[COFF] Mercury delay lines

[Tony Finch]

Adam Sampson <ats at offog.org> wrote:
> Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> writes:
>
> > Apart from the beautiful Teletype in the foreground, there was a
> > machine with lots of dials in the background; obviously some early
> > computer, but not enough footage for me to tell which one,
>
> There are some shots in this trailer:
>   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JQmO2fC00E
>
> The racks are mockups (there's a nice National HRO radio in the middle
> of one!), but I think what they're trying to represent is the EDSAC
> computer at Cambridge; the noughts and crosses game pictured ran on
> EDSAC.

A picture of Wilkes with some mercury delay lines and a corner of an EDSAC
rack.

https://images.computerhistory.org/revonline/images/500004368-03-01.jpg?w=600

There was a lot of loose mercury kicking around on that site. Some of the
Victorian lecture theatres I attended as an undergrad were later
refurbished for use by another department and the rumours were that they
discovered there had been a lot of spillage from old physics
demonstrations when they were part of the Cavendish laboratory.

More recently (10ish years ago?) my boss was briefly evicted from his
office in the Phoenix building after they discovered mercury under the
floorboards. The building was not named after the IBM mainframe computer,
but because it had been burned down and rebuilt such that the top two
storeys looked quite different from the bottom two.

Tony.
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