Engineered Solution
This is a personal story about solving an engineering problem using logic rather than waiting for evolution to find an answer using trial and error. In the late 1970s, I had a friend who was a computer salesman and had invested in several oil wells. Apparently, being in sales pays better than engineering. He was concerned that since the price had risen from $40 per barrel to $80 per barrel his well production had gone down. He wanted me to protect his investment.
I went to West Texas to look at the wells. He had three that looked pretty much like this. All three wells pumped oil into a storage tank near the wells.
The storage tank was about 30′ in diameter and about 8′ tall. I reasoned that the best control would be to measure the oil in the tank all of the time. The best way to do that was to measure how full the tank was. Polaroid Camera had a device on the front of their cameras that sent an ultrasound signal and measured the time to return the signal, thereby giving the distance to the picture subject. I bought several of these and created a circuit board that triggered the Polaroid pulse, measured the time until echo returned, and converted that into depth of the oil. I transmitted the time delay to the oilfield office for monitoring. My friend was ecstatic.
It didn’t take long. The next week, we detected a sudden drop in the level of the tank at 7 AM and sent the local sheriff to investigate. A field worker was draining the water from the bottom of the tank. Oil well output is a mixture of oil and water and the water collects at the bottom. You have to drain it before moving the oil into an oil truck.
A lot of time and money to find it was a natural field operation. Soon after, the price dropped from $80 to $20 per barrel, but it was a fun project.
Types of Communication Media
Acoustical Reverberation
Echo – Wikipedia When data is turned into sound, it can “bounce” off solid objects and return to the sending site. One of the examples given in the Wikipedia echo article is Echo Point which is in the Blue Hills of Australia, just west of Sydney. When we visited, the was an Aborigine playing the didgeridoo. With the echo, he only had to play 60% of the time. (Not really). It is quite an impressive site.
One of the first computer uses of sound storage was to make radar signals easier to read during WWII. Stationary objects such as buildings or parked planes would appear in the image. John Adam Presper Eckert Jr. (what a great name) used a column of mercury with a speaker at one end and a microphone at the other to store the images of the static structure and the inverted the signals and fed them back into the system to eliminate them. Delay-line memory – Wikipedia.
When I worked at IBM in the early 60s, memory was very expensive and IBM developed a video monitor IBM 2260 – Wikipedia that used a coiled wire to store the “dots” on the screen. Like the radar application, it had a transducer to generate the sound and a microphone to detect the dots before sending them through the wire again. The strangest part to me was that the wires had to be kept in an oven to keep the time delay constant.
Wired connection – output from one computing module is connected to another using a conducting element or compound – e.i. – a channel between logic devices. In the case of pre-history, this could be cracks between pieces of silicon logic. Modern channels are etchings on microchips.
Electromagnetic radiation (radio waves) Electromagnetic radiation – Wikipedia that transmits data. In the speculation I presented earlier, if you have powerful enough solar cells, you can broadcast to the Universe. Wardenclyffe Tower – Wikipedia
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