 

eae11caab700fc9cba0c765db03d0a218c120ff2.thumb.jpg.2e257a8f366331bfc961546000c60e94.jpg

Wayne

Neither should a ship rely on one small anchor, nor should life rest on a single hope.
Epictetus

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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 "broimage.png.973d2f96ad18736fd3deef222466f6dc.pngor 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 by Louie da fly
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  • 1 year later...

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

 

917286490_downloadlorientlightningrod2.png.5950572035d9a342668f4a1f51bb9383.png

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STAY SAFE

 

A model shipwright and an amateur historian are heads & tails of the same coin

current builds:

HMS Berwick 1775, 1/192 scratchbuild; a Slade 74 in the Navy Board style

Mediator sloop, 1/48 - an 18th century transport scratchbuild 

French longboat - CAF - 1/48, on hold

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Nice, thank you!

 

Is this another view of #16?

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

 

 

XXXDAn

To victory and beyond! http://modelshipworld.com/index.php?/topic/76-hms-victory-by-dafi-to-victory-and-beyond/

See also our german forum for Sailing Ship Modeling and History: http://www.segelschiffsmodellbau.com/

Finest etch parts for HMS Victory 1:100 (Heller Kit), USS Constitution 1:96 (Revell) and other useful bits.

http://dafinismus.de/index_en.html

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

 

 

 

 

Edited by Keith Black

Current Builds: 1880s Floating Steam Donkey Pile Driver 

                             Wood Hull Screw Frigate USS Tennessee

                             Decorative Carrack Warship Restoration, the Amelia

 

Completed: Early Swift 1805 Model Restoration

 

 

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