I used to work for a company that built printing presses. It was a great job for a mechanical engineer - lots of gears, wheels and cams to play with. One style of press that they built was used to print the wrappers for Wonder Bread. If you know anything about printing, you know that each color is printed by a different print roller and Wonder Bread wrappers have a lot of different colors. In fact, we used to print Wonder Bread wrappers to get all the print rollers synchronized. The multicolored balloons were great for being able to see which print roll was out of synch.
I guess technology has changes the way that the wrappers are produced today but there was nothing like watching this huge machine print with such delicacy.
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My own personal mechanical thing of wonder was the Model 19 Teletype.
I owned one. Made it work, from the perforating paper tape punch to the tape rader to the keyboard to the clattering printer: hundreds of parts, each marvellously made, and if all was right, capable of transmitting and receiving the printed word from around the world.
And at Christmas-time, an astute operator could make the bell play "Jingle Bells".
MC
Never knew that was how they did it, thanks for the education!
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/san-franciscos-secret-dc-grid
You'll get a kick out of this.
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