"It is most gratifying that your enthusiasm for our planet continues unabated. And so we would like to assure you that the guided missiles currently converging with your ship are part of a special service we extend to all of our most enthusiastic clients… And the fully armed nuclear warheads are, of course, merely a courtesy detail. We look forward to your custom in future lives. Thank you."
If they're still at the same address, I wonder what would happen if Techmoan sent them the product registration card, 37 years after the product was released.
I'm imagine that the 'visual' relay would be intended for a slide projector or the like, but this is definitely one of those elegant solutions in search of a problem.
I mean in case of museum usage, which I think was sugested to it could enable the lights of a showcase. Saves power if nobody is there and lights it up when people are interrested. Ofc in this case the visual aspect would be visual in terms of presenting a part of an exhibition to the one interrested.
With all due respect, speaking as a food delivery person I would hate someone trying to use this to leave delivery instructions. When I'm delivering I'm on the clock. I want to drop off the order and get out so I can be picking up my next one. The last thing I want is to have to fiddle with some gizmo and then wait while it delivers a message. I can read instructions left on a piece of paper far faster than a tape player can rattle off the same message.
These were still being used by a classic car dealer on Beach Blvd in Buena Park when I was there in 2007! My Dad and I spent about half an hour one evening, tapping the side windows of the cars, listening to 'Big Bobby' reel off the stats of various Mustangs, Pontiacs and ancient Chevy trucks -)
I truly believe every time a new Techmoan video is posted, the universe realigns us to a timeline where one more obscure audio format or device exists so there will never be an end to potential content.
I think you're right. When I was young no one knew about the walkman. But now I have clear re-memories of them. To think a few years ago the walkman simply didn't yet had existed. Well, what will they did have come up with next.
@@kodinamsinh1267 [Boring humor destroying explanation]: Chad talks about re-aligned realities. I'm continuing his idea with language to describe how a thing didn't exist but then later it did in the same time span because of a sort of reality shift akin to the proposed Mandela Effect. The fun in my comment (that I'm now destroying by explaining this) arises from how language would have to bend to reflect this concept. So the line; "What will they come up with next" must be enhanced if a past (already lived through) suddenly changes. It must include "What did they come up with". [As it is in the past]. The line becomes; "What will they; did have; come up with". My comment includes "my surprise" at my sudden changed memory of a thing. My "re-memory". Because of a recognition that reality shifted. Talking in "re-past tense", is something that does not exist in out current boring reality. Hence the resulting humor at the enhanced language needed to deal with such a phenomenon. You have now been made aware of the potential of the (admittedly minor bit of) humor you may have missed at first glance. Oh and don't worry. No one else seemed to get it either.
Could also be used for museum exhibits. The switching of lighting would come in handy there. Exhibit behind glass, tap the transducer, increase lighting in the exhibit space and play the message.
There are touch things for museums that have far surpassed the capabilities of this. More common is headsets that trigger the appropriate information near to the exhibits, that are more reliable and serve as many people at the same time as need it with full clarity.
@@Safetytrousers There are NOW, yes. This thing, though, is straight out of the 1970s (yes, I know the manual says 1986, but I imagine it had been available for a few years by then). To be honest, - I think they tried to reinvent the wheel. There have been 'push button for info/presentation' systems around since the 1950s, most based on endless loop tape systems. One of the earliest was made by a company called Echo-Matic, and was used in those mechanical 'gypsy/fortune teller' booths at carnivals and amusement parks (they recreated one for the Tom Hanks movie 'Big'). Granted, this is slightly more sophisticated, but not by much.
We fitted something similar but smaller which we plugged into the sound card of pc in the 1990's. It was fitted to estate agents plus other shops and used the glass as the speaker cone. It died out due to double glazing. Ok seen you also had the same problems.
What? Double glasing was not a thing where you live in the 90s? Here in Sweden we had triple glasing in the 50s and single glasing was primitive in the thirties, 1830s!
@@borjesvensson8661 i think hes just getting a bit confused between domestic and commercial glazing, even now its not too unusual for a shop front of a certain age to be single glazed (even in sweden)
They are very old tech, if you think about it it's basically just a regular speaker that uses something else as the speaker membrane, so I suspect the biggest hurdle they had was to create something that was powerful enough to vibrate thicker solids without causing damage to the attached point. People just didn't use them because unless you create the unit specifically for a given surface the sound quality goes up and down depending on what you attach it to.
Actually I remember encountering surface transducers in the late 1960s. Real estate agents were using them when they did open house events. The things looked like the magnet and voice coil, minus basket and cone, of a large speaker. They attached to the wall somehow and used the whole wall as a cone. Quiet "beautiful" music seemed to emanate from nowhere in particular and filled the entire house.
I remember this device when I bought my red 1988 Buick Skylark back in December of '88. I tapped on it but it didn't work. An employee told me the device had run down the battery, so he game me all the car's details. Anyway, I ended up buying that useless car that would give me nightmares for years to come. Only good thing about it was the stereo system on it.
When I saw "Visual" on the box, even before it was opened, and I was wondering what imaging it was have, and then when the box opened, I was even more intrigued. A compact-cassette doesn't have a lot of capacity for "video"! You'd hard pressed to store a still image on cassette! And, of course, it doesn't! I wasn't surprised to see it defeated by double-glazing.
There was a toy camcorder that recorded black & white video onto audio cassettes, the Fisher Price PXL2000. I believe Techmoan has a video on that one.
In the early 1960s there was a "home video recorder" offered for sale in the UK either ready built or as a self-assembly kit. It offered around 30 minutes of recording time on a 10.5" reel of double-play audio tape in 405-line B&W. I have a copy of "Practical Television" from the time that has an article about this recorder in it. I doubt it worked well as it seems to have rapidly vanished without trace. Not that many years later Sony marketed the CV2000 helical scan recorder, also for 405-line B&W for the UK version, which provided an hour of recording on a 7" reel of half-inch video tape and came with its own tuner/monitor for off-air recording and playback.
@@crashbandicoot4everr No, this one was called the VKR500 and was made by a company called Wesgrove Electronics. I've just located the article about it from Practical Television from March 1965. The article does briefly refer to the Telcan video recorder which it says "did not appear on the market" The VKR500 cost £97 10s in kit form or £150 ready built. But I can't imagine it sold well as I've never seen one or heard of anyone who owns one. The CV2000, however, I have come across. Some years back I was asked to recover the video from some off-air tapes recorded on a CV2000, convert the video to 625 lines and re-record it to DVD. It was quite a challenge due to the poor time-base stability of the CV2000, not helped by the fact that the supplied tuner/monitor used mean-level AGC so the amplitude of the recorded sync pulses varied with picture content.
Reminds me of a Toy Shop Window in My Hometown back in 84. The Window had a Pushbutton top operate a Model Train. And for Christmas Season you also would hear Jingle Bells and Train Noise.
I've never been shouted at by a shop window, but I do recall videotext systems --- typically in tourist information offices --- which had a capacitative number pad glued to the inside of the window controlling a CRT information display system. I was always excited to see one as a child and would go and play with it. (I still do, but I did then too.) I imagine they died out due to double glazing too.
@@peanutmans0 I've seen estate agents premises with modern versions of this that are sensitive enough to work through dobule glazing. Looks like it's installed by specialists though, not just put in the window by the agent themselves.
You guys call pharmacists "chemists"?!? That's awesome! I'm getting a serious "Space Hunter" vibe from that. Now, almost no one will get that reference, but I shared it anyway.
If I'd had one of these at one of my old stores, I'd have probably used it to record jokes or humorous messages for daytime passers-by, and the late night, slightly tipsy city dwellers to enjoy
I tapped on this sheet of glass and metal that I'm holding in my hand and you started speaking to me, and I could even see you visually. Isn't technology amazing ;-)
The speaker in the transducer reminds me of the acoustic characteristics of a few toys we had for our kids in the '80s & '90s. One of them was more or less a gramophone, it had a record with a needle attached to this thin plastic cone, directly producing the sound like a speaker cone (but lower quality).
Very cool. I don't think we give the engineers of yesteryear the credit they deserve for solving problems they encountered in the manner in which they did. I expect this was not an inexpensive unit for the times, either.
Expensive, yes. Dedicated-function 'business/sales' gadgets usually were (and still are!) overpriced, because the manufacturers who make them know most businesses will happily call the expense an 'investment'. As for the engineering... I'm not that impressed. It's just the 'announce' mechanism from one of those old answering machines with a few wizmos tacked on. I know the manual has a date of 1986 printed in it, but everything else fairly screams 1970s at me.
I was trying to fathom what the heck this was for. Thanks for the wonderful hint with the cigarette lighter connector. All the same, I'd never have guessed. I'd be thinking it was to tell people not to break your window, your dog has its favourite tunes and the A/C is turned on.
I would affix this to the driver door window of my car and if approached by a traffic cop tapping on the window the message would play 'please come back later, I am busy driving'. As usual Techmoan makes any subject fascinating. 👍
No spoilers, but when you reach a part near the end of the video that you *think* might lead you to a certain something… it will. Techmoan always follows through.
It certainly seems like the predecessor to those touchscreen advertisements that you sometimes see in stores, particularly in the health and beauty section advertising shaving razors and things like that.
It's basically the spiritual ancestor of an AR phone app, just like _Haunted House_ is the spiritual ancestor of the _Resident Evil_ series. You tap the glass, and something magically comes to life for a moment that would normally just be lying still. Unfortunately, the coolness might have been a factor its own undoing. After all, if the word on the streets is "Hey, down at the mall, they've got this cool gizmo where you tap on the glass and an enormous animated pineapple sings to you!" but all the customers are so impressed by the gimmick that they forget to buy a carton of the fruit juice it was supposed to be advertising, the juice company are going to be looking for a different gimmick to sell the next flavour they think of .....
Well, at least it works fine on car windows. But the additional light unit would be also quite useful in this case, as you can put the car details sheet on the dash inside and have it light up by the touch of the button, so buyers could read it even when the dealer lot is dark.
I could see something like this having a lot of use in museums. They could even conserve power by not having to illuminate the exhibits at all times. Simply have someone walk up to a dim glass cabinet, give a light tap on the glass, and then an audio-visual presentation is played out before them.
Very neat and interesting device! Some double glazed windows have some quarters, if its your case, maybe if you place just in between can work, so the knocking can be transmitted along the solid material instead of the gas in between the double glazing. I love the "extra connection" in the very last bit of the video, I don't want to spoil anybody...
Unfortunately it relies on window glass to vibrate the sound back so it won't work well enough. At that point just sticking a speaker and a normal button on the outside would do a better job. But that wouldn't be very magical, I guess... BTW probably missed that last bit, timestamp?
Back in the 70s and early 80s, my father used to be very active in the "Car Show" circuit. He'd later go on to the custom hot-rod community into the 90s, but this is exactly the sort of thing I could see him having installed in his show-van. Maybe with some sort of history or something, turning on some lamps perhaps. I was actually reminded of an old 'zoo' in the town where I grew up, they had glassed off enclosures for a lot of the animals, and you'd have a sign with a doorbell-button. Pressing the button, a recording would play with information about the animals. I really liked the connection to QR codes. I wish augmented reality markers were better supported. Imagine being able to point your phone at a sticker, and an animated character could give you the information about the item, or just suddenly there's a video right there in place of the token.
I saw something similar years ago that was fitted inside Halloween decorations.When someone banged your door it turned on lights and played whatever you had on a tape hidden inside.
I remember interacting with devices like this at some lesser known nature and theme parks in Florida in the 1980s. In particular, Gatorland had one at the ticket booth during closed hours to give general park information and ticket prices.
There were "stereo" versions of these that used one channel for audio and the other channel for tones that controlled lighting, solenoids, etc in a display. Think museums, national parks, amusement parks, haunted houses, etc. The ones I remember had plexiglass panels with screenprint on them and I was today years old that I learned how that trigger interface worked. I remember seeing the walkman-looking part and the power strip with all the lights and stuff plugged in but never knew how the touch trigger worked. Thanks!
Imagine a car dealer has a black Trans Am in 86 with this thing and a voice box connected to it. And when you tab the window it says "I'm the Knight Industries Twothousand or K.I.T.T. if you prefer."
I remember, when I was a child, the local toy store sometimes had a model railway in the window. You could make it run for a few minutes by tapping the glass, much like with this device here.
Yes the 'VISUAL' part was intriguing. I was looking forward to seeing a mini VHS cassette player. When the audio cassette appeared in the video, I then thought of the Fisher Price PXL-2000 camcorder lol (same time period) I imagine these units might be used in a museum setting, although, why would anyone want children tapping on glass instead of pressing a button for information? Anyway, very cool vintage tech.
The visual aspect might come to life by using this device with, say, models of medieval towns at local history museums, where a turret, townhall or market would light up whilst being talked about on the audio. Or in technical displays, highlighting circuits whilst explaining them, etc.
Mat, since this won't work out with your double glazing, it would be a fun project to put together a system that will work. I'm planning major renovations soon and will be replacing my basic doorbell with a system that plays audio from an SD card through a speaker built into the overhead light fixture. I'll have fun musical doorbell sounds for Halloween and Christmas and a sign I'll stick on the front door telling delivery drivers to press the bell for instructions as I'm out of the house. One instruction will be to put the sign through the letterbox so that potential burglars don't get any ideas!
I honestly didn't have much desire to learn about this contraption until I watched the video. It's utterly fascinating!! Almost like the Harry Potter world, where Arthur Weasley is fascinated how Muggles have come up with such great ways to get along without magic...from a year 2022 perspective, it's fun to learn how we managed without all the technical advancements we take for granted today.
A device which prevents a consumer from having to talk to an annoying car salesman!? I think I know who killed this product! I can imagine a team of salesmen hovering in nearby shrubberies and, upon hearing a window knock, running like ravenous wild hyenas towards a fresh carcass....
I'm a huge fan of the *Wollensak 2873 AV Sync Audio Cassette Player/Recorder* . You plugged a Kodak carousel slide projector into it and you would record your narration/ music onto the tape and the Wollensak recorder would encode with an inaudible trigger tone to advance the slide corresponding to your pressing of the brightly lighted red and green buttons. Some also had a yellow button. Upon playing the tape back the projector would automatically repeat the same cues and advance to the next slide...like magic! The 2873 units had a nice and loud onboard speaker that could fill a classroom or conference room no problem. The units could be daisy chained together so that multiple projectors could project multiple images in different nearby locations. The Steamboat Museum in Marietta, Ohio had a small nook with seating for a small classroom size of viewrs. There were multiple Wollensak 2873 units and a very 1970's wall of big white cubes, each with a medium size image. The sound would follow the projected image for a unique listening experience. I went there in 1976 with my 5th grade class. Years later in 1991 my wife and I visited the museum and they still had the exact same setup! Around 1997 I did experimental AV stuff with a bored fine arts graduate. We had several Wollensak desk reel to reels we made tape loops with. The loops didn't even need the reels on. The pinch roller capstan maintained the motion of the tape. The Wollensak 2873 AV Sync Audio Cassette Player/Recorders were abundant in thrift stores for $7-$8. A very common issue with the 2873 units is the rubber pinch roller was made of a rubber that after 20 or so years into it's life it completely melted into a puddle of sticky tar. Inferior rubber. You could still by the rollers for $10, but I discovered that the *General Electric 3-5016d Portable Cassette Player Recorders* also abundant for $3-$4 had the exact same pinch roller.
Maybe you could use it as a polite car alarm: On seeing the "Touch Here" message a prospective thief would do so... maybe, you never know. The message might play something like "Leave my car alone you scallywag! I invite you to consider your life choices and reform your ways." On hearing such a persuasive argument the chastened thief would decide not to molest the car, rethink their priorities, and join holy orders in penance. I can see no issue with such a use case, especially given the entirely likely and positive outcome. PS I might be tempted to record something like "Ooo, touch me there again!", crank the volume, and put it somewhere public. Especially as it has a relay connector that could be used to hook it up to all sorts of 'fun stuff'.
If this happened they'd have to turn down the sensitivity. I was able to set mine off with my voice on its most sensitive setting when it was on the tabletop.
The "plug-in relay module that lights up lights" thing just makes me think it's a really limited, poor-man's copy of the system that's in (or used to be in) most museums aimed at children, where there's a pre-recorded spiel that plays and the various things discussed get spot-lit and/or have their section back-lit on the plaque. Now that I'm dredging up those memories, I think SeaWorld had that at some of their exhibits too...
Wonderful clever video and I hadn’t thought about the QR code provenance. Very Techmoan - always ahead of me Matt. Saturdays are essential RUclips morning now over here in Yorkshire, England.
I believe Mr Techmoan is only a few miles across the Pennines from you in, I think, Wigan. By your use of "over here in Yorkshire, England", I think perhaps you thought he was uploading from The States.
@@grahamlive yes you’re right. My shocking lack of clarity - I suppose I was trying to write to the wider viewing audience many of whom are probably found in the states as well as around the world. I am originally from down the road from him in Ellesmere Port but I escaped at the earliest opportunity. Anyway, apologies for setting off confusion. In any event, its clear that Sir Tech of Moan is streets ahead of most YT channels in production values, interesting content and that little intangible factor that makes his stuff appealing to gen Xers like me.
So what you do, you attach a QR code to your door for the delivery person to scan. It will simply give them the message "Tap on the glass to hear your message." Then on the recording they hear when they tap on the glass you say "If you have a delivery for this address, please go to the neighbours at number 10". Then you instruct the neighbours to tell the delivery person they can leave the parcel in a safe space (such as a wheelie bin). Problem solved.
Museums tend to use headsets that trigger the appropriate information near to the exhibits, that are more reliable and serve as many people at the same time as need it with full clarity. I'm amazed by the number of people who don't seem to have been to a museum for many years.
Having had a 1989 Camaro (which was basically the same car as the Firebird), I can tell you that the 0-60 time was about half an hour--pretty respectable for 1989, when the beefiest engine you could get in a GM F-body had the power of 235 not-very-excitable horses. ;) As for the product itself, I think the deco on the transducer and the packaging supports your mid-'80s estimate--I can't think of another time when an electronics manufacturer would have thought of labeling the product in Starfleet Bold.* * I know it's a real font with a proper name, but I mean, c'mon
If they had this in a shop when we were hanging out in the mall after school this would have been the highlight of the day. We were flocking around motion detectors and elevator buttons back then.
Oh, you 'found it online', eh? I'm thinking maybe you dusted off the time machine to bring back another BNIB tech item. I assume you had to stop using it cause the time travel Police found out..
I remember ads for this. It seemed practical for leaving instructions for where the food is when mom cooks then works second shift 🥰 it was marketed to place next to your existing answering machine to leave messages for people in the house since you couldn’t call yourself
Well that's something l've never seen or heard of, was a great idea to give information when needed, so thankyou for more interesting gadgets, nice job, PS you should have had the puppet knocking on the glass, there really good ciau
The sound of the recording reminds me of the old amusement parks in Germany. There was often a "fairy tale forest" with small show boxes. At the push of a button, you could hear part of a fairy tale in similar quality...
Okay that was legitimately really neat, and once you mentioned "Museums" it totally made a lot more sense! When it comes to cars, most of the windows you could stick it on, would be part of a door that you'd likely want to open, and get into the car through. So while maybe it did work for Car dealerships, it seems to me the Museums likely benefited the most from it. Furthermore, I suspect the audio projects better with single-pane glass, than double-pane. Your second demonstration likely is single-pane, but I can't be sure. I suspect the double-paning dampens a good bit of that vibrational transfer that exhibits as audio. Anyways, really cool! I'm tempted to start thinking about how to do equivalent things with home hacking... NEAT!
I seem to remember these at some museum displays when I was little in the early 90's. and yeah it would light up parts of the exhibit it was talking about. now they just have regular buttons or touch screen displays but this was a simple way for them to add some interactivity to older displays without investing a lot
U.S. Military recruiters used to put these in shop windows with recruitment posters for the Army, Navy, and AirForce. If you were a young man, you knew a military recruiter would follow you like a Scientologist looking for a new cult member. So we always joked they recruiters were capturing copies of your fingerprints when you played the audio (So they could find you later at home for an enlistment pitch).
Your house windows are two panes of glass with gas between. This device was obviously meant for a single pane of glass. I was impressed how well the glass amplified the audio, and I wish I had seen one of these in use back then.
I was a US Army Recruiter back in 1993-96 and we had one of these issued to us to use. We installed ours against a front window to our office but it was a waste of time since nobody used it.
A friend of mine had an audio transducer back in 1978. You could put it on glass and get a really clear sound from it. It was also designed to attach into a wall to turn the entire wall into a "speaker." If you wanted to listen to music, you would need a subwoofer or a woofer to get the low frequencies. From time to time, I see speakers using glass as a tweeter, and it's probably no more complicated to do than having a device like this vibrating the glass. It seems to me it's designed incorrectly. For a car, the power adapter has to be connected to the device, so it would have to be INSIDE the car (unless you had a really long cable and snaked it through the dashboard or ran it out the window. The activation button should have been on the back to activate it while you sat in the car. As you showed, it didn't work on a double-pane window or perhaps a thick car windshield. For a store window, you're encouraging passersby to bang on your window, possibly breaking the glass, which is not a good thing either.
This is the sort of item that reminds me of the expression, "I want to live in Theory. Everything works there." This was yet another brilliant idea spoiled by reality.
I believe I saw something similar to this as a small child, but with a button. It was at a museum. You’d tap a button, and a taped message would repeat. Sometimes a display light would switch on as well. I never considered what the machine playing the message must have looked like.
I spent 2 days there back in the 70's. The one policeman in town would turn off the one traffic light off at 10 pm and back on in the morning. Beautiful place.
I know this is a bit more elaborate than should be necessary, but I think you can still have your "message for the UPS driver" machine. You would need to house the window-mounted end in a box of its own, outside, so you might as well put the whole thing in one box, but it would work. It would hang off your door like a shoe rack. I think the bigger showstopper is that it doesn't record. In order to put a new message on the tape, you have to use another piece of gear. You can keep multiple cassettes with messages you expect to reuse, but even then you have to twiddle with the shutoff delay to match that specific tape. It doesn't seem practical for leaving a message just once, or just a few times. It's much better suited for fixed installations (and cars for sale are close enough to it) and one I think would work well is museums. Tap the sign and it reads itself to you. Touch the display case the signs ask you not to touch, and it asks you not to touch it again.
Image seeing this in some display and pressing it only to hear:
"Ｐｌｅａｓｅ ｄｏ ｎｏｔ ｔｏｕｃｈ ｔｈｅ ｇｌａｓｓ！"
"A sign lit up saying 'please do not press this button again."
Lllololll
"It is most gratifying that your enthusiasm for our planet continues unabated. And so we would like to assure you that the guided missiles currently converging with your ship are part of a special service we extend to all of our most enthusiastic clients… And the fully armed nuclear warheads are, of course, merely a courtesy detail. We look forward to your custom in future lives. Thank you."
I live in Cookeville but didn't recognize the company name or logo. I looked them up and it's actually still in business. Wow.
Are they or did they just buy the name?
If they're still at the same address, I wonder what would happen if Techmoan sent them the product registration card, 37 years after the product was released.
@@OofusTwillip It would probably amuse them.
Wouldn't it be hilarious if the company still used one of these on their front door to describe their business when people happen by after hours??
Well I definitely read the place name wrong
I'm imagine that the 'visual' relay would be intended for a slide projector or the like, but this is definitely one of those elegant solutions in search of a problem.
I mean in case of museum usage, which I think was sugested to it could enable the lights of a showcase. Saves power if nobody is there and lights it up when people are interrested. Ofc in this case the visual aspect would be visual in terms of presenting a part of an exhibition to the one interrested.
Hi Fran! I love your work, too!
@@Ramog1000 There's nothing wrong with a timer button for lights, which is simpler and more reliable.
@@Safetytrousers It was thinking like that that stopped these devices from becoming popular in the first place!
Great idea Fran.
I think this was secretly a product by Windex...
🤔😳🤣
😂 Probably.... I can just IMAGINE the fingerprints all OVER the window, around the unit.
With all due respect, speaking as a food delivery person I would hate someone trying to use this to leave delivery instructions. When I'm delivering I'm on the clock. I want to drop off the order and get out so I can be picking up my next one. The last thing I want is to have to fiddle with some gizmo and then wait while it delivers a message. I can read instructions left on a piece of paper far faster than a tape player can rattle off the same message.
It's OK, chill - I never have my food delivered. If I'm getting a takeaway I go and pick it up myself. Personal preference.
@@MrPaxio Most of them are not. They're paid by the delivery. So faster deliveries = more deliveries = more money at the end of the day.
These were still being used by a classic car dealer on Beach Blvd in Buena Park when I was there in 2007! My Dad and I spent about half an hour one evening, tapping the side windows of the cars, listening to 'Big Bobby' reel off the stats of various Mustangs, Pontiacs and ancient Chevy trucks -)
I truly believe every time a new Techmoan video is posted, the universe realigns us to a timeline where one more obscure audio format or device exists so there will never be an end to potential content.
I think you're right. When I was young no one knew about the walkman. But now I have clear re-memories of them. To think a few years ago the walkman simply didn't yet had existed. Well, what will they did have come up with next.
@@fex144 sorry come again?
@@kodinamsinh1267 [Boring humor destroying explanation]: Chad talks about re-aligned realities. I'm continuing his idea with language to describe how a thing didn't exist but then later it did in the same time span because of a sort of reality shift akin to the proposed Mandela Effect.
The fun in my comment (that I'm now destroying by explaining this) arises from how language would have to bend to reflect this concept.
So the line;
"What will they come up with next"
must be enhanced if a past (already lived through) suddenly changes. It must include
"What did they come up with". [As it is in the past].
The line becomes; "What will they; did have; come up with".
My comment includes "my surprise" at my sudden changed memory of a thing. My "re-memory". Because of a recognition that reality shifted.
Talking in "re-past tense", is something that does not exist in out current boring reality. Hence the resulting humor at the enhanced language needed to deal with such a phenomenon.
You have now been made aware of the potential of the (admittedly minor bit of) humor you may have missed at first glance.
Oh and don't worry. No one else seemed to get it either.
LOL 🤣💪
Could also be used for museum exhibits. The switching of lighting would come in handy there. Exhibit behind glass, tap the transducer, increase lighting in the exhibit space and play the message.
There are touch things for museums that have far surpassed the capabilities of this.
More common is headsets that trigger the appropriate information near to the exhibits, that are more reliable and serve as many people at the same time as need it with full clarity.
This is what I was thinking.
@@Safetytrousers There are NOW, yes. This thing, though, is straight out of the 1970s (yes, I know the manual says 1986, but I imagine it had been available for a few years by then).
To be honest, - I think they tried to reinvent the wheel. There have been 'push button for info/presentation' systems around since the 1950s, most based on endless loop tape systems. One of the earliest was made by a company called Echo-Matic, and was used in those mechanical 'gypsy/fortune teller' booths at carnivals and amusement parks (they recreated one for the Tom Hanks movie 'Big').
Granted, this is slightly more sophisticated, but not by much.
@@xaenon I was replying to something that said could also and would.
@@Safetytrousers fair enough.
We fitted something similar but smaller which we plugged into the sound card of pc in the 1990's.
It was fitted to estate agents plus other shops and used the glass as the speaker cone.
It died out due to double glazing. Ok seen you also had the same problems.
yes and also earlier versions in the eighties would not have sound but move a carousel to show the next side of property display cards
What? Double glasing was not a thing where you live in the 90s? Here in Sweden we had triple glasing in the 50s and single glasing was primitive in the thirties, 1830s!
@Matt Quinn That very much depends on what part of Sweden you are in. The south has a climate not much different to say northern England or Scotland.
@@borjesvensson8661 i think hes just getting a bit confused between domestic and commercial glazing, even now its not too unusual for a shop front of a certain age to be single glazed (even in sweden)
@Matt Quinn Well when you say it, not so sure when shops here got dubble glasing😅
I'm impressed at the use of a surface transducer in the mid 1980's!
They are very old tech, if you think about it it's basically just a regular speaker that uses something else as the speaker membrane, so I suspect the biggest hurdle they had was to create something that was powerful enough to vibrate thicker solids without causing damage to the attached point. People just didn't use them because unless you create the unit specifically for a given surface the sound quality goes up and down depending on what you attach it to.
Actually I remember encountering surface transducers in the late 1960s. Real estate agents were using them when they did open house events. The things looked like the magnet and voice coil, minus basket and cone, of a large speaker. They attached to the wall somehow and used the whole wall as a cone. Quiet "beautiful" music seemed to emanate from nowhere in particular and filled the entire house.
@Pontiac Soviro Neither of those }:(. Just hadn't seen commoditised use of surface transducers before. Aware that it has been around for a long time.
@Pontiac Soviro Even the super sci-fi bone transducer tech that can make your skull a speaker is old.
In the 80's the word transducer would have sounded like magic to most people.
I love that it turned out to be so reliable and it works so well, shame we didn't see more of them in the wild.
I was actually surprised how well it worked and sounded. Matt is correct, those Koreans might really have a future in electronics.
I remember this device when I bought my red 1988 Buick Skylark back in December of '88. I tapped on it but it didn't work. An employee told me the device had run down the battery, so he game me all the car's details. Anyway, I ended up buying that useless car that would give me nightmares for years to come. Only good thing about it was the stereo system on it.
When I saw "Visual" on the box, even before it was opened, and I was wondering what imaging it was have, and then when the box opened, I was even more intrigued. A compact-cassette doesn't have a lot of capacity for "video"! You'd hard pressed to store a still image on cassette!
And, of course, it doesn't!
I wasn't surprised to see it defeated by double-glazing.
There was a toy camcorder that recorded black & white video onto audio cassettes, the Fisher Price PXL2000. I believe Techmoan has a video on that one.
A cassette does if it's a Fisher Price PXL2000.
In the early 1960s there was a "home video recorder" offered for sale in the UK either ready built or as a self-assembly kit. It offered around 30 minutes of recording time on a 10.5" reel of double-play audio tape in 405-line B&W. I have a copy of "Practical Television" from the time that has an article about this recorder in it. I doubt it worked well as it seems to have rapidly vanished without trace.
Not that many years later Sony marketed the CV2000 helical scan recorder, also for 405-line B&W for the UK version, which provided an hour of recording on a 7" reel of half-inch video tape and came with its own tuner/monitor for off-air recording and playback.
@@davidfaraday7963 That one was called the Telcan system if I'm right.
@@crashbandicoot4everr No, this one was called the VKR500 and was made by a company called Wesgrove Electronics. I've just located the article about it from Practical Television from March 1965.
The article does briefly refer to the Telcan video recorder which it says "did not appear on the market"
The VKR500 cost £97 10s in kit form or £150 ready built. But I can't imagine it sold well as I've never seen one or heard of anyone who owns one.
The CV2000, however, I have come across. Some years back I was asked to recover the video from some off-air tapes recorded on a CV2000, convert the video to 625 lines and re-record it to DVD. It was quite a challenge due to the poor time-base stability of the CV2000, not helped by the fact that the supplied tuner/monitor used mean-level AGC so the amplitude of the recorded sync pulses varied with picture content.
Only Techmoan can make a retro-tech device sounds very interesting.
Matt can almost sell anything.
A pen
But... but... they are very interesting!
Reminds me of a Toy Shop Window in My Hometown back in 84. The Window had a Pushbutton top operate a Model Train. And for Christmas Season you also would hear Jingle Bells and Train Noise.
I've never been shouted at by a shop window, but I do recall videotext systems --- typically in tourist information offices --- which had a capacitative number pad glued to the inside of the window controlling a CRT information display system. I was always excited to see one as a child and would go and play with it. (I still do, but I did then too.) I imagine they died out due to double glazing too.
I also swear that estate agents had touch screen crt set ups for their listing outside
@@peanutmans0 I've seen estate agents premises with modern versions of this that are sensitive enough to work through dobule glazing. Looks like it's installed by specialists though, not just put in the window by the agent themselves.
@@peanutmans0 Definitely did. I often contemplate making something similar for operation through a glass coffee table.
Snap
I remember a bowling alley with touchscreen CRTs that didn't have any additional glass on the CRT, I wonder how that worked
Would it work on your door? Some knocking on it making a message play? Safer than a ring doorbell anyway, I always agreed with you on that product 👍
Probably not as uPVC doors are made much the same way as the windows but with panelling and insulation sandwiched between them.
How is a ring doorbell not safe? Its a button with a camera on it that makes noise. Dont use smart locks and its fine.
They make microprocessor-based devices like this today. Usually less than $40US.
@@mycosys Yeah, Bezos will probably send his black helicopters.
@@mycosys well what can go wrong then?
Make sure to scan the QR code at 12:23 to find Mat's secret channel, Techmoan After Dark.
ouuuuuuuuugh
And in it there’s another code for muppets after dark
ITS A TRAP!
DAMN YOU!!
That was fun!
That is a blast from the past! I remember pressing one of those every time I went past the local chemists as a kid in about 1995/96.
You guys call pharmacists "chemists"?!? That's awesome! I'm getting a serious "Space Hunter" vibe from that. Now, almost no one will get that reference, but I shared it anyway.
@@FirstLast-vr7es They are normally called Chemists in the UK.
@@FirstLast-vr7es Many people are gradually changing over to calling them pharmacies rather than chemists, but a lot of people still use "chemist".
What did it tell you ?
australia too :)
Love these videos you make. You’re like the John Peel of obsolete tech. Thanks for making them!
This feels so accurate
OMG you’re so right!!
This is great. My front door is single glazed so that would be the spot. I've seen similar stuff back in the day in museums. Thanks for the video.
Would be quite easy to rig up something with an arduino, a sensor, and a speaker…
I like to think that Techmoan's house continually blasts his narrations about random stuff 24 hours a day.
That QR code, What a hidden gem.
I really should have expected that, in Animal Crossing New Horizons, I have a pattern that is a QR code going to the same thing.
I recognized that URL.
If I'd had one of these at one of my old stores, I'd have probably used it to record jokes or humorous messages for daytime passers-by, and the late night, slightly tipsy city dwellers to enjoy
had a giggle bc the script reminded me of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
I tapped on this sheet of glass and metal that I'm holding in my hand and you started speaking to me, and I could even see you visually. Isn't technology amazing ;-)
You could do a similar system for Hermes. Stick a big arrow on the door, pointing up to a open window. That's their usual method of delivery.
The speaker in the transducer reminds me of the acoustic characteristics of a few toys we had for our kids in the '80s & '90s. One of them was more or less a gramophone, it had a record with a needle attached to this thin plastic cone, directly producing the sound like a speaker cone (but lower quality).
This is really a neat device, I think with a little more publicity it could've become common especially in shop's windows
Very cool. I don't think we give the engineers of yesteryear the credit they deserve for solving problems they encountered in the manner in which they did. I expect this was not an inexpensive unit for the times, either.
Definitely an engineer solution - brilliant, but lacking in usefulness
I totally agree! Reminds me of a company I used to work for that designed products in search of a solution.
Expensive, yes. Dedicated-function 'business/sales' gadgets usually were (and still are!) overpriced, because the manufacturers who make them know most businesses will happily call the expense an 'investment'.
As for the engineering... I'm not that impressed. It's just the 'announce' mechanism from one of those old answering machines with a few wizmos tacked on.
I know the manual has a date of 1986 printed in it, but everything else fairly screams 1970s at me.
@@philipkern6774 Any funny examples?
@@xaenon The plastic case feels more 80s, but the tech does seem like it could be older.
I'm so glad you didn't put the cassette in the wrong way. You would have caused a tear in the space time continuem
Nice thingy. You could switch a video recorder and TV as well with it to make it fully audiovisual.... ;-) Greetings from Ricky as well.
I was trying to fathom what the heck this was for. Thanks for the wonderful hint with the cigarette lighter connector.
All the same, I'd never have guessed. I'd be thinking it was to tell people not to break your window, your dog has its favourite tunes and the A/C is turned on.
I would affix this to the driver door window of my car and if approached by a traffic cop tapping on the window the message would play 'please come back later, I am busy driving'. As usual Techmoan makes any subject fascinating. 👍
I like how part of the review is recorded on that tape and played back but cut perfectly into the video. Spot on representation of the media :)
No spoilers, but when you reach a part near the end of the video that you *think* might lead you to a certain something… it will. Techmoan always follows through.
I spent way too long screen grabbing
He never lets us down
He never gives up
Bad puns overrrule spoilers - You've been RiQRolled!
This is one of those things that's epically cool and I wish we still had a use for such things in the modern world.
It certainly seems like the predecessor to those touchscreen advertisements that you sometimes see in stores, particularly in the health and beauty section advertising shaving razors and things like that.
It's basically the spiritual ancestor of an AR phone app, just like _Haunted House_ is the spiritual ancestor of the _Resident Evil_ series. You tap the glass, and something magically comes to life for a moment that would normally just be lying still.
Unfortunately, the coolness might have been a factor its own undoing. After all, if the word on the streets is "Hey, down at the mall, they've got this cool gizmo where you tap on the glass and an enormous animated pineapple sings to you!" but all the customers are so impressed by the gimmick that they forget to buy a carton of the fruit juice it was supposed to be advertising, the juice company are going to be looking for a different gimmick to sell the next flavour they think of .....
Well, at least it works fine on car windows.
But the additional light unit would be also quite useful in this case, as you can put the car details sheet on the dash inside and have it light up by the touch of the button, so buyers could read it even when the dealer lot is dark.
I could see something like this having a lot of use in museums. They could even conserve power by not having to illuminate the exhibits at all times. Simply have someone walk up to a dim glass cabinet, give a light tap on the glass, and then an audio-visual presentation is played out before them.
Very neat and interesting device! Some double glazed windows have some quarters, if its your case, maybe if you place just in between can work, so the knocking can be transmitted along the solid material instead of the gas in between the double glazing. I love the "extra connection" in the very last bit of the video, I don't want to spoil anybody...
Unfortunately it relies on window glass to vibrate the sound back so it won't work well enough.
At that point just sticking a speaker and a normal button on the outside would do a better job.
But that wouldn't be very magical, I guess...
BTW probably missed that last bit, timestamp?
@@jwhite5008 - 12:50
Back in the 70s and early 80s, my father used to be very active in the "Car Show" circuit. He'd later go on to the custom hot-rod community into the 90s, but this is exactly the sort of thing I could see him having installed in his show-van. Maybe with some sort of history or something, turning on some lamps perhaps.
I was actually reminded of an old 'zoo' in the town where I grew up, they had glassed off enclosures for a lot of the animals, and you'd have a sign with a doorbell-button. Pressing the button, a recording would play with information about the animals.
I really liked the connection to QR codes. I wish augmented reality markers were better supported. Imagine being able to point your phone at a sticker, and an animated character could give you the information about the item, or just suddenly there's a video right there in place of the token.
I saw something similar years ago that was fitted inside Halloween decorations.When someone banged your door it turned on lights and played whatever you had on a tape hidden inside.
I remember interacting with devices like this at some lesser known nature and theme parks in Florida in the 1980s. In particular, Gatorland had one at the ticket booth during closed hours to give general park information and ticket prices.
Too bad these things didnt replace actual car sales people.
There were "stereo" versions of these that used one channel for audio and the other channel for tones that controlled lighting, solenoids, etc in a display. Think museums, national parks, amusement parks, haunted houses, etc. The ones I remember had plexiglass panels with screenprint on them and I was today years old that I learned how that trigger interface worked. I remember seeing the walkman-looking part and the power strip with all the lights and stuff plugged in but never knew how the touch trigger worked. Thanks!
12:22 That's a very interesting QR code, but I'll leave it up to the viewers out there who want to find out for themselves!
Haaaaah! Too funny.
NICE! But it's not really a evpxebyy with mandatory anti-vaping and insurance commercials that must be watched first.
LOL! Awesome!!
ow now i had to scan it too LOL :)
Brilliant 🤣 over 1 billion views!
Thanks for the QR code! Most enjoyable :)
Yeah, The old Fart got me as well..
I was suspicious, yet I fell for it!
best use of a qr ever, if you ask me.
Got me too. I thought it might be hes online store or a link to the channel
I'd recognise that QR code anywhere. Not falling for it!
Imagine a car dealer has a black Trans Am in 86 with this thing and a voice box connected to it.
And when you tab the window it says "I'm the Knight Industries Twothousand or K.I.T.T. if you prefer."
Haha, exactly what I was imagining as well, especially if it has a port for "light show", aka KITT's voice modulator 😁
I remember, when I was a child, the local toy store sometimes had a model railway in the window. You could make it run for a few minutes by tapping the glass, much like with this device here.
Yes the 'VISUAL' part was intriguing. I was looking forward to seeing a mini VHS cassette player. When the audio cassette appeared in the video, I then thought of the Fisher Price PXL-2000 camcorder lol (same time period)
I imagine these units might be used in a museum setting, although, why would anyone want children tapping on glass instead of pressing a button for information? Anyway, very cool vintage tech.
The visual aspect might come to life by using this device with, say, models of medieval towns at local history museums, where a turret, townhall or market would light up whilst being talked about on the audio. Or in technical displays, highlighting circuits whilst explaining them, etc.
Mat, since this won't work out with your double glazing, it would be a fun project to put together a system that will work. I'm planning major renovations soon and will be replacing my basic doorbell with a system that plays audio from an SD card through a speaker built into the overhead light fixture. I'll have fun musical doorbell sounds for Halloween and Christmas and a sign I'll stick on the front door telling delivery drivers to press the bell for instructions as I'm out of the house. One instruction will be to put the sign through the letterbox so that potential burglars don't get any ideas!
😄Love it being called an "Alien face hugger" 6:41 😄
The one thing I noticed was that unless you rerecorded the message it actually sounded better when played through glass.
That’s the whole idea, the glass acts as the speaker cone.
Drawing comparison between this and the QR code is spot on.
Me: "I s'pose he's gonna pull out a Jackery to power this thing."
Techmoan: Pulls out a Jackery...
😐
I love this somewhat novelty that a device like this could bring in the modern day I wouldn't mind picking one up of my own
I remember seeing one of these installed in a shop window of a TV and HIFI dealer, but from what I remember it never worked.
Maybe you needed to "touch" it more forcefully, perhaps with a good sized stone or a brick?
I honestly didn't have much desire to learn about this contraption until I watched the video. It's utterly fascinating!! Almost like the Harry Potter world, where Arthur Weasley is fascinated how Muggles have come up with such great ways to get along without magic...from a year 2022 perspective, it's fun to learn how we managed without all the technical advancements we take for granted today.
A device which prevents a consumer from having to talk to an annoying car salesman!? I think I know who killed this product! I can imagine a team of salesmen hovering in nearby shrubberies and, upon hearing a window knock, running like ravenous wild hyenas towards a fresh carcass....
I'm a huge fan of the *Wollensak 2873 AV Sync Audio Cassette Player/Recorder* . You plugged a Kodak carousel slide projector into it and you would record your narration/ music onto the tape and the Wollensak recorder would encode with an inaudible trigger tone to advance the slide corresponding to your pressing of the brightly lighted red and green buttons. Some also had a yellow button. Upon playing the tape back the projector would automatically repeat the same cues and advance to the next slide...like magic! The 2873 units had a nice and loud onboard speaker that could fill a classroom or conference room no problem. The units could be daisy chained together so that multiple projectors could project multiple images in different nearby locations.
The Steamboat Museum in Marietta, Ohio had a small nook with seating for a small classroom size of viewrs. There were multiple Wollensak 2873 units and a very 1970's wall of big white cubes, each with a medium size image. The sound would follow the projected image for a unique listening experience. I went there in 1976 with my 5th grade class. Years later in 1991 my wife and I visited the museum and they still had the exact same setup!
Around 1997 I did experimental AV stuff with a bored fine arts graduate. We had several Wollensak desk reel to reels we made tape loops with. The loops didn't even need the reels on. The pinch roller capstan maintained the motion of the tape. The Wollensak 2873 AV Sync Audio Cassette Player/Recorders were abundant in thrift stores for $7-$8. A very common issue with the 2873 units is the rubber pinch roller was made of a rubber that after 20 or so years into it's life it completely melted into a puddle of sticky tar. Inferior rubber. You could still by the rollers for $10, but I discovered that the
*General Electric 3-5016d Portable Cassette Player Recorders* also abundant for $3-$4 had the exact same pinch roller.
Loved the printed out message telling us that you might as well have printed the recording out 😂
Maybe you could use it as a polite car alarm: On seeing the "Touch Here" message a prospective thief would do so... maybe, you never know.
The message might play something like "Leave my car alone you scallywag! I invite you to consider your life choices and reform your ways."
On hearing such a persuasive argument the chastened thief would decide not to molest the car, rethink their priorities, and join holy orders in penance.
I can see no issue with such a use case, especially given the entirely likely and positive outcome.
PS
I might be tempted to record something like "Ooo, touch me there again!", crank the volume, and put it somewhere public. Especially as it has a relay connector that could be used to hook it up to all sorts of 'fun stuff'.
Clever and certainly unusual. If it's in a shop window, I wonder if vibrations from passing vehicles would set it off?
If this happened they'd have to turn down the sensitivity. I was able to set mine off with my voice on its most sensitive setting when it was on the tabletop.
I doubt it- if double glazing prevented it from operating.
@@Techmoan It would make a burglar alarm pick up vibrations and then play a barking dog.
I wonder if it's vibrations, or capacitive coupling?
The "plug-in relay module that lights up lights" thing just makes me think it's a really limited, poor-man's copy of the system that's in (or used to be in) most museums aimed at children, where there's a pre-recorded spiel that plays and the various things discussed get spot-lit and/or have their section back-lit on the plaque. Now that I'm dredging up those memories, I think SeaWorld had that at some of their exhibits too...
Wonderful clever video and I hadn’t thought about the QR code provenance. Very Techmoan - always ahead of me Matt.
Saturdays are essential RUclips morning now over here in Yorkshire, England.
I believe Mr Techmoan is only a few miles across the Pennines from you in, I think, Wigan. By your use of "over here in Yorkshire, England", I think perhaps you thought he was uploading from The States.
@@grahamlive yes you’re right. My shocking lack of clarity - I suppose I was trying to write to the wider viewing audience many of whom are probably found in the states as well as around the world. I am originally from down the road from him in Ellesmere Port but I escaped at the earliest opportunity. Anyway, apologies for setting off confusion. In any event, its clear that Sir Tech of Moan is streets ahead of most YT channels in production values, interesting content and that little intangible factor that makes his stuff appealing to gen Xers like me.
So what you do, you attach a QR code to your door for the delivery person to scan. It will simply give them the message "Tap on the glass to hear your message." Then on the recording they hear when they tap on the glass you say "If you have a delivery for this address, please go to the neighbours at number 10". Then you instruct the neighbours to tell the delivery person they can leave the parcel in a safe space (such as a wheelie bin).
Problem solved.
This would probably have been used in a museum... before they hand personal guided tours.
More like after they fired all the personal tour guides due to a lack of funding.
Museums tend to use headsets that trigger the appropriate information near to the exhibits, that are more reliable and serve as many people at the same time as need it with full clarity.
I'm amazed by the number of people who don't seem to have been to a museum for many years.
works pretty well. I respect people who invent such things...really out of the box thinking.
Having had a 1989 Camaro (which was basically the same car as the Firebird), I can tell you that the 0-60 time was about half an hour--pretty respectable for 1989, when the beefiest engine you could get in a GM F-body had the power of 235 not-very-excitable horses. ;)
As for the product itself, I think the deco on the transducer and the packaging supports your mid-'80s estimate--I can't think of another time when an electronics manufacturer would have thought of labeling the product in Starfleet Bold.*
* I know it's a real font with a proper name, but I mean, c'mon
@ZGryphon
I've got a 1940 Ford deluxe pretty sure it's only got85 horses under the hood and it's a very heavy machine
sounds like you had a crappy one, they're still faster than a 2020 Civic Si
0-60: yes
Another inspirational video on something from the recent past.
Would be nice to do a teardown on that speaker so see how it works inside and what they are using for a transducer.
Just the same as under almost every speaker cone. A magnet, and a coil of wire around it.
If they had this in a shop when we were hanging out in the mall after school this would have been the highlight of the day. We were flocking around motion detectors and elevator buttons back then.
Oh, you 'found it online', eh? I'm thinking maybe you dusted off the time machine to bring back another BNIB tech item. I assume you had to stop using it cause the time travel Police found out..
Love your videos, it's become somewhat of a Saturday morning tradition to watch them.
i could see it catching on and not needing a sign if it had been more popular/successful. I get it. That sounds like an intriguing alternate history
I remember ads for this. It seemed practical for leaving instructions for where the food is when mom cooks then works second shift 🥰 it was marketed to place next to your existing answering machine to leave messages for people in the house since you couldn’t call yourself
This is brilliant.
If I had seen this in 1986, there’s no way I would have figured out how it worked (I mean inside)
Well that's something l've never seen or heard of, was a great idea to give information when needed, so thankyou for more interesting gadgets, nice job, PS you should have had the puppet knocking on the glass, there really good ciau
It says "digital counter" which is not digital, but since it was the buzz-word of the eighties...
I love the font on the machine and box. It is quite distinctive.
The sound of the recording reminds me of the old amusement parks in Germany. There was often a "fairy tale forest" with small show boxes. At the push of a button, you could hear part of a fairy tale in similar quality...
Okay that was legitimately really neat, and once you mentioned "Museums" it totally made a lot more sense! When it comes to cars, most of the windows you could stick it on, would be part of a door that you'd likely want to open, and get into the car through. So while maybe it did work for Car dealerships, it seems to me the Museums likely benefited the most from it. Furthermore, I suspect the audio projects better with single-pane glass, than double-pane. Your second demonstration likely is single-pane, but I can't be sure. I suspect the double-paning dampens a good bit of that vibrational transfer that exhibits as audio. Anyways, really cool! I'm tempted to start thinking about how to do equivalent things with home hacking... NEAT!
I could see these as having been more useful in museum exhibits - things behind glass, etc, that you could then receive further information about
I love the "face hugger" description... now I cannot see that thing any other way!
I seem to remember these at some museum displays when I was little in the early 90's. and yeah it would light up parts of the exhibit it was talking about. now they just have regular buttons or touch screen displays but this was a simple way for them to add some interactivity to older displays without investing a lot
U.S. Military recruiters used to put these in shop windows with recruitment posters for the Army, Navy, and AirForce. If you were a young man, you knew a military recruiter would follow you like a Scientologist looking for a new cult member. So we always joked they recruiters were capturing copies of your fingerprints when you played the audio (So they could find you later at home for an enlistment pitch).
Your house windows are two panes of glass with gas between. This device was obviously meant for a single pane of glass.
I was impressed how well the glass amplified the audio, and I wish I had seen one of these in use back then.
I was a US Army Recruiter back in 1993-96 and we had one of these issued to us to use. We installed ours against a front window to our office but it was a waste of time since nobody used it.
Now, at the end, I was expecting you to wire a lighring setup to show the "visual" part of the machine. Very good discovery!
A friend of mine had an audio transducer back in 1978. You could put it on glass and get a really clear sound from it. It was also designed to attach into a wall to turn the entire wall into a "speaker." If you wanted to listen to music, you would need a subwoofer or a woofer to get the low frequencies. From time to time, I see speakers using glass as a tweeter, and it's probably no more complicated to do than having a device like this vibrating the glass.
It seems to me it's designed incorrectly. For a car, the power adapter has to be connected to the device, so it would have to be INSIDE the car (unless you had a really long cable and snaked it through the dashboard or ran it out the window. The activation button should have been on the back to activate it while you sat in the car. As you showed, it didn't work on a double-pane window or perhaps a thick car windshield. For a store window, you're encouraging passersby to bang on your window, possibly breaking the glass, which is not a good thing either.
It's used inside a car in the video - it works fine.
Of course it should be inside the car? If your sitting in the car you already have a salesperson there to just tell you the info
That was a good one! I'm actually impressed with the sound quality through, or by, the glass.
This is the sort of item that reminds me of the expression, "I want to live in Theory. Everything works there." This was yet another brilliant idea spoiled by reality.
I believe I saw something similar to this as a small child, but with a button. It was at a museum. You’d tap a button, and a taped message would repeat. Sometimes a display light would switch on as well. I never considered what the machine playing the message must have looked like.
What a pleasant little device. I hope it’s proved useful for the museum industry.
Another great 'who knew that that ever existed?' video! Thanks!!
Thank you, Techmoan! As always, thanks for sharing!
I loved your description of the touch pad as an alien face hugger.
I see Cookeville, TN on the back of the transducer! Used to live there a few years back. Neat!
I spent 2 days there back in the 70's. The one policeman in town would turn off the one traffic light off at 10 pm and back on in the morning. Beautiful place.
I know this is a bit more elaborate than should be necessary, but I think you can still have your "message for the UPS driver" machine. You would need to house the window-mounted end in a box of its own, outside, so you might as well put the whole thing in one box, but it would work. It would hang off your door like a shoe rack.
I think the bigger showstopper is that it doesn't record. In order to put a new message on the tape, you have to use another piece of gear. You can keep multiple cassettes with messages you expect to reuse, but even then you have to twiddle with the shutoff delay to match that specific tape. It doesn't seem practical for leaving a message just once, or just a few times. It's much better suited for fixed installations (and cars for sale are close enough to it) and one I think would work well is museums. Tap the sign and it reads itself to you. Touch the display case the signs ask you not to touch, and it asks you not to touch it again.
Great video Matt, I’m certainly never gonna give you up!