When my mother proposed that we take a holiday together somewhere, and that I could choose the destination, I started by looking at the Geohashing Expeditions Map.
Where, I wondered, could I find a cluster of mostly-land graticules (“square” degree of latitude and longitude) in which nobody had ever logged a successful expedition?
I’ve been geohashing for ten years now and I’ve never yet scored a “Graticule Unlocked” achievement for being the first to reach any hashpoint in a given graticule.
Over the next week, if the fluctuations of the Dow Jones and the variable Irish weather allow, I’ll be changing that.
You’re probably familiar with the story of George and Robert Stephenson’s Rocket, a pioneering steam locomotive built in 1829.
If you know anything, it’s that Rocket won a competition and set the stage for a revolution in railways lasting for a century and a half that followed. It’s a cool story, but
there’s so much more to it that I only learned this week, including the bonkers story of 19th-century horse-powered locomotives.
The Rainhill Trials
Ten teams submitted applications to enter the Rainhill Trials, but only five actually took part. Four of these were the steam locomotives illustrated above.
Over the course of the 1820s, the world’s first inter-city railway line – the Liverpool & Manchester Railway – was constructed. It wasn’t initially anticipated that the new railway
would use steam locomotives at all: the technology was in its infancy, and the experience of the Stockton & Darlington railway, over on the other side of the Pennines, shows
why.
The Stockton & Darlington railway was opened five years before the new Liverpool & Manchester Railway, and pulled its trains using a mixture of steam locomotives and horses1.
The early steam locomotives they used turned out to be pretty disastrous. Early ones frequently broke their cast-iron wheels so frequently; some were too heavy for the lines and needed
reconstruction to spread their weight; others had their boilers explode (probably after safety valves failed to relieve the steam pressure that builds up after bringing the vehicle to a
halt); all got tied-up in arguments about their cost-efficiency relative to horses.
Nowadays, a train can be cancelled and a paying customer might barely get a half-hearted apology and a spot on a crowded rail replacement bus. But back in 1826 even the crew
of a broken-down train might be offered a copious allowance of beer to keep them motivated. Scan from page 119 of The North Eastern Railway; its rise
and development, by William Weaver Tomlinson.
Nearby, at Hetton colliery – the first railway ever to be designed to never require animal power – the Hetton Coal Company had become so-dissatisfied with the reliability and
performance of their steam locomotives – especially on the inclines – that they’d had the entire motive system. They’d installed a cable railway – a static steam engine pulled the mine
carts up the hill, rather than locomotives.
This kind of thing was happening all over the place, and the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Company were understandably cautious about hitching their wagon to the promise of steam
locomotives on their new railway. Furthermore, they were concerned about the negative publicity associated with introducing to populated areas these unpopular smoke-belching engines.
But they were willing to be proven wrong, especially after George Stephenson pointed out that this new, long, railway could find itself completely crippled by a single breakdown were it
to adopt a cable system. So: they organised a competition, the Rainhill Trials, to allow locomotive engineers the chance to prove their engines were up to the challenge.
When the Stockton & Darlington line began serving passengers in 1826, their advertisements only ever showed passenger coaches being pulled by horses, never steam locomotives.
The challenge was this: from a cold start, each locomotive had to haul three times its own weight (including their supply of fuel and water), a mile and three-quarters (the first and
last eighth of a mile of which were for acceleration and deceleration, but the rest of which must maintain a speed of at least 10mph), ten times, then stop for a break before doing it
all again.
Four steam locomotives took part in the competition that week. Perseverance was damaged in-transit on the way to the competition and was only able to take part on the
last day (and then only achieving a top speed of 6mph), but apparently its use of roller bearing axles was
pioneering. The very traditionally-designed Sans Pareil was over the competition’s weight limit, burned-inefficiently (thanks perhaps to an overenthusiastic
blastpipe that vented unburned coke right out of the funnel!), and broke down when one of its cylinders cracked2.
Lightweight Novelty – built in a hurry probably out of a fire engine’s parts – was a crowd favourite with its integrated tender and high top speed, but kept breaking
down in ways that could not be repaired on-site. And finally, of course, there was Rocket, which showcased a combination of clever innovations already used in steam
engines and locomotives elsewhere to wow the judges and take home the prize.
But there was a fifth competitor in the Rainhill Trials, and it was very different from the other four.
Cycloped
When you hear the words horse-powered locomotive, you probably think of a horse-drawn train. But that’s not a locomotive: a locomotive is a vehicle that, by definition, propels
itself3.
Which means that a horse-powered locomotive needs to carry the horse that provides its power…
If this isn’t the most-zany railway vehicle you’ve ever seen, please share what beats it.
…which is exactly what Cycloped did. A horse runs on a treadmill, which turns the wheels of a vehicle. The vehicle (with the horse on it) move. Tada!4
You might look at that design and, not-unreasonably, decide that it must be less-efficient than just having the horse pull the damn vehicle in the first place. But that isn’t
necessarily the case. Consider the bicycle which can transport itself and a human both faster and using less-energy than the human would achieve by walking. Or look at wind
turbine powered vehicles like Blackbird, which was capable of driving under wind
power alone at three times the speed of a tailwind and twice the speed of a headwind. It is mechanically-possible to improve the speed and efficiency of a
machine despite adding mass, so long as your force multipliers (e.g. gearing) is done right.
I’ve long loved this 2010 photo of Blackbird, simultaneously showing a flag (blowing left, with the wind) and a streamer (blowing right, as a result of the wind-powered
vehicle’s speed) demonstrating that it is travelling against the wind, but significantly faster than the wind.
Cycloped didn’t work very well. It was slower than the steam locomotives and at some point the horse fell through the floor of the treadmill. But as I’ve argued above, the
principle was sound, and – in this early era of the steam locomotive, with all their faults – a handful of other horse-powered locomotives would be built over the coming
decades.
Over in the USA, the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company successfully operated a passenger service using the Flying Dutchman, a horse-powered locomotive with twelve seats
for passengers. Capable of travelling at 12mph, this demonstrated efficiency multiplication over having the same horse pull the vehicle (which would either require fewer
passengers or a dramatically reduced speed).
This strange contraption was eventually replaced with a steam train, under the understanding that improvements in steam locomotive technology would continue to develop faster than
advancements in techniques for the selective breeding of horses.
As late as the early 1850s, people were still considering this strange approach. The 1851 Great Exhibition at the then brand-new Crystal Palace featured Impulsoria, which
represents probably the pinnacle of this particular technological dead-end.
Capable of speeds up to 20mph, it could go toe-to-toe with many contemporary steam locomotives, and it featured a gearbox to allow the speed and even direction of travel to be
controlled by the driver without having to adjust the walking speed of the two to four horses that provided the motive force.
The reins now arriving on platform one is the Mane Line service to Carlisle. Mind the gallop. Stand clear of the hackamore.
Personally, I’d love to have a go on something like the Flying Dutchman: riding a horse-powered vehicle with the horse is just such a crazy idea, and a road-capable
variant could make for a much better city tour vehicle than those 10-person bike things, especially if you’re touring a city with a particularly equestrian history.
Footnotes
1 From 1828 the Stockton & Darlington railway used horse power only to pull their
empty coal trucks back uphill to the mines, letting gravity do the work of bringing the full carts back down again. But how to get the horses back down
again? The solution was the dandy wagon, a special carriage that a horse rides in at the back of a train of coal
trucks. It’s worth looking at a picture of one, they’re brilliant!
2 Sans Pareil’s cylinder breakdown was a bit of a spicy issue at the time because its
cylinders had been manufactured at the workshop of their rival George Stephenson, and turned out to have defects.
3 You can argue in the comments whether a horse itself is a kind of locomotive. Also – and
this is the really important question – whether or not Fred Flintstone’s car, which is propelled by his feed, is a kind locomotive or not.
4 Entering Cycloped into a locomotive competition that expected, but didn’t
explicitly state, that entrants had to be a steam-powered locomotive, sounds like exactly the kind of creative circumventing of the rules that we all loved Babe (1995) for. Somebody should make a film about Cycloped.
On the way to school this morning, the 10-year-old lagged behind to build a small snowman.
On the way back, the dog saw the snowman, which wasn’t there when she’d passed earlier. She wanted to make it clear that she Did. Not. Trust. it. She stood back and growled at it for a
while, and then, eventually, was persuaded to come closer.
Leaning as far as her little legs could manage, she stretched to carefully sniff it while keeping her distance. She still wasn’t entirely happy and ran most of the way to the end of the
path to get away from the mysterious cold heap.
(This same dog earlier this year spent quarter of an hour barking at our wheelbarrow when, unusually, it was left in the middle of the lawn, rather than beside the shed. She doesn’t
like change!)
I was sceptical when the forecast said there’d be sleet and snow this morning, but sure enough, it’s just barely beginning to settle on the skylight of my attic bathroom. 🫢
Hypothetically-speaking, what would happen if convicted felon Donald Trump were assassinated in-between his election earlier this month and his inauguration in January?
There’ve been at least two assassination attempts so far, so it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that somebody will have another go at some point1.
Hello, Secret Service agents! Thanks for visiting my blog. I assume I managed to get the right combination of keywords to hit your watchlist. Just to be clear, this is
an entirely hypothetical discussion. I know that you’ve not always been the smartest about telling fiction from reality. But as you’ll see, I’m
just using the recent assassination attempts as a framing device to talk about the history of the succession of the position of President-Elect. Please don’t shoot me.
If the US President dies in office – and this happens around 18% of the time2 – the
Vice-President becomes President. But right now, convicted felon Donald Trump isn’t President. He’s President-Elect, which is a term used distinctly from
President in the US Constitution and other documents.
This card was pretty-much nerfed by Wizards’ ruling that Presidents-Elect, Vice-Presidents etc. were not (yet) kinds of President.
It turns out that the answer is that the Vice-President-Elect becomes President at the inauguration. This boring answer came to us through three different Constitutional Amendments,
each with its own interesting tale.
The Twelfth Amendment (1804) mostly existed to reform the Electoral College. Prior to the adoption of the Twelfth Amendment, the Electoral College members each cast two
ballots to vote for the President and Vice-President, but didn’t label which ballot was which position: the runner-up became Vice-President. The electors would carefully
and strategically have one of their number cast a vote for a third-party candidate to ensure the person they wanted to be Vice-President didn’t tie with the person they wanted to be
President. Around the start of the 19th century this resulted in several occasions on which the President and Vice-President had been bitter rivals but were now forced to work
together3.
While fixing that, the Twelfth Amendment also saw fit to specify what would happen if between the election and the inauguration the President-Elect died: that the House of
Representatives could choose a replacement one (by two-thirds majority), or else it’d be the Vice-President. Interesting that it wasn’t automatically the Vice-President,
though!
It didn’t happen like this. In real life, there was a lot less singing, and a lot more old white men.
The Twentieth Amendment (1933) was written mostly with the intention of reducing the “lame duck” period. Here in the UK, once we elect somebody, they take power
pretty-much immediately. But in the US, an election in November traditionally resulted in a new President being inaugurated almost half a year later, in March. So the Twentieth
Amendment reduced this by a couple of months to January, which is where it is now.
In an era of high-speed road, rail, and air travel and digital telecommunications even waiting from November to January seems a little silly, though. In any case, a secondary feature of
the Twentieth Amendment was that it removed the rule about the House of Representatives getting to try to pick a replacement President first, saying that they’d just fall-back on the
Vice-President in the first instance. Sorted.
Just 23 days later, the new rule almost needed to be used, except that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s would-be assassin Giuseppe Zangara missed his tricky shot.
The Twentieth Amendment (1967) aimed to fix rules-lawyering. The constitution originally said that f the President is removed from office, dies, resigns, or is
otherwise unable to use his powers and fulfil his duties, then those powers and duties go to the Vice-President.
Note the wording there. The constitution said that if a President died, their their duties and powers would go to the Vice-President. Not the Presidency itself. You’d
have a Vice-President, acting as President, who wasn’t actually a President. And that might not matter 99% of the time… but it’s the edge cases that get you.[foonote]Looking
for some rules-lawyering? Okay: what about rules on Presidential term limits? You can’t have more than two terms as President, but what if you’ve had a term as Vice-President
but acting with Presidential powers after the President died? Can you still have two terms? This is the kind of constitutional craziness that munchkin US history scholars get
off on.[/footnote]
It also insisted that if there’s no Vice-President, you’ve got to get one. You’d think it was obvious that if the office of Vice-President exists in part to provide a “backup” President
in case, y’know, the nearly one-in-five chance that the President dies… that a Vice-President who finds themselves suddenly the President would probably want to have one!
But no: 18 Presidents4served without a Vice-President for at least some of their
term: four of them never had a Vice-President. That includes 17th
President Andrew Johnson, who you’d think would have known better. Johnson was Vice-President under Abraham Lincoln until, only a month after the inauguration, Lincoln was assassinated,
putting Johnson in change of the country. And he never had a Vice-President of his own. He served only barely shy of the full four years without one.
Anyway; that was a long meander through the history of the Constitution of a country I don’t even live in, to circle around a question that doesn’t matter. The thought randomly came to
me while I was waiting for the traffic lights at the roadworks outside my house to change. And now I know the answer.
Very hypothetically, of course.
Footnotes
1 My personal headcanon is that the would-be assassins are time travellers from the
future, Chrononauts-style, trying to flip a linchpin and bring about a stable future in which he wasn’t elected. I
don’t know whether or not that makes Elon Musk one of the competing time travellers, but you could conceivably believe that he’s Squa Tront in disguise, couldn’t you?
2 The US has had 45 presidents, of whom eight have died during their time in office. Of
those eight, four – half! – were assassinated! It’s a weird job. 8 ÷ 45 ≈ 18%.
3 If you’re familiar with Hamilton, you’ll recall its characterisation of the
election of 1800 with President Thomas Jefferson dismissing his Vice-President Aaron Burr after a close competition for the seat of President which was eventually settled when
Alexander Hamilton instructed Federalist party members in the House of Representatives to back Jefferson over Burr. The election result really did happen like that – it seems that
whichever Federalist in the Electoral College that was supposed to throw away their second vote failed to do so! – but it’s not true that he was kicked-out by Jefferson: in fact, he
served his full four years as Vice-President, although Jefferson tried to keep him as far from actual power as possible and didn’t nominate him as his running-mate in 1804. Oh, and in
1807 Jefferson had Burr arrested for treason, claiming that Burr was trying to capture part of the South-West of North America and force it to secede and form his own country: the
accusation didn’t stick, but it ruined Burr’s already-faltering political career. Anyway, that’s a diversion.
4 17 different people, but that’s not how we could Presidents apparently.
The rest of the family and I are visiting for my youngest’s birthday to do a handful of fun activities. Geocaching didn’t make the list, but that wasn’t gonna stop me finding this
QEF while putting our swimming stuff back in the car before we eat our lunch. Thanks to the hint, this was in almost the first place I looked.
TFTC, and greetings from Oxfordshire!
Was playing around with some HTML and made a cable car for my page. Hmh.
Beautiful. It feels like it ought to have been wrapped in a HTML Web Component, maybe called <cable-car>, with progressive enhancement bonus features (maybe it’ll
only run during daylight hours? or when the wind isn’t too fast?)?
On a number of occasions over the first two decades of this century I’ve attempted to write a particular short story with a science fiction/alternate history feel. Now, I’ve given up on
it, and that’s… fine.
Fiction
The story’s taken several forms over the years, but the theme’s always been the same: a crazy narrative spun by an isolated society turns out, incredibly, to be true. But ultimately the
people who discover that fact choose to keep it a secret because the flawed lie they live in is preferable to the instability and chaos that they fear could result. It taps into ideas
about conspiracy theories, hidden worlds, and the choices we make when we have to choose between living authentically or living comfortably.
Guess this Obsidian note is off to the “Never” folder, now.
In its most-concrete form, the story covered the political aftermath of the capture by the DPRK of a fishing boat that (allegedly) drifted into North Korean waters1. The North Korea of the story represents the country at its most
isolationist and mysterious, and the captured trawler crew are surprised to experience at Pyongyang a socialist utopia supported by futuristic technology. It turns out that North
Korea’s in-universe propaganda is true: they really are an advanced self-reliant nation whose message of peace is being distorted by Western imperialist leaders. Insofar as the truth is
known in the West, it’s suppressed for fear that the Korean model represents a democratic, post-scarcity future that threatens to undermine the power of the oligarchs of the world.
When the boat and those aboard it are repatriated with the assumption that they will act as ambassadors to the outside world, the crew are subjected to interrogations and cajoling by
their home nations. They mustn’t talk about what they saw North of the 38th parallel, they’re told, with threats of imprisonment and violence if they do and financial inducements
offered for their compliance. But in the end, the most-effective message for getting the wayward fisherfolk on side is their realisation that the world isn’t ready for the truth. In a
dialogue between the imprisoned seafarers, they agree that they should take the bribes and return quietly to their families, not for their own sake but because they believe that telling
their story would lead to a terrible war between two equally-matched parties: a small nation armed with futuristic sci-fi weapons, on one side, and the might of the nuclear superpowers
of the rest of the world.
As a final twist, it’s revealed that the captain of the vessel was actually a spy, aware of the truth the entire time, who allowed the boat to go off-course with an aim of gathering
information on the North Korean situation. The story finishes with the captain, having been instrumental in persuading their crew not to share what they saw, wavering in their
confidence, and possibly being implied to be the author of the story.
Re-reading my notes and drafted content, I’ve got to admit that it’s got a certain feel of… Dr.
Strangelove discovers Wakanda? Or maybe more like the Pueblo incident set in the world of They Live.2
It might’ve been fun to finish, someday, but now it’s not.
Sadder
That nod to Dr. Strangelove is apt, because my aim was to write something which looked farcically at the nature of political competition on a global scale, in a world in
which the zaniest possible conspiracy theory turned out to be true. Strangelove used the existence of a Project Sundial-style doomsday device as the surprise truth; I was using the idea that DPRK propaganda might actually be more-honest
than the narratives of its rivals3.
“Gee, I wish we had one of them doomsday machines,” was funnier when nuclear annihilation was the
only existential threat we were routinely talking about. Nowadays saying it sounds like it carries a bit of Farnsworth’s dejected “I don’t
want to live on this planet anymore” energy.
In my off-and-on-again long-running effort to pen the story, I last made any real effort back in around 2015-2016. Since then, the entire concept hasn’t been funny any more. Today, the
story would be less farce than lampoonery, and not in a good way.
When I first envisaged the concept of the story, researching conspiracy theories meant laughing at Flat Earthers and picking holes in the arguments of the proponents of a “moon landing
hoax”. For the most part, conspiracy theories seemed ridiculous, but not dangerous4.
But somewhere along the way from then to now, conspiracy theories started becoming more… mainstream?
Don’tcha miss when conspiracy theorists were mostly harmless idiots?
It turns out that my comedy villain – the leader of the “free” world who leverages enormous power to lie to and manipulate everybody – isn’t a laughing matter any more.
Perhaps I should try my hand at writing bleak, dystopian fiction instead.
Footnotes
1 Like this incident in 2009, perhaps, although there are lots of similar examples before and since.
2 In my notes somewhere I’ve got a concept that I never explored for the story which was
that North Korea is under the control of a benevolent alien species trying to uplift humanity, while much of the rest of the developed world is under the influence of a malicious
alien species who’re using their position to push humans to terraform Earth into something more-suited to their needs. So maybe like The Forge of God but with a climate change message? I never really worked
on this idea though because it felt like I was weaving too many concepts into one tiny narrative.
4 Obviously I know there are exceptions and I’m speaking from a position of privilege. For
a long while, for example, conspiracy theories relating to holocaust denialism have caused real harm to people. And of course there’s for a long while been actual damage caused by
folks who (loudly) subscribe to false beliefs about HIV, or 9/11, or Sandy Hook, and countless others.
5 This is the kind of conspiracy theory that should be funny: idiot who bitches
about claimed birthplace of president annoys that president enough that he times a battle with a wanted terrorist, so that the terrorist’s death will coincide with the timeslot of the
idiot’s TV programme. But somehow, the way that politics has gone lately, especially in the USA, means that it’s not funny any more. Easily-disprovable conspiracy theories
were amusing when they were the territory of crazy fringe groups; once they get tens of thousands of (armed, militant) believers, they go from being an amusement to being a dangerous
cult.
My past self, receiving a copy of Transport Tycoon for his 14th birthday, would have his mind blown if he could see the kind of insanely-complex super-stations that are
possible in (the open-source successor to) the game 30 years on.
Of course, this kind of thing – multiple simultaneously shared in-and-out routes on a bidirectional station – wasn’t (sensibly) possible before the introduction of path-based signalling in OpenTTD 0.7.0. And modern path-based signals in the game are even smarter.
But still, 14-year-old me had a dream. And nowadays that dream is real.
The dog and I came out to Ducklington today for a spot of geohashing, in search of the 2024-11-14 51 -1 geohashpoint.
After a walk around the fields to the East we had to give up on that expedition (for reasons that’ll be described in my geohashing log) so we decided to console ourselves with a hunt
for this nearby geocache, instead.
Solving the first part was made harder when I failed to read the description properly and started counting letters in the sign, rather than the plaque, but once we’d corrected that
mistake we were on our way.
At the GZ there was a clear trail that looked likely, but the dog took some coaxing to join us. As soon as I was at the coordinates (feeling like I was hiding in a bush!) and followed
the hint instructions the cache was an easy find. TFTC!
The dog and I drove out to Ducklington, parking near the church, and walked out to these fields. Unfortunately the hashpoint turns out to be 33+ metres into a field full of sheep. That
_might’ve_ been the kind of trespassing I’d have been willing to consider, were it not for the combination of the amount of pedestrian traffic (a whole platoon of birdwatchers, armed
with extra-long camera lenses, and every dog walker under the sun!) and the fact that I had the dog with me (who’d have to have waited unhappily outside the field: not taking her _into_
a field of sheep, even by only 33 metres).
So near, and yet so far…
Instead, then, we took a pleasant walk around Ducklington and found the GC656RM “Church Micro 8564…Ducklington”
geocache, so it wasn’t entirely a wasted trip. The dog’s come home and zonked out in her basket after a decent walk, anwyay!
Maybe it’s just that my sabbatical is making me pay more attention then usual, but it feels like I’m getting very lucky with nearby geohashpoints lately. Tomorrow’s hashpoint in my
graticule might be achievable!
This is a good omen, perhaps, for next week. Next week my mother and I are going to hop over to the West coast of Ireland where there are several contiguous mostly-land graticules that
have never seen a successful expedition. We could be the first! 🤞
Kids’ ability to pick up new words from context is amazing.
Kids’ confidence even when they’ve misunderstood how a word is used is hilarious. 😊
This evening, our 7-year-old was boasting about how well-behaved his class was while their regular teacher had to attend an all-day meeting, vs how much it impressed the temporary
teacher they had.
His words: “Today we had a supply teacher and we totally DOMINATED her!”
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