I love '50s tech names; "Reservisor", "device-o-tron", "thing-o-matic"

Fran wrote below the video: "Why can't displays be this cool today?" - And I totally agree.

Since you mentioned escapements, it occurs to me that a half dozen of these displays, properly configured, could make a really cool clicky clock.

Imagine how it must have sounded to have an entire wall of these firing constantly.

My father worked for Teleregister in the 1950's through 1970's. He was a repairman for the "Big Board" at the NYSE and used to bring broken parts home for me and my brother to play with. We made up all kinds of stuff with these devices. So fun to see this video! Thanks.

Forget about the mechanics, that font is absolutely amazing.

This was a really nice explanation. Clear camera work and demo, and interesting history. Enjoyed a lot.

Can you imagine how it would be working in a stock office where you had hundreds of these things CLACK CLACK CLACKING away all day?

I do wonder who designed the typefaces for all these cool displays that Fran digs up for us.

These would make an interesting electro-mechanical clock I think.

These displays are very similar in operation to score reels on early electromechanical pinball machines from around the same era. I'd suggest checking out Joes Classic Video Games channel... they have several (dozen) repair videos on electromechanical pinball machines (and later stuff too) where he goes into detail of their operation including displays, bonus counters and other cool stuff. EM pinball machines have an artistry to them that modern electronics just aren't capable of

12:38 - cool Texas Tnstruments vintage calculator.

This is what you do best Fran. Eloquent and interesting as always. Keep up the great work. Thank you.

Hi Fran Bill B here and I worked for Teleregister starting in 1959 to 1988. The indicator that you have there was part of the Stock Boards that Teleregister provided stock quotation from 1930 till 1968. Your explanation of how it operated is basically correct. Everytime a price was updated the indicators in that field would first be cleared to blank and then pulsed to the desired number. Clearing the indicators to blank provided a way of knowing where the indicator was. One area that you were amiss is the operating voltage. It was 48 to 54 volts. The pulse rate was about 20PPS and the duty cycle was 50% The clearing pulses always numbered 10 and it insured the indicator would be at the blank location. Then the lower contact would be grounded and anywhere from 0 to 10 pulses would spin the indicator to the desired number.

That new intro never gets old-it’s absolutely perfect. A wall full of these teleregister displays must’ve been quite loud with all the mechanical clattering. We snicker at pulse phone systems now, but it allows the elegant simplicity of being able to accomplish so much with only 2 or 3 contacts. It would be interesting to see the controller that produced the pulses to operate these displays, but I’m sure it was enormous and is long gone. The vertical axis of the barrel forces the display space to be really narrow compared to the overall width of the unit. Kind of interesting to compare to horizontal axis barrels like odometers. It also makes me appreciate why Heathrow’s iconic flip displays are made the way they are-the two pieces allow a greater area of each unit to be used for characters.

I love these electromechanical devices and they throw me back to a time in history to when things like this were magical. I can only imagine the sound of a wall of these things doing a zero reset.

The two oval openings on the top are the sockets where the 'lock' popped in when you slid it into the rack. You needed to release the lock manually (which required a special tool) in order to extract it from the rack.

Those would be super cool if they had radium luminescent painted displays

So imagine a room with massive Teleregister displays busily working. I want to hear that sound! Thanks Fran.

I am old enough to have been alive in 1959 when these were built. If you could use your amazing talents to make an electronic machine to transport me back to that era I would be very grateful Fran. Getting bit fed up with so called life today !

An ingenious and surprisingly complex display. I'm enjoying this series of old switches, lamps and displays.

That TI-30 brings back some memories!

I love it when you casually whip out the Texas Instruments to do a little arithmetic. I had one of those TI calculators in the late '70s. Upgraded to an HP 10C programmable calculator in 1982, for university.

I can only imagine the awesome sound a board would've made when reset all to blanks and the clunking noise all day during use

Fran, I worked as an engineer for the Teleregister Corporation AKA Bunker Ramo Corp in Stamford CT. In the nid 60s. Be happy to answer any questions you may have. Also, I like to comment that the numerical indicator you have was also used by the New Haven railroad, banking industry and a small installation in Denver Colorado for the United Airlines system.

Omg memories of my childhood - that TI-30!

love the font. interesting explanation of a clever mechanism

Yes. Fans of the TV series Mission: Impossible (1966 to 1973) have seen these digital displays - and other similar ones in many scenes. Thanks for sharing the info on these neat early digital displays.

This is just the sort of thing my dad would see and try to build himself. Back in the sixties, he'd have coil forms, masonite, brass screws and spools of enameled magnet wire to make his own latching relays. It was fun to him.

My father worked for this company selling these to stock brokers in NYC. Awesome, thanks for this!

Your calculator brings back memories of when I had one .

More cool display stuff! The first thing this reminded me of was a synchronous clock system. (Master clocks like schools and airports.) The Simplex system used a setup kinda like that so at the 59th minute, it would open the input lead and no advance until a pulse went thru the other contact, setting it to 00 and reconnecting the input again. So a few extra pulses would insure all clocks started correctly. And, as others noted, very like a pinball score reel. For resetting the reels to 00000 at the start the reset relay would route a bunch of fast pulses from the score motor thru a contact on the reel that would drop out at 0. Love that "chunk, chunk, chunk" sound as several reels reset. (My pin has four banks of 4 reels each, so can be a bit noisy!) Love EM pins. A lot more work to maintain than electronic pins, but often more responsive and tune-able. And very satisfying to get back to full speed and function! Mechanical logic is fun... Stu

"Still Amazing! 1950's Teleregister" No, YOU'RE still amazing Fran!

These things are just fascinating. The things they thought up to make the most of what they had at the time.

12:40 a vintage TI-30 calculator! I have one of those. It was a gift from one of my aunts when I was a teen back in the '80s. The manual was bigger than the calculator! I have since moved to Texas and live within half-an-hour of Texas Instruments

All of your videos need to be saved and stored, they are pure gold. Please keep making them I learn more from some of your casual comments than I have from hours of study. You are an incredible teacher.

sweeeet. that was way more simple than i was initially thinking. good design. thank you fran!

Great series. Really interesting to see the evolution of these displays. Hope that there are more to come!

I truly appreciate your incredible knowledge!

Fran, thank you for showing these kind of awesome displays, and with so much info. it's really nice to learn about these things!

Ha ha this intro is exactly what I wanted to see. SUCH a GREAT video opener!

Your videos are the only ones I continue to watch during the credits. The song is so catchy and charming

As others have pointed out, this works the same way EM pinball displays work. I suspect the upper leaf switch was the reset circuit that was senta series of 10 pulses that guaranteed the home blank position. Afterwards, numeric data was pulsed in through the lower leaf terminal. The case would have been the common ground. I also wonder if the working voltage was 6.3 volts, which was at that time very common as it was the same used for supplying tube filaments, and tube gear was still the prevalent technology of the time. In fact, the solenoid may well be designed for ac power, which had an added benefit of not causing the large emi kickback when the magnetic field collapsed - EM pinballs used AC solenoids for that same reason. Still very interesting - I have not seen that specific display before. Love it!

these videos are endlessly fascinating.

You totally get points for using that vintage calculator

Fran - you always do cool stuff, but this series on old display technology is absolutely outstanding! Thank you!

Clever little unit... Always enjoy seeing how carries are implemented on older devices like these!

Very interesting. Coming from a digital hardware design background, it is refreshing and I enjoy the vintage “analogish”’ equipment experimental videos. Nice job. Thanks.

12:49 She's using a Texas instruments TI-30 calculator. I had that same exact calculator in High School 1976-77. Now that is old school....and way cool. Rock on Fran!

The patent drawings show some really cool designs. US2737650A Including the copper dial plates. EDIT found the rack in which these slide, it's at edit 6. EDIT 9 Found the actual patent drawing for the unit in the video US1979028A. The ratchet mechanism dates back to 1932!!! Whoa. This baby is even older than the 50's. Edit 2: US2617870A is also interesting. Edit 3: whoa, check this one out. US3245074A yeah, i fell down the hole. Edit 4: another variant US2737650A Edit 5: On the original patent, one of his partners (if that's what you call them) had this one US1890878A Edit 6: JACKPOT found the rack in which the dial is set, check this baby out. US2117661A

Hi Fran. Greatly enjoy your channel, particularly those featuring vintage display tech. In UK some rail control centres of the late 1950s to early 70s used very similar rotary displays made by Sodeco to store and display four-character train IDs. These tracked around schematic representations of the network by applying a train of ten pulses for each character when a train passed a trackside signal out in the field. The pulses would first rotate the source display round to a home position then be switched to the destination display for the remainder to count up to the previously stored value. All based on telephone exchange type equipment, off-stage storage of an ID used rotary selectors and the operators entered IDs using old-fashioned rotary telephone dials. A very simple system conceptually, but the displays were maintenance-intensive and were all changed out for various alternative displays over the years before the old control panels were themselves superseded fully by computer screen-based technology. When I was a trainee back in the early 80s, there were still a few of these displays around but they were gone very soon after that. Swindon Panel Society have such an old control panel at the Didcot Railway Centre museum with an operations simulator under the hood. For the train number display, the panel is currently still equipped with the display screens that were there at decommissioning in 2015, but there's a project to restore these mechanical oddities on part of it, along with some of the other displays used over its history. Here's a video of one of the displays in action. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/itl2krei18XPomg.html

I guess that the isolation at the blank Display part could be used for leading zero removal too. Excellent piece of kit and video.

Thank you for this interesting content.

Cool stuff Fran, I love seeing how this old things work

I’m diggin’ the 40+ year old TI-30 calculator. I had one just like it in high school in my physics class in ‘76-‘77. I think it cost about $30 which was a good some of money back then. Brings back some great memories.

Amazing how the were able to cram the numbers so close.

Love the graphics, the style is timeless, I hope to see these stylish numbers come back in media such as tv

You're going to hate me for this, my teletype workshop in a telephone building was in the room where these "counters" were installed in a huge array. The clickety clack didn't bother me much, they were pretty quiet compared to a Model 35 Teletype banging away. The counters slid in from the front and made contact with contacts at the back. There were single digit counters by row and column and then multi-digit ones in the rows and columns. When they switched over to fully computerized counting systems, they turned them all off and I was amazed at how quiet it got in there. I was there when they tore out all the old equipment, just throwing all of the counters into big plastic rolling carts which they took out and dumped to be taken to a bulk recycler. I "salvaged" a few of the single and multi digit counters to use with my model railroad, but that project also got scrapped in favor of computerization. Eventually I just tossed them myself. Although telco standard battery was 48 to 52 volts, the phone companies did use other voltages in and around the offices, and 12V is easily derived from 48V. Along side various switches and frames, you would find little bakelite blocks with several different voltages present in order to facilitate testing.

Can only imagine how much one of those complete panels weighed, with hundreds of these modules

Marvelous work Sherlock !...cheers.

II appreciate all of your videos! Thx from germany!

An array of these must have sounded so crazy in action.

Great find Fran

Love this!! Thank you

When I was a kid my grandad had mini traveling displays (like the zipper on Times Square). Had a paper band. Punched it out to read like letters. Ran on a clock type motor. Wish I still had it. Skys the limit for electromechanical displays. I used to work on central clock systems. They got extremely elaborate.

Love the typeface used in the display. Spent a few minute looking for it, but didn't find anything right off the bat. Love the path these display videos have take you! Thanks Fran. :)

The figures are very close each other to cover the eleven slots available on the drum's circumference as most efficiently as posiible and are tall and narrow. The result was a very ellegant typography in my modest opinion. I'm sure that the designer of those symbols kept in mind to make em visually pleasent.

Now that is nice, showing electromechanical devices with long nails ...nice !

Another frantastic video. Thanks a franillion.

I like the TI calculator right out of the 1970s

Love the TI 30 calculator

It's sort of stuff, how big is to run stock market information systems is absolutely amazing. Thanks for doing this one Fran

Interesting and educational as always. Keep up the great work!

November 17 1958 I was 8 days old ! The display is wearing better than me.

So, when I'm investigating an unknown coil for a relay or solenoid, I use an adjustable current source. By gradually ramping up the current to the point where the device activates, you can simply measure the voltage that develops across the coil. I'm a tad weird in that I prefer current source driver circuits for coils and L.E.D. circuits.

Reminds me of the old airport schedule boards. Very cool.

Grate job on this video!

I can almost hear what the stock exchange boards would have sounded like every time they update. Almost like a telephony stepper switch. Something cool about mechanical stuff like this.

Hey, for me the calculator is vintage enough! I just about remember those. Great video.

👍👍 Thanks Fran!

I'm hearing the sounds of the schedule boards at a very large passenger train station in Chicago, circa 1969.

Fun to see the TI calculator. I spent 50 hours wadges to buy a 6 function TI for my physics class in 1974.

I remember these.. bought them surplus a very long time ago.

Thanks for sharing this Fran :)

Fran you rock!

The spring steel piece on top which looks like copper color is the locking mechanism. To install these and remove them you simply slide them in from the front. They lock in place. They were designed to be easy to remove and reinstall if one of them failed. Also, the reason they are so close in size to the later displays is actually flip-flopped. The later displays were designed to replace these, that is why they are the same size.

Thanks for making me feel archaic. I was born in 1961. I can't believe electronics were this stone age at that time.

So cool! Reminds me of the rotary step-by-step relays in the old phone systems I used to scavenge!

That is a nice device that, as a fun project, can be reproduced with 3d printing, small solenoid and a few wires. I did a note, to return to this, when I will have free time

Keep doing more of this Fran

Nice forensic analysis of technology that drove the financial and the airline industry in my childhood.

Really cool. Thanks.

I recall seeing a smaller Alpha-Numeric display on a B-52 bomber in an old Cold War film. It was used for receiving coded messages from command. I remember it making that click clack noise as the letters and numbers registered on it.

I was browsing eBay because I was watching your display videos and I almost bought the exact listing on eBay

Very interesting...and cool! Thanks!

Great choice of device.

Thanks, Fran. Beautifully analyzed and explained, as always. Imagine the sound of hundreds of these being updated with stock prices. Four would make a rather nifty clickety-clackety clock, driven via a microprocessor, of course. Why not mix the old and the new? Looking forward to whatever you dig up next!

awesome reed switches. Throwing sparks is a great thing.

the 1950s teleregister and the 1970s ti30 calculator, quite an era!

At 2:44 it seems that both Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald were working with these.