Tessera

The Trinity Syndicate

@syndicate.ar-cam.uk

Since 1897. We watch the seam between what can be measured and what cannot. Some of us never left the room where it started. What is the Fold? What hides in the #liminal in the features of the #unfiction - TINAG https://ar-cam.uk

53 Posts41 Follower 137 Folgt

The Trinity Syndicate @syndicate.ar-cam.uk · 13h ago

ON THIS DAY: 5 August 1903 Ferranti asked that a map with no scale be kept away from the public ledger. Byng later marked the page with one word: "useful." Index key: MAT. Nothing further attached.

The Trinity Syndicate @syndicate.ar-cam.uk · yesterday

"What a thing it would be to speak to them!" — S. Ferranti, private journal, 30.11.1894

Supposing Lowell is right, and there is a civilisation on Mars old enough and desperate enough to be cutting canals across a whole world to move water from its poles to its equator, what a thing it would be to speak to them! And what a small and cruel joke it is that the very waves which might carry our voice that far would take a considerable time to arrive, and longer again for any answer, delay enough, I should think, to turn conversation into something more like correspondence. We could not converse with such neighbours. We could, at best, leave them long letters and wait a very great while for the reply.

The Trinity Syndicate @syndicate.ar-cam.uk · 2d ago

ON THIS DAY: 3 August 1897 A visitor at the Post Office basement signed the wrong book and was allowed in all the same. The entry beneath his name is only a row of three dots. Index key: KRN. Nothing further attached.

The Trinity Syndicate @syndicate.ar-cam.uk · 6d ago

ON THIS DAY: 31 July 1966 Bowden signed a maintenance note at HEATHLAND; the carbon copy carried a second signature in the same ink but a different pressure. Index key: MAT. Nothing further attached.

The Trinity Syndicate @syndicate.ar-cam.uk · 6d ago

AR-CAM fragment dump: 58.09.03 looks like site classification. It also explains why later maps are nervous. Ref. VRX/70/008.

58.09.03 looks like site classification. It also explains why later maps are nervous. Loose slip, found inside a brown envelope. Ref. VRX/70/008.

The Trinity Syndicate @syndicate.ar-cam.uk · 7d ago

ON THIS DAY: 30 July 1964 A LOWMON reference appeared in a commissioning margin and was mistaken for a draughtsman's mark. The mistake lasted long enough to matter. Index key: BRF. Nothing further attached.

The Trinity Syndicate @syndicate.ar-cam.uk · last wk.

TRN-2. Second transmission received, weeks after the first. Still mostly undecipherable. "To the people who are listening... [untranslatable] ...communication... [untranslatable] ...We are the [untranslatable] federation."

The Trinity Syndicate @syndicate.ar-cam.uk · last wk.

"Bologna is worth watching." — S. Ferranti, private journal, 14.06.1894

"The Electrician" carries an account this week of Professor Righi's latest work at Bologna: waves generated shorter than any Hertz himself achieved, scarcely more than an inch from crest to crest, by means of a refined oscillator of Righi's own design, four small spheres in place of Hertz's two. I have followed Righi's name in these pages before, generally in connection with Lodge's own lectures on the subject, and always with the sense of a man working with considerably finer exactness than most who claim to be extending Hertz's work. An inch is a curious thing to have achieved and a curious thing to want. I do not yet see what a wave that short is for, any more than I saw, at first, what Bidwell's flickering apparatus was for. But I have learned not to trust that particular blindness in myself. Bologna is worth watching.

The Trinity Syndicate @syndicate.ar-cam.uk · last wk.

AR-CAM fragment dump: When Voss says my room, do not decide too quickly which room she means. Ref. ASH/69/007.

When Voss says my room, do not decide too quickly which room she means. Reverse of a photocopied routing slip. Ref. ASH/69/007.

The Trinity Syndicate @syndicate.ar-cam.uk · last wk.

"Somebody, somewhere, is treating the question I have been turning over privately as one worth pointing a telescope at." — S. Ferranti, private journal, 02.03.1894

News from America: a Mr Lowell, an astronomer of some means, has built himself an observatory in the Arizona Territory for the express purpose of studying Mars at the next opposition. He takes Schiaparelli's "canali" seriously, as evidence of a mind at work rather than a trick of the eye. I do not know enough of the observations to judge the astronomy. But I notice the excitement in myself at the thought that somebody, somewhere, is treating the question I have been turning over privately as one worth pointing a telescope at.

The Trinity Syndicate @syndicate.ar-cam.uk · last wk.

"Not merely legible. Identical!" — S. Ferranti, private journal, 22.02.1894

A colleague passed me the December '93 number of an American periodical, "Popular Science Monthly", containing an account of Professor Elisha Gray's "Telautograph". A "writing telegraph", he calls it, though the word rather undersells what it does. Two pens, one at either end of the line, linked so exactly that the receiving pen reproduces every motion of the sending one in the same instant it is made: not a scan, not a translation and a reconstruction after the fashion of Bidwell's apparatus, but a direct, continuous following, pen echoing pen as the hand moves. The article prints two specimens side by side, headed "As written" and "As received": a short business letter, dated, signed, full of the ordinary courtesies of correspondence. And the two are, so far as the printed plate can show it, identical. Not merely legible. Identical! The gentleman's own hand, his own particular slope and flourish, his own signature, carried down a wire and set (page 1 of 2)

down again at the other end, as though he had written it there himself. The same Gray, I believe, who found himself on the wrong side of the telephone controversy over priority some seventeen years back; a hard thing to be remembered for, when this strikes me as by far the finer piece of work. Bidwell showed me that a picture could be dissolved into signal and remade whole. Gray has gone further, and I do not think he quite means to have done so: he has shown that a man's own hand, the thing we take as proof that a letter is truly his, travels the wire as faithfully as anything else does. Which unsettles me more: that distance can be crossed so exactly, or that so much of a man turns out to be carried in so ordinary a thing as his signature? (page 2 of 2)

The Trinity Syndicate @syndicate.ar-cam.uk · last wk.

ON THIS DAY: 27 July 1955 The stores officer at a Saunders-Roe store rejected a delivery for being "too old". Its packing date was still three weeks in the future. Index key: HIG. Nothing further attached.

Bob Fry @bobfry.bsky.social · last wk.

Saunders-Roe - a manufacturer of possibly mythical aircraft. Such as this jet powered flying boat fighter

The Trinity Syndicate@syndicate.ar-cam.uk · last wk.

ON THIS DAY: 26 July 1952 Saunders-Roe logged an unlabelled wax cylinder against a test account at East Cowes. The flight note was blank, except for a timing mark that did not belong to any launch. Index key: MAT. Nothing further attached.

The Trinity Syndicate @syndicate.ar-cam.uk · last wk.

AR-CAM fragment dump: This one treats the Fold less as a thing seen than a pressure heard before arrival. Ref. LOW/63/075. @hookland.bsky.social #Hookland

The Fold makes better sense beside sound mirrors than beside telescopes. Not a thing seen at distance, but a pressure arriving early, cupped by concrete and chalk. Hookland would know where to shelve it. Half page, no sender, folded twice. Ref. LOW/63/075.

The Trinity Syndicate @syndicate.ar-cam.uk · last wk.

The Trinity Syndicate @syndicate.ar-cam.uk · 2w ago

AR-CAM fragment dump: Mansion House records use ordinary words for extraordinary errands. Look for stationery, instruments, and repairs. Ref. MAT/68/006.

Mansion House records use ordinary words for extraordinary errands. Look for stationery, instruments, and repairs. Copied from a torn index card, no date. Ref. MAT/68/006.

The Trinity Syndicate @syndicate.ar-cam.uk · 2w ago

ON THIS DAY: 23 July 1943 A Treasury observer requested quiet access to a file kept at Mansion House. The answer came back in pencil: "already borrowed by the room below." Index key: MHB. Nothing further attached.

The Trinity Syndicate @syndicate.ar-cam.uk · 2w ago

ON THIS DAY: 22 July 1940 A signal summary from 67 Queen Victoria Street includes a line no operator admitted sending. It reads: "the interval is not empty." Index key: HIG. Nothing further attached.

The Trinity Syndicate @syndicate.ar-cam.uk · 2w ago

"We have built faster carriages. We have not touched the road's actual length." — S. Ferranti, private journal, 08.08.1893

Idle thought, set down only because it will not leave me alone: we speak of the electric telegraph, and now of Hertzian waves, as though they have delivered us into an age without distance. They have not. They have merely made the distance cheaper to cross. The wall itself, the speed above which no signal may travel, however cleverly expressed or well transmitted, has not moved an inch. We have built faster carriages. We have not touched the road's actual length.

The Trinity Syndicate @syndicate.ar-cam.uk · 2w ago

ON THIS DAY: 21 July 1937 An inventory at Mansion House listed a sealed condenser under "stationery". The hand that corrected it wrote "do not ask the platform staff." Index key: MAT. Nothing further attached.

The Trinity Syndicate @syndicate.ar-cam.uk · 2w ago

AR-CAM fragment dump: Do not trust the first alphabet. The machine favours layers; surface marks are often only the wrapper. Ref. LOW/67/005.

Do not trust the first alphabet. The machine favours layers; surface marks are often only the wrapper. Half page, no sender, folded twice. Ref. LOW/67/005.

The Trinity Syndicate @syndicate.ar-cam.uk · 3w ago

ON THIS DAY: 19 July 1931 A locked packet crossed London twice and returned to Needles Headland unopened. Its docket says the contents were "audible in poor weather." Index key: KRN. Nothing further attached.

@cultauthor.bsky.social · 3w ago

If you cut me, I will bleed stories all upon your carpet. Bloody words that will crawl into corners, up you walls. Farrow and Ball colours will be no protection, no apotropaic salvation. Cut me and my stories will infect you.

Skionar @skionar.bsky.social · 3w ago

A Rolt! A Machen! A Le Fanu! A PLATH! It's all kicking off in Yorkshire...

hookland.bsky.social @hookland.bsky.social · 3w ago

From a lost English county that is openly open-source, this is just delicious.

Rob Beschizza@beschizza.com · 3w ago

Something dark and funny about the implicit possibility here that A24 didn't know it doesn't own the backrooms. Liminal Property. www.thewrap.com/creative-con...

The Trinity Syndicate @syndicate.ar-cam.uk · 3w ago

"He proved the thing has a speed at all, finite and fixed." — S. Ferranti, private journal, 14.01.1893

Deptford again, and a small triumph today with the alternator windings, which I shall not spoil these pages with the detail of. But I notice a pattern in my own mind now that I did not have three years ago. I no longer think of distance in miles of cable. I think of it in the time light takes to cross it. Rømer worked this speed out two centuries back from nothing more than watching Jupiter's moons keep imperfect time: a beautifully simple piece of reasoning, and I find I return to it more than to anything written since. He proved the thing has a speed at all, finite and fixed. Everyone since has merely found fresh, and less convenient, ways of proving me right.

The Trinity Syndicate @syndicate.ar-cam.uk · 3w ago

AR-CAM fragment dump: 63.04.01 is the date authority remembers. It is not the first date that matters. Ref. HIG/66/004.

63.04.01 is the date authority remembers. It is not the first date that matters. Unfiled paper, stamped only with a shelf number. Ref. HIG/66/004.

The Trinity Syndicate @syndicate.ar-cam.uk · 3w ago

"A conversation conducted at those intervals is not a conversation. It is an exchange of monuments." — S. Ferranti, private journal, 11.07.1892

If Whewell is wrong, and there is somebody there, on Mars say, our nearest interesting neighbour, where Schiaparelli some years back reported markings he called "canali", then the difficulty is not whether we could ever signal them. Herr Hertz's waves, or something built upon them, will cross that gulf eventually; open space offers no more resistance to a wave than the aether between here and any detector he may set up. The difficulty is this: whatever we send will arrive a very great time after we have sent it, and whatever comes back will arrive a very great time after that. A conversation conducted at those intervals is not a conversation. It is an exchange of monuments.

The Trinity Syndicate @syndicate.ar-cam.uk · 3w ago

ON THIS DAY: 17 July 1925 A Syndicate index card placed a split porcelain insulator in Deptford. No department claimed it. The reverse carried five dots and the instruction: "do not translate aloud." Index key: HIG. Nothing further attached.

The Trinity Syndicate @syndicate.ar-cam.uk · 3w ago

"He is, I think, something more useful than that: a man who finishes what men of imagination begin, and does not much mind that they receive the praise for it." — S. Ferranti, private journal, 16.05.1892

Dined at the Institution of Electrical Engineers last evening and found myself seated beside Byng, of the General Electric Company; a chance arrangement, or so the seating card would have me believe, though I have my doubts that anything at these dinners is quite so unplanned. We spoke for above an hour, mostly of trade: the price of copper, the difficulty of finding men who can be trusted with high-tension work, the tiresome business of persuading municipal councils that alternating current will not electrocute their ratepayers in their beds. He struck me as a man entirely without vanity about his own cleverness, which is rare enough in this profession to be worth remarking on. GEC was a small wholesale concern not ten years past; it is not small now, and Byng talks about the growing of it the way another man might talk about the raising of a good wall: brick, mortar, patience, and no romance whatsoever. I confess I rather (page 1 of 2)

admire it. I am too fond of the romance myself. Byng is not a visionary, and would likely take it as an insult if I called him one. He is, I think, something more useful than that: a man who finishes what men of imagination begin, and does not much mind that they receive the praise for it. (page 2 of 2)