Guess the purpose of this patent

15 Responses

Chris Lusto, on March 2, 2012 at 6:42 pm said:

Counting words!

Reply
Robert Hansen, on March 2, 2012 at 7:03 pm said:

Isn’t that the automatron that could write a letter?

Reply
- Robert Hansen, on March 2, 2012 at 7:07 pm said:
  
  I take that back, that isn’t what I thought it was and it is about a 100 years later.
  
  Reply
cary, on March 2, 2012 at 9:27 pm said:

I’m going with counting *characters* on the down-stroke.

Reply
gasstationwithoutpumps, on March 2, 2012 at 11:04 pm said:

It is clearly a counter (I had a similar counter as a kid, made in plastic and not pencil mounted). It is probably for counting something (inventory, people, …) while also taking notes with the pencil. I doubt that it is for counting the writing per se.

Reply
- Jason Dyer, on March 3, 2012 at 11:16 am said:
  
  It is indeed a counter, but there’s something unusual about it (other than it being attached to a pencil).
  
  Reply
  - mrbgreen, on March 3, 2012 at 8:02 pm said:
    
    The only thing about this device that I think is unusual is the fact that there is no 1’s place. Just 10, 100, and 1000. Also the order of the place-values is reversed from their usual right-to-left orientation. The latter seems more like a design simplicity issue, but the absence of a 1’s place is strange. Why would the designer explicitly be thinking you’d be counting in tens and not ones with this thing?
David Jones, on March 3, 2012 at 3:18 pm said:

It counts time. Amazing.

Reply
mrbgreen, on March 3, 2012 at 5:16 pm said:

As others have said, it’s clearly a counter.

I think the key is that the button is placed so that applying downward pressure on the pencil increments the counter.

For this reason I think the purpose of this invention is to count tally marks. Every time you make a tally mark, you push down with your index finger on the button and increment the counter.

Reply
- Jason Dyer, on March 3, 2012 at 7:34 pm said:
  
  It is indeed a counter that works in the manner you describe, but there is something unusual about it nobody has mentioned yet.
  
  Reply
gasstationwithoutpumps, on March 3, 2012 at 7:43 pm said:

It counts by 10s rather than by 1s (that is, the low order digit, which is on the left, not the right) is labeled 10. The picture does not provide enough information to tell whether it is counting up or down (we’d need to see the order of the digits on the wheels).

It looks like a perfectly ordinary design for mechanical counter, so I’m not seeing anything to get excited about—you’ll have to tell us what is so special.

Reply
Jason Dyer, on March 3, 2012 at 8:15 pm said:

Just to summarize mrbgreen & gasstationwithoutpumps we have:

a.) a counter attached to a pencil that advances by pushing a button
b.) the place values are reversed from left to right rather than right to left
c.) the 1s place is missing

I’ll let this hang for only another day or so before I give it away.

Reply
OMGCarlos, on March 4, 2012 at 9:01 am said:

The labels h, h’, and h^a are kind of odd. Also, from Fig 3 it would appear that the left gear activates the central gear once every 10 clicks which simultaneously activates the one on the right!

I think maybe it was used for writing encrypted messages.

Reply
- mrbgreen, on March 9, 2012 at 2:18 pm said:
  
  If you look more closely at Fig 3, you can see that one of the pins on gear a (the central gear) is longer than the others (it happens to be the one engaged with the rightmost gear in the picture), the shorter pins will not advance the right gear at all.
  
  Reply
IMPROVEMENT IN ADDING-REGISTERS FOR PENCILS « The Number Warrior, on March 4, 2012 at 7:16 pm said:

[…] Guess the purpose of this patent […]

Reply