by Eric Flint
If you are taught the Italian style, the use of a dagger as a defensive weapon is recommended. The main functions of a dagger are to parry, hit and trap the enemy's blade. There are two types of fencing daggers. They usually both have a straight, pointed, double-edged blade between fifteen and twenty inches long. The first type is a simple cross-hilted design, usually with slightly drooping or forked quillons (the two arms, straight or bent, that are the sides of the hilt) creating an acute angle with the blade itself. This is to entrap and break the enemy sword by a simple twist of the wrist once its attack has been parried. It also has an additional side ring called an "anneau," whose purpose is to protect the knuckles. The second form of fencing dagger is called a shell-guard dagger or main gauche. This weapon's hilt is formed by long straight quillons and a shell protecting the whole hand.
Almost no academy taught the use of the sword alone. Much time was dedicated to fencing with daggers in close combat. The name for dagger and knife fighting was "scherma corta": short fencing. In the seventeenth century, short fencing reached extraordinary levels of complexity and the training was performed with the dagger alone or with other tools (cloak and dagger, dagger and hat, dagger and pistol, dagger and cane).
Multiple techniques of offense and defense with the dagger were developed and taught. Due to the brutality of knife fighting it wasn't uncommon for the duelers to fight with knife alone, especially when the duel was to the death. These are the words of Salvatore Fabris, fencing teacher in Padua:
"There are moments, where there is neither time nor the occasion to use a rapier, and it's important for a gentleman to never neglect his skills with the use of a dagger."
When not busy studying fencing with rapier or dagger, a good swordsman would be studying other forms of codified combat. These included the use of spear and pike and the use of batons and walking canes as self-defense weapons. There were, of course, moments when none of these weapons were available, so a good swordsman had to learn hand-to-hand combat. European unarmed forms are not so different from modern martial arts. A treatise written in Florence at the beginning of the century states in its introduction "my system teaches both the use of fists and kicks and the use of limb locks and torsions depending on the occasions and the intentions of the enemy."
In conclusion we may say that a seventeenth-century swordsman had to be good at fencing both in a melee and during a duel as well as a ruthless fighter ready to defend himself from assaults when simply walking on a lane. He would have to know how to use all the weapons at his disposal: his own hands, daggers, one or two sticks as tall as a man or as long as an arm or as short as a dagger; rapiers, sabers, spears, halberds. In a few words he was a tough nut to crack.
Links
The Internet is full of interesting pages about the Western Martial Arts. I selected a few of them for whoever is interested in studying the topic in more depth.
http://www.schooleofdefence.co.uk/
This is an extremely interesting site, full of pictures and a very detailed description of a ten second duel in twenty-five sequences.
http://members.lycos.co.uk/rapier/contents.htm
Another interesting site. It contains "La scherma" of Francesco Alfieri (1640) with description of the techniques, plates and some pictures.
http://www.thehaca.com/Manuals/pallas.htm
This is another treatise, one of the best English texts on differences between Renaissance sword and rapier.
http://www.kismeta.com/diGrasse/index.htm
Another treatise of the period.
http://www.thehaca.com/terms3.htm
http://www.classicalfencing.com/glossary.shtml
These pages contain a dictionary of words used commonly in historical fencing.
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~wew/fencing/masters.html
A brief description of the masters of the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries.
http://www.kismeta.com/diGrasse/index.htm
A useful page with links to many fencing resources.
http://www.ahfi.org/
Follow the link to the articles. It contains numerous interesting information.
http://www.classicalfencing.com/articles.shtml
Another list of useful articles.
http://www.martinez-destreza.com/articles/spanish1.htm
The Spanish school, a complete description.
http://www.deltin.it/swords6.htm
Pictures of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century swords, complete with description, by one of the most renown Italian sword smiths.
So You Want To Do
Telecommunications In 1633?
By Rick Boatright
Introduction
David Freer's story in the Ring of Fire anthology "Lineman for the Country" described the beginnings of wired telecommunications in the 1632 universe and the founding of AT&L. Like any good story, much of the technology was mentioned, but not described in detail. This article seeks to fill in the gaps in that story, and provide a glimpse into the development of non-radio telecommunications in the USE. This article will not attempt to go into the details of the history of various types of telecom. Please see the references at the end for such history.
Basics of
Telecommunications
You have used a telegraph. You don't know that, but it's true. Have you ever stood inside your house and flicked the lights on and off to signal to someone in the driveway? Have you ever pressed a doorbell and had a bell inside the house go Ding? You, my friend, have used a telegraph! At its base, a telegraph is nothing more than a doorbell. Press a button here, and something makes a sound "over there." The very first telegraph, made by the famous American scientist Joseph Henry, used a switch and an electromagnet to move an iron bar and ring a bell.
I just can't write an article about the telegraph without a physics lesson. How does that doorbell ring? The answer took the work of half a century by scientists on two continents. Electricity running through a wire produces a magnetic field. (And vice versa but let's stay focussed here.) If you take a flashlight battery, and hook a long piece of wire to it running up and down, a magnetic compass brought near the wire is deflected from north. Sadly, the compass wiggles slowly and only a little, even if you use a lot of electricity. It certainly won't ring a bell. What did Henry do? He took the wire, covered it with silk so that it did not short out against itself, and wrapped it round and round a horseshoe. As the electricity wrapped around in a circle over and over and over, each bit of wire added its bit of magnetism, and together they did what one small length of wire could not do. More wire allowed more loops and generated more magnetism.
By making up a "code," we can send complex messages using this system. The simplest code is just to count letters. You can do this with a doorbell. One ding indicates a step along the alphabet. So, the message "abc" would be sent ding, ding-ding, ding-ding-ding.
This simple code is very inconvenient. Sending a "Z" requires pressing the doorbell button twenty-six times. Samuel Morse and others came up with a number of clever ways to make the process shorter. The most important was making the system make a sound both when you PRESS the doorbell button AND when you let it go. Ding-DONG or more accurately for Morse's sounder: Click-CLACK. This lets you distinguish long and short presses, and you can make a much better code. (Morse code for "Z" is --.. )
There are several variants on "Morse" code. Two of them are known to be used in Grantville: "International" Morse used by the Ham radio operators, and "Railroad" Morse used by the operators for AT&L. The two codes are slightly different, but many operators are comfortable in either.
Telegraph Details
So, we have a wire, we have a doorbell button, we have the new weird doorbell that goes click-CLACK, we have a code... DONE! Not hardly. What else do we need to make a commercial telegraph operation?
First, we need wire. Modern telephone and electrical wire is copper, but copper wire alone is weak, and requires too many telegraph poles. The transcontinental telegraph in the
US used #8 iron wire at 375 pounds per mile. Sometime after the civil war, the telegraph companies switched to copper-clad iron wire, then to multistranded copper over a steel weight-bearing core. No one in seventeenth-century Europe will be making that any time soon. It's iron for us.
The problem is, iron wire placed up on poles in the air rusts; #8 iron wire hung out by itself alone in typical North American weather rusts through in a year. The solution in the 1860s, and for the USE is to "galvanize" the wire, that is, to coat it with zinc. For every mile of wire, we will need ten pounds of zinc.
This raises another problem. We can't just lay the wire on the ground. We need poles. Iron wire needs the support of twenty two poles per mile. That's a theoretical number, incidentally. In practice, allowing for the effects of terrain, you have to figure that 40 miles needs approximately 1000 poles and 135 miles needs 3500 poles.
The use of fewer poles results in the wire sagging, and if multiple wires are strung from each pole it becomes possible for the wires to touch when swaying in the wind. Live trees make poor telegraph poles for several reasons. They grow, and the wires get pulled, they have leaves and other branches that can short out the wires, and they have sap running through them that acts as a conductor, helping "earth" the signal. Additionally, frequently there's no strong tree where you want one. It's far better to have poles made from dead trees that don't have sap, don't grow, and lack branches. Don't lose count. We need twenty two per mile.
There is another complication. You can't just hang the wire from the pole itself. We need insulators. Wire simply stapled to the pole will work over very short distances (a few miles) when the pole is utterly dry, and the weather is fair. However, the least hint of dew, or moisture or rain, and the wire is "earthed" or shorted to ground. No signal can get through when the water running down the pole carries the electricity into the ground. Insulators prevent the electricity in the wire from reaching the ground.
This photo, of a telephone line in western Kansas, shows a Hemingray-17 insulator supporting a galvanized iron wire held on by a loop and wrap of galvanized wire. This is the "standard" installation of a glass or porcelain insulator. Note the design of the insulator. There is a groove near the top, which supports the wire, and then there is a VERY long path down the outside of the insulator, around a "petticoat" or "skirt" and then back up INSIDE the insulator before it finally touches wood. Glass insulators get their surfaces dirty. Soot, from town fires or passing trains is particularly conductive. Insulators crack and water settles into the cracks, and so on. With this skirted cup design there is a long path for any electricity to reach the wood, and in all but the hardest storms, the inside of the insulator is dry and provides a poor path for electricity. Conductive dust and soot wash off glass insulators easily in the rain. The most common modern insulators are porcelain. Porcelain attracts water less than glass, but it is harder to make, and must be vitrified entirely through. Glazed ceramic insulators absorb water if the glaze cracks in the least bit and then fail as insulators.
Good insulators are critical to telegraph (and telephone) operation. Without insulators, maximum signal distances are a few miles and only that in good weather. Fortunately, making insulators is not all that difficult. Even "threaded" insulators which "screw" on to the support rod that holds them can be made by apprentice glassmakers with little training. A few samples should suffice to allow any glass shop to make adequate insulators. The Hemingray 16 shown below is a good example of an advanced design that is simple to cast. It incorporates advanced features such as internal threads, "drip points" and a fluted skirt lip.
At this point, someone usually asks, "Why do we need insulators like that at all? Why not just use insulated wire?" Of course, today we do. If you look at modern telephone lines in most places, the insulators are disappearing as the bare wires are replaced with Teflon and other plastic-coated lines held off their poles with plastic spacers. I hope that I do not need to go into why Grantville will not be making Teflon coated wire or fiberglass for several years.
Second, we need batteries. Wait, it's not second any more is it? Oh well, fourth then. We need batteries. Yes, of course, as long as our main telegraph office is in Grantville, we can power the telegraph from the power lines. But even in the twenty-first century, that's not really done. Up-time telephones are run from batteries that are charged from the power lines. Downtime, unless you're in Grantville, you don't have power lines to charge your batteries from, and you must use 'primary' batteries that, like the batteries you buy at the drugstore, make electricity due to their chemistry, rather than being charged.
Take a look at this photo from the classic film "Union Pacific" featuring a more-than-comely Barbara Stanwyck, and the ever-handsome Joel McRae.
If you can tear your attention from our attractive heroes for a moment, and look behind them, you will see an array of boxes full of jars with wires going across them.
The producer of Union Pacific, the famous Cecil B. DeMille was a fanatic for accurate historical detail when he chose to be, and this re-creation of a railroad station Western Union main line office is very accurate. Note the acid drips down the front of the wooden battery boxes. There are 10 boxes of 12 cells, and this is typical for a main line telegraph office in the post-civil-war period in the US. One of Mr. Calvin's (played by the accomplished character actor Harold Goodwin) most important duties was the daily care and feeding of the Daniell Cells that powered the telegraph. Our seventeenth-century telegraph is going to need batteries, too.
The most common battery used by telegraph companies prior to the mass electrification of the U.S. was a variation on the Daniell Cell called a Crowfoot or gravity cell. It had two advantages. It could be refreshed without complication, and it did not have a drop in voltage as it was used up. The "dry" cells—be they traditional carbon cells or Ni-Cads—that you buy at the store put out less and less voltage as they age. Daniell Cells give constant voltage if they are operating at all, and were therefore called "constant" cells by many telegraphers. The open circuit voltage was about 1.02 V. It is no accident that the cell voltage is close to 1.0 V, since the Daniell cell was the original standard of voltage.
To make a gravity battery a zinc electrode (crowfoot zinc) is hung near the top of a glass jar. A copper electrode (battery copper) is placed in the bottom surrounded by blue vitriol (copper sulfate or "bluestone"). The jar is filled with water and a little sulfuric acid. The electrical action of the cell quickly forms zinc and copper sulfate solutions that remain practically separate because the copper sulfate solution is much heavier, hence the term "gravity" battery. Battery oil or heavy mineral oil is poured over the top to prevent evaporation. This battery has an excellent capacity. An average main line cell will use eight pounds of vitriol, two pounds of zinc and a pound of copper per year. Copper fingers plate out on the zinc, and must be knocked off nightly with a bent rod. (See photo below.)
Each main line station then, will have 120 cells, and use 250 pounds of zinc, 125 pounds of copper, 1200 pounds of copper sulfate (Blue vitriol), 60 gallons of mineral oil, and sixty gallons of sulfuric acid each year. We will need a main line station approximately every 30 miles at first. Eventually, we should be able to run 300 miles on a main line without a relay, but perfecting that kind of technology will take time.
While we're at it, clearly Ms Stanwyck is not staring at a compass wiggling back and forth. She isn't pressing a doorbell button either. What are all those things arrayed in front of her?
Reading from top right to bottom left there is a sounder. This is a bar, arranged over an electromagnet that wiggles up and down as the electricity of the telegraph goes on and off. As it goes down it makes a distinctive click, and as it comes back up, it makes a distinctive Clack. Thus, every key-up and key-down at the sending end produces a click Clack at the receiving end. Note the adjustable points that allow the sounder to be adjusted for differing line conditions relating to weather, and the condition of the battery at the sending end.
&
nbsp; Next is a relay. Relays allow a fading signal reaching one station to be refreshed and sent on to the next station with full vigor. The relay looks a lot like a sounder turned on its side. The magnetic coils have many more turns of wire, and produce a very strong magnetic field for very little electricity. As the relay goes back and forth it acts as a switch for the next piece of the telegraph line.
Then a telegraph key. The pressing of the key makes and breaks the circuit, removing the need to manually touch and un-touch the wires. It is a lot easier on your arm than pressing a doorbell button. Note the side-arm switch on the key that allows the circuit to be closed when the key is not in use. Since stations act as relays when they are not sending, and since the same wire is used for sending and receiving, it is important to remember to short your key when you are not using it.
Next are a pair of switches used to take the line in and out of service, and to control if the station is set up as a sending and receiving station, or as a relay.
Finally at the end of the desk is a combination main-line instrument. This is a key coupled to a very sensitive sounder used to directly send and receive on the main line itself without a local relay.
You will notice that most of those instruments (except the key and the switch) feature tightly wound coils of wire. You remember that Joseph Henry figured out that you need to wind coils in order to get a strong magnetic field to make clicks, or to make relays close. Prior to a Beldon Wire company employee's invention of flexible enamel in 1909, there were only two solutions, wrap each layer carefully, placing a thread between each coil of wire and its neighbor and a layer of paper between each layer of the coil, and "silk covered wire." Silk-covered wire was the hottest thing in the wire biz until well into the 20th century. The problem is, we don't have a machine to wrap #30 thin magnet wire with silk. Further, the Grantvilliards need hundreds of feet of #30 wire for each sounder and relay. Making the wire itself is simple enough. German artisans were making wire for centuries before Grantville appeared, but wrapping the wire in silk thread will be tricky, and will require a long process of experimentation. Expect orders through Venice for substantial amounts of silk thread. In the meantime, coils will be laid up by interwinding thread, layering with oiled paper and lacquer (exactly the same way that the generator coils at Hoover dam were made in the 1930s).