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From: Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: Electrostatic actuators to move robots legs...
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2024 17:54:43 +1000
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On 16/09/2024 3:12 am, Nick Hayward wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Sep 2024 11:38:53 +0100, Jeff Layman wrote:
> 
>> On 15/09/2024 10:58, Cursitor Doom wrote:
>>> On Sun, 15 Sep 2024 08:13:15 +0100, Jeff Layman wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 15/09/2024 03:49, john larkin wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> The best thing about MK is that it's close to Oxford.
>>>>
>>>> I really must disagree. The best thing about MK is Bletchley Park.
>>>> It's more than possible that none of us would be here if it wasn't for
>>>> the activities at Station X in the early 40s.
>>>>
>>>> It's perhaps interesting to surmise that if what went on at Bletchley
>>>> Park hadn't been kept secret until the mid 70s, perhaps the new town
>>>> envisioned in the 60s would have been called "Bletchley" in honour and
>>>> recognition of what it had done to hasten the end of World War II.
>>>
>>> They've made a museum out of it and it's *very* well worth a visit.
>>
>> I visited at the end of November 2009, when it had just opened and the
>> huts were still in a pretty rough state. It was a good time to go as it
>> was a very cold day and there were few visitors. I was lucky on twos
>> counts. Firstly, we were shown round by Jean Valentine (who worked there
>> during the war and had appeared on numerous "Station X" documentaries.
>> She was one of those who entered the various settings onto the Bombe
>> machine, and then phoned the possible decryption code to the hut where
>> Turing worked. It was more-or-less next door, but she had no idea where
>> it was, not even if it was at Bletchley Park!). Secondly, I was able to
>> chat to Tony Sale for a while, as there was nobody else around. He, of
>> course, was the driving force behind rebuilding Colossus. He had spoken
>> with Tommy Flowers, who designed and built the original, and helped Sale
>> with the rebuild as almost all the original documentation had been
>> destroyed on Churchill's orders
> 
> Astounding brain power those guys had. What is it about the English that
> makes them such amazing thinkers? They're not so great when it comes to
> building things affordably and efficiently, but as conceptualists, they're
> simply unbeatable.

No nation has a monopoly on brain power. Bletchley Park did pull in an 
interesting mix of academic and practical skills - Alan Turing was 
primarily an academic, though he was also good with hardware.

Tommy Flowers was a telephone system engineer before he went to 
Bletchley Park. In the early 190's Britain did have its back to the 
wall, and some of the social prejudice that separated upper-class 
English academics from middle-class engineers did get repressed (for a 
while).

People from the colonies also got accepted. William S. Butement - the 
inventor of the proximity fuse - came from New Zealand. He was my boss 
for it bit - around 1970 - and I suspect that he would not have been a 
good choice to get the proximity fuse to work, which is a job the 
Americans took on.

-- 
Bill Sloman, Sydney