Battle of the Machines

Most people if asked to name an old sewing machine would automatically name Singer. Yet it was the Willcox and Gibbs chainstitch machine, such as this one, that dominated the market until the late nineteenth century. These very elegant machines, advertised as the Silent Automatic, were cheap to buy and run. The lack of a […]

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Power Within Reason

Nowadays we have smart meters that monitor and, in some cases, remotely measure and control our power use. In the 1890s, as the availability of electrical power became  more common, two of the most successful electrical power meters measuring power usage were the Edison and the Aron electricity meters. The Edison meter had two copper […]

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